by Will Wiles
“No. To Hilbert. To the hotel.”
“Nothing. I hit him with a chair.” I wanted to laugh, but there was nothing in my lungs but white-hot barbed wire. Instead, I grimaced and wheezed. “So that’s another thing we have in common.”
I was slumped on the floor, in a doorway, half in a room and half out. Patting myself down to identify the main site of injury, I discovered a plasticated strip of cardboard lying on my chest. One end was hook-shaped. A DO NOT DISTURB sign, fallen from the door handle.
Dee smiled at the sign, then at me. “You looked very peaceful, but I thought it was best to disturb you anyway.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
She helped me up. I had enlarged my collection of agonies, but without crippling myself. The ringing in my head, the writhing black tension in the electricity of my brain and the swimming spheres behind my eyes challenged my crumpled ribs for king of the traumas.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Hilbert? Gone. For now. He can’t be killed as long as he’s inside the hotel.”
“But if he leaves?”
Dee shrugged. “Are you good to get moving?”
I took an experimental step, and kicked debris. The corridor was littered with tattered paintings, their frames no more than matchwood.
“What a mess,” I said. “Is the whole hotel like this?”
“No,” Dee said. “From what I can tell, Hilbert was generating a localized depression in the hotel fabric, like the effect of a black hole on space-time.” She shook her head at the havoc. “Violent. Reckless. He’s lost it.”
“He’s crazy.”
“He was always crazy, but the craziness came with a code. Boundaries. Limits. His own sense of fair dealing. Through-and-through perverse, but a structure all the same. That’s gone. He’s capable of anything.”
“It works to our advantage. He’s irrational, improvising, making mistakes. He didn’t even see the chair I dropped.”
“True.”
My third step sent a spike through my knee, and I wobbled. For a moment I feared the floor had begun to tilt again. My vision doubled and blurred—the paintings beneath my feet lost their edges, their patterns melted together, coalesced . . .
No boundaries. The blurred edge.
“We can trick him,” I said.
“How?”
“Can you get us back to the MetaCenter Way Inn? The first floor?”
Dee puffed out her cheeks. “Maybe. The way the hotel is shaken up, though, it could take days, or longer.”
Once again, the paintings on the floor were fractured, many facedown, none contiguous. But the flowing image they had, for a neuron’s flight, generated for me lingered as an after-impression, a ghost that orbited and rotated and smiled for me when my eyes were closed. A grand design, the brother or sister to what I had glimpsed on the walls in Dee’s room.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I know the way.”
The DO NOT DISTURB sign was still in my hand. I hung it back on the doorknob, flipping it over after looking at the chaos past the threshold, the minibar contents dripping from the gaping fridge onto the shards of the destroyed television.
PLEASE CLEAN THIS ROOM.
We trampled ruined corporate art.
Everything had changed around us and everything was as it had always been: familiar, banal, its muted colors and composite surfaces lit with intelligence. What had changed was within me. The hotel’s air, maintained at an ideal temperature, polymer-scented and laced with WiFi, spoke to me; a forest speaking to a hunter-gatherer. The paintings were only the start: meaning could be derived from the interrelation of sequences of room numbers, from the distribution of room-service trays, from the location of DO NOT DISTURB signs. Patterns everywhere, everything data to be mined and pummelled for insight.
We found a stairwell and descended to the first floor. The stairs went no farther.
Since our last encounter with Hilbert, Dee had followed me. “I can see what you’re doing,” she said, “but only after you do it.”
“I don’t think I’m doing anything,” I said. “I’m just walking.” Walking, yes—walking without direction or intent, letting the hotel unfold before my feet, drifting through its currents.
Dee, staring at her tablet, said nothing, but shook her head, disbelieving. I didn’t know if she was shaking it at me or at the arrangements and juxtapositions that danced in her eyes.
“You were right,” I said. “It’s beautiful. The grand design. The harmonic structure. All I can get is a hint of it, an impression of part of the shadow of an outline . . .”
