The Way Inn (35 page)

“What do executives do,” Hilbert shrieked, “but execute?”

And from nowhere he was on me, a weight holding me down—but it was not him, it was Dee, who had also been thrown to the floor and who had now rolled over to straddle me. Another attack? I had led Hilbert to her too many times, and she had decided to take me out of the picture?

“Hold on,” she said. “I'm going to try something.”

I would have held on if I had been given the time. Instead I had the immediate sensation of being in a plummeting lift. My innards made a bid for flight. In front of me, a wall and its painting rose from the floor, blocking Hilbert's path.

The lurch ceased. Dee stood and spun on the spot, a pirouette of joy. “Wow, wow! It worked! Vertical laminar decoupling!”

Still a little queasy, I sat up. The new path Hilbert had forced through the hotel had gone; so had one of the branches of the Y-junction we were contemplating. This was a plain stretch of corridor.

With a youthful skip, Dee checked the nearest door number. “Two-seven-eight,
two
-seven-eight. We're on Two. Fantastic. Fantastic.”

“Wait,” I said, climbing unsteadily to my feet. “We're on Two? We went through the floor?”

“No, the floor came too,” Dee said. “This whole corridor did. Hilbert had created a cross route and I, uh, uncreated it. I uncrossed it, separating it into two corridors and moving one down. Laminar flux, he said, levels moving independently—gave me the idea. Should confuse the hell out of him.”

Another shudder passed through the hotel, accompanied by a deep groan.

“Trouble?” I said. As I stood, I feared my balance might have been impaired by the punishment I had taken—either that or the floor had developed a distinct slope.

“Not Hilbert trouble,” Dee said. “Maybe other trouble. He was right, we can't make these big, sudden changes to the hotel with impunity. But what I'm doing is nothing compared to his slashing and burning—I've never seen him like this, so angry, so reckless.”

“What if he pursues us out of the hotel?”

“Won't happen. He won't leave the hotel. He's become dependent on it, I think. It's keeping him going.”

“Hell of a bargain,” I said. “You get to live for ever. But you have to spend eternity in a chain hotel on a motorway.”

Dee smiled. “Not so keen now, are you?”

“No.”

“Do you know why I'm still helping you?”

I shook my head.

“You've made Hilbert angry,” she said. “Really angry. And that makes you OK as far as I'm concerned.” She woke her tablet from power save and stabbed the screen a couple of times. “Come on. We've won some time, but not much.”

Wearily, I grabbed the straps of my shoulder bag. It was heavy, much heavier than it needed to be. Maybe I could lighten it, dump some clothes, dump everything but the essentials.

I knelt and unzipped the bag. Red like innards. Thin crimson plastic crinkled.

When I had gone back to room 219 after Hilbert interrogated me, my bag had been waiting on the bed. The wardrobe had been empty. There had been no sign of the pinstripe suit—my pinstripe suit.

“Dee,” I said. “Hilbert's ability to do what he does. His material advantage. Does that come from his suit?”

“Yes, I think it might, at least part of it,” she said. “The suit might be pseudofabric, hotel-stuff. Why?”

I pulled the Way Inn dry-cleaning bag from my luggage and held it up for her to see. “I have a suit just like it. Can we use that?”

Eyes wide, Dee looked from the suit to me and back. “That's idiotic. Totally insane. Dangerous.” She broke into a blazing paradox of a grin, equal parts devilry and innocent delight. “I love it.”

As I changed into the clean pinstripe and shirt, Dee wrapped my bloodstained, torn leisure clothes in the discarded dry-cleaning plastic. They could be left here, lightening my bag. She emptied my pockets, handling the black keycard with suspicion. Once I was done dressing, I did a model's turn for Dee, stripes flickering like road markings under a speeding car.

“How do I look?”

“Like a nightmare I've been having recently,” Dee said.

“How does this work, anyway? This spatial kinesis.”

