The Way Inn (22 page)

My thoughts scrambled and cohered like a radio finding a signal. At first I imagined that I had woken myself—maybe it was the pounding of my heart that roused me, but what unremembered terror had so roused my heart? I listened to it thumping in my ears. I had been prey for something in the passages of my own subconscious, something lean and athirst that cohered from the corners. No light in the room, no hint of dawn at the hems of the curtains. The alarm clock said 12:33. The night had barely begun.

A knock at the door—three knocks in fact, three sharp blows separated by deliberate, heavy gaps; a repeat of the pattern that woke me. Housekeeping? At half past midnight? Impossible. Someone else was out there.

“Just a minute. I'm coming.”

Could it be her, perhaps? I had left her my room number in my voice mail. A nocturnal visit. My mind filled with tawdry, soft-focus clichés; the bottle of champagne and two glasses, a negligee under a dressing gown, “I couldn't sleep . . .” The word
tryst
. Some people, educated by rented DVDs consumed with cheap wine, do behave this way. Some drop unsubtle hints that they would welcome this kind of visit. I had seen it—I had done it. I had been to
those
conferences.

But not her, surely not her.
That isn't where this is going
, she had said. She was wise to the way hotels put sex on the brain, posing themselves as convenient selection boxes of beds and genitals. She would never pull a tacky insomnympho stunt.
That isn't where this is going
.

As these thoughts ran, I was throwing on a Way Inn dressing gown and going to the door, repeating: “I'm coming, I'm coming.”

There was no one there. Disappointment, then anger. Was this a moronic joke by a drunken guest, a bit of mischief on the way back from a heavy session in the bar? But there was no muffled laughter, no retreating footsteps. The evening's parties were over, the function rooms would be dark by now. I had been fully awake, without a doubt, when whoever it was knocked for the second time; it was not an intrusion from a dream. I blinked, rubbed my eyes, and looked down at my bare feet.

On the carpet outside the door of my room was a mobile phone. My mobile phone. It had been her at the door, but she had not lingered. She was just making a delivery.

I bent to pick up the phone, cursing my slowness. Once again I had missed my chance. But if she had wanted to see me she would have waited. This was exactly the way she wanted this to work out—to give me back my phone without talking to me. Whatever relief I felt at being reunited with my phone was thoroughly soured by the realization that it would not serve to reunite me with her. It had been a meager thread connecting us, but its breaking was a shattering breach. In regaining something that had been lost, I had lost something far more important.

Closing the door on the corridor, I turned on the room lights. The depressing sight of a room-service tray, dirty plates and a crumpled napkin greeted me. Earlier I had dined alone in the room, unwilling to face the restaurant, and had gone to bed before ten. Not so long ago, but long enough to slip into a deep sleep. Now I feared sleep would be elusive, at least until I had calmed myself.

That isn't where this is going
. She had given me no time to weigh those words. This—whatever “this” is—was not going toward her bed. But it was going somewhere. A route for “this” had been left open.
You'll have to catch me
. The possibility was there, almost an invitation. It was not a dead end, it was a door, closed, but leading somewhere.

I woke the phone and thumbed through the familiar options and menus; perhaps there was a clue there. No new numbers in the phone book, no new text messages, nothing in the sent folder. I had a few fresh emails, but all routine, and nothing sent from there either. No voice mail—the messages I had left had been picked up. The call log showed a call to voice mail hours ago. She had listened to my messages earlier in the evening and then waited. Trying to figure out her next move? Waiting for me to go to bed?

The last thing to check was the camera. Nothing new here. My last picture, of the painting, taken from the same spot on the bed where I sat now, was still there. If she had copied it, she had not done so by texting it to herself. I put the phone on the bedside table. It wasn't going to help me.