“That’s all you need. Any more, you end up like our mutual friend. It’s too much.”
“You taught me. You showed me. I’m different, and you did it. Everything matters, everything is unique. Everything and everybody.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, thank you.”
She had not met my gaze during this exchange—perhaps embarrassed. Perhaps something else: I suspected a return of the reserve that had defined her when we were reacquainted three days ago. An unspoken thing, a mighty and significant item of knowledge that she was holding back.
“Everything OK?” I am a man. These are the only tools I have.
“Fine. Thank you. For the thank you. Let’s save the congratulations for now, shall we?”
“Sure. Can you get us to the business suite in the MetaCenter Way Inn?”
“From here, no problem,” Dee said. She stopped herself. “I say no problem, but there’s a couple of big problems. We might still be in the inner hotel, a simulacrum of the business center coterminal with that location in the outer hotel. So even if the exit looks clear, it might just be a closed loop.”
“Yup. I’ve gone that way already. Climbed out of a window, ended up staring at the back of my own head. What’s the other problem?”
“There is no exit from the business center. It’s a dead end. No way out. A perfect trap.”
“Yes,” I said. I had tasted the potential in the air during the battle with Hilbert, all the doors opening at once, outside and in. I wanted to taste it again. Where better to meet than the meeting rooms. The perfect environment for unfinished business.
The suites slept behind glass, lights dim, rooms silent, chairs set up like chess pieces awaiting players. What time was it? The question had lost its relevance. I had come a long way. I thought of relativity, that time slows the faster you travel, that astronauts on a light-speed spacecraft would emerge fresh-faced while decades had passed in the world they left behind. It had been late morning when I tried to check out the first time, a matter of perhaps eighteen hours ago. Eighteen hours and millions of miles and an eternity.
Lights blinked on. The aircon muttered as if stirring in a dream. Outside the Gallery Room, I stopped. Here was as good as anywhere.
“Do you trust me?” I asked Dee. I took the black keycard from my pocket and held it up, showed it to her. She looked at me and at it, eyes reflecting glass reflecting spotlights.
“The corruption that claimed Hilbert came from within him,” she said, as tender an expression on her as I had ever seen. “Do you trust yourself?”
“It’s two against one,” I said. “Good odds.”
“As long as I’m not the one.”
I shook my head. “Still suspicious. What a world.”
“Do it. Trust is overrated anyway. All the treachery in the world is built on a foundation of trust.”
“Cynic.” I put the card into the Gallery Room slot. The light turned green and the door unlocked. I pushed it open, but didn’t enter. In the dark, I saw the missing painting had been replaced. The sequence was complete again.
Nothing happened.
“Never any staff on duty when you need them,” Dee said.
“We could have a Nespresso.”
“Maybe you should shut that door.”
I did as she said. We stood in silence. With a grunt, Dee dropped her bulging bag fro
m her shoulder. How she had carried it all this time, I didn’t know—with all those books and papers, it must have been an enormous strain. But it was a life’s work, I supposed: the sum of her research and discoveries. If I carried the total output of my endeavors on my back, I, too, would be reluctant to part with it.
With a twist of horror I realized that my bag did contain the measure of my time on earth: a laptop, a modestly priced suit and a spongebag. An email inbox full of e-tickets, hotel reservations and conference timetables. An experience composed of forgettable trade fairs and forgettable leisure in forgettable hotels. No memory track. Until now.
“Look,” Dee said.
The Gallery Room was halfway down a corridor that led to the Vista and Garden rooms. Our presence had triggered the lights as far as the door, but the rest of the path stayed dim. As we stood and waited for Hilbert to appear, the lights we had woken one by one returned to slumber until only those in our immediate vicinity remained at full power, a little island of light. But Dee was not alerting me to this phenomenon. She was facing the other way, toward the overlook. There, the lights were coming on, one by one. But nothing was there to trigger the motion sensors.
“What’s doing that?” I said. Uncertain energy sloshed within me as I wrestled with the impossibility of defending myself against an invisible assailant.
