Something was wrong. I knew it as soon as I opened the door. This wasn’t the hotel I had been in. This wasn’t the run-down place I had been just a few minutes ago.

  The hotel I was in now looked brand new. The paint was shining and bright, the hallways were vacuumed, there were fresh flowers on the table and the lights were also brighter.

  I could hear laughter and cheer, like people having a good time.

  Which was strange because everyone had been so quiet until now. They should all have been eating. This noise sounded like friends at the pub making jokes and patting each other on the back.

  Or maybe they knew each other from before? That would explain it.

  I wanted to go back to the dining room, but that was my second problem. I had no idea where I was.

  Shit.

  The toilet had been right across from the dining hall, but now I could see a dozen rooms in front of me. The hotel seemed to have grown ten times larger and at least twice as bright. Not knowing where to go, I decided to follow the sound of the laughter.

  All the while, my heart kept thumping very loudly. This was wrong. I should not be here. My body tingled like it was in danger. It was screaming trying to warn me, but I couldn’t understand what the danger was. Where was it? Where was the threat?

  I had to find a mirror. I had to ask her for help. Even though I hated her, she had saved my life quite a few times.

  But there was no mirror to be seen. Accepting the inevitable, I kept walking ahead. The sound seemed to be coming from one of the rooms at the end. Now I was a hundred percent sure this wasn’t my crowd because I could hear at least two dozen voices laughing and cheering. I could hear wine glasses being tinkled, I could hear expensive cutlery cutting through exquisite food, I could hear dozens of people making jokes and having a merry time with each other.

  This wasn’t in my hotel. I was in some other place.

  Taking a deep breath, I pushed open the door to the dining room to find… …Nothing.

  No one.

  Empty.

  And yet I could feel the tension in the room, even though the dining room was empty. I could sense at least two dozen eyes staring at me with anger and hatred, with so much loathing and venom that I felt I would be cut to small pieces.

  I felt like I had interrupted someone’s private party. A party I was not only not invited to, but where my type were not welcome.

  That was a sort of hatred and hostility. I felt pure, raw fury. A dozen invisible eyes wanting to tear into me to rip me apart to kill me where I stood.

  But there was no one there. And yet someone had been there just a few seconds ago. I could see a dozen lit cigars, a few wine glasses, half drunk, and I could smell expensive perfume from invisible woman.

  I felt nervous.

  I tried to give an awkward laugh. “Hey guys, don’t mind me, I was just passing through. Hey, I’ll leave if you want.”

  GET HIM

  The voice was not said by any human mouth, but I still heard it. It was said in a tone dripping with acid and bile, and I heard a dozen chairs moving back. The temperature in the room dropped by at least ten degrees.

  Fuck.

  I turned and ran to the door, but an invisible fist punched me hard in the stomach.

  As I went down, more invisible hands slapped and punched me, and invisible feet tried to kick me. I fought back and punched a few of them, but while I was making contact, I was having no effect. The people ever hitting were ghosts—literally and figuratively.

  They didn’t exist.

  But boy did their punches hurt.

  I knew I would be dead in a minute at most. I needed help.

  I grabbed an invisible leg and pulled the person down. Then, I proceeded to punch an invisible body that had been hitting me.

  The ghosts moved back, and I jumped on top of one of the tables and picked up a wine glass. I angled it until I could see a reflection in it from the harsh yellow light on top of me.

  He is calling for help. Kill him.

  “HELP!” I shouted to my reflection.

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  I felt something dull but hard hit me in the back, and I collapsed with a loud thud.

  ***

  When I opened my eyes, I was back in my own hotel, the old and faded one with weak yellow lights, and seven or eight surprised faces staring at me.

  “What the hell?” said a voice. “Did he just drop from the ceiling?”

  Another voice, a woman spoke. “Is that a knife in his back? Shit! Did someone try to kill him?”

  There was a flurry of emotion as chairs were moved back. People rushed to help me. I was pulled off the table when my friend Joey came up.

  “Back off, everyone. Let me check,” he said.

  I felt another pain in my lower back as Joey pulled something out.

  “Mate, you’re very lucky this is a dull kitchen knife. It couldn’t break your skin, but it has left a very ugly scar. What the hell, Royce? What happened?”

  The next few minutes were a flurry. A dozen questions were asked of me; everyone wanted to see my scar. The crazy influencer wanted to interview me using three different cameras, with the fourth one pointed at her own face.

  Finally, I asked everyone to back off. “I’ll tell you if you all sit down and stop harassing me,” I said. “First, what’s your name-- Lydia? Do you mind showing us what your camera captured?”

  “Here,” she said and showed me her laptop.

