john_amend_all ([personal profile] john_amend_all) wrote in [personal profile] thisbluespirit 2010-02-28 09:23 pm (UTC)

Well, here's a fragment. It should require no more Prisoner knowledge than what you see in the opening titles.

Mia didn't feel up to moving yet, but she could, at least, look around. Nothing seemed out of place: the chest of drawers, the dressing table, the bedside lamp, the door to the bathroom, the pictures on the walls. The room she'd woken up in was one of the first-floor bedrooms at the Royal Clarence Hotel.

As the pounding in her head and the fuzziness in front of her eyes slowly diminished, a nightmarish thought jumped into her head. She forced herself off the bed. Her legs buckled under her, but she managed to crawl to the dressing table and drag herself up in front of the mirror. At the sight of her face, she sighed with relief.

All right, she'd woken up in a hotel room with no memory of how she'd got there. But she was still herself. She might be living Mary's life, but she hadn't actually turned into Mary.

She let herself slide to the floor, stared across the room at the bathroom door, and wondered if there'd be dead body in the bath for her as well.


"You haven't seen Mia, have you?" Mary asked.

Bob shook his head. "I was wondering if I should ask you the same question, miss. No-one seems to know where she is."

"You don't think she's just feeling a bit under the weather?"

"If she couldn't get here, she'd call in. The sort of things that happen round here, you learn not to leave anything to chance."

"No." Mary shivered. She resolved to see if any of the hotel's supernatural residents were visible, and if they had anything useful to say. If not, it would have to be DI Harrison.


On the plus side, Mia could now walk. That meant she'd been able to check the bathroom, and found that the bath was completely free of dead bodies. On the minus side, the moment she'd looked out of the window she'd realised that she was a long way from home. She'd never seen brightly-coloured Italianate buildings like these before, and she was positive there were no cobbled streets anywhere near where she lived. Through a gap between two of the buildings, she glimpsed a flat area of grass, by the look of it a bowling green.

As far as she could see, there were three possibilities. Either the window had suddenly become a portal to somewhere else, or the whole hotel had been transported to somewhere else, or somebody had gone to a lot of time and trouble to build an elaborate replica of this room, and kidnapped her to go with it. Somehow, despite that last one not involving any supernatural elements, it seemed to be the least likely of the three.

The telephone rang. As she turned to pick it up, she realised that it didn't match. Rather than the dull, beige plastic things she was used to, this was black, somehow managing to look futuristic and outdated at the same time. A simple white label with red digits gave the number: "51".

She picked up the receiver.


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