The Way Inn (34 page)

“That's not good,” Dee said, real consternation appearing on her face. Glitching blocks of acid-colored digital stress spattered the screen of her tablet, the only possession she hadn't packed. “Not good, not good.”

“What do we do?” I was standing.

“We go. Right now.” And she was away, out of the door, grabbing her keycard from its slot as she went. It was, I saw, white. Awash with panic, saturated with it on a molecular level, I scrambled to pick up my own bag and was about to follow when I saw something jutting from the teetering room-service trays on the armchair, something I recognized: the wooden handle of a steak knife. I pulled it out from the pile, ignoring the trays as they slid to the floor in a cacophony of smashing plates and glasses. The knife was short, serrated and dirty, but it had a good, nasty point. I stuffed it into my jacket pocket and left the room.

A miracle. Dee was waiting for me in the corridor. A real miracle. She had waited. Never had she looked so beautiful to me. But her eyes, flashing with impatience, left mine and passed over my shoulder, and her expression twisted into one of terror.

I turned. Hilbert was stalking down the corridor toward us, taller than I remembered, elongated with fury. His suit flowed with black energy and the walls of the hotel caved out as he passed, as if straining to give him space. The lights stuttered and threw improbable shadows, catching angles that could not and should not be present.

All along the corridor, the abstract paintings boiled in their frames, spheres and arcs lashing across the canvases.

“Housekeeping!” Hilbert bellowed, feedback whine stripping the humanity from his consonants. He surged forward, a movement that was accompanied by an awful oceanic shifting in the ground beneath me, as if the distance between us had contracted. I had no time to consider evasion before he cannoned into me, head lowered, no finesse, a bull charge. My torso was replaced by a torso-shaped entity of pure pain and I registered being airborne. With a sickening, bitter breath the air was slammed from my body by the wall of the Way Inn and then the floor of the Way Inn.

Curled up, gasping, I found myself unable to move. My rib cage was a barrel of agony and I feared I had dislocated a shoulder. My legs were lost luggage, and something had fallen across them—one of the abstract paintings, knocked from the wall by my impact. As I tried to regain full use of them, Hilbert appeared above me, face a blur, not pausing before his attack.

I had a hold on the painting and, acting on instinct, was able to lift it to shield my throat from the elbow Hilbert had aimed at it. The painting's frame cracked apart, but Hilbert's strike was deflected onto the floor. Adrenalin fired through my body—still clutching the sides of the painting, I rolled over, onto Hilbert, the canvas covering his head and chest. He thrashed beneath this shroud and I saw sepia ovoids and curves creeping from the design onto my hands and toward my wrists. Letting go of the painting with a yelp of horror, I clumsily climbed to my feet and hunted in my pocket for the steak knife. Finding it, I knelt and stabbed through the painting into Hilbert, once, twice, three times. Blood leaped around the blows and Hilbert's legs convulsed like eels.

“Neil! NEIL!”

Dee, farther down the corridor, was urgently beckoning to me. “Come on! He won't stop! We have to go! Now!”

I sprinted toward her, striving to ignore the white-hot iron of pain that pushed into my side with each contact my feet made with the floor. My left hand was sticky with blood, fingers aching with cramp around the wooden handle of the knife. I remembered the sensation of driving the point into Hilbert—the split-second of resistance, then the fleshy give, the purr of the saw teeth against a torn edge. Seeing me stare dumbly at the reddened weapon, reading my thoughts, Dee said: “He'll be fine. You need to worry about us.” Resolution flashed in her eyes.

A clatter and a thud sounded behind me. Hilbert had cast off the ruined painting and had sprung upright like an insect. He glared at us, poised and ready for another charge. Glancing at Dee for a lead on what to do, I saw her engrossed in her tablet. Two paintings were aligned on the screen, edges matched—she flicked these apart and they separated to find places in a new sequence.

