“Yes, that room is off limits, correct.”
Maria gives the woman another moment to stew before filling the awkward silence. “Okay, understood,” she says, before adding, “And I take it they’re not coming. The children? The client?”
Oddly, the woman doesn’t disagree. “We are still attempting to contact —”
“Right. Well, I’ll be here. Until the final contracted day. Unless you’d like to cancel the rest of the booking?”
“No, no. Let’s stick to the plan,” the woman counters.
—
MARIA CONSTRUCTS A NEW PLAN: stay until the end, don’t go near the white room, and collect the full amount of contracted money in ten days. No client is coming. It will be easy money.
—
THE NEXT EIGHT HOURS ARE some of the simplest, most carefree moments of Maria’s life.
She lies on the warm sand of the beach, her skin gently bronzing as she reads. She swims in the warm emerald shallows and feels the sand ooze satisfyingly underfoot.
Then she lunches by the pool, sleeps on a sun-warmed lounger, swims in the cool chlorinated water when the temperature gets too much, hotfooting it across the baked-earthenware tiles back to the comfort of her towel. That evening she showers, drinks a glass of wine, and eats dinner while music drifts from the overhead speakers. She feels as close to free as she ever has. No one to tend to, no one to impress, just life to be lived.
Before bed, she goes through the house, closing up as she goes. She places the docket the electrician left her earlier that day on the hall table under a small ebony sculpture.
Downstairs, the door to the white room slides open as she passes it carrying damp towels from the indoor pool area to the laundry. Something new inside it catches her eye.
On the floor about a foot into the room lies a small object. She recognizes it immediately. She doubles back, squats down in the hallway, towels in hand, and squints into the room. A pencil: short, red, chewed at the end. It was the electrician’s; he must have dropped it.
Maria considers the pencil for a long while. Then seemingly on a whim, she reaches out the short distance from the hall and tries to grab it, careful all the while to remain firmly in the hallway. But the little red pencil is just beyond her reach.
Of course it is.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she huffs, and goes to get something long.
Spatula in hand, she tries again, wafting and leaning until she bites the bullet and crawls with both hands into the room, her knees still in the hall.
Overhead the lighting, sensing her presence, suddenly changes.
Surprised, Maria looks up quickly, loses her balance, and falls, whacking her elbow hard onto the floor. Pain shoots through her funny bone and instinctively her knees pull into the room. She freezes. Then lightning quick, realizing what she’s done, she leaps back up, and jumps back out into the safety of the hallway. But nothing happens. She stares back at the room, almost disappointed. Nothing happened.
“Huh,” she says.
The red pencil is still on the floor in there. So she just walks into the room and picks it up. Still nothing happens.
She looks around the space, her confidence growing. She spreads her arms now, like the man did earlier, like Christ the Redeemer, and she spins. Still nothing happens.
She walks over to the pulsing green button and stares at it. Then, as the man did before her, she smooths her hands over the white walls surrounding the button. He was right: no join, no access panel. But regardless, nothing happens.
So she too presses the green button.
A bassy low-frequency alarm is emitted, the lighting in the room immediately changing again, this time from white to pink.
This definitely did not happen when the man pressed the button.
Panic flares inside Maria. She spins but—as fast as she moves, and she moves fast—she does not make it back across the space before the door to the hallway seals shut in front of her.
CHAPTER 9
NINA
