Part I - Part II
Eleven is a conniving number. Wedged between two round, robust integers, it sits on the fringe of all that is balanced. It sneaks and schemes. It lurks and loiters.
I only learnt of the number’s limitless layers when I left a hotel room — numbered eleven — at precisely three in the morning. Right on the hour, minute, and second. I believe that’s how it works, but I only ever received fragmented answers.
THE ELEVENTH DOOR AT THE STROKE OF THE THIRD HOUR.
That sentence was sloppily scrawled on the beige wall opposite my room. I looked at my wristwatch. Three o’clock. If the written message were a prank from another hotel guest, it would have been an eerily well-timed prank. How could anyone possibly have known I’d leave my room at that exact moment? I hadn’t planned my exit. I was heading to the car because I’d forgotten my phone charger.
The eleventh door at the stroke of the third hour. The odds of those variables aligning are astronomically slim, but it happened to me, so I have to assume it could happen to others. I may be the first victim of this paranormal phenomenon in human history, but I hope to be the last.
The hotel corridor was a liminal space — a threshold to a world I still don’t understand. It appeared ordinary on the surface, but something about the stark soundlessness of the hallway incessantly irked me. I realised I was utterly alone. I had slipped into a foreign reality.
I turned to my left. My stomach dropped as I squinted at the end of the hallway. Much to my dismay, I found that the hallway had no end. I turned to my right. Another assaulting wave of nausea — there was a ceaseless corridor in either direction.
Twisting to face my hotel room, I was at least partly relieved to see that it looked exactly the same. Hoping to latch onto the remaining semblance of normalcy, I stepped back into Number Eleven and closed the door. I took a quick glance at my still-sleeping family, then I opened the door to the corridor again, praying for a different result.
I internally despaired. The words were still there. The writing’s on the wall, I mused, not oblivious to the foreboding connotations. The endless corridor had not contracted back to a finite length. I was still trapped in the dreadful alternate dimension.
Are my wife and daughter trapped with me?
I re-entered the room and watched the two of them, lost in the land of dreams. They hadn’t exited the eleventh door at the stroke of the third hour, so I hoped they were still in the real dimension, but that hypothesis didn’t entirely convince me.
Unwilling to explore the petrifying place between worlds — having watched far too many horror films with reckless protagonists — I closed the door, undressed myself, and returned to bed. Adios, Hallway to Hell, I thought. Out of sight, and out of mind.
Maybe it’s just a bad dream.
I repeated that mantra tirelessly. Not so tirelessly that I couldn’t eventually drift off to sleep, however.
“Evan, where’s Malia?” Sydney asked.
My wife jostled me awake, and I turned to face every parent’s worst nightmare: Malia’s bed was empty. I looked at my wristwatch. Three o’clock. Time was standing still.
“It’s that boy she’s seeing,” Sydney huffed. “He’s probably driven over here to pick her up.”
My foggy brain collected itself, and I attempted to ascertain whether I’d simply dreamt of the never-ending hotel corridor.
“Have you rung her?” I asked.
Sydney shook her head, her brow ferociously furrowing. “I can’t get any signal on my phone — I swear it’s been three in the morning on the clock since I woke up. I must be losing it. Maybe I should just peek at the car park to see whether I can spot that boy and his barbaric bike.”
I inwardly smiled at the unintended alliteration, but I still hadn’t registered Sydney’s words. Perhaps something deep within my consciousness wouldn’t allow me to face reality. Some truths are too overwhelming for mortal minds.
“This is our last holiday before she goes to university, Evan,” Sydney sighed, opening the curtains. “I don’t think she-”
My wife turned to stone. Slowly, but surely, she unleashed an awful, ascending wail. Her entire body was trembling at the sight of the night sky before her. It wasn’t until I sat upright in bed that I saw what she saw. It wasn’t the night sky. It was a void. Eternal blackness.
“Evan… What’s happening?” Sydney whimpered.
I slid from bed, clumsily slithering into my grey T-shirt and faded denim jeans. I could feel the colour draining from my face, and I could also feel Sydney noticing that.
“I saw something,” I said. “I thought I’d been dreaming, but now… Are we awake?”
Sydney pinched herself. “This seems pretty real to me. What did you see?”
I gulped, gathering my words. “At three o’clock, which feels like hours ago, I left the room to fetch my phone charger. I couldn’t sleep — I was just going to put on an audiobook or something. Anyway, I… Well, maybe I should show you.”
I opened the door to the corridor and quivered at the writing I had hoped I wouldn’t see. My wife peered over my shoulder and gasped.
“Is.. Is somebody tormenting us by-” She started.
