Death Hotel II

I didn't get five feet before I immediately regretted my decision. It was dark as hell and the redness gave made me feel like I was inside some sort of fucked up demon's belly. It was absolutely silent. Every time I stepped, I could hear the sounds echoing across the far wall, across the wall to my left, through the vast silence of the courtyard. I swear to god that if I closed my eyes I could have found my way like a damned bat. Even my breath sounded like the deep gasping of some sort of half-dead and ragged monster. I felt about ten feet tall, like everything in the world had grown huge with me and if I walked out of the hotel I'd find that the rest of the world had stayed tiny, like even the cells of my body had just said "fuck it" and expanded a thousand thousand times.

I realized that I'd been walking for a couple of minutes now, and there was no end to the damn doorwats. This place was not that size before. Something was up. I wondered if I was dreaming now, because I'd had dreams exactly like this before, the kind of dreams where you think you wake up but everything is wrong and you can't figure out what the hell is going on because as you realize what's happening, your dream changes because the only thing causing your perception is the part of the brain that you can't see, and as soon as you turn to see it, it moves.

Have you ever been in a darkness so vast and so pure that you could swear you saw it running from you? Have you ever wondered whether light or darkness is the active one? Have you ever felt the darkness pressing in on you, and you knew that the only thing stopping it from getting you and engulfing you in a black ocean was a flashlight, or a weak, buzzing ceiling flourescent, and you look out into the darkness and you know, then, that darkness is the natural state of the world and that every light ever is just a hiccup in the plan. You know that when mankind is dead and the sun has died its heat death in the blink of an eye in the enormous continuity of the universe, it will all be dark again, and there is nothing you can do about it.

If you can imagine how you felt when you first realized that, you now know exactly how I feel. The darkness, I swear to god, was licking at me and it became a race to the next tiny flame. Like I was a moth and the darkness was a flock of ravens waiting in the great depths of the courtyard to come and get me. I knew that if I slowed down, even for a moment, there would be nothing left of me.

I ran and hopped this way, I swear to god, for nearly half an hour. And then I saw the end of the hallway.

There was no way this could be a dream- I've never sweated in a dream. And I'll be damned if I'd ever bitten my lip or stubbed my toe in a dream, either. That electric shock you feel when you hurt yourself and your mind suddenly goes clear- that wasn't part of a dream, either.

Just out of curiosity, I looked at the door number I happened to be at.

It was my room number again. Somehow, by going in a straight line long enough to make me sweat, I'd returned back to my own room. The door was still locked, and still very closed. Behind me- the endless corridor I'd just run from. I could see a dozen doors before tricks of the light and the rusty redness made everything line up. So I hadn't imagined that, then.

The only possibility, then, is that I have seriously gone insane.

I would have turned around and seen what happened, but honestly, I don't know if I could bear going back the way I'd came. It had only gotten darker. I could see the lights struggling to even put out the meager flourescence they'd been managing, and I knew that if I stood still, it would only get worse.

There was the stairway two doors down. After the second door, the lights went out, and I was confronted with a raw sheet of blackness. I don't know, and I can never be sure, but the darkness was moving. It was quavering, ever so slightly, like a bowl of Jello made of inky shit and turned sideways and aimed directly at me. I sort of run-jumped the last two doors, then stopped and looked directly at the black wall. It was close enough that I could touch it, if I was that stupid.

I took out a cigarette, and lit it with one of the matches. I took a long, slow drag. It was toxic, I could feel, something about the air was mixing with the smoke and turning it into aerosol acid, but I held it in. I breathed out, more a sigh than anything, and flicked the half-ash cigarette, executing a beautiful head-over-tails flip that you see in action movies.

As soon as it hit the wall of blackness, the cigarette extinguished and fell straight through where the ground would have been if common sense were still working.

