Why would our room lead to a tunnel under the hotel?

This fall I've been taking a writing class with Nick Mamatas, Fabulist Fiction, the SF Creative Writing Institute. I have to say it's been both stimulating and humbling to go through critiques every week. Overall, it's a great privilege to have other writers read and comment on my work, and I've found myself in a kind of revision reverie for my short stories, taking things out here, putting them in there, getting bolder with my decisions. It's also been fun to focus on writing exercises, like this one on dialogue, which contains some techniques I really need to remember when my characters are chatting away and revealing so much about themselves, even when they don't intend to!

Karen: For godssakes, why would our room lead to a tunnel under the hotel?

Jack: I don’t know, but keep walking, it’s damned dark in here and I want to get out.

Karen: Easy for you to say. Stop pushing, Jack! Why don’t you get out in front, then?

Jack: My sweet, you know my vision’s worse than yours.

Karen: So you say. And what were you doing pressing on the tiles behind the headboard, anyway?

Jack: I could have sworn I heard a mouse or something. You know I can’t sleep when I know something’s moving around in the room.

Karen: Mice run around on the floor, Jack.

Jack: You know what I mean. In the walls, in the walls! Didn’t you hear it? I thought that’s why you were up. You put your hand on my shoulder, you had your slippers on!

Karen: I was in the bathroom. I heard you get up…Whoa, watch it!

Jack: Jesus. It’s all crispy.

Karen: How do you know?

Jack: Can’t you smell that? And it’s blackened… I’m going to be sick.

Karen: Maybe a dog, or a raccoon? I don’t understand how it could have been burned down here.

Jack: You know what? I don’t care, I don’t like it, I don’t like it down here at all.

Karen: Don’t be such a baby, Jack! My god, you’d think you weren’t a grown man.

Jack: Well, I hardly think that matters, one way or another.