“- Look down the corridor,” I interrupted. “Just… It’s going to mess with your head.”
I could only watch helplessly as my wife stepped into the hallway, screamed, and paced to and fro, clutching the sides of her head. Then, suddenly, her face fell still.
“No. It’s a trick. It has to be,” She asserted. “They’ve set up mirrors and… But I couldn’t see my reflection. Okay… Screens? Digital screens?”
“How do you explain the nothingness outside?” I asked quietly.
Sydney stormed back into the room, picked up her slipper, and walked over to the window. I followed her back inside. She was presumably hoping to throw her slipper outside and rip the black canvas, revealing the hotel car park behind it.
That didn’t happen. What did happen was inexplicable.
The window opened, and the colour drained from the room. Not just the colour — the light, the sound, and the matter. Swirling towards a plughole, Sydney and I watched our bodies warp and stretch, much like everything else in Room Eleven. We were being dragged into the black absence beyond the window.
“Shut it!” I fearfully screamed.
Sydney braced herself against the window frame and the wall, wrestling with the unseen agent of darkness that sought to claim us. Miraculously, she managed to slam the window shut. The room’s colour and physical matter returned to its rightful place — and elasticity. My wife and I collapsed onto the diamond-patterned orange carpet.
“I don’t think it’s a trick of the light,” I breathlessly said. “I felt that. I felt the blackness pulling me towards it.”
Sydney started crying, so I crawled over to her. She lay in my arms, sobbing whilst I rocked her back and forth.
“Where’s Malia?” She bawled.
If our teenager daughter hadn’t gone outside, that only meant one thing. She was somewhere within the never-ending hotel. My wife suddenly wrenched herself from my body and ran to the open door.
“I just remembered something,” She said. “Come and look at this.”
Sydney pointed at a spot on the carpet of the corridor. To the left of our room, there was a trail of crisp crumbs. Sydney’s eagle eyes astounded me.
“Let’s be thankful for her early-hour snacking,” Sydney said. “I’m going to get dressed, then we can find our daughter.”
Sydney quickly donned her golden cardigan and ripped jeans, joining me in the corridor a minute later. My wife dumped a green coat on the hallway carpet, pointing out that it would be wise to leave a marker outside our room. She looked at the words on the wall as we turned left and began our hunt.
“You think you opened a doorway to this place?” She asked.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“No, I… I just want to figure out how we’re going to open a doorway out of here,” Sydney said.
As we proceeded to follow the trail of crisp crumbs down the beige hotel corridor, I found myself wondering the same thing. I also found myself slipping deeper into the terrifying throes of insanity. The never-ending corridor melted my mind — none of the doors were numbered, and the environment was simply repeating itself ad infinitum. Eventually, of course, the crisp crumbs stopped. We were blindly searching for Malia.
When something new appeared on the horizon, Sydney seemed to have renewed energy, and she quickened the pace. I sprinted after her, and we slowly started to distinguish the shape of a vacuum cleaner in the corridor. There was a growing sound too. The vacuum was steadily buzzing away — its squiggly cable disappeared into an ajar door on the left.
A yellow post-it note clung to the vacuum cleaner.
“‘Enjoy your stay. How would you like to pay?’” Sydney read, shuddering. “What the fuck does that mean?”
Before either of us could summon the bravery to push the door, it started to squeak open of its own accord. Our eyes followed the curvy trail of the vacuum cleaner’s cord. There was a chambermaid kneeling on the floor, wriggling from side to side as she vacuumed. She was hidden around the side of the bed, so we could only see her legs and part of her torso.
“Where’s Malia?” Sydney firmly asked her.
My wife had uttered the question before I had a chance to stop her. The chambermaid stopped moving, and the vacuum cleaner switched off. The room plunged into silence. A horrifying sound, like a rusty tap handle twisting, emanated from the woman as she hoisted herself to her feet.
Sydney and I screamed. The chambermaid had a body that was almost human, but some anatomical parts had been rendered incorrectly. She had four arms which all hung to the carpet, and her hair coated her entire head, seeping into the orifices on her face where her eyes and mouth should have been.
My wife and I fled as the rusty squeaking noises of the creature pursued us down the long hotel corridor. We were putting distance between us and the chambermaid, who moved at a glacial pace, but our stamina was dwindling.
Sydney eventually swung to her right, fumbling with a door handle, and we both slinked into a darkened room. She hurriedly closed the door behind us, and we waited in the lightless space for the unearthly woman to either lose us or lose interest.
Thankfully, we heard the chambermaid’s abnormally-quiet footsteps pitter-patter across the carpet past our room and disappear into the distance. And how wonderful it would have been for the horror to end there.
But a telephone rang in the darkness.