Part I - Part II
We paid more than a pound of flesh to escape the eternal corridors of that hellish hotel.
I’m not going to tell you twice. You know what you must never do. If the first part of my family’s tale were insufficient to deter you from such an ill-advised endeavour, I think this closing post might suffice.
“Something really freaky is happening in this hotel, Nick. I can’t find my way out. This voice note should send when I finally get some phone signal. As soon as you hear it, please come and pick me up.”
The crackly voice on the other end of the telephone line unmistakably belonged to our daughter. Sydney screamed into the receiver until she realised it was a voice recording. Fortunately, the message played on a loop. My wife listened to it five times before finally feeling content that she’d heard every last word.
“Why did it make us listen to that?” Sydney asked.
I was illuminating her tear-stricken face with my phone torch, given that the light switches in the room were unresponsive. My wife stumbled towards me, and I wrapped a comforting arm around her.
“Something’s either toying with us or threatening us,” I eventually replied. “I don’t think we were ever supposed to slip into this world.”
“I’m not going to hide here and find out. We need to find our daughter,” Sydney said.
I led the way to the exit with my phone light and gingerly opened the door to reveal an empty corridor. Well, it was empty as far as the eye could see, but danger lurked in that infinite passage. We had learnt that.
As we stepped outside, I caught the briefest flash of movement before a door slammed.
“What was that?” Sydney screeched.
“It came from there,” I replied, pointing at a door a few yards away.
We hurried over, and I shakily prepared myself for another room of horrors. What I did not expect to find was another hallway. This one was different to the beige corridor that we had been traversing for the best part of an hour — it was tiled and lacked the garish fluorescent lights of the main hotel corridor. Instead, it was scarcely lit by endless rows of vending machines that lined either wall.
The first few machines were empty, but Sydney and I stopped at the sight of a revolting red pool on the black diamond-patterned tiles.
“Evan…” Sydney cried.
I didn’t respond. I was looking at it too. The shelves of the vending machine were overflowing with bloodied slabs of meat — human meat. Not just that. There was an assortment of severed limbs, still donning blood-smeared flesh.
I had a sickening thought that I might be looking at the remains of other victims the endless hotel had claimed. Perhaps I hadn’t been the first poor soul to step through the eleventh door into that world. Or perhaps there are simply other ways to enter that realm.
“Let’s keep moving,” I whispered, attempting to remain composed for Sydney. “Careful on the… wet tiles.”
As we continued to walk down the gloomy hallway, each vending machine told a terrifying tale of death and, most likely, suffering. And then there was the vending machine that prompted my wife and I to run — a decapitated human head lay on its side, and the eyelids sprang open, unleashing faded pupils that erratically eyed us.
We ran until our lungs wheezed, and then we kept running. I eventually noticed a change in the far distance. The limitless line of lights seemed to have a limit after all. I could see an end to the vending machines. An end to the hallway. But there was no light beyond that point of finality. The thought of total darkness, like the void from Room 11’s window, haunted me more than the unearthly corridor or rows of vending machines. There would be no way to see what was lurking in there.
The doorway led onto a hotel lobby, which made no sense, given that we were on the third floor of the hotel. We’re not really in the hotel, I reminded myself. And nothing here makes sense. The space wasn’t as wholly dark as it had seemed from a distance. It was faintly lit by kerosene lamps on the walls, which burned relentlessly. Still, they did very little to reveal our surroundings.
And whilst the floor area of the room was finite, unlike the corridors we’d just traversed, the lobby walls climbed ceaselessly upwards. There was no visible ceiling. No staircase. No other floors.
“We’ll have to try those double doors,” My wife said, nodding at the only exit from the darkened lobby. “We don’t even know whether Malia-“
A sinister sound interrupted Sydney’s sentence. It came from the corridor of vending machines that we’d just left. It was the sound of a window scraper. I don’t know how else to describe it. Like everything else in that distorted dimension, it was menacingly mundane. A sound almost of our world, but not quite.
We both turned to face the source of the sound. A slinking spider-like creature, with four razor-thin limbs, was shooting towards us — a spectral bullet in a chamber. Illuminated vaguely by the faint glow of the machines it passed, I could see that it wore a purple suit on its inhuman body. It looked like the concierge of the hotel.
Wailing wildly, Sydney and I ran for the doors at the far end of the lobby, barrelling for the only escape route from the haunting being that pursued us. My wife trembled as she threw open the doors, revealing another dimly-lit space. An endless space, of course. The hotel’s kitchen.