  Yes, the event was being broadcast live. I was a social media influencer now, I guess? It was exactly like everyone had said. Like I had literally dropped from the ceiling and onto the middle of the table.

  Of course, the camera hadn’t covered all the angles, so people could claim I had been hiding on the side and had merely jumped on the table. A few sceptical commentators in the YouTube comments said exactly that.

  The other commenters wanted the sceptics to shut up and hear my story.

  “One second, we were all getting ready to start dinner. In the next second, you just dropped in the middle of the table,” said Wynn, “as if by magic. I’ve been scientifically minded my whole life, but I can’t explain this, Royce. I was looking right at the place where you landed, and I can say with 100% certainty that you appeared out of nowhere, like from thin air.”

  Her sister Selena spoke next. “I can sense death and ghosts around you, Royce. Tell me if I am wrong. You were attacked by something not living. Is that correct?”

  Damn, here I was thinking the woman was just a scam artist, but she had gotten me right on the first attempt.

  Joey stepped in, “Let him tell his story. Go on, Royce, you can’t keep us waiting. This mysterious act only works once.”

  “I’m not trying to act mysterious,” I grumbled.

  I wanted to see if it was possible to turn the cameras off, but it didn’t look like it. So I started speaking slowly. I told them of how I had found myself in this strange place, how I found a lot of people laughing in the dining room, but when I opened it there was no one there. How I had felt the hostility, and then suddenly invisible people had attacked me.

  “Invisible,” said Selena, “Maybe you cannot just see ghosts?”

  I just mumbled something to get her off my back.

  “But how did you end up here? Asked Wynn.

  This was tricky. I didn’t want to tell these people about my shadow companion, so I just shrugged.

  “I have no idea. I’m guessing whatever magic or spell was holding me there broke when they attacked me, or maybe my falling brought me back to the present.”

  Luckily for me, they didn’t push the point.

  Everyone broke out into loud discussions about what could have happened. Lydia went back to answering her YouTube comments. At one point, she gave an excited shriek. “We are reaching 1 million live viewers. This is awesome, people! I’ve never had so many people view my telecast live. Most people watch on the repeat. And this is greatly helping.”

  “That’s great!” said Hazel. “I have a 100k live viewers too! Plus more joining every second.” “We are really setting records here,” said Lydia. “Many of my viewers are experts in the paranormal, and they have their own theories about how you could have appeared magically. The most popular one, at least the one most people agree with, is that you temporarily travelled in time for a few seconds, but for whatever reason, the spell broke, and you came back. There is some debate about who those people were and why they attacked you.”

  That was a surprisingly good theory, and it agreed with what I had seen. The hotel I had been in was not the current one. It was a hotel in its heyday when it was brand new and popular, not the shit hole it was now.

  Selena cleared her throat. “I can explain why they attacked him.”

  She paused theatrically while everyone stared at her, and then answered, “Because the people he met are the ghosts of the people who have died here. They are still stuck in this hell, and they don’t like outsiders, like us, interfering in their world. I have been sensing their anger since I arrived, and I’m scared that more of us will be attacked as the evening goes on.”

  Everyone shut up then. Even Lydia stopped typing and stared at her with an open mouth. Hazel, the other influencer, looked like she was going to cry.

  Damn, this Selena woman was sharp.

  I had taken her for the standard airy-fairy psychic who waves her hands in the air and pretends to read auras, but she seemed to be the genuine type, and she was 100% right. The longer this went on, the more people would be attacked. I had the strongest connection with the spirit world, which is why they had come at me first.

  But nobody in the hotel was safe.

  If the boundary between the real and the ghost world opened more, more people would be susceptible to their influence, and they would most certainly murder one of us before the night was out.

  But did Selena have to be so blunt? She had scared the shit out of most of us. Hazel, who was probably the youngest of us, was openly crying now.

  I had to take control.

  I banged my fist on the table. “Everyone quiet. Many of you asked me why I was here. I’m here because my client believes something like this might happen—something Selena hinted at. Someone being attacked by the ghost world.

  My job is to try and stop it. Don’t look so surprised; I’ve done this before.

  We have a lot of experienced psychics and paranormal researchers in this room, and between us, we can figure out how to fight this threat. Whatever it is, just don’t panic. Fear makes the ghost world stronger.

  I know it’s hard, but try to remain calm and rational. The ghosts from the other world have to follow rules; they can’t willy-nilly come into our world and kill whoever they want. If they had that much power, they would have killed us all by now.”

  Everyone seemed to relax a little at this.

  “So, how do we start?” asked Dr. Anand. “Where do we begin on investigations?”

  “We begin with dinner. It’s impossible to conduct any serious investigation while you are hungry.”