“I don’t know,” Dee said. “Could be . . .”
She trailed off. I stared at her. “Could be what?”
“A warning. Think like a building. How do you say, ‘Something is coming’?”
“Maybe we should move,” I said. I took a few steps down the corridor, toward the Vista room. No unseeable force.
“That way? Toward the—whatever?”
“This is the way.” I beckoned to Dee, but she remained rooted, indecision written all over her.
Behind her, in the power-save-dim corridor, the shadows thickened into slicks and oozed from under the paintings. The way we had come was swallowed by ink. The darkness swirled and thickened—it curdled and bonded. Within it, a formation, a separation of finely spaced lines, a bar code.
“Oh God,” I said. “Dee . . .”
She saw the danger at the moment it became danger. Hilbert stepped from the darkness—not simply out of the darkness but born of it, coalesced in it, the dark woven into him like the black thread of his suit. In a slight, casual movement—a man indicating a particular slice of pie chart in a PowerPoint slide—he sent Dee crashing into the wall. But this act was an aside. He was focused on me.
“Not bad, Mr. Double,” he said. “Leadership qualities. Fast-track potential. I’m willing to reopen our offer, for a limited time only. The hotel needs dynamic thought leaders like yourself.”
“Dee!”
I need not have worried—she was upright and swinging. Her right fist met the point where Hilbert’s spine connected to his skull with freight-train force. He did not cry out or buckle; his face closed in a grimace and he reared up as if electrified. It was enough to allow Dee to slip by him and join me.
“We’re stuck,” she said, brandishing her tablet, a starburst of cracks spanning its dead screen. “Unless you can give me an hour or two to work out some stuff on paper. I hope you know a way out of here.”
Hilbert cried out, like sound itself being torn, igniting ultrasonic frequencies and sending a shudder through the hotel. I closed my eyes, and saw churning designs, glimpses of immense and horrid panoramas, titan pillars of interlaced spheres, an abstraction, but one that represented a truth, the true form of the hotel, a fractal continuity in which our whole universe might as well be a pebble in a courtyard.
But there was no time, thank God, to reflect on what was revealed, or almost revealed. Hilbert had regained that thread of composure that still held him back from undiluted, untargeted rage. My plan snapped back into mind—though it was less a plan than a blind throw.
I ran and Dee followed, past the glass wall of the Vista Room, filled with the dull, orange, secondhand light of the motorway and the secret purpose of places that have no fixed purpose, a sense of never being used and yet always on the cusp of use.
Through the picture windows, in the amber penumbra, the steel ribs and curved glass of the skywalk.
The first-floor reception, yet to check in its first guest. I tore aside plastic tape and sheeting. Behind us there was a crash, the destruction of a giant pane of the Vista’s glass wall. Bulbs flared and burned out, throwing migraine fluoro flickers. The cast-off illumination of the corridors disappeared and left us in security quarter-light. I kicked aside warning signs and barriers. Polythene-wrapped armchairs lurked in the gloom.
“Dead end!” Dee shouted, unwilling to follow but terrified to stop.
Beneath my feet, the carpet was different—the same hard-wearing, high-traffic fiber, a similar gray, but flecked with yellow—a distinction impossible to make out in the sodium shade.
But I had seen it before, in the MetaCenter. I knew it was there.
We were entubed in the skywalk. It rose gently as it crossed the motorway, and at the summit of this rise, above the central reservation, was the break: a twenty-foot drop onto concrete and crash barriers and speeding juggernauts. A yellow plastic membrane covered the hole, pulsing obscenely from the wind’s movements beyond.
The tempo of the traffic was the steady, fast beat of the small hours, not the constant heavy roar of the day. But while it could be heard, it could not be seen: the lower half of the glass tube was frosted to obscure the view. The idea, perhaps, was to make the skywalk true to its name and show only the sky, so conference-goers could imagine themselves drifting through the heavens without being disturbed by the reality of the heavy-duty infrastructure that made their seminar, their espresso and their muffin possible. As long as they could ignore the constant bellowing of it, and I knew they could, with their meaningless prattle and performance laughter. I hated them, I hated them all. They had been churned into a mass by their environment; they had let it happen, becoming an industrial sludge to be processed in industrial facilities.
