The Way Inn

by Will Wiles

  A DO NOT DISTURB sign hung from 333’s doorknob. I listened at the door and heard, I believed, the rustling of someone within. Not being able to summon any alternative ideas, I knocked.

  The rustling ceased. I knocked again.

  Another bout of silence, then a voice from within: “Yes?”

  For a fleeting instant I considered saying “housekeeping,” but to shovel more deception into this relationship would be a bad move. “It’s Neil. Neil Double.”

  A pause. “Go away.”

  “I want to apologize. I really messed up. Hilbert had wheedled me into something I didn’t understand. The last thing I wanted was to put you in danger.”

  “Go away, Neil.”

  “Please. You’re still in danger, we both are. Hilbert is crazed. He’s not serving the hotel anymore, he’s on a personal crusade, and the aim is us, dead.”

  No answer. I waited, but the silence was stubborn.

  “How do you think I found you, Dee? The hotel told me where you are. It’s helping me, not Hilbert. We have to work together.”

  The black keycard was in my jacket pocket, and I felt its width between my fingers—that little bit of extra luxury, executive heft, pure display meant to flatter the holder. Would it open this door? Or would that merely bring Hilbert down on us? But as I considered using the keycard, the door opened.

  Dee stood before me, wearing the same leather jacket and sweatpants as before, but Dangermouse had been ousted from the T-shirt by Joy Division.

  “No Dangermouse?”

  “Blood on it.” She stared at me, her words a reminder of my treachery, and a warning of the probable consequences if I wronged her again.

  “I wouldn’t recommend the dry-cleaning service here.”

  Dee didn’t reply, but stood aside to allow me through the door.

  Room 333 was a mess. Not a degenerate mess like the rooms in the wasteland motel, but the habitat of a less-than-fastidious workaholic hermit. Desk and bed were thick with papers, mostly loose leaves torn from pads and covered with Dee’s esoteric, geometric doodles and devices. There were other documents, too—misfolded hand-annotated maps, a couple of textbooks and paperbacks. More paper covered every wall, including the screen of the television: hundreds of printouts of photographs of the abstract paintings. Dee’s tablet was slotted into a tiny clearing on the desk and attached to a keyboard and stylus pad. The paintings shifted and shuffled without a pause on its screen, having their edges matched and their vectors plotted.

  As the armchair was stacked with room service trays, I sat on a free corner of the bed.

  “I’ve seen the inner hotel, Dee,” I said. “The hotel won’t let me out, but it did let me in. I’ve seen the motel. I spoke to the neon sign. It answered my questions.”

  “I’ve seen the motel,” Dee said, a note of injured pride in her voice, as if she was anxious to stress that she had seen it first, or irked that I had found it at all. I was privately pleased with this reaction—it was human. “There are some dark places in the inner hotel, darker even than that.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “Look, I don’t doubt you know the inner hotel better than I do, that’s why I’m here. The hotel won’t let me leave. But I think it will let us leave together.”

  In my peripheral vision, an arabesque uncurled across the pictures stuck to the wall, and evaporated when I tried to focus on it; a fleeting impression of a larger interconnection. I found myself unable to trigger it again. Disquieted, I looked away, picking up the book my left hand had been resting on. Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, battered and fringed with bookmarks like all Dee’s books. It was unknown to me, but before I could flip it over to read the back, Dee snatched it out of my hands.

  “Do you mind?” She started to gather up the papers around me, piling them without apparent system.

  “Escher—the guy who did the endless staircases and upside-down castles? Fits right in here.”

  “Maurits Cornelis Escher.”

  “Maurice?”

  She ignored me and continued to collect her papers, stuffing them into her giant shoulder bag.

  “I spoke to the hotel,” I repeated. “It answered my questions.”

  “It can be pretty chatty when it wants to be,” Dee said, without warmth or very much in the way of sincerity. “I put it down to mostly having to deal with psychopaths. And aeons of loneliness.”

  “It said Hilbert was going to kill me,” I said. “So we have that in common.”

  “Congratulations. What else did it say?”

