WHO: Jack and Sydney WHAT: Trying to make contact WHEN: just before dinner, day 2 WHERE: East wing WARNINGS: mild language, but mostly it’s just sad and a little ~spooky~
Find Jude and Jeremiah. His eyes opened and that thought played on repeat in his head. He felt disoriented, but then, that wasn’t new; this day had felt like a nightmare, and, if he and Teddy were right, it would only get worse. But Jack was a fighter. He would find his friends and figure out what happened to him, even if he didn’t like the results.
He headed for their rooms but of course there was a closed door, blocking off the hall. He patted his pockets, searching for his room key, but that, along with his wallet and phone, was gone. Figured. But theft was the least of his worries; it was positively meaningless next to being fucking dead. He tried the door, pushing with all his might. Nothing.
Well fuck it. He could wait.
He leaned against the wall, crossing his arms and scowling. Someone would come. In the meantime he could think
After the elevator ride with Ian, Sydney decided to take the stairs in order to meet with Milo. He wordlessly passed her a key, and the whole way back up to the seventh floor, she kept turning it in her hand. It was striking how many things a single key could potentially open.
Condemned, spooky buildings always, in her experience, had signs trying to keep people away. They were posted at a distance, then usually with greater frequency the nearer you got. When she first went to her room earlier that day, Sydney had noticed the sign. The East Wing was closed for renovations. Walking that way now, Syd wasn’t surprised to see more signs the closer she got. Before, when Milo had told her the wing was closed, Sydney had been skeptical. Why wouldn’t the hotel stay closed a bit longer if it meant finishing all the necessary renovations? And what were really the odds of that wing being the only one still closed? But now, seeing all the gentle signs that looked a great deal like warnings, she wasn’t skeptical anymore.
She knew this wasn’t about renovations.
The entire hallway was blocked off. Two more identical signs were posted on either side of a locked door in the middle of a temporary plywood wall structure. Someone chose to paint the wood, probably so it wouldn’t take away from the rest of the hall visible on this side of the door. Sydney was more interested in the construction of the wall than the color of it. It was built to block entry, to block visibility, but being temporary meant it wasn’t built to the ceiling. The gap was noteworthy. As was the darkness beyond it.
Even though she had a feeling how this would end, Sydney tried turning the door handle anyway. It was a proper knob, not a keycard. It didn’t turn. Without hesitation, Sydney backtracked to the nearest cozy little seating nook sprinkled strategically all over the hotel, gripped the back of one of the plush armchairs, and dragged it back to her locked door. She lined it up as flush to the door as she could, the back of the chair against the wood. Sydney wasn’t tall enough to make it to the gap from the seat alone, but stepping onto the top of the chair, she pulled herself up and over, dropping down with all the grace of a former cheerleader.
One glance around told her any renovations planned for this wing had been cast aside a long time ago. The hall was dark and grim, dusty and forgotten. No, not forgotten.
It was abandoned.
She had no interest in being followed, and drawing attention would counter her efforts in that regard, so Sydney turned and unlocked the door, pushing hard to move the chair as the door opened. She pushed the chair back down the hall a ways, so nobody passing would think of maybe using it to hop the barrier, and then she made her way back into the dark wing, quietly shutting the door behind her.
There was a noise and Jack followed it. He was surprised to see a plywood wall that he couldn’t recall ever seeing before. Had that always been there? How had he had missed it? But come to think of it, he couldn’t fully recall how he had gotten here and- wait. His thoughts were interrupted when he realized just who had jumped the barrier. Sydney. He pushed himself away from the wall and followed her through the door. He didn’t even attempt speaking with her; she clearly couldn’t see him. He nearly hurried past her to his room, but then he paused. Maybe there was a way to communicate with her. He looked around for something he could move, but it was just an ordinary hallway, identical to any other and practically empty, not even a left out room service tray. The only thing he saw was a table light and he rushed towards it, shoving it with both hands. It didn’t budge. He growled and pushed harder but still nothing. She was moving past him now, and he couldn’t let her get away so with a frustrated sigh, he gave up and raced ahead of her, frantically looking for something that would get her attention.
There was dust everywhere. Sydney could see signs of a renovation -- paint cans, ladders, stacks of plywood -- but it was so clear those projects had been cast aside a long time ago. The hall was in ruins, left to die silently behind a locked door. There was still storm damage -- broken windows and debris -- but what hadn’t been cleared wasn’t going to be cleared.
If she saw Harmony again, or even Russ, Sydney thought she’d ask what had stopped the renovations here. Not because she didn’t have a theory. Because she wanted to know if they would share theirs.
