Preston Madden

Period 6

4/13/09

My palms were sweating when my friend Josh told me to go into the hotel. My thoughts raced as Josh said, “Come on. Nobody’s in there anymore. It’ll be fine!” I didn’t think of the consequences this was going to bring me. I guess this wasn’t such a good idea now was it? To be locked up in an abandoned “haunted” hotel. I wasn’t exactly frightened, just a bit more curious than the average sixteen year old would be if he too went inside a hotel like this one. It was ten o clock p.m. I didn’t know how long we were going to be out in this empty hotel. Than fear struck me as soon as I heard somebody on the upper level of the hotel. I told myself Josh and Allan went upstairs to go check the place out. I heard them still outside. As I ascended the stairs I heard it louder, and this time it was painfully loud. The long journey upstairs seemed to be rewarded with a flash of light gleaming off the wall. My thoughts were “it’s a flashlight. Nothing more.” How wrong I was. The light moved and I followed it. I rounded the corner into one of the rooms. All the wallpaper was torn, there was scratch marks on the wall. As my face turned pale I could feel the blood drain out of my head. That’s when I saw her. She appeared to be a lonely little girl that was lost.

I approached her cautiously, as if I were in a field of land mines. The room door slammed shut behind me. The little pale looking girl didn’t flinch at all. I finally got as close as I was going to and said, “What are you doing in here? Shouldn’t you be at home asleep?” She turned around and her face was white. As white as a sheet of paper. Her eyes had no pupils nor did she look like she had eyelids. She looked at me with a glare on her face and suddenly she screamed. As soon as I heard her ear piercing scream I ran to try to get the door open. It had no use. She glided across the room to me, as I shut my eyes, I heard one final noise. As my eyelids retracted open, there was no girl. No one standing there. The room was filled with an icy chill that made me shudder.

I heard more thumps on the door. I ran faster across the room to the window that was nailed shut. I broke open the window with my fist. I was bleeding horribly. As to my excitement, Josh appeared in the door way with Allan. Josh said, “We heard something. It sounded like you screamed? What’s wrong?” I couldn’t speak. My mind was paralyzed with one thought. That frightening child who looked about the age of nine. I explained in a short brief notion. They both nodded and all three of us went back down stairs. We tried the front exit of the hotel. Nails were stuck in it, and the door padlocked shut. We ran to the back of the hotel, the only other exit, and found it no use. Allan wanted to go see if the basement had another exit. Josh and I stayed in the main lobby.

We heard a loud crack and bangs that grew softer with time. We both rushed to the basement stairway. We couldn’t see anything. I was the first to climb down the steep, cracked, wooden stairs. At the end of the flight of stairs there was a overhead light turned on. I found Allan at the end of the steps. His skull was opened. Blood was gushing out of him. His last expression was if someone had frightened him or caught him by surprise. I was almost vomiting when I realized Josh was still upstairs.

I made it half way up the stairs when I heard him scream. Sweat streamed down my face with fear and a horrified expression showing. I climbed to the top of the stairs, finding no one there. I found Josh’s cell phone laying on the ground. I picked it up and found a picture of him on there, with a white flash behind him. His face was terrified. I ran upstairs finding streams of blood everywhere. I almost got sick feeling alone in the hotel. My night was about to get worse in this hotel. I found Josh on the floor in one of the dark rooms with his throat ripped open.

I ran to the window I had broken earlier, shut the room door behind me, and dialed nine-one-one. The phone signaled no service. Then I heard banging on the door. It wasn’t soft pounding. It was violent, rapid, banging. The door flew open. I saw the little girl dressed in what looked was from the eighteen hundreds. She stared at me with her piercing eyes. I considered my options. Her pale figure was coming closer to me. The next and last thing I remembered was hurtling down to the ground out of the second story window watching her eyes stare.

I felt the impact of me and the ground. I saw her white figure disappear as if satisfied in my suicide. I felt the blood rush out of my body and onto the jagged rocks beneath me. My arms were snapped. I was paralyzed and slowly bleeding to death. My self sacrifice for this twisted hotel caused the young girl to be happy and find pleasure in killing. As the world twisted and disappeared into black, I saw the faint image of her. A distant nightmare I’d no longer forget.