The Stranger In Room 407

Part Two: The Vanishing

A story of terror in Paris

"I am not crazy," I hissed to myself, pressing the hot towel against my pounding temples. The face in the mirror—pale, eyes wild with panic—didn’t look convincing, but I knew what I knew. Thomas wasn’t a hallucination. My fever had spiked, sure, but a virus doesn’t erase human beings from reality.
I refused to let that smiling, dismissive concierge be the end of it. The hotel l’Horloge might have forgotten my boyfriend, but I would make them remember. If they wouldn’t give me answers, I would take them.
My first mission was data. Thomas’s plane ticket, his passport application... I needed hard evidence that he existed. I remembered he kept a scanned copy of his driver’s license in a shared Dropbox folder. I used my laptop, praying the patchy hotel Wi-Fi held. The file wouldn’t load. The network simply refused, flickering 'Connection Lost' every time I clicked 'Download.' It was a technical glitch, but it felt targeted.
Frustrated and desperate, I crept downstairs again near midnight. The night concierge was a different, sleepier man. When I asked about historical guest records, citing a family genealogy search, he blinked and mumbled something about the Archives Départementales being closed.
"No, I mean this hotel’s records. From... twenty years ago?" I lied, trying to look scholarly rather…