The Hotel
A story by Aebha Curtis
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The silhouette of the hotel appeared on the edge of the horizon. It had been an overcast autumn evening when Josef had left home, a fugitive in the ominous dusk. Blue fields surrounded him on all sides, and he felt as though they were watching him trudge along the narrow dirt path with only a single briefcase in tow. He had been walking for over an hour, following vague instructions from a worker at the train station, so solemn and grave that Josef hadn’t dared ask for any further details than the ones he had been given.
Josef was struck by the paucity of light emanating from the hotel- the only visible ones glowing dimly from the windows and door of what he could only assume to be the reception- but pushed onwards, too weak to question this too deeply. The hotel was a monstrous structure, looming large and lonely over the flat countryside.
As he pushed the door open, a dimly lit hall presented itself to him. It seemed to Josef that the hotel’s soul had faded with the years, a grey shroud of dust and grim coating the décor of the hall. The once rich greens and creams and reds of the furniture had grown feeble to the point of giving an impression of withered flowers. Across the lobby, a thin man sat at the desk and waited for Josef to reach him. It occurred to the man that despite this new guest’s predominantly average features, he still had a distinctive appearance. A stout, red-faced man of about 40, he found himself perpetually and inescapably uncomfortable with the world around him and within him. Constant twitches haunted his face, and were, at this moment in time, considerably more frequent given his circumstances. Accompanying these twitches was a ceaseless flow of perspiration, symptomatic of hyperhidrosis that seemed to spring from the top of his head and steadily move downwards, cascading over his face at an alarming rate. These hallmarks of a guilty man followed him throughout his life in spite of many conscious efforts to rid himself of them.
‘Hello, sir, how can I help you?’
‘Well, I suppose I’d like to book a room for the night, please.’
‘One night? Are you sure? No more trains are running until Monday, sir.’
‘Oh?’
Presented with a timetable of the coming and goings of the trains, Josef wasn’t sure of what to say or do.
‘Well, um, one night is still enough for me.’
After this brief encounter, Josef continued on, alone again, climbing two flights of rickety stairs that creaked under his weight and followed the long and winding corridors, until at long last he came to the room he had been allocated. He had been quite surprised, and a little troubled, by the number on his key, which was 237, having expected, given the apparent lack of activity, to have been allocated a room on the ground floor, but his lack of assertiveness coupled with a desire to keep a low profile had silenced him. The passages were faintly lit, bulbs burning hot just close enough to each other that a new one illuminated his path each time the last one he’d passed had become ineffectual.
He opened the door to his room with a great sense of apprehension, even higher than the familiar anxiety that went with him everywhere. On the other side of the frame was a small room with a large bed, with yet more fading décor. Shuffling into the room, Josef shook off the jacket of his pea green suit and placed it with caution on the bed before turning to a mirror to inspect his hair- it had been thinning for several years now, his bald patch gaping wider and wider until he could stand it no more and resorted to a comb over in a weak attempt to ameliorate the forlorn appearance of his formerly glorious locks. Finding himself vaguely less unsatisfactory, he moved again to sit in an armchair in the corner of his chamber, and removed his shoes. Although he had been physical exerting himself for over an hour, he realised that he was still unable to relax. The light of the room seemed to him obscenely bright, and his eyes could not adjust to it. Just as he thought this, the light began to flicker off and on, off and on. He was plunged into darkness only to re-emerge bathed in the intense glare of the bulb. Suddenly, the room rattled as though, he thought, a train were passing, although he knew this was impossible. Panicked, he broke into an even more profuse sweat and began to look for his shoes so that he could go to reception and ask the hollow man tending the desk what was happening. But he couldn’t find them. He looked next to the chair, under the chair, next to the bed, under the bed, but they were nowhere to be found.
Eventually, it stopped. The incident ended as suddenly as it had begun. Divested of his shoes Josef continued to undress and was terrified by the thought that it was the fractured tectonic plates of his sanity colliding that had caused his world to tremble. He pulled back the blanket and sheet and climbed into bed. He desperately sought solace and a retreat from his own mind, his thoughts becoming increasingly divorced from reality. The darkness threatened to envelop him and there were no bedside lamps to keep it at bay. Caught between the glaring light and the menacing gloom, he chose the light.
He slept fitfully, and in waking he found himself left with shards of the nightmares that had caused his restlessness; they were painful and miserable and sinister and too much for his fragile mind. All seemed to be in fragment like the reflections of a shattered mirror; nothing seemed to connect to anything and he couldn’t make sense of anything. He dreamt of his wife, of an electric chair, of his own screams and hers. He saw the faces of his wife- by turns loving, warm until her face twisted and distorted into hateful and grotesque forms. The latter were all too real for him. The springs in the limp, lumpy and sagging bed had pierced him, and he could not find a comfortable position no matter what he tried. Josef felt forced to rise, feeling more dead than alive. He slowly got up and felt the apprehension and fear thunderously sweep through his aching bones and pulsating through his blood vessels as he searched for a clock in vain. Finding nothing but a discolouration on his bedside table where one may have once stood, he finally registered the absence of items, the chair he had sat upon and the mirror he had looked into earlier. As he grasped at his thin memories, clinging to them, he felt them slip even further out of reach.
Feeling claustrophobic, he lunged toward the closed curtains in the hope of being able to open a window. He felt himself cast adrift on desolate tundra of his splintered inner mind and he urgently needed to reconnect with the real world or he would forever be lost. But behind the curtains there was simply a continuation of the wall and its ugly, crackling cream paint. This raised a horror in him, as though he had been met with an empty eye socket or a yawning, toothless mouth. He staggered backwards, rendered utterly helpless by the situation and he felt tears run down his face, scorching a path as they trickled down to his chin.
There was no reprieve for him, Josef realised. There was nothing he could do to escape what he had done. He glanced upwards at the rafters and, turning again to find his briefcase, he finally opened it and took out the rope.
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