  “It said that you knew the way out. That if I found you, I would find the way out. And that it had been shielding you from Hilbert.”

  “Well, babe, I’m afraid it might be wrong about that.”

  This worried me—I realized that up to this point my faith in Dee’s ability to extract me from the hotel had been total. Way Inn’s ability to reshape reality had impressed me so greatly that I had assumed, without good reason, that its pronouncements would be infallible. But what if it was capable of error? And why shouldn’t it be capable of mendacity?

  “We should at least try,” I said, sensing the weakness in my voice.

  Dee didn’t reply. Working with frantic haste, she had cleared all the papers and books from the bed into her bag, and had moved on to plucking the photos from the walls, quickly and without care. As she took the pictures from the gridded positions, again I thought I saw something in their interrelations—not a simple continuation from one image to another, but a sense of harmony. But it was gone at the moment of my noticing.

  “Don’t tidy up on my behalf,” I said. “I’m sorry to intrude. I know it’s not like you were expecting visitors.”

  “I’m not tidying,” she said. “I’m leaving.” A shake of the head, eyes closed. “Fleeing, really.”

  “Fleeing?” For crucial seconds the word made no sense to me, as if an archaism like jousting had dropped unexpectedly into the conversation. “What?”

  “You’re an idiot, Neil,” Dee said with a kind of bitter amusement. “I like you in a way—God knows why—but you’re an idiot. You wander around in the inner hotel, Hilbert’s domain, his place of business, and you don’t even wonder where he is? Why he hasn’t pounced? You might think he’s crazy but you can’t imagine he’s stupid. He’s more than capable of biding his time. He’ll wait.”

  “Wait? For what?”

  Dee smiled—a sad, pitying smile. “Wait for you to find me. Then he has us both.”

  While she spoke, a chesty rattle had arisen in the air conditioning, and when she stopped it became a deep, far-dragged moan as if answering her.

  “Shit.”

  “Major reconfiguration of hotel pseudofabric, and close,” Dee said. She had cleared the walls and desk, leaving behind Blu-Tak acne and a stuffed bin, and was now topping off her bag with the few clothes in the room. “Air is forced through the system. Like a Tube train coming.”

  “He’s coming.”

  This time, Dee’s smile to me was a crazed grin—no fear, only exhilaration. “Oh yes, he’s coming. Coming round the mountain.”

  The radio-alarm on the bedside table shrieked with interference, a wail like nothing in nature. breaking down into agonized chattering.

  “That’s not good,” Dee said, real consternation appearing on her face. Glitching blocks of acid-colored digital stress spattered the screen of her tablet, the only possession she hadn’t packed. “Not good, not good.”

  “What do we do?” I was standing.

  “We go. Right now.” And she was away, out of the door, grabbing her keycard from its slot as she went. It was, I saw, white. Awash with panic, saturated with it on a molecular level, I scrambled to pick up my own bag and was about to follow when I saw something jutting from the teetering room-service trays on the armchair, something I recognized: the wooden handle of a steak knife. I pulled it out from the pile, ignoring the trays as they slid to the floor in a cacophony of smashing plates and glasses. The knife
was short, serrated and dirty, but it had a good, nasty point. I stuffed it into my jacket pocket and left the room.

  A miracle. Dee was waiting for me in the corridor. A real miracle. She had waited. Never had she looked so beautiful to me. But her eyes, flashing with impatience, left mine and passed over my shoulder, and her expression twisted into one of terror.

  I turned. Hilbert was stalking down the corridor toward us, taller than I remembered, elongated with fury. His suit flowed with black energy and the walls of the hotel caved out as he passed, as if straining to give him space. The lights stuttered and threw improbable shadows, catching angles that could not and should not be present.

  All along the corridor, the abstract paintings boiled in their frames, spheres and arcs lashing across the canvases.

