Do I have to sign up to read it or can you cut/paste the article?
I’m able to read the whole story, so there’s no sign up. (I hate signup sites)
But there’s the first graph for ya as a teaser:
“On February 1, 2013, Elisa Lam vanished while staying at the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The 21-year-old Canadian college student was in the middle of a solo west coast tour at the time of the disappearance. In an attempt to locate her, the Los Angeles Police Department released the last known images they had of Lam—a snippet of security footage taken in the hotel’s elevator on the day of her vanishing.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TjVBpyTeZM
But the clip was far from ordinary.
“The Appointment in Samarra”
(as retold by W. Somerset Maugham - 1933)
The speaker is Death
There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.
The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threating getsture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.