For now, she had one room key. She started down the hall, taking out her phone to use its flashlight for additional light. Milo had been right about the wires. A lot of the lights seemed to be missing, wires dangling loose from the ceiling. She couldn’t say how many fixtures were victims of the storm and how many had been removed in the aftermath, before fixing the wing was removed from the renovation plans. It didn’t matter. She just made a note of the hazards to avoid and continued along, looking for the right room number. When she found it, the sight of those three numbers hit her harder than expected. She swallowed, closing her eyes for a moment, taking a careful breath to steady herself. It was such a small thing, just a number, but her brother had stayed here. It was the last place he’d stayed.
There was a chance it was still that last place.
Sydney turned the key in the lock and let the door swing open on its own so she could take a moment to really assess the room as a whole.
Jack heard her footsteps stop and he turned. She was opening the door to one of the rooms. This seemed promising; surely he could find something in the room to get her attention, and maybe he would even be lucky enough to find a pen and paper. He backtracked and jogged after her-
Only to trip and fall, landing on his hands and knees.
“What the fuck?” He looked behind him angrily, searching for the culprit but nothing was there. Just an ordinary carpet. He turned, cautiously sweeping one hand across the rug, and to his shock, he came across something round and solid and entirely invisible. “Fucking hell, what-” he blinked before he finished his thought, and when his eyes opened again, everything had changed.
“Shit!”
He yelled and scrambled backwards. The hall, which had first struck him as perfectly normal, now looked like it had been abandoned in the middle of renovation. Debris, rust, water damage, broken light fixtures, and a paint can that had sent him tumbling. Jack closed his eyes hard. “It’s just a dream.” He had just been here. How could this place have changed so much in the course of a day?
Unless. With a sinking feeling, he realized that maybe far more time had passed than he had thought.
He opened his eyes cautiously, only to be greeted once again by ruin. “This is some fucking horror movie shit,” he mumbled, breathing hard. It was an odd feeling, intuiting what your body should be doing- pounding heart, sweaty palms, labored breathing- without actually being able to feel any of it. His head was spinning, but physically, he couldn’t feel any signs of fear. Jack had hoped he and Teddy had come to the wrong conclusion, that they weren’t dead at all and this was just a dream, but it was getting harder and harder to argue with.
He exhaled. Focus. One thing at a time. Why hadn’t he been able to see this before? Had his mind been unprepared for the reality of this situation and shown him what he had wanted to see? That somehow seemed more terrifying than the sudden appearance of a construction site and he shivered. But there was no time to give in to fear. If the door closed behind her, he would be trapped out here. He stood and- more carefully this time, dodging a pile of plywood- made his way over to her and ducked into the hotel room.
There was something surreal about seeing this room. The structure, the bones, were so similar to her current hotel room, obviously; even through the ruin, these two spaces both resided in the same hotel, after all. Sydney remembered the photos Nick had sent her, the goofy selfie with the hotel room behind him, door open and room number just barely visible. The storm had destroyed the space where Nick had resided his last few days, but it was still the same space. The thought settled heavily. She let out a breath and slowly stepped inside.
Her first act was to set her phone down, casting the flashlight against the ceiling to increase her visibility. One of the windows was completely broken, with the tatters of old curtains obscuring the light from another one. Even with natural lighting, there were shadows. Sydney wanted to see everything. She reached for the lightswitch next, flicking it up before glancing at the ceiling. No surprise the electricity wasn’t turned on. It didn’t hurt to try though. She flipped the switch back off without thinking of how unnecessary that was.
“Okay…” she said, taking another step deeper into the space. “Take One, Nick.” Sydney hadn’t brought anything with her. She was just scoping the East hall out this time. But she was curious. She didn’t know which bed had been Nick’s, but she sat on the corner of the nearest one. It smelled like warm air and subtle decay. “You here?”
The room was nothing short of creepy, but it was Sydney’s question that sent a shiver down his spine. She couldn’t see him- or Nick, wherever he was- but she expected someone to be there. Or someone’s ghost. He was dead, wasn’t he. He had known or guessed, but that didn’t make facing it any less difficult. There was a part of him that wanted to collapse on to the bed next to her and give up, to cry or scream or disappear. But he refused. He wasn’t going to let this break him, not yet, not until he exhausted every last possibility. He needed to try.
Jack studied the room. He needed something light that he could move but not too insignificant that she wouldn’t notice. The desk was covered in debris that had flown in from the broken window, with the lamp lying on its side next to a waterlogged hotel information book. But, perched half over the edge, was a pen. He reached for it but he couldn’t quite grasp it, no matter how hard he tried. Hadn’t he moved one before? Or was that all a hallucination? “Come on, it’s just a fucking pen.” He clenched his jaw, and tried again, this time hoping to push it off the desk. It was so close, it wouldn’t take much, and yet it was almost like he was moving through it and no matter how many times he swung his hand across the desk, it stayed stubbornly put. “Fuck!” He felt a surge of anger and this time, it did budge, only slightly, barely perceptibly. It wobbled and rolled not even a millimeter but it was enough for gravity to take hold and drag it to the floor.
