The Way Inn (29 page)

“No,” I said, suspecting I could be heard even if there was no one there to listen. “I'm finished. Leaving. Transaction complete.”

They, whoever they were really, could keep the suit. They could keep Dee. I took my bag and left the room in a hurry.

The watered-down Stones tune playing by the lifts was “Sympathy for the Devil.” I hit the down button and a set of doors opened immediately. I hit G for Ground, for Go, for Get out. The doors shut. Maximum occupancy six persons. In the event of fire do not use lift. A photocopied sheet of paper in a frame tells me that the weather outlook is uniformly cloudy and rainy and today's special is Thai green curry. Beside this is a framed advert for the hotel's conference facilities. Way Inn and Way Inn Metro branches. Registered trademark.

My reflection, in opposed mirrors. Me, my back, me, my back, and so on, the line of us curving away as the tiny difference in angle between mirrors increased with each repetition. The slight curvature in the line of Doubles obscured the vanishing point—when I try to look round me to see infinity, the other mes are always bending to stay in the way. A mercy, perhaps. Who first placed two mirrors opposite each other? Was there a moment of vertigo when they saw the hole they had made in finite space? Were they afraid? I hoped they felt fear. Fear would have been an entirely appropriate reaction. It often is. I was afraid. Terribly afraid.

Mirrors eliminate the experience of waiting. We preen and this reduces the aggravation of forced inactivity. Like parakeets distracted from their prison. The mirror swallows time. My appearance was not good. Dark rings had appeared under my eyes. I looked rattled, haunted. How much time had been swallowed? Was the lift even moving?

One of my multiple reflections leaned out of line. Just one. I hadn't moved, only the reflection had moved. Then it stepped from its column, leaving a gap. It was four or five repetitions deep. The pinstripes of the reflection's suit were reddened toward the collar, but its pale skin was clean. He turned toward me. We stared at each other, mirror-Hilbert and I. Hilbert did not look angry—more terrible than that, he looked pleased and knowing. Then he broke eye contact and leaned to one side, looking around and behind me.

I turned. In the opposite mirror, all the reflections were Hilbert. Those that had their pinstriped back to me all turned as one to join the others in facing me. They stared at me, still with that freezing smile.

In panic, I don't know if I jumped toward the lift doors or fell toward them, my body not waiting for impetus from the incapacitated mind but making its own decision, cobbling together an ad hoc reaction from the few responsive muscle groups it could raise. But my desperate fingers found the button that opened the doors, and the doors slid apart as I slumped against them, leaving the lift in a couple of heavy, seasick steps, almost collapsing. I leaned back into the lift to snatch up my bag, not looking at the mirrors, at the impossibility they were showing me.

The lift doors closed. This was not the ground floor. It was the second. Signs told me to go right for rooms 201 to 240 and left for rooms 241 to 280. I had not moved at all.

Stairs. But the fire door to the stairwell was not there. If I could only believe that my memory deceived me and the door was in fact elsewhere. How I yearned to remember that it was around the corner or down the corridor. If only. But I knew that it had been here as fixedly as I knew that it was now gone. In its place was a white wall and a painting.

A soft
ping
issued from the lift and its doors rumbled apart. Hilbert stepped into the second-floor corridor. The expression on his face conveyed no sorrow or anger, nor anything that suggested he was dealing with another human being, or had ever been one himself. He shimmered with distortion. I tensed, but there was no preparation for the blow he delivered, without preamble, with the flat of his right hand to my left temple.

The room died.

Waking for the second time today, I experienced pain as a kind of tiredness. That one blow had knocked all the power from me as surely as it had deprived me of reason. My head was clouded as if from deep sleep. Within it, my brain felt just a little too small, and seemed to shift with the slightest movement, sliding and bumping in its cushioning gravy.

I was sitting at a table, slumped over, head resting on my left arm. My left arm felt good, and I did not want to move. I could see my right arm, and behind that was a glass of water.

My left arm had gone to sleep. I tried to move it, to get some feeling back in the hand, and was rewarded with an igniting match of new pain in the arch above my left eye. A small exclamation of complaint escaped my lips: “Ah!” The table was hard and white, a durable artificial substance, surely trademarked.