“Your brain tries to knit what it perceives into a seamless continuum, which we call reality. Little tricks like saccadic masking, where it shuts off visual processing when we move our eye, so we don't see motion blur. In Way Inn's representation of reality, the seams are a bit more visible, and more tractable. So . . .” She faltered, lost, hunting for the words. “So you . . . just . . . feel for them. Like finding the end of the sticky tape, but in your perception of where you are in space. I'm sorry I can't explain it better.”

“You learned it,” I said. “Can't you teach me?”

“It took me weeks—months—of contemplation and meditation before I had any inkling of control. That's on top of years of study of topography and topology at doctoral level, and a gift for pattern recognition. It's instinct as much as anything—overcoming millions of years of expectations about how your environs behave.”

“So what good will I be able to do?”

Dee shrugged. “You might be able to stir up some chaos, some fog of war to give us cover. At the very least, you've saved yourself some time. You're now dressed for your funeral.”

“Thanks,” I said. “That's really comforting.”

“I'm not your mum. Let's get going.”

We carried on, working to no plan, letting the inner hotel unfold and reveal itself, both hoping that an exit would appear before Hilbert did. Our progress was slowed by the pronounced but unpredictable slant that had developed in the floor. Never was there any visible sign that the corridor might be listing, but at times we felt ourselves strongly tilted to one side, and at others as if we were climbing or descending an incline. No words passed between us about the phenomenon, but I knew Dee was experiencing it as well as me from the caution that appeared in her steps. Combined with the irregular, and increasingly troubling, acute and obtuse angles that had crept into the hotel layout, I had the impression of a structure buckling under stress—or of one steadily deforming under its own mass as we approached its core. If there was a core. Or had I already seen the center of the labyrinth, at the motel?

All the while, I felt the heavy wool of the suit across my shoulders. And I asked myself if I could detect any force or capability flowing from it to me, any new potency. But tiredness and soreness were the only answers.

“I don't feel any different,” I said to Dee after hours of silence. “No special power, nothing.”

“Maybe that's for the best,” Dee said. “It does corrupt.”

An added layer of discomfort prickled between me and the fabric. “Do you think that's what happened to Hilbert? The suit? It corrupted him?”

“No. I think Hilbert forgot where he ended and the hotel began,” Dee said. “It didn't happen overnight. He's way over the edge now. He lasted a long time, longer than all the others, but no one can hold out for ever.”

“Is he the last?”

“Possibly. I don't know. The last of the first generation, maybe. The ones who went upriver, got religion, got infected with
purpose
. The evangelists. It'll be functionaries now, technocrats; not ideologues, not prophets gibbering in the desert. The new generation will know there doesn't have to be a purpose—there is no need for meaning, no need for belief, all that Way Inn wants is growth; growth for its own sake.”

Her voice had risen to a pitch that was either passion or despair. It was unexpected.

“You've never met any of this new generation?” I said.

“I thought I had,” Dee said, looking me up and down. “But I might have been wrong about him.”

“Were you meant to be one of them? The new generation?”

“Maybe. Yes. I was a poor prospect, though. I find patterns. Meaning, possibly. The hotel is subject to mathematical harmony, like the structures of leaves and seashells. There's a kind of beauty there, even in all this”—she held out her arms and raised her head, encompassing the whole of the hotel corridor around her—“banality. Possibly because of it. Way Inn took an architecture we were already distilling down to its essentials and made it pure; cultureless, placeless, global. In that, it showed us a truth about ourselves. The other chains have copied it and it in turn has learned from them. And beyond its inner threshold it takes this form, this bloodless architectural Esperanto, and makes an infinite cathedral from it. It's beautiful, for sure. You could almost call it God.”

“You could indeed.”

The voice arose from the matter around us, the substance of the walls and the windows, the air itself. Particles of fiber and motes of dust rose in concert from the carpet, the lights failed and stuttered back to life, switching agitatedly between full shine and power-saving mode. The aircon wailed.

Hilbert rounded a corner that had not been there moments previously. Seeing me and the suit I wore, he shook his head and frowned. “Oh, my boy . . . Such a disappointment. You, however”—his attention snapped to Dee, and he raised an accusing finger at her—“you were trouble from the start. I said as much, whatever your freak abilities. But the hotel, you know. It's so very accommodating.”

