The Way Inn (30 page)

“You don't really want to kill me, Hilbert. That isn't the way to go.”

“Whoever said anything about killing you?” Hilbert said, amused. “Killing you is quite superfluous. We are in a labyrinth. I know the way out and you do not. That's all it comes down to. You would be living out your time in the hotel one way or another. And it's not a question of what I want—it's a question of what the hotel wants.”

“You're crazy.”

“Not a very original line to take, Mr. Double. And you know what they say about glass houses. You've spent three days in the midst of a paranoid fantasy about mystery women and infinite mazes. And now imaginary murder plots. Having isolated yourself from your fellow man you find yourself facing the possibility of losing your job and your savings, and you lose your mind in a hotel room. Hearing things, seeing things. A breakdown, a psychotic episode. We get suicides all the time. People often choose a hotel room as the place to end their life. Did you know that? It's a consideration in the design of the light fittings, and some of the other aspects of the room, although not one we'd admit to. Maybe they do it because they know the body will be found; it won't rot undiscovered in a one-bedroom Docklands flat. So the hotel becomes an antechamber of the morgue. Sounds plausible, in your case, doesn't it? It's something to consider. A way out.”

A deep, cold sickness swirled within me as Hilbert spoke. He meant to screw with me, to push me into a corner in which I felt helpless, unable to do anything but agree to join with him in his little room-service cult—I knew all this, I could see the tactics, but nevertheless what he was saying hurt me, it twisted me around until I wasn't sure of myself, wasn't sure of the fact of Hilbert and those walls and this hard white conference table in front of me, its composite surface cool and smooth under my hands, a benign surface maybe; it was a real object, not a figment or an illusion, the only real thing I was feeling apart from pain and loss. I blinked several times, saliva flowing freely in my mouth—was I nauseated? Or was this a concussion? The looseness in my skull was giving way to a swimming sense of dizziness, a resumed bout of black lightning above the top of my spine. The air around me was thickening, charged with energy, frothing with inaudible, invisible frequencies and messages. I was not in the world, the world I used to believe was the only world—I was in the hotel, in its inner place, the place it was making for us and within us, where I could be destroyed by mere forgetfulness. My life was, as Hilbert had said, already lost to it. The choice before me was already largely made. But it was not my extinction that I found myself thinking of. I was not thinking of myself at all.

“What will happen to Dee?”

Hilbert did not answer. He appeared to be listening closely, but gave no sign of having heard my question. Indeed, he no longer appeared to register my presence in the room. His head was bent over slightly and his brow knotted in concentration, as if trying to remember an elusive melody or straining to hear a distant noise.

“What is going to happen to Dee?” I repeated. “What are you going to do to her?” Though it filled me with fear, the question also gave me a sense of control. I could try to make sure that Dee was safe, that she was beyond Hilbert's grasp. Even if she had no need of my help, she had reached out to me, and I had failed. Going on made sense if its purpose was to make good on that allegiance to Dee. It was a reason to fight, to aid her, to misdirect her enemies. If I could hold on to that promise to myself, part of me would be held back from Way Inn. A locked room within myself, reserved for me. Hilbert might get to me, but not to her.

Whatever it was that had distracted Hilbert still had his total attention. He appeared almost catatonic—only small movements made by his eyes suggested his continued cognition. Tension was etched into the angle of his body and the hunch of his shoulders. At one point he mouthed a word, a small word, perhaps “Yes.” I began to wonder if it might be possible to simply slip past him to the door while he was in this diverted state. As he had retreated into himself he had lost most of the menace that had held me in my seat, and I felt a normal level of control and animation returning to my fear-frozen limbs. But before I could reach a conclusion, he rejoined me, as sprightly and pleasant as an old business buddy making small talk before renewing a long-standing contract.

“Right,” he said, straightening. “Good. I'm going to step out for a moment so you can consider the offer. Do excuse me, back shortly.” And he smoothed down his suit jacket, which oozed unlikely spectra under his palms. Blood ran freely from his head injury, but he did not appear to care.