Dizziness overcame me—but this was not dizziness, it was the same seasick swell I had felt earlier during Hilbert's attack. And before my unbelieving eyes, the corridor between us and Hilbert lengthened. He went from ten meters away to a hundred in a giddy second before being folded behind a corner. Another wall somehow slid into the long passage that had grown beside us, turning it into a T-junction.

My throat was tight, almost too tight to speak, and the words came in a whisper. “You did that?”

“We can't count on it working again,” Dee said. “Let's go.”

Both lumbered with bags, we half-strode, half-ran through the hotel—fast walking broken by bursts of jogging, to which I would always have to call a halt, wheezing and clutching my side while spots jumped in my vision. I had broken a rib, I was sure, and while my shoulder was not dislocated, it hurt abominably.

Dee led the way, of course, and at first I was too pre-occupied with the tumbling afterimages of my struggle with Hilbert to pay much heed to where we might be going. But I became aware of variations in my surroundings, variations that were slight but deeply unnerving. Thus far, every part of Way Inn I had seen had followed a strictly orthogonal plan: the corridors were straight and intersected at right angles. In the locales we were now traversing, all these angles were somewhat
off
. We turned eighty- and hundred-degree corners and the corridors kinked and curved.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“The inner hotel,” Dee said. “Deep. I didn't change Hilbert's relative position, I changed ours, projecting us into the hotel. The deeper you get, the more the environment is susceptible to . . . manipulation.”

“How do we get out?”

“I don't know. Not the way we came, that's gone. And this”—she waved the tablet at me, its screen still jumbling and sorting paintings—“is barely helping. Hilbert was twisting things round as well as me. Local changes to the hotel fabric have far-reaching nonlocal effects, universal effects in fact: it's like a kaleidoscope, a small shift means the whole pattern changes. The first time I tried active spatial kinesis, I was lost for a week. A week of Pringles and five-pound jars of salted nuts.” She shook her head at the memory. “Like a savage.”

“Minibarbaric,” I said, and for the first time since I had met her, Dee laughed; she had chuckled at me, or smiled at a joke of mine or an instance of my stupidity, but this was an authentic laugh, head back, red hair blazing in the halogen spotlighting. There was no discernible natural light any more and curious shadows without origin made unsettling patterns on the walls.

We passed a light well, but it provided no illumination. The sky above it was the dull, angry, bronze dome that had sheltered the motel. We moved at tangents through angles acute and obtuse, past doors whose numbers were no longer sequential. I thought I detected an adverse camber in the floor, but I could never be certain of it.

“What happens if we are lost?” I said. “Can we get into these rooms?”

“Some, probably,” Dee said. We had stalled for some time at a junction, one corridor branching into two in a sharp
Y
. Dee had photographed all the nearby paintings and was engrossed in a calculation, muttering as she worked. This was a person unaccustomed to being in company. I wanted to talk to remind her of my presence, to break into her dialogue with herself. And I was concerned she was sticking to her own ascetic standards in assessing how far we could go, how fast, and for how long. Two days of continual exertion, only thinly separated by sleep, were taxing me heavily.

“It'll be night soon.”

“Not here.”

“We can't go on forever—where do we sleep?”

“We have to go on as long as we can,” Dee said, distracted by her tablet. “I don't know how much distance we've put between us and Hilbert, but it can't be enough, I'll tell you that.”

“I'd be reassured if I knew we could get into a room, find a bed, eat something . . .”

“Not now.”

“If we're going to be lost for more than a week . . .”

This broke her from her flashing screen, and she glared at me. “We will not be lost for a week,” she said, cheeks flushed. “I know more now, I can figure this out, if you could just
be quiet
for
one minute
.”

Don't question her abilities, I thought, that's a lesson learned. She returned to her work and I turned to the nearest door: a room door, like all the others, with the number 378. I took my keycard from my pocket and tried it in the lock.

The light turned green. When I pressed the handle, the metal moved smoothly against metal and the door opened.

“This one's open,” I said, pushing the door wider and peering in. In the gloom, there were two armchairs facing a coffee table, a bed and a flat-screen telly slab. “Hey, this room