  “Housekeeping!” Hilbert bellowed, feedback whine stripping the humanity from his consonants. He surged forward, a movement that was accompanied by an awful oceanic shifting in the ground beneath me, as if the distance between us had contracted. I had no time to consider evasion before he cannoned into me, head lowered, no finesse, a bull charge. My torso was replaced by a torso-shaped entity of pure pain and I registered being airborne. With a sickening, bitter breath the air was slammed from my body by the wall of the Way Inn and then the floor of the Way Inn.

  Curled up, gasping, I found myself unable to move. My rib cage was a barrel of agony and I feared I had dislocated a shoulder. My legs were lost luggage, and something had fallen across them—one of the abstract paintings, knocked from the wall by my impact. As I tried to regain full use of them, Hilbert appeared above me, face a blur, not pausing before his attack.

  I had a hold on the painting and, acting on instinct, was able to lift it to shield my throat from the elbow Hilbert had aimed at it. The painting’s frame cracked apart, but Hilbert’s strike was deflected onto the floor. Adrenalin fired through my body—still clutching the sides of the painting, I rolled over, onto Hilbert, the canvas covering his head and chest. He thrashed beneath this shroud and I saw sepia ovoids and curves creeping from the design onto my hands and toward my wrists. Letting go of the painting with a yelp of horror, I clumsily climbed to my feet and hunted in my pocket for the steak knife. Finding it, I knelt and stabbed through the painting into Hilbert, once, twice, three times. Blood leaped around the blows and Hilbert’s legs convulsed like eels.

  “Neil! NEIL!”

  Dee, farther down the corridor, was urgently beckoning to me. “Come on! He won’t stop! We have to go! Now!”

  I sprinted toward her, striving to ignore the white-hot iron of pain that pushed into my side with each contact my feet made with the floor. My left hand was sticky with blood, fingers aching with cramp around the wooden handle of the knife. I remembered the sensation of driving the point into Hilbert—the split-second of resistance, then the fleshy give, the purr of the saw teeth against a torn edge. Seeing me stare dumbly at the reddened weapon, reading my thoughts, Dee said: “He’ll be fine. You need to worry about us.” Resolution flashed in her eyes.

  A clatter and a thud sounded behind me. Hilbert had cast off the ruined painting and had sprung upright like an insect. He glared at us, poised and ready for another charge. Glancing at Dee for a lead on what to do, I saw her engrossed in her tablet. Two paintings were aligned on the screen, edges matched—she flicked these apart and they separated to find places in a new sequence.

  Dizziness overcame me—but this was not dizziness, it was the same seasick swell I had felt earlier during Hilbert’s attack. And before my unbelieving eyes, the corridor between us and Hilbert lengthened. He went from ten meters away to a hundred in a giddy second before being folded behind a corner. Another wall somehow slid into the long passage that had grown beside us, turning it into a T-junction.

  My throat was tight, almost too tight to speak, and the words came in a whisper. “You did that?”

  “We can’t count on it working again,” Dee said. “Let’s go.”

  Both lumbered with bags, we half-strode, half-ran through the hotel—fast walking broken by bursts of jogging, to which I would always have to call a halt, wheezing and clutching my side while spots jumped in my vision. I had broken a rib, I was sure, and while my shoulder was not dislocated, it hurt abominably.

  Dee led the way, of course, and at first I was too pre-occupied with the tumbling afterimages of my struggle with Hilbert to pay much heed to where we might be going. But I became aware of variations in my surroundings, variations that were slight but deeply unnerving. Thus far, every part of Way Inn I had seen had followed a strictly orthogonal plan: the corridors were straight and intersected at right angles. In the locales we were now traversing, all these angles were somewhat off. We turned eighty- and hundred-degree corners and the corridors kinked and curved.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “The inner hotel,” Dee said. “Deep. I didn’t change Hilbert’s relative position, I changed ours, projecting us into the hotel. The deeper you get, the more the environment is susceptible to . . . manipulation.”

  “How do we get out?”