The door shut softly behind him. I was alone. Why? To “consider the offer”? I wasn't going to do very much of that. Even the vague outline of Hilbert's luxurious little hotel cult appalled me, and I was sure its details would be unspeakable. What really amplified my revulsion at the idea of pledging myself to the hotel and to Hilbert's kind, however, was my knowledge that had I been asked a couple of days ago I might have readily agreed, and without much thought. What had changed in that time?

I had changed. And I had met Dee. She might have saved my life—or if not my life, some other vital aspect of me, which had been past ripe but not yet rotten. Hilbert seemed to have cashed in a significant part of himself—not just his sanity but also a base element of his being, opening himself to a corruption that an eternity in fitness centers and hot showers could not expunge. And he made this forfeit to serve this monstrosity, this unthinkable warren, an unlimited appetite on a limited planet.

Refusing meant what, though? Death? Abandonment in a labyrinth without exit, as Hilbert had suggested? Could the hotel eliminate guests itself, driving them to despair, withdrawing their oxygen? I realized with a thrust of fright that I was in a sealed, windowless room. The air-handling units still hummed, but were they still handling unadulterated air? I sniffed for any diminishing of the atmosphere. Nothing seemed amiss.

Sacrifice one way, sacrifice the other. Neither was my style. I walked over to the door and hesitated beside it a moment, wondering if Hilbert might be waiting on the other side. Then I tried the handle. It was locked. There was a key slot above the handle and I tried it with my black card, but was given the orange-red light. Another two tries produced the same result.

I was stopped from further pursuing this futile repetition by a noise from behind me. It was a percussive burst of interference from one of the clock radios, like the herald of a mobile phone call. As this first
blat-blat-blat
of sound receded into a softer chattering and fizzing, another radio struck up, and then another, and steadily more joined together in a deafening chorus of seething, yelping electronic ululation. I turned toward the great mound of damaged devices to see light flickering on their clock faces, little red digital fragments dancing and guttering in time with the mindless tune of the cackling speakers. Quickly alight with anger, I picked one up, causing a couple of others to slide down the pile like scree, and examined it. White plastic. Made in China. Normal. Its normality was a taunt. I hurled the radio against the breezeblock wall. Its casing burst and its inner mechanism separated into three parts, still tenuously connected by wires. The din rose to fill the room, the radios joined by a rising roar from the air conditioning and by a buzzing in the air itself. I had the sense of standing in a gale, in the presence of forces that could tear me apart if I were subjected to more than a fraction of their slightest influence. Buffeted by the onslaught of potency blizzarding through the room, I felt my mind yaw and pitch. There was no sensory apparatus that could cope with this fury, and my body was desperately lying to itself when it interpreted the storm as heat or light or pressure, my struggling mind serving up its own analogies to plaster over the splintering impossibilities being revealed. I laughed, a high-pitched, agitated laugh which merged perfectly with the maniacal piping of the interference from the hundreds of radios.

The room died—the impression of it collapsed, replaced with an immense arena of space choked with endless congeries of interlocking spheres, their edges fizzing like fractals down to infinite detail. Black lightning arced in the spaces between the spheres and in my inner space, where it blazed through and scorched away any last coherent thought.

Later. Time had elapsed, but in the unchanging, blatant light of the room in which Hilbert held me, I had no way of telling how much time. I was sitting on the floor, back against the wall by the door. Without that wall supporting me, I would have been lying on the ground. Had it always been there, or had it gone and returned while I had been . . . wherever I had been? And the floor? Both felt solid and real, which was comforting if not comfortable. At the other end of the room was the mountain of radio-alarm clocks. They were real too, and inert. Could they be tampering with the air, lacing it with hallucinogens? Aerosolized LSD, subsonic frequencies? Why? My memory of what I had seen was fragmentary, just a series of glimpses and unwholesome impressions. This, I believed, was a mercy.

I pushed myself onto my feet, the synthetic fibers of the carpet rough under my fingers. Real—real synthetic, anyway. The clock radios were mute, their trailing plugs advertising their powerlessness. I stumbled toward them, unsteady on stiff, numb legs. Separate from the main heap was the radio I had smashed against the wall, a dead crab on a beach. I thought of smashing lobsters in seafood restaurants. Those shellfish experiences aren't for me. They're for couples, for families. They're not good for lone dining. That's why you rarely see them in a hotel.