Hilbert would be disappointed, of course. With no further means of contacting the woman, I had no way of fixing up the meeting he wanted. Would he be angry? It was his idea that had come to naught, not mine, so it was hard to see how he could infer failure or ineptitude on my part. A long shot had fallen short, that was all. But the thought of explaining what had happened filled me with concern. I strongly disliked the prospect of going back to him empty-handed. He had not so much as hinted at the existence of the mildest penalty for failure, and his demeanor had been consistently pleasant, if formal. Even so, I was powerfully disinclined to bring him bad news. I did not want to displease him. The realization stole up on me, and when it came I found it quite unshocking, as if I had known it from the start: I was afraid of Hilbert.

A chorus of buzzing and staticky chirruping burst from the radio-alarm, causing me to jump. Again, the same problem! Still not fixed! But before I had a chance to get properly annoyed, a new sound broke in: the trill of my mobile phone. All day I had been listening to the electromagnetic chattering of the radio and hearing the herald of a phone call that never came. And now the other shoe had dropped; the phone was ringing.

Unknown number. “Hello?”

“Hello?” A woman's voice. Her voice.

“Hi!” A squeak.

“Neil, yes?”

“Who else?”

“You have your phone back. Evidently.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“You know who this is?”

I wanted to say, you're Dee, but she had never given me her name—Hilbert had. “Yes,” I said. “You're the art collector. With a sideline in phone collecting.”

This was meant to be an icebreaker, but nothing came over the air in response. Which is not to say the spectra around me were empty—a rising and falling galvanic gale was emitting from the radio-alarm, punctuated by episodes of sharp ethereal percussion.

“What's that noise?” the woman said.

“It's interference from the clock radio, some kind of recurring fault—they were meant to fix it, but it's worse than ever—”

As I spoke, I was yanking the radio's plug from its socket, which again failed to dim or quieten it, but turned its display back to 3 33. Or was it already showing 3 33? I had not checked. I wrapped the flex around the radio, which vibrated on a high frequency in my hand, and stuffed it under the duvet of the bed.

“There, that should be a bit better. It won't shut up even when it's unplugged. Really annoying.”

“It makes that noise when it's unplugged?”

“Yeah. It must have some kind of emergency reserve power system, or something.”

“An emergency reserve power system?” There was a teasing tone to her voice. “What do you think it is? A nuclear submarine? An incubator in a children's hospital? It's a cheap alarm clock in a hotel room. They buy them by the thousand. The
thousand
.”

Underneath the duvet, the radio-alarm was continuing its frantic tittering monologue. I eyed the folds of cotton concealing it, as if expecting movement from below.

“What are you saying?”

“Nothing. You said you wanted to talk to me. Go ahead.”

I froze, openmouthed. True, I wanted to speak with this woman, but most of all I wanted her to speak, to unpack the nested mysteries she represented. Somehow she had to be prompted, but I had no idea what questions to ask.

“As long as I can remember,” I said, “I've believed hotels to be special places, important places. That they have power. In a hotel, you become a different person. Still you, but with new avenues of possibility open to you, new potential. And I sought out careers that would entail as much time in hotels as possible, so I could spend my life as that enhanced, unburdened hotel-person. It's how I ended up in my present job, which is perfect . . .”

“That's great,” she said, cutting in. “You've found your niche. What does it have to do with me?”

“I'm coming to that. This world I've been living in—it's like an immense city populated solely by people who are just passing through, staying for a few days and then returning home. This city, this world, is my home. I'm not passing through. I live here. My flat is nothing to me in comparison—it's where my bank statements are posted, that's all. And when I met you, I realized that you were another permanent resident of this world, and that you had a unique affinity with it. So it was natural that I should want to reach out to you.”

Nothing came in response. Even the radio-alarm had slipped into a lull.

“Since I ran into you in the bar a couple of nights ago, things have been going wrong for me, and at the same time I keep seeing you, at times when it's not possible, at 3 a.m. in daylight . . . Earlier today you said that maybe the hotel was trying to tell me something, and I admit I was pretty sceptical when you told me about the paintings, but now I think I see what you mean. Everything is joined together in ways we can't always see, and somehow the hotel is at the center of it.”