As we closed the double doors behind us, we caught one final glimpse of the spider-like monstrosity entering the lobby, scurrying towards us with its lengthy limbs of terror. I grabbed a nearby broom and threaded it through the handles, praying that it could withstand the impact of the concierge.
But no thud came. We could hear the creature charging for the doors, but its footsteps suddenly stopped.
“Let’s keep moving,” I whispered to Sydney.
More never-ending space. Mundanity breeds insanity. As we passed countless countertops, I started to wonder whether we would ever find our daughter or escape that endless realm.
“Evan, listen…” Sydney said, gripping my arm.
I heard it. A metallic banging noise, accompanied by a girl’s scream for help. It was Malia’s voice. But we couldn’t know that with any modicum of certainty.
“Are we sure that’s Malia?” I asked, terrified of the dimension’s treacherous trickery.
My wife shot a fearsome glare in my direction. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”
We kept running until we reached the sound, which was coming from a freezer door.
“Help!” The voice cried. “The door’s stuck!”
“Open it, Evan!” Sydney pleaded.
I drew a deep breath, bracing for whatever awful abomination might be waiting to pounce. Sydney stepped back whilst I heaved the stiff door open, heart beating against my chest.
“Malia…” I gasped.
There, shivering on the floor, was my petrified, teary daughter. She looked up at me with a childlike vulnerability that I hadn’t seen in years. Her tough teenage façade had fallen by the wayside. She embraced me and sobbed.
“What’s happening, Dad?” She cried. “Where are we?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “But let’s get you out of here.”
“Where’s Mum?” Malia asked.
And now we reach the part of the story that I’m going to struggle to type, even after all of these years. Ten years, to be exact. But I’ll try. It’s time for me to finally let go.
My wife wasn’t behind me. She’d vanished into the nothingness of the endless hotel, without so much as a whimper.
Before I had a chance to suggest searching for Malia’s mother, a sudden sound horrified me. A window scraper. The creature had found its way inside the kitchen. Of course it had. I don’t know why I’d assumed it would obey the laws of physics.
I clutched my daughter, unsure of which way to run, but a deafening ding answered the question for me. It was the sound of lift doors opening, a hundred yards or so to the left of us. And, a hundred yards to the right, crept an insidious insect in a purple suit.
“Run!” I screamed at Malia.
We high-tailed to the open doors, and I prayed that the doors would remain open. I didn’t want to imagine what the spider creature would do if it were to catch us. When my daughter and I hurled ourselves into the lift, I smashed the only button on offer and held my breath as the doors slowly drew together. The concierge stretched one of its terrible tentacle-limbs towards the lift as the two doors met, but we were barricaded before it could tear into us.
Neither my daughter nor I said a word as the lift moved. We could have been travelling left, right, up, or down. Nothing felt normal in that world. All I know is that I feared what we would find on the other side of the doors when they eventually opened.
I certainly didn’t expect to gaze upon the door to Room 11, but that was exactly where the lift took us.
“How… How?” Malia asked.
I soundlessly ushered my daughter out of the lift, sobbing at the disappearance of my wife. As if to answer that thought, I heard a whisper behind me.
“I love you both.”
I turned hopefully, but that hope morphed into bloodcurdling fear when I saw the reflection of my wife in the mirror of the hotel lift. She was a disembodied spectre, caged in a glass pane, smiling at me with a white complexion and blood-stained clothes. The lights in the lift flickered, and she was gone.
“Dad?” Malia asked.
The lift doors closed, and I turned to face my daughter. She hadn’t seen or heard her mother. Given the horrifying sight, I think I’m glad of that. Instead, she had been reading a post-it note on our door.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“‘Payment accepted’,” Malia replied.
We sombrely entered the room, and I closed the eleventh door behind us. When I looked at my wristwatch, the second and minute hands were in motion again. Tentatively testing my hopeful hypothesis, I eased open the door. The corridor was a normal, finite length — no ominous message on the wall, either. I heard a car honk outside, as if to confirm that we had returned to reality, and turned to see the night sky out of our hotel window.
A harrowing but hopeful end to the most haunting experience of my life. It’s been a decade, and we’ve never been the same since. I am thankful for Malia’s safety, but I can’t stop thinking about Sydney’s phantom in that lift mirror.
I never had closure. Can something as finite as death occur in the infinite hotel?