There were two very real possibilities- either I was right, and this was my Doom, or I, a stone-cold sober military man, was hallucinating so hard that I was capable of both extended trains of logic and seeing a thousand-yard hallway end in a black wall of quavering nothingness.

The third possibility came to me- it was very possible that Hell had come to Earth. Not the bullshit religious hell (did you know that the popular conception of Hell came from a combination of Paradise Lost and Dante's Inferno and isn't mentioned anywhere in the Bible except in passing references to giant garbage pits?), but the Hell we all know exists because no matter how bad it gets here on Earth, you know that it could always be worse if you were in Hell.

Well, I was there now, or close enough to it that it didn't really matter what the fuck was happening now.

I figured I might as well go down the stairs. I never did explore the place, I was laughing now, and shit, I could use some nice cold water here or there.

I went down the stairs, which were lit by nothing and yet were clearly visible through the gloom. I was as though there were lights underneath the stairs, but I checked, and there wasn't shit under them. Just a diffuse light under my feet, coming from the steps themselves. At the end of the stairs, I found myself on yet another level. Didn't seem like it was going anywhere special, at least, so I figured I could at least find my friends. Their room number was 121, which I'd always thought was wierd since I was on the ground level and was room 77. I guess they decided to count down from the top level, which is whatever, when you get down to it.

The room number next to me said 175, so their room would be, somewhere, something roundabouts on the other side? Wasn't really in the mood for more stretched-out hallways, but honestly, I had absolutely nothing else to do, so I just started walking.

The lights down here worked well enough, although you could hardly tell from the darkness of the upper level. I was trying to figure out if there was some sort of tree in the way, or maybe a particularly thick set of vines or something, when I realized that the trees' canopies were all on this level. They were growing out onto the balcony, something I hadn't noticed before. Sloppy housekeeping, I thought, until I walked closer to one.

The trees looked about normal enough, if you were willing to give the benefit of the doubt to that damn overcast reddishness, except that the branches didn't seem to quite end right, and the leaves didn't seem like leaves as much as short, webbed hands. I wouldn't have noticed, except that they were moving slightly, making tiny grasping motions like a baby's hand in slow motion. I stared at it, and noticed that the branches of the trees were moving, too, back and forth ever so slightly. I honestly didn't want to get any closer than I already was. If you've ever read Piers Anthony (but don't, seriously), you'll remember the damned tangle grass. If you sit in it, it grows straight through you and pins you in place and so your ass gets stuck to the ground. Just imagine that- you are peirced through the entire body by a patch of grass.

I wasn't about to find out what was going on- if I was in hell, it'd probably eat and rape me, and if I was hallucinating, well, it'd still hurt and honestly it was really creepy and I figured I'd just go down another flight and then try going back up. The darkness seemed to be gone, for what it was worth, and that was always nice.

The stairs were right where I left them, so I went down another flight. The red was deeper- maybe it was something in the courtyard? I can't believe I didn't look down before, so I walked closer to the balcony, but as I got closer I realized that there was no way the light was coming from down there. I could feel an intense, disgusting warm wetness the closer I got to the balcony and figured, you know what, they could have whatever was down there. I am completely uninterested in what they've got.

Now look, here's the funny thing- I was so interested in the balcony that I'd completely forgotten that this place only had three stories when I got there in the evening. Now that it's night time, I notice that the stairs keep going down, and what the balcony was now used to be the courtyard. It hit me about now- picture my eyes wide, my bladder getting loose.

You know what roadkill bothers people from the city and suburbs? It's because nature is a thing that happens to other people. Death and carnage isn't something that people have to deal with, so when they see a reminder that nature is right there, and that death is right behind, people get uncomfortable with it. It doesn't belong, it's not part of their world, and it's not something that's supposed to be there in this perfect man-made world.

If you can capture that feeling for me, the feeling that this is not the way it's supposed to be, I'd appreciate it. It makes what I'm about to say fit in a little bit better.