Another silence. I had been rambling, saying almost anything, and there was nothing else. On top of my incoherence over coffee and my desperate voice mails, a clear picture must have built up, and I did not like to imagine how it looked.

“I've been here awhile,” she said at last. “Since the first time you saw me, years ago. Not quite a permanent resident yet, but close, too close. And it matters that you saw me then and that you have now returned; it's more than a coincidence. You don't understand yet, but you will.”

“Understand what?” I said.

“Can you leave your room? I want to show you something.”

“Sure,” I said. I would have to dress in a hurry, but I wouldn't have declined her invitation if I was stark naked.

Following directions from Dee over the phone, I left my room and turned right—away from the lobby, into the hotel. At each turning and junction in the corridor, she told me which way to go. In between these instructions, as I padded over the hardwearing carpet, she mostly stayed silent. When she spoke, it was in arcane aphorisms, not invitations to conversation.

“People form habits quickly in hotels. They nurture new routines. You go out of your room, you turn toward the lift or the stairs, and you repeat that same turn every time. There's no reason to turn the other way. What is there? More room doors, closed and locked. A fire escape. The rest of the hotel might as well not exist.”

I walked. Tonight was midconference quiet, with none of the raucous behavior of last night. The air was thick with sleep.

“No room has its own key anymore. All are opened by keycards. These are programd centrally, told which room they open. You could have a locked room with no key. Your key could also open another room, and you would never know because you would never think to try. Rooms, locks and keys. It's all just data.”

What if this was a joke? Was she mocking me, again? Leading me to a dead end for the satisfaction of her inscrutable sense of humor? Flattering her in order to keep our fragile connection alive was all very well, but not so long ago I was convinced she was deranged. Had she given me any reason to believe otherwise? Not to my knowledge. So why was I putting more of my faith in her? Maybe I was a little crazier now, and finding fixed reality more mutable to her version of it.

“The plans of the hotels, their internal layouts, are off the peg. I choose the site, recommend the number of rooms, and the design comes from a selection of fixed templates. A few minor concessions are made to locality in signage, reg compliance, façade treatment. But the plan is generic, universal.”

My route was, I believed, roughly the same as the one I had taken on my unplanned jog the previous night. I passed one light well, then another. Outside it was drizzling.

“What I look for in a Way Inn site is a special unspecial quality. Every day there are more of these places. These places that are not places.”

A third light well. A fire door.
THIS DOOR IS ALARMED
. It could have been the same dead end I came up against last night.

“Go through it,” she said.

“It's alarmed,” I said. “It's late. People are sleeping.”

“It's OK,” she said. “Trust me.”

I pushed the metal bar. A shriek, maybe not loud but at a high, sustained pitch unknown in nature; a sharp chisel driven into my brain through each ear.

“Just push through,” she said, nurse calm.

The shriek clawed at the partitions between consciousness and oblivion. Black lightning crackled. My eyes were closed. Distortion throbbed across the phone signal and my fingers weakened on the plastic.

I was through. The alarm died as the door swung shut. Nothing stirred beyond the doors of the bedrooms around me. Bedrooms, a corridor. The same as the other side of the door. No fire escape.

“Keep going.”

In due course, a fourth light well. My mental sketch layout of the hotel warped again. I had passed lift shafts and stairwells. And how many rooms? The numbers were rising through the 250s. But I knew I had passed more than thirty doors since 219. More than fifty. More than a hundred. There had to be more than one room 219, perhaps more than two of them. My phone whistled in my ear, and I looked at it to check its battery. Only a sliver of power remained.

“How much farther?” I asked.

“How much farther do you want to go?” she said.

A fifth light well. How many were there, in total? I had not been proceeding in a straight line. Were there eight, ten, twelve? Three hundred rooms per floor, five hundred? That would make more than a thousand rooms in total—there were skyscraper hotels with that many, and sprawling resort complexes, with vast reception areas and hundreds of desk staff. How many people could be seated in the restaurant, or the bar, here? Fewer than a hundred. And what an exhausting walk the guests in this section would have before they were able to eat or drink or leave. It didn't make sense.