In the thunder of the motorway there was another gathering sound, a splitting shriek with an unmistakable note of triumph. Rushing up behind us came the darkness, limned with improbable chroma, gasping with overloaded bandwidth. Pulling it like a parachute was Hilbert, his eyes the standby diodes of Hell, his skin awash with sweat and blood, erupting with lesions, the flesh vehicle collapsing under the supernatural forces being conjured through it.
“The bottom line,” he said, words hissed through dripping, fraying lips.
“Here we are, Hilbert,” I said, failing to conceal my fear. Dee kept glancing to the end of the skywalk, and I could sense her calculating the survival odds of a jump. I knew those odds were poor. “No more running. Nowhere else to go.”
Come closer.
“Negotiation is a thrill, but in the end there always has to be a decision,” Hilbert said, advancing, plainly savoring his approach. “No more tricks or tactics or breaks. You are no longer dictating terms. Due diligence is done, the books are open. Are you in or out?”
As I had suspected, the wild sensation of potency, of influence, that had been gathering within me since donning the pinstripe suit had dissipated with our arrival on the skywalk. It was gone. This wasn’t the endlessly flexible and rewarding inner hotel, that glorious, vigorous, unquenchable labyrinth. It wasn’t even the outer hotel.
I wanted to be back in the hotel. I wanted that feeling, that capability. I wanted to be back inside Way Inn. Always.
Dee was staring at me. I was, I realized, not answering—I was undecided, and she knew it. Courage was leaving her expression and with it whatever faint affection she held for me. I was losing her, and I wanted her back. More than I wanted the hotel.
“In or out?” I said. “Hilbert, I’m already out. So are you. This isn’t Way Inn. We’ve left the hotel.”
If Dee and I were above the central reservation, Hilbert had reached the inside lane, a National E
xpress coach-width away.
He stopped, flexed his hands, looked down at them. The darkness had receded, sucking back into the hotel, leaving him behind.
“Unresponsive,” Hilbert said. “Can’t . . .”
Without a sound, a terrible wasting took hold of him—he thinned, his body reducing to a wire outline under his suit, then little more than a two-dimensional image. “My God,” he breathed, the lines in his face multiplying and deepening, his eyes sinking into shadowed sockets, their fire extinguished, his hair graying and withering. In a second he aged six decades.
“Way to go,” I said, giving my best service-industry smile.
In obvious panic, Hilbert wheeled back toward the hotel and took a couple of frail steps down the incline of the skywalk. The effort of that modest maneuver was too much for his drastically impoverished body. He crumbled; he did not fall or break apart but simply disintegrated. His suit lost cohesion along the line of every white pinstripe, separating into a mass of black ribbons that writhed around the diminishing man within, consuming what was left. Faint UV trails snaked out of the resulting heap and streamed together, neat and parallel, back to the first-floor reception, seeking corners and edges.
I ventured toward the black tangle that was all that remained of Hilbert. The ribbons were profoundly fragile, nigh weightless, already further deteriorating to graphite dust from the touch of a draft. An incinerated video tape, scorched residue needing nothing more than a stiff broom. A faint smell of acetone.
“Did you know that would happen?” Dee said. She stayed where she was, as close as possible to the yellow plastic barrier.
“No,” I said, returning to her. “Not exactly. I thought tricking him out of the hotel would deprive him of his special abilities. Weaken him. Give us a straight fight. Not this.”
“Liminal space,” Dee said. “He didn’t see the exit because there was no exit. No threshold. He didn’t realize the extent to which the world has adapted itself to Way Inn.”
I smoothed the jacket of my suit, an action Dee watched with odd intensity. I wanted to be jubilant, but her manner stopped me.
“So that’s that then,” I said, wanting to prompt some recognition from her of what we had achieved. “All over.”