“Mr. Double.”

I lifted my head to see where the voice had come from, though I already knew who had spoken. Hilbert sat at the other end of the conference table. For a moment I thought I was back in the Gallery Room—same size room, the same table in the middle. But this room was sparse, the light utilitarian, the door behind Hilbert plain, not dark wood. The walls were white-painted breezeblocks, and only one painting hung on them—one with a broken frame and a liberal dash of Hilbert's blood. I had the sense of being underground. Air conditioning whirred loudly.

“Have some water, Mr. Double. I'm afraid you hit your head quite hard on the floor on your way down.”

Hilbert sat with his hands clasped in front of him. Blood had soaked his shirt around the collar and stained his suit. But he had cleaned it from his poached-egg skin. The wound on his brow was half-covered by shining black hair.

On my way down. You sent me down, you bastard
. I took a sip of water and tasted iron—blood in my mouth. Probing for its source, I found I had bitten my tongue: a neat notch on its right side which started to hurt as soon as I discovered it. So Hilbert was prepared to be violent, prepared to strike and injure and imprison on behalf of the hotel. My fear in his presence was, for the moment, drowned out by anger. He had assaulted me and I wanted to assault him back, or to hit at the hotel itself—to injure it, or at least scare it, in some way. How, though, do you threaten a hotel?

“TripAdvisor is going to hear about this,” I said. “Just you wait. This place is going to get some serious one-star reviews.”

Hilbert smiled. “I apologize for the direct nature of my approach. I hope we can put it behind us and move into more productive areas of discussion.”

“On balance, I think I'm done discussing with you,” I said. “I did everything you asked. Brought her to the conference room. I'm not responsible for what happened. She's your problem now. I'm useless to you. I've got no way of getting in touch with her and even if I had, she'll never trust me again. Thanks to you.”

“Precisely,” Hilbert said. “She could never be relied upon—you see that now as well as I do. That woman has burned her last bridge with me. And you should understand that she has nothing to offer you. She is increasingly temperamental and secretive. Unstable. Perhaps dangerous.”

“Yes,” I said. As he talked about Dee, Hilbert's tone had turned sour, and this made my bruised jaw ache with pleasure. “How is your head?”

Hilbert's arm flinched at the elbow as he overcame an obvious impulse to put his fingers to his brow and feel the broken edges of his skin. His hands remained tightly clasped in front of him.

“Fine, thank you. Healing very nicely. How is yours?”

My pleasure dissipated. Scoring points against Hilbert could never be more than momentarily entertaining. Whatever brief satisfaction it brought was followed by a powerful sense of futility.

“I don't know why you need me at all,” I said, a complaint that towed a great tiredness behind it. I wanted to be done, to go home. “You're obviously a very powerful man, so how has she been able to elude you?”

Hilbert widened his eyes in a look of bafflement and shrugged, an incongruously human, even vulnerable, act. “It's something of a mystery to me as well, Mr. Double. She is not without abilities herself, and has been able to shield her location. The hotel will be aware of her, of course, but its interventions in our business are oblique at best. That's why it needs employees with initiative and zeal—employees who can take a more direct approach. Which brings us smartly to the next item on the agenda: my offer to you. I'm afraid I need to push you for a commitment.”

“Offer? What offer? We're done here. I did my part, you did yours. Thank you. Now it's time for me to go.”

“It's not nearly time for you to go,” Hilbert said sharply, rearing up suddenly in his seat, eyes flashing like geodes. “Not until you see the bigger picture. The keycard, the suit—these items are not given lightly, Mr. Double! We had a deal!”

“You can keep them,” I said, but with care; Hilbert's temper was clearly up and I didn't like the way he seemed to flare with visual noise as his ire rose, a representation straining and breaking down. I didn't want to peer behind that representation at whatever once-human remnant was there. He was more agitated than I had seen him, even when under direct attack. “You're most kind, but this is a mistake. This isn't me.”

