Somewhere in Cupertino, California. Right before a two-story house decorated with exposed red bricks and freshly painted red wood fences, Jason knocked on the door and then rang the doorbell.
“Hey, little Jie, you are here.” Elaine opened the door and showed Jason in: “Thank you for coming.”
“No problem, thank you for meeting me.” Jason walked in, and tried to not step on the paws of an over friendly corgi, “Cute dog you have.”
“His name’s Toasty.” Elain led Jason and the corgi through the hall and into the spacious living room: “You want tea? Coffee?”
“Coffee’s fine, thanks.” Jason just sat down and started petting Toasty.
“Is he here?” Donovan’s voice came from the kitchen, “Sorry dear, I forgot the time.”
“He’s in the living room. I’m getting some coffee.”
“Hey Jason, haven’t seen you for a while. How have you been?” Donovan walked into the living room and showed Jason a big hug: “Thank you for coming by! ”
“Um, thank you, actually...” Jason was not much of a hugger, but Donovan insisted so he obliged: “... actually I am the one wanting to see you. How are you feeling? ”
“To be honest? Not good. ” Donovan sat down by Jason’s side: “After … what happened, at first we felt alright. But recently after we moved here, we’ve been having some trouble sleeping. ”
“Trouble sleeping?”
“Yeah, yeah, just like - at night, both of us feel really tired but we just can’t fall asleep. And then after a while when we do fall asleep? We then start having these really weird dreams. It’s not scary like nightmares. But… since you are the one who saved me, and we happened to see you on that Branston stream. So we were wondering if you could help us or at least point us to the right direction… ” Donovan seemed a bit embarrassed: “I know this is asking a lot. But you are the first one we could think of that has any real experience dealing with this… You were the only one at the wedding that was not affected by whatever happened. And I know that you and your friend went back to the hotel to investigate… so please, we would really appreciate any help you’d give us.”
“Actually that is why I’m here.” Jason said: “In order to figure out what happened and what might be going on, I will need your help. Do you remember anything from that night before you lost consciousness, like the dreams, visions or just strange feelings you had?”
After the visit to Donovan and Elaine’s new place, Jason headed straight to home, for he had a really bad feeling about what Donovan and Elaine told him.
According to Donovan and Elaine: their trouble with sleep did not seemed to be related to stress or any other mental pressure: they planned a month of honeymoon time with no work and pure enjoyment and sightseeing, they were quite disturbed by what happened at the wedding but they found a therapist to help them and they’ve been feeling better about it. The sleeping aid medicines they used were not too helpful and they were starting to get worried that perhaps it was not something medicine could help. The dreams they had were all very similar and involved two themes Jason was very familiar with: in these dreams, they were completely alone one of these two places: either they were in a long hallway with no end in either direction, whose windows on one side were all shut and doors on the other leading to nowhere; or they were in a staircase, and no matter which direction they went they always ended up on the same floor - they also couldn’t tell which floor it was since the signs in the staircase were all broken, they only way they could tell they were not moving was because the signs were all broken the same way.
Jason also asked both Donovan and Elaine on what they could remember from that night. Somewhat to his surprise, different from before where they were just having relatively fuzzy pieces of recollection, ever since they started having these strange dreams, some of their memories during that night started coming back. Elaine remembered that she saw some weird shadows in the hallway before they went in their room. And when she was taking a shower, she heard strange knocking and scratching sounds from one of the doors in their hotel suite but she thought it was Donovan or some of the guests pranking her. While Donovan remembered more: he was waiting for Elaine to get out of the shower, when he suddenly heard knocking and scratching sound from their suite door. He also thought it was some of the hotel guests pranking them because he knew that it was not uncommon where Elaine’s mother was from. And as he walked to open the door to see if he could catch the ones he thought were pulling the prank, he lost consciousness the moment he opened the door. The next thing he could remember, was that he was on the ground in the hotel hallway.
A lot of people at the wedding, including Donovan and Elaine, were checked by Jason and Caroline after the incident at the Prime Royals Hotel. All of them seemed to be doing fine and had no black markings on their hands and arms after Jason and Caroline defeated that giant spider made of human bodies in the limbo. Jason and Caroline thought that should be the end of it, but turned out they were wrong - even though the black markings are gone, the influence of whatever haunted the Prime Royals Hotel seemed to still maintain some kind of effect on its victims.
Before he started his drive home, Jason called both his father and mother, but for some reason they were not responding. Feeling like he had no time to wait, Jason went directly home.
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As he opened the door, he saw that his younger brother, Mac was at home with his friends, playing some pretty violent video game.
Jason’s entrance almost made Mack jump out of the couch, but then when he realized it was Jason, he sat back down and said loudly: “Dude! Why don’t you call first! I thought it was Mom and Dad!”
“And nice to see you too.” Jason started shaking his head: “Where’s Mom and Dad?”
“Oh! Fuck! That fucking newbie piece of shit!” Mack’s character was just shot in the head with a shotgun by a zombie soldier, so he had the chance to look back at Jason and said: “They flew to Los Angeles, they didn’t tell you? They went to visit some of their friends - Dad’s having some high school reunion thing. They’ll be back next Monday.”
“Huh, I guess they wouldn’t tell me about this kind of boring stuff.” Jason walked to the back of the living room and signaled Mack to come over.
“Alright, Tyler, my big bro has a lesson to teach me. Don’t drop my gear.” Mack gave his controller to a friend by his side and walked to Jason: “What’s up? You’re looking for something?”
“Before Mom and Dad left, were they having problems?” Jason asked.
“Problems? What kind of problems? ” Mack looked at Jason suspiciously.
“Sleeping problems, like having trouble sleeping. Bad dreams.”
“You are talking about what happened at the wedding? You’re still looking into that?” Mack pointed at Jason with an expression that insinuated “I understand what you’re talking about”.
“Yes I am still looking into that. Can you tell me if they had been having troubles?”
“I just came home yesterday, so I don’t know.” Mack says: “But if you call them in about an hour you can ask them yourself.”
Jason sighed: “Okay.”
“Are you a psychic? Because if you’re not, it makes no sense that you will be able to save Donovan. And it explains why you had to go back and deal with the loser Branston Gang.” Mack chuckled: “Have you visited Donovan and Elaine? They were the main victims there.”
“Yeah I just did.” Jason did not answer the psychic question: “Just let me know if anything strange happened, alright?”
“Aha, you did not deny, which means it is true.” Mack laughed and said: “You need a sidekick? He’s really good with computers and information security.”
“Unless he can hack the FBI database, then no.” Jason patted on Mack’s shoulder and refused with a smile: “Alright, I’ll leave you and your friends to it, I’ll call Mom and Dad later.”