Places like this were almost always silent. Movies included a lot of whipping wind and creaking floorboards, but Sydney didn’t encounter that much. Empty places sounded empty, and in that emptiness, even a whisper sounded like a scream. Something touching the carpet made her gaze snap immediately, and Sydney looked at the pen with sharp curiosity for a moment before she pushed herself to stand. There was the tricky truth about emptiness. It was a void. The human mind wanted to fill voids, and desperate minds were quick to try filling them with hope.
Sydney picked the pen up with a sigh, and set it back on the edge of the desk. She could feel a gentle breeze against her back, coming in through the window nobody had ever bothered to fix. She wanted to believe one thing. She was hoping for one thing. For three years, there had been a silence, an emptiness, that she had no ability to fill. But this room was a shambles. It had suffered a storm. Nothing was in its place. After three years of neglect, a gentle breeze could knock a pen off a desk. That was the logical assumption.
She took a step back. The breeze still brushed her shoulders. It wasn’t strong enough to move anything beyond her though. It probably wasn’t strong enough with her blocking it to, for instance, knock over a pen again.
“Take Two.”
Jack watched, eagerly, as Sydney approached but his triumph was short lived. She simply placed it back without any fanfare, without any curiosity. Fine. If he did it once, he could do it again. It would be harder for her to ignore if he knocked it over twice, right? He rolled his shoulders, planted his feet firmly on the ground, and pulled his arm back as far as he could before swinging it forward. It took him six tries before finally finally it rolled forward, just slightly.. The effort of it all was embarrassingly exhausting and he leaned back against the desk to rest as he prayed that she would notice.
Thirty pirates had died on this island. One of the women working at the hotel believed their ghosts still haunted the beaches and jungles. The hotel itself. And then thirty kids died during a freak storm nobody had seen coming. Her research hadn’t provided that connection before. It hadn’t offered that number. But she had it now. If thirty people died here once, and they were still haunting the place, why couldn’t there be thirty more ghosts? Why couldn’t Nick still be here?
The answer was simple: he could. But Sydney knew the difference between hope and reality. She knew the difference between could and was.
Because she was exhibiting caution didn’t mean she wasn’t waiting eagerly. Sydney didn’t realize she was holding her breath until the pen rolled and she let out that air in a sharp, shaky burst.
“Okay. Well…” It didn’t prove much. It didn’t prove anything beyond the existence of someone she couldn’t see. But that alone was something. Not being alone was something. “Right.” She’d have to come back with actual equipment, but she didn’t want to leave just yet. With nowhere specific to look, Sydney found herself looking back at the pen, then the desk itself. The dusty, abandoned desk. A smile started to form as she took a finger to drag the word ‘Hi’ through the dust.
“Thank Jesus.” His shoulders slumped with relief, but he quickly found himself leaning forward as Sydney started writing. Hi. He couldn’t help but laugh, and it felt like a weight had been lifted off him. She couldn’t see him, he couldn’t speak to her, but at least she believed he was there. The disarray of the room was proving useful, and there was plenty of dust on the desk to write in and he dragged a finger straight down in a long line. His stroke was clumsy and uneven, with spots of undisturbed dust breaking up the line despite the pressure he was trying to apply. Like a child learning to write again, Jack bit his lip in concentration and drew two more, finally connecting the first two into an uppercase H. It barely looked like a word and the letters were faint and sloppy. He doubted it would be legible or even noticeable to most people but maybe if he was lucky, if she was really paying attention, she could read it.
HI.
Sydney had known ghosts were real since she was five years old. For her, acceptance was never the hard part. It was always the investigation, figuring out exactly what she was dealing with. Answers like that weren’t always easy to come by. Not every presence was forthcoming. Not every presence could communicate.
She watched the dust, waiting for anything. A fingerprint, or a word. Anything at all. Her brow furrowed as a thin smear of dust was cleared away. She exhaled.
To her, it was just a line. Not even an especially long one. But she knew that patch of desk had been coated in the same film as everything else in the room just a moment earlier. She accepted that fact without hesitation. She hadn’t cleared away the grime. Someone else had.
Sydney traced out the word ‘Yes,’ then added ‘No’ on the other side of the new line.
“Do you know where you are?”
Bless Sydney. Jack had always liked her well enough, but renewed affection was welling up inside of him. If he could touch her, he would have reached out and hugged her but instead he carefully tried to circle the word ‘yes.’ This wasn’t the right question. It wasn’t a perfect system. There were questions he needed to ask her but he wasn’t sure how he could, when writing a single line was so difficult. But it was progress and that was a start.
