It was a nearby raucous hooting, loud and mournful.
Greco stopped in mid-sentence, listening like a hunted creature. "My
room," he whispered. "All my equipment--on the floor above--"
I stepped back, a little worried. He was a strange man, skinny and
tall and wild-eyed. I was glad he was so thin; if he'd been built
solidly in proportion to his height, just then he would have worried
me, with those staring, frightened eyes and that crazy way of talking.
But I didn't have time to worry, in any case. Footsteps were
thundering in the halls. Distant voices shouted to each other.
The hoot came again.
"The fire whistle!" Greco bayed. "The hotel's on fire!"
He leaped out of my room into the corridor.
I followed. There was a smell of burning--not autumn leaves or paper;
it was a chemical-burning smell, a leather-burning smell, a
henyard-on-fire smell. It reeked of an assortment of things, gunpowder
and charred feathers, the choking soot of burning oil, the crisp tang
of a wood fire. It was, I thought for a second, perhaps the typical
smell of a hotel on fire, but in that I was wrong.
"Demons!" yelled Greco, and a bellhop, hurrying by, paused to look at
us queerly. Greco sped for the stairs and up them.