The Thirteenth Floor of the Ashford Hotel

My sister, Elena, and I shared a room in the old Ashford Hotel, where our parents had taken the position of night managers. The hotel was a grand, decaying relic of the 1920s, with creaking floorboards and gas lamps that flickered even when the wind was still. We were twelve and fourteen, and the hotel was our home, its labyrinthine corridors our playground. But there was one rule we never broke: we never took the elevator to the thirteenth floor. The buttons skipped from 12 to 14, but the floor existed, accessible only by a hidden stairwell behind the boiler room. The staff whispered about it, but never spoke of it directly.

One night, I woke to find Elena standing at the foot of our bed, her eyes wide but glazed, her mouth moving like she was speaking to someone just beyond my sight. She whispered, ‘They’re coming back, Marcus. The ones from the basement. They want to finish the story.’ I tried to shake her, but she was cold as the marble in the lobby. Then she collapsed onto the floor, and when I turned on the light, she was breathing normally, as if nothing had happened.

A week later, our cat, Figaro, went missing. We searched every floor, from the grand ballroom to the dusty attics, but he was gone. Two days after that, my father, who had been pacing the lobby with a flashlight, found Figaro collapsed in the elevator, barely alive. The vet said it was old age, but our cat was only three. As we buried him in the garden behind the hotel, I noticed Elena staring up at the turret that marked the thirteenth floor, and she whispered, ‘He was trying to tell me something, but he couldn’t speak.’

I started having dreams. In them, I was walking down a long, narrow hallway, the wallpaper peeling to reveal black mold that pulsed like a heartbeat. At the end was a door painted a deep, glossy red, and behind it, I could hear a child sobbing. I’d always wake before I could open it, my heart pounding.

Last Friday, I was working late in the hotel’s old archive room, cataloging guest ledgers from the 1930s. I came across an entry dated October 31st, 1932, for a child named ‘Evelyn Rayner.’ The note in the margin, in a cramped, angry hand, read: ‘Do not let her speak. She will call the others.’ Curious, I followed the trail in the ledgers to the boiler room, where I found the hidden stairwell. The door at the top was painted that same deep red. I pushed it open.

The thirteenth floor was not abandoned. It was a replica of our own floor, but everything was faded, sepia-toned, like a photograph left in the sun. The air was thick with dust and the smell of old perfume. I walked to the room that corresponded to ours. Inside, a girl in a white nightgown sat on the edge of a bed, her back to me. She was humming a tune I didn’t recognize, but it made my skin crawl. I stepped closer, and she turned. Her face was blank, like a doll’s, but her eyes were old, ancient. She spoke, not with her lips, but from the walls: ‘You’re not the one. The one who hears was supposed to be a girl. You must bring her.’

I stumbled backward, but the door slammed shut. I ran for the stairwell, but the corridors shifted, and I found myself in an endless loop of identical doors. I could hear Elena’s voice, faint but clear, calling from somewhere below, ‘Marcus, don’t listen to her. She’s the one who took Figaro.’

I woke up in my own bed, drenched in sweat. Elena was asleep beside me, but when I looked at her, her neck bore a bruise in the shape of a child’s hand. I knew then that the thirteenth floor was not a place, but a threshold. The ghosts of the hotel had been waiting all these years, and they had chosen my sister as their vessel. They wanted to speak through her, to finish what they started in 1932. And if I didn’t find a way to stop them, Elena would become one of them.

The next morning, I told Elena everything. She listened, her face pale, and then she said, ‘I’ve seen her too. In my dreams. She says she’s sorry, but she can’t leave until she tells someone what happened. She says the night staff buried her alive in the basement because she saw them stealing the silver. And now she wants me to dig her up.’