My tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth, but I manage to choke out a yes. Derek swings the door open to an empty room. The bathroom door is still ajar but he rips it open without hesitation. Again, empty. Relief floods my body.
“Clear,” he says, and I start to giggle, all the stress of the last few minutes dissolving into hysteria. “Pull yourself together, girl. Now, where’s this phone?”
My giggles subside. It feels off now I know someone else has been in here, less secure. Like my privacy has been completed invaded, which I guess it has. My phone is exactly where I left it, slammed face down on the corner of the desk.
“Here.” I unlock the device and hold it out to him.
“Er, no thanks, don’t wanna be riffling through a student’s phone.”
“Oh. OK.” I open the album and go to click on the last image. It’s one of Jess, swinging her legs on the wall with a mouthful of chips. I scroll through, but that’s it.
“That’s not . . . I mean, they were right here.” I swipe through the other albums, thinking I might have been looking somewhere else, but the creepy photos are nowhere to be seen. Derek’s sympathetic gaze burns into me.
“It was probably just a bad dream,” he says. “You’ve had a hell of a time.”
“No! They were here. Look!” I pull up a recently deleted file and expect to see multiple copies of my sleeping face, but there’s nothing there either.
Every single photo has gone.
“What, every single picture? There wasn’t even one?”
“Yep.” I slurp at the dregs of my chocolate milkshake before tossing the paper cup into a nearby bin. I haven’t had fast food in ages, Meghan always puts me off with those documentaries she watches, but she’s not here and I’m knackered and starving and a student, so it seemed like a great idea. And, not gonna lie, it was.
“Hmmm,” Jess mumbles through a chicken nugget. She nibbles all the way around the edges, just like I do with Jaffa Cakes, and is busy working on the last one. I wait for her to finish before questioning her again.
“So, you believe me?”
“Er, yeah.”
“Try to sound a little more convincing, will you?”
“No, I really do. I mean, the noodles were there, right?”
“Yeah,” I say. “What do the noodles have to do with it?”
“Well, if you had a nightmare, and you looked at your phonebeforeyou went for food, you could’ve still been asleep and thought it was real. But if you were awake enough to go all the way to the kitchen, and boil a kettle and make noodles, andthenyou looked at your phone, it’d be pretty hard to do that while you were half-asleep, wouldn’t it?”
“Exactly!” Thank God someone is on the same page. “That’s what I told Derek, but he wasn’t having it. I reckon he thinks I’m getting all hysterical.”
“But he has a taser?” I nod in response. “Cool.” Jess breathes.
“It is, right? He said I could move rooms, so I’m closer to reception.”
“Please tell me you took him up on that offer?”
“Hell, yes. The closer I am to him the better, I think.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right.” Jess pulls at a curl so it springs back up. “Do you really think he doesn’t believe you?”
“I dunno. Eugh, you should have seen those pictures though, just hundreds of them, all of me flaked out on the bed.”
“You don’t think he, when the creeper was in your room. . .” Jess begins.
“What, did he sexually assault me?”
Jess nods.
“No.” I cast my mind back. “No, I don’t think so. So they’re completely effing psycho, yes, just not in a sex pest kind of a way.”