It was best to keep it simple. But Sydney really didn’t have a starting point beyond the dangerous, hopeful guess that maybe, just maybe, she had found her brother in one go. All it took was three years of waiting, a borrowed key, and some minor parkour. She couldn’t let her thoughts cling to that notion. Not yet.
“Were you a guest here?”
He circled yes again. This would take forever though if she tried to guess who he was. Maybe he could write his own name. Above the yes | no, he traced a large uppercase J, pushing his finger as hard as he could into the dust. It likely would have hurt if he had been able to feel it, and he supposed he could be thankful for that at least. He traced it twice more in attempts to make it more legible before moving on. The A was more difficult, and the lines, where visible at all, were too curved, more like scribbles. Still, he was undeterred as he moved on to the C. By the time he reached K, he felt a phantom pain in his finger, like he imagined an amputee must feel, but he reminded himself that it was just in his head and he kept writing. The result looked like it had been written by an infant who hadn’t learned his alphabet yet but the J, at least, was relatively clear. If she could understand that, she could at least narrow his identity down.
A faint smudge close to the yes made her nod, lips already parted for her next question. But Sydney stopped when she saw another small, clear patch of desk appear. It was such a strange thing to watch. Even if there was a chance the breeze had knocked the pen from the desk, clearing dust in such a manner wasn’t exactly plausible. A finger dragging against wood, without even the slightest pull of noise, should’ve made her uneasy. Instead, Sydney watched attentively, too determined to decipher what she was seeing to consider the unsettling nature of doing this, alone, in an abandoned, decimated hotel room.
If she squinted, she thought it could be a J. The dust cleared inconsistently beyond that, trailing off into untouched dirt. Drawing a conclusion would be a stretch at best, but communicating like this wasn’t exactly her ghost-hunting go-to. If she wanted to learn anything, she’d need to make a few educated guesses. “Is that part of your name? J?”
Jack made another circle by ‘yes.’ It had been amusing when he had met them how he, Jude, and Jeremiah all had J names, but now it just seemed like it would make things needlessly difficult, implying that she thought of them at all. He went back to work on the A, retracing it again and again and again and again.
Her heart sank for a moment. Just a single beat. Yes, the person’s name started with the letter J. This wasn’t her brother. But, if every ghost who wasn’t her brother left her completely shattered, Sydney never could’ve survived what she chose to do these last three years. Following Nick’s research was still a connection to Nick. It was part of the path. Back to him, she hoped. Just...not yet, apparently.
Sydney watched for more beyond the fingertip tap above the ‘yes,’ but nothing else changed. Her teeth caught her lower lip before she let out a breath. “Have you been here long?”
Jack felt like a mad man, writing the same letter over and over and still she couldn’t see it. He swore it was there, clearly a crude A to him, and yet when he closed his eyes for just a moment, when he reopened them the dust resettled as if he had never displaced it at all. He swore loudly but kept at it. What else could he do. He didn’t know how long he had been here, he didn’t know what day it was, what month, what year so how could he answer that? His only hope was for Sydney to figure out who he was and then give him the answers he needed.
A A A A A A
His frustration grew with each stroke, rising to an impotent anger and then a light flickered, startling even himself.
Sydney was alone, staring intently at a dusty desktop. It was such a ridiculous thing, when she thought of it in those terms. But then, she knew she wasn’t alone. Waiting for the next response, the next light tap that indicated an answer, made sense.
Which meant it also made sense when the light flickered and she jerked back, letting out a startled gasp. The room beyond the desk had faded from her awareness, so anything else happening, any other trigger, was completely unexpected. Hand clutched over her heart, Sydney looked at the light. The same one she had tried to turn on earlier. The same one she’d established had no electricity running to it. Syd let out another breath.
The dust wasn’t working. It wasn’t the most effective method, and if she had to guess, her new companion was flickering lights in frustration.
“I’m going to come back later, okay? I’ll bring more to help. So it’ll be easier to communicate. Hopefully.” She nodded, even though she couldn’t see who she was talking to. “I promise.”
Making sure she still had the key, Sydney started back into the hall.
“No!” His writing forgotten, Jack followed her. “No, Sydney, please stay. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. Please please please stay. I need to know, I need you to know.” He reached for her wrist out of habit only the touch air, and he gave a strangled groan. “Please, it’s Jack. You know me. Don’t leave me. Stop!” But no matter how desperately he plead, she couldn’t hear him. It was useless.
So, finally, for the first time that day, Jack stopped fighting it.
He sunk to the ground in the middle of the hallway, just outside the plywood door. He was dead. His chin dropped to his chest, and had he still been alive, a tear would have fallen from his eye. But he wasn’t. He was dead and she couldn’t save him.