Hilbert smacked the table with the palm of his hand, hard enough to make me jump in my seat and to set the water in my glass seesawing from side to side. “You don't understand what you're rejecting! It's not just a suit and a card; the potential of the hotel far exceeds anything you can imagine! You have the use of an infinite structure. Do you see? An infinite structure, one reflecting human desire—no boundaries, no limits. An unending supply of transient visitors, too. Ones that won't be missed. You can take whomever you wish into the inner hotel, take whatever pleasure you wish . . . and they're gone, lost, forever. Such fun times we've had down the more remote corridors, far beyond any hearing or caring from the limited, outer world.”

The rise of his rhetoric had lifted him out of his chair, and he leaned over the table, tongue working behind teeth, a trail of blood again trickling from his head wound. “It's no world at all, the outer world, not really, not like our world . . . But you know that already, don't you? You're already in the undergrowth of our world, and you can see the woods beckoning, sense the freedom there . . .”

Freedom, yes; I had sensed it, known that it was out there, this freedom that Hilbert offered. Not out there—
in
there, within the hotel, within my ringing head. And looking at Hilbert, into those red-edge, blade-shine eyes, I saw the meaning and the price of that freedom, what manner of liberation it truly was. Hilbert was quite unfettered. He was far beyond the restraints of sanity. Whatever his compact with the hotel, however he had chosen to enjoy it, it had driven him mad.

“How long have you been serving the hotel, Hilbert?” I asked, working in a note of pastoral concern.

“Yes!” Hilbert said. He appeared delighted at my query. “I knew you sensed it. I knew it. Precisely the question. How long? That is what we are offering, Mr. Double. Time. Life, life unlimited. Eternal life. Time in the inner hotel is not time spent. It is not deducted. No sickness, no growing old, no death! Don't you see, Mr. Double? There's the promise!”

I started to consider escape. Whatever hopes I had of reasoning with Hilbert had to be discarded. And I did not intend to find out what pleasures he sought and found in the chambers of the inner hotel, willingly or unwillingly. The only door I could see was on the far side of the room, behind Hilbert—I would have to pass him to reach it. Letting him rant on, I turned slowly to look over my shoulder, trying to make the act as subtle and relaxed as possible.

There wasn't a door or window behind me; but what there was gave me a jab of surprise. Heaped up against the rear wall of the room, as far as the ceiling, was a mighty landslip of clock radios. All were identical to the one in my room—possibly the original radio from my room was somewhere in this mass—but most were damaged, their screens smashed or their casings cracked. It was impossible to tell where the rear wall actually was, so deep and high was this pile, which trailed power cords like the exposed roots of a wind-felled tree. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of clock radios—the kind of thing you'd see at a factory liquidation or tumbling from a spilled shipping container on a dockside—all in this hotel basement. Maybe there was no rear wall, and the radios went on forever. I was ready to accept almost anything as fact.

“How about you give me some time to think about it?” I said.

“Why would you need more time to think?” Hilbert said. “The decision is, surely, already made. It's the offer of a lifetime, quite literally. Your life has led you here. You are prepared. If you do not want this, then there is nothing you do want. And if you seek nothingness rather than fulfillment, well, that can also be arranged.”

“Recently I've been considering making some changes in my life,” I said. “I think maybe you've come to me at the wrong time.”

“Nonsense. The advantages of what I am offering are plain. Immortality, liberty and luxury. An infinite world, at your disposal.”

“A finite world. Nothing but hotel. Hotel all the way down.”

The trail of blood from the gash on Hilbert's forehead had progressed down the side of his nose, a neat red pinstripe, and reached his hairless top lip. The tip of his tongue appeared, tasting it, as if he had only just noticed it. “You have the manner of a man about to make a fatal mistake.”

“You could let me leave now and I'll never return. Gladly. No one would ever hear about this, you have my word.”

“But I have a very simple way of making sure that no one ever hears about this. Why should I reject that option for the uncertainty of letting you go?”

We were clearly coming to the crux of the matter, the inescapable collision of our respective trajectories, and I had to be ready for action. Dee might not have killed Hilbert, but she had incapacitated him long enough to escape him, and that was all I needed. The chair I was sitting on was a plastic folding affair, not nearly as heavy as the ones in the Gallery Room, but it might serve. But my body was not at all ready. My legs felt like badly packed supermarket carrier bags. Nowhere in me lay the blueprints and resources for sudden, inspired violence of the kind that Dee had meted out. And more than anything, she had the element of surprise, and I did not.