  “I don’t know. Not the way we came, that’s gone. And this”—she waved the tablet at me, its screen still jumbling and sorting paintings—“is barely helping. Hilbert was twisting things round as well as me. Local changes to the hotel fabric have far-reaching nonlocal effects, universal effects in fact: it’s like a kaleidoscope, a small shift means the whole pattern changes. The first time I tried active spatial kinesis, I was lost for a week. A week of Pringles and five-pound jars of salted nuts.” She shook her head at the memory. “Like a savage.”

  “Minibarbaric,” I said, and for the first time since I had met her, Dee laughed; she had chuckled at me, or smiled at a joke of mine or an instance of my stupidity, but this was an authentic laugh, head back, red hair blazing in the halogen spotlighting. There was no discernible natural light any more and curious shadows without origin made unsettling patterns on the walls.

  We passed a light well, but it provided no illumination. The sky above it was the dull, angry, bronze dome that had sheltered the motel. We moved at tangents through angles acute and obtuse, past doors whose numbers were no longer sequential. I thought I detected an adverse camber in the floor, but I could never be certain of it.

  “What happens if we are lost?” I said. “Can we get into these rooms?”

  “Some, probably,” Dee said. We had stalled for some time at a junction, one corridor branching into two in a sharp Y. Dee had photographed all the nearby paintings and was engrossed in a calculation, muttering as she worked. This was a person unaccustomed to being in company. I wanted to talk to remind her of my presence, to break into her dialogue with herself. And I was concerned she was sticking to her own ascetic standards in assessing how far we could go, how fast, and for how long. Two days of continual exertion, only thinly separated by sleep, were taxing me heavily.

  “It’ll be night soon.”

  “Not here.”

  “We can’t go on forever—where do we sleep?”

  “We have to go on as long as we can,” Dee said, distracted by her tablet. “I don’t know how much distance we’ve put between us and Hilbert, but it can’t be enough, I’ll tell you that.”

  “I’d be reassured if I knew we could get into a room, find a bed, eat something . . .”

  “Not now.”

  “If we’re going to be lost for more than a week . . .”

  This broke her from her flashing screen, and she glared at me. “We will not be lost for a week,” she said, cheeks flushed. “I know more now, I can figure this out, if you could just be quiet for one minute.”

  Don’t question her abilities, I thought, that’s a lesson learned. She returned to her work and I turned to the nearest door: a room door, like all the others, with the number 378. I took my keycard from my pocket and tried it in the lock.

  The light turned green. When I pressed the handle, the metal moved smoothly against metal and the door opened.


  “This one’s open,” I said, pushing the door wider and peering in. In the gloom, there were two armchairs facing a coffee table, a bed and a flat-screen telly slab. “Hey, this room’s bigger than mine.”

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  Dee was staring at me, aghast, holding her tablet so limply I feared she might drop it. A terrible quality in her voice flushed me with ice water.

  “Do I have to take that fucking card away from you? You idiot. You fucking idiot.” Without waiting for a reply, she lunged toward me. I had already withdrawn the keycard from the lock and was seized by a superpowered instinct to protect it from her.

  “No, it’s mine!” I said in a squawk, stuffing the card back into my jacket pocket. Dee stopped, hands raised and eyes wide, visibly surprised by my reaction. It had come as a surprise to me as well.

  “You have raised a big, black flag over our location,” she said. “Again. How many times is that? You want that damned piece of plastic, you keep it, Gollum. But you use it again in my presence and I swear I will snap it in half and insert it in you, broken edge first.”

  “OK, OK, I’m sorry,” I said. The card radiated shame through me and I considered breaking it myself as a gesture of regret. But a tendril of desire uncurled from an unseen place within me and suffocated the idea. “How can Hilbert know where we are? Do you know where he is?”

  “He’s been doing this longer than I have,” Dee said. “Much longer. Decades longer. Maybe since the start. He has material advantages. And a natural affinity for the work.” A smile, the flash of a scalpel under the lights of the operating theater. “Like you.”

  Winded, a knot of agony from neck to knees, I suddenly felt the heat of possible tears, not sadness or hurt but frustration, exhaustion—our acquaintance had become a recursive loop of distrust, with me continually returned to square one. “No affinity, not from me, not any more. I just want to go.”