I saw, just down the way a little, a man bleeding from his mouth and nose. He looked at me. I could tell he was in a lot of pain, because I could see that he had a thick cable jammed into his torso, like the kind of cable that holds up a bridge, but, naturally, most of those aren't inserted into somebody's chest cavity. It was tugging at him, pulling him downstairs. He looked at me, sobbing gently through the blood. He kept touching at his chest, and his feet were slightly lagging behind his body. I got the sense that if he didn't move with it, it'd tear him in half. He walked, slowly, reluctantly down the stairs, bleeding all over the ground. I could smell- he had shit himself, and the smells of blood and shit were acrid and revolting, and that was all I needed to see to know that I was getting the fuck out of here.

The painful silence was back, and there was no way I was running. I soft-stepped as fast as I dared, when I ran into Jackson, the brunette. Her eyes opened wide, and the words "holy shit" died directly on my lips. Her hand found min and she half-walked with me, and half pulled me with her. The trees were nowhere to be seen, but everything was dark red. There were no lights left. Everything was dark, lit only by the horrible underglow coming from the balcony. The tree's hands had gone back to the trunk, I assume, and there was her room, right past the tree.

She opened it silently, and I went to turn the light on in her room when she plucked at my hand. I could barely see her shake her head. I whispered to her "Do you have your car keys?" She nodded her head, then motioned her head at the sleeping form of her roommate, Smith. I angled the blinds of the room just enough so that a sliver of the glow outside the room was visible. I could see that her roommate was sleeping peacefully, clearly breathing in and out. But I could also see the angry red gash in her chest. It was wide enough that I could see the back of her chest cavity, where her internal organs would have been. Jackson's hands were shaking now, almost violently, and she was biting her lower lip. The keys were in her roommate Smith's pockets. The ones that she was still wearing.

I realized then that, in this echoing silence, any noise we made would be as loud as machine gun fire. Aside from Smith's loud sleep-breathing, this was going to be very, very loud.

Jackson looked at me, expectantly. I shook my head, and opened my eyes wide at her. She shook her head almost violently, then screwed her eyes shut. I grimaced, then moved slowly towards her roommate, my hand moving a milimeter a second, reaching towards her prone body. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and I could feel every nerve in my body. My lip started to throb where I'd bitten it, when her roommate suddenly fucking rolled over. Jackpot. Her keys were practically hanging out of her pants anyways. I thanked whatever marketing idiot was responsible for women cramming their asses into tight pants and plucked at the keys.

Smith never noticed. She continued to sleep. I motioned for Jackson with my head, a quick "come the fuck on" thing. She was already on the way out, and I grabbed her by the hand while we went straight out the door. I didn't bother to close the door because honestly, I couldn't give two shits less about anything in that room. What I cared about was getting the fuck out of here.

And so the two of us walked back out. The tree was still pulled back, and the night was still a deep, angry blood red. She was tight-lipped and wide-eyed, and I figured I'd ask what she'd been though maybe a little later. For now, I was concerned with exactly how we were going to get out of here. Specifically, how I'd get her out of here.

Chalk it up to depression if you like, but I've never felt like my own life was particularly worth much. Don't get me wrong, I liked living it just fine, but I've always felt a bit like I didn't deserve anything. Like I've always gotten too much attention, somehow. I'd always just wanted to be left alone, and if it ended up being my fate to be killed by some strange and awful method in a fucked-up hotel, that was fine with me.

But that didn't mean that other people were the same. I love other people, and even though I wasn't romantically interested in a nice women who was interested in me, that didn't mean I didn't love her too. And even if I'd have given up and sat in my room and waited for death on my own, there was no way that was happening to her.

So we went around the tree and up the stairs and the darkness was gone from there, too. It was just regular darkness, the kind that happens when you don't have enough lights on and it's a dim moonless night. It was almost quaint to see the lights being yellow and the darkness being a plain black.

We walked down two doors, and there was my room, not that I could get in it. Or, wait...

(To be continued)