I like hotels. Because you can leave.

Behind me, the metal sound of a latch working.

The door was open. I could leave.

No Hilbert in the corridor. And it was a corridor, not a bare underground utility passage—I wasn't in a basement at all. A routine hotel corridor, dark wood doors, careful lighting, cream carpets and regular abstract paintings.

Such was my surprise that I let the door from which I had emerged close before I thought that it might be better to keep it open. But it closed—a dark wood door, indistinguishable from the others. The number on it was 219.

I tried the black keycard in the slot. Red light. Another room 219. I put my fingers against the number 2. It was hard, cold, real. Where my finger had rested, a little halo of fog was left on the metal. This trace of the warmth of my hand disappeared within seconds. But it had been there.

The corridor, the same, of course. Always the same, everywhere the same, forever.

Where to go? My options were, I supposed, unlimited—six continents, and an untold universe within these walls. But it was six continents of airport sprawl and peripheral highways, business parks and enterprise zones. The outer realm of Way Inn, where it could blend in, get comfortable, be unnoticed. What about inward? Not just into the hotel, into myself—into that objective delusion Dee had talked about, that she had in fact visited. I had glimpsed it—the inconceivable gulfs between screeching geometric thunderheads, falling into a gas giant composed of ever-denser intersections, those monstrous spheres that the paintings hinted at, though even en masse, even when the edgeless jigsaw was reassembled, still the paintings could only hint. But I thought I saw how it was done—not in the frames but in the zones of potential between them. When Dee had discovered the hotel's secret—when it had discovered her—she had spent weeks exploring. I was not her, though. I didn't have her intrepid spirit. I didn't even have my bag—it had been with me in the lift and was not with me now. And I was a hunted man. The hotel had presented me with an exit, out of that other room 219, and I had to assume it was a limited offer—an act of clemency, a stay of execution—and that Hilbert's distraction would be only temporary. Leave then, go, get out. Find Dee.

The bag was nothing: disposable, replaceable, just clothes and toiletries and a work laptop used only to read work emails. I stumbled back toward the lifts. Whatever had happened in that room—a blow to the head, a seizure, a fainting spell with added visuals—had left me giddy and confused. The route from room 219 to the lifts was different. It wasn't “my” room 219, I had to remember. I felt the floor tilt under me, a fresh bout of dizziness, and I slumped against the wall, knocking a painting askew. My own little realignment of space. I laughed at this thought as my legs continued to buckle under me. Then fear settled gray across my mind again. Get out. Could someone help? The door nearest me was 211. I hammered my palms against it.

“Is anyone in there? Help. I need help.”

Silence within. Of course. If the hotel truly was infinite, and the number of guests remained finite, the chance of coming across an occupied room would be infinitesimally small. Especially here, wherever
here
was.

Room 211—lower than 219. Counting down might lead me out. Night rain was falling in the nearest light well. Manchester? Manaus? Manila? It didn't matter, I had found the gray metal doors of the lifts, their vanity mirrors, their potted palms and unused sofas. I pressed the call button and immediately realized my mistake. The lift was nothing more than a trap—if Hilbert had found me there last time, he could find me there again.

I looked for the stairwell, but couldn't find it. Perhaps that was all it was: I just couldn't find it. But I suspected it would be more accurate to say it wasn't there to be found. It had been edited away. Only the hotel's corridors, branching out for ever. No way down, no way out.

Everything curved back. In front of me, again, was the door of room 219. The route I had taken from the lifts was the same route I took every time; the same route I had taken on the first day, carrying my bag, after checking in. Outside, in the courtyard, the autumn daylight was already beginning its retreat. And it was drizzling—as expected. The usual route was impossible. It could not exist in the same space as the route I had taken from the other room 219, where Hilbert had tried to inter me. The structure had rearranged itself, or my perception of it was being changed. It was useless to try to thwart the hotel. You cannot escape a labyrinth that can reconfigure itself. I could go only where it wanted me to go to, and that was back to room 219.