This time, I didn't need a cue from Dee—I was the first to run, seeing the expression on her face, the smirk at Hilbert's words, as I spun to flee. Or at least I tried to run, but each pace was slower and tougher than the last. The subtle slope in the floor was steepening under me, a flat dash steadily becoming an exercise in mountaineering, pitching me back toward danger.

To my rear, Dee and Hilbert continued to face off, Dee retreating step by step up the growing incline, not followed by her opponent.

“Why not call it God, why not?” Hilbert said. Around him, walls distended and carpets crackled. “These are godless times. A little faith might be just the tonic.”

All the paintings in the corridor were hanging at a forty-five-degree angle, toward Hilbert. I abandoned hope of climbing away and instead began to fear slipping back down. Dee, with her trainers, was doing only slightly better.

“Have you spoken to the hotel lately, Hilbert?” This, I was bemused to realize, came from my own mouth, shouted over the din of tortured metal and glass and frantic ultrahigh frequencies. “I have. It helped me. Why would it help me evade you? Maybe you're out of favor with your god.”

Hilbert diverted his glare to me. Something far from human animated his gaze, an inner furnace stoked too far. “False! False! My insight is unique!”

Dee was putting precious inches between her and the maniac. I had to keep talking, to keep him trained on me. “We mortals are nothing but rats in its walls—do you think it's truly concerned with a falling-out among rats?”

“You might be mortal,” Hilbert said. “Indeed, I'm about to make a very thorough demonstration of your mortality. But I am at one with forever. I am elect, preserved for special purpose.”

With a loud crack, two sections of drywall between Dee and Hilbert split apart and black electricity dripped from the fissure. In the distance, behind Hilbert, the corridor bored down into a maelstrom of darkness. Hilbert, I saw, was still able to stand upright, feet flat on the carpet, unaffected by the sinking of the floor.

“You're hurting your god, Hilbert!” Dee shouted. “Don't you see? You want us so much you're tearing your precious hotel apart!”

“We all have to make sacrifices. Management is about tough decisions.”

Sacrifice—the steak knife. But it had been in the pocket of my other jacket, and must have been left behind when I dumped it. A painting tumbled past us, into the abyss. My shoes lost their purchase against the pile of the carpet and I started to scrabble, feet and hands. Raw fear, an animal terror of being cornered, clamped down on my thoughts: get out, get out get out getoutgetoutgetout
getout
.

A multiplied metallic click. Every light on every lock turned green; every door in the corridor fell open, into its room. I launched myself to one side to find a secure perch on the nearest door frame. Inside the room, furniture slid and piled up in the gloom.

Dee followed my lead and jumped for the nearest door. She and Hilbert stared at me.

“Was that you?” Dee said.

Yes, I thought, yes I think it was me, but before I could say anything, Hilbert cut in. “It doesn't change anything. Nothing at all. You get a few extra seconds. Pathetic.” But the raving certainty of his previous taunts was diminished.

Paintings were falling down the near-vertical shaft of the corridor like hail. Hilbert was forced to flail his arms to bat the plummeting art away from him; then he missed, and a painting caught him squarely on the temple with a spinning corner, not far from the wound Dee had opened. He staggered backward and downward. And with this distraction, the corridor righted itself a little.

There was no end to the downpour of paintings, which also fell as splintered sections of frame and bolts of canvas, the product of collisions farther up. Farther up where? How long was this corridor, how many paintings could there be? Each was a suggestive streak of spheres and radii in a mounting racket of crashing and grinding. Hilbert was occupied full-time in deflecting the paintings as they reached him, and appeared so enraged by the bombardment that getting out of its way never occurred to him. His gaze burned like the motorway's double yellow lines, reflecting an exploding fuel tank, but it was no longer directed at us.

The bedroom I was using as an aerie was chaos. A fallen bedside table had smashed the flat-screen TV. An armchair was on its side under the overturned bed. That was what I needed: the armchair. Standing on what had been one of the walls, I worked to free the chair from the heap of furniture and then dragged it to the door. Hilbert was continuing his furious battle with the plunging paintings.