I interrupted him. "What's that?"
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.
I followed.