Page 22 of The Haunted Hotel

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I say, again fighting that urge to squeeze his hand to comfort him.

“Have you worked here long?” He changes the subject abruptly as he eyes the fading wallpaper.

“Yes, I’ve spent most of my life here,” I reply. “My mum used to be a maid here when I was little. We didn’t have anywhere to live, so Mr Ashton-Drake let us stay here up on the fifth floor. I used to lie on the carpets in the hallways playing with my toys or doing my homework. The guests were always really nice. When I turned sixteen, Mum got another job and moved to Leeds. Iwanted to stay, so I started working here and I’ve been here ever since.”

“Youlivedhere? What about the rest of your family?”

“It’s always just been me and Mum.” I shrug. “I never knew my dad. Neither did my mum, really,” I chuckle. “I was conceived in a field in the pouring rain at a music festival while Oasis was playing.”

He turns to stare at me. “Is that true?”

I nod again. “Yep.” I laugh as we begin to climb the stairs to the next floor.

“Where are we going?” Morgan asks. “I’d have thought we’d meet in the restaurant or the bar, maybe the study? Doesn’t my grandfather have an office?”

“An office?” I laugh, trying to picture Mr Ashton-Drake in a stuffy office. “No, he’d hate that.”

“Then how does he run the hotel efficiently?”

I shrug. “He just tells us what he wants us to do and we do it. To be honest, most of the time he just leaves us to it. He doesn’t want to run the hotel day-to-day. After all, that’s what a manager is for. The only problem is that we can’t seem to keep managers. I think Mr Eldritch was the one who lasted the longest.”

“And how long was that?”

“Three months and twenty-two days,” I muse. “Mr Jackson was the shortest—he only lasted thirty-eight.”

“Thirty-eight days?” he says in surprise.

“Minutes.”

He stops dead and stares at me. “Seriously?”

I shrug again. “For some reason, people don’t seem to warm to this place, but honestly, Ashton House is the best place in the whole world.”

“I think your world view may be slightly lacking, because this is most definitely not the best place in the whole world,” Morgan replies, his tone dry.

“You just need to give it time to grow on you.”

“Like a fungus,” he mutters.

“It’s in your blood.”

“I sincerely hope not.” He once again begins climbing the steep stairs. “Where did you say we were going?”

“To the family apartments. They were created when the house was renovated into a hotel back in the early eighties. The family rooms take up nearly an entire wing, but to be honest, Mr Ashton-Drake only uses two of them. The rest we close up to save on the heating bills. Aggie and Dilys have rooms on the ground floor. John the Maid, Rosie, and I have rooms up on the fifth floor in the old servants’ quarters.”

“Five live-in staff members?” He glances sideways at me when we reach the top floor. “Please tell me you have more staff than that though.”

“Not at the moment, no,” I answer as I lead him down a narrow corridor.

“So, let me get this straight.” His brow wrinkles. “You have no manager, only five people on staff, and no guests.”

“Well, we technically have one guest at the moment. Mr Pennington. He’s a writer.”

“How is this place still open?” he asks in confusion. “Surely it’s not making enough money to pay for the–”

“Here we are,” I announce as we reach Mr Ashton-Drake’s door.

I stare at the unassuming wooden door in front of me. It has no numbers, unlike the doors we passed on the other levels. Instead, there’s only a little brass plaque polished to a high shine and bearing only one word.