The crews return the following afternoon and Chanyeol joins them, leaving Baekhyun in their room to “rest up.” He’s only been bedridden for a day and he’s already going out of his mind with boredom. The hotel isn’t wired up for cable and there’s only so many times he can watch the movies saved on the hard drive he and Chanyeol share. He’s supposed to be drafting up designs for eye-catching sculptures and an intricate banister for the grand staircase in the lobby, but his usually oh-so-creative mind is blank.

He hasn’t mentioned it again to Chanyeol, knowing that the younger doesn’t believe him and is probably starting to worry for his sanity, but Baekhyun can’t stop thinking about the dead girl in the attic. The blonde girl with the pretty rosebud mouth and the haunting eyes. If he didn’t already know he was sane, he might think he was crazy too.

Days turn into a week, and then two. Chanyeol brings back reports every night when he returns to their room, bringing takeout with him that they eat curled up in bed while the younger recounts the progress on the kitchen. The crews finish gutting the kitchen, getting rid of all the ruined appliances and counters. They pull up all the flooring and take down the walls. They reinforce the foundation and lay new flooring, matching the previous as best as they can to retain the authentic look Chanyeol and Baekhyun are striving so desperately for.

Baekhyun hates not being able to see this progress for himself. Chanyeol brings him a whole slew of pictures on the expensive digital camera they’d splurged on, but it’s not the same. Eventually, after Baekhyun whines and pouts for ages, Chanyeol agrees to get a technician out to check on the elevator. After two days of waiting on edge, the technician pronounces that the elevator is fit for use and Baekhyun can hobble into it with his crutches.

He’s even more in the way now that he’s got crutches, but the difference is now, after weeks of solitude in his room, the sidelong looks and glares don’t bother him.

After two more days of this, however, even the renovating of the kitchen begins to bore Baekhyun and he begins exploring the hotel again. With the elevator in use, it’s much easier to get between floors.

He knows he shouldn’t, but he finds himself on the seventh floor once more. Try as he might, he can’t get that hanging girl out of his mind.

It’s incredibly difficult to get up the narrow staircase with his crutches, and in the end he sits on his and scoots up while dragging the crutches behind him. The attic looks just the same when he gets up there, the same broken furniture, the same piano with the missing keys. And there’s the low-hanging beam that the girl had been hanging from. A shiver goes down Baekhyun’s spine just looking at it.

“Hello?” he calls uncertainly, not really expecting an answer. “Uh, miss?”

And there she is, standing on the other side of the dusty piano wearing her weird black dress. She’s eyeing him distrustfully with those big brown eyes, soft blonde hair tumbling over one petite shoulder. But there is no sign of a noose.

“Oh,” Baekhyun says, surprised. “You’re real.”

“Yes,” she answers, and he’s surprised by how young she sounds.

He swallows the lump in his throat. There’s something about this girl that gives him the creeps, and he’s not really sure if it’s just because he saw her hanging by her neck a few weeks back. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here…” she answers in a dreamy sort of voice, one hand splayed across her belly, the dark fabric of her uniform visible between the pale flesh of her fingers.

His brows furrow in confusion. “In the attic?”

“In the hotel,” she answers.

“The hotel is closed,” Baekhyun answers. “You shouldn’t be here. It’s dangerous. We’re doing construction.”

The girl gives him a confused look. “I work here…” She looks around for a second. “Where’s Mr. Kim?”

Baekhyun’s mind is spinning. “Who’s Mr. Kim?”

But the girl doesn’t answer him, just continues to look around with obvious confusion.

Baekhyun takes a deep breath. “I saw you the other day…” he says. “You were…” But he can’t bring himself to say it. Say what, he’s not really sure. Hanging? Committing suicide? Dead?

But the girl isn’t paying him any attention anymore. “I need to see Mr. Kim,” she says. Over and over she says it until she sounds like a broken record, her voice growing more distant and broken each time. She turns to look out the window, the one with broken glass, and for a second Baekhyun is afraid she might jump.

“You must be hungry,” he says, reaching out to grasp her arm. She jumps when his fingers close around her flesh. “Come down to the kitchen and we’ll find you something to eat.”

After a moment of what appears to be confusion, the girl nods and allows Baekhyun to lead her over to the stairs. There he has to let go of her arm to maneuver his way down the stairs with his crutches and, when he turns around, she’s gone.

“Hello?” he calls up the stairs. “Miss?”

But there’s no response.

“I can’t believe you went back up to the attic again,” Chanyeol yells at him when he tells his boyfriend later that night. “After what happened last time? Do you have a ing death wish?”

“You don’t understand,” Baekhyun explains, sitting on the bed with his foot propped up and iced because he’d put too much weight on it while out and about that afternoon. “I saw the girl again. The one from before.”

“You mean the dead one?” Chanyeol says skeptically, pulling his shirt over his head and going into the bathroom to turn on the taps in the shower.

Baekhyun groans and flings himself back onto the mattress. “Well apparently she’s not as dead as I first thought.”

“Which is even more concerning, when you think about it,” Chanyeol calls from the bathroom. “It means we’ve got a squatter on our property.”

“You should have heard her talking,” Baekhyun muses, making himself more comfortable against the pillows. “She said she lives here. Hell, she said she works here.”

“Oh, great. So not only do we have a squatter in our hotel, but she’s completely loony,” Chanyeol’s garbled voice comes from the shower.

“Maybe not crazy,” Baekhyun says thoughtfully. “Maybe just confused or something.”

“Babe, unless this woman is in her sixties, there’s no way she’s ever worked here,” Chanyeol says, and he’s using that patronizing tone that Baekhyun hates. “This hotel hasn’t been open in forty years. Not since the seventies.”

“I know that,” Baekhyun grumbles, annoyed. “But…I don’t know. Maybe she got confused about what hotel she was in or something.”

The water in the shower turns off. “Babe,” Chanyeol says, and a second later he appears in the doorway, towel slung low around his waist. “Please don’t go wandering around the hotel again, okay? At least not until we can repair the floors upstairs. Please. For me.”

Baekhyun heaves a heavy sigh. “Fine. I suppose that’s the least I can do.”

Chanyeol smiles and it looks like he’s about to say something, but a noise at the door stops him before he can. “What was that?” he demands, brows furrowing together.

“It sounded like a knock,” Baekhyun says matter-of-factly.

Chanyeol rolls his eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous, Baek. There’s no one else in this hotel besides us. It wasn’t a knock.”

“Then go see what it was,” Baekhyun challenges.

Chanyeol hesitates, then goes to the door and yanks it open. There’s no one in the brightly-lit hallway; instead there’s a shirt folded neatly right in front of their door.

“What is it?” Baekhyun calls curiously, propping himself up in bed.

Chanyeol bends down and picks it up. “A shirt,” he says, bewildered. He wrinkles his nose as he tosses it to Baekhyun. “Looks like it’s in pretty bad shape.”

Baekhyun catches the material and frowns at the singed smell coming from it. “It’s burnt,” he mutters.

“And pretty recently too,” Chanyeol adds, looking up and down the corridor once more before shutting the door, locking both the deadbolt and the chain.

“It’s still a little warm,” Baekhyun frowns.

“Probably just the crew playing a stupid prank,” Chanyeol says, but he doesn’t sound as confident as he did before. “I’ll sure be glad when we get that hole in the wall and those windows fixed up. At least then we won’t have to worry about ing strays wandering in.”

“Strays,” Baekhyun repeats, tossing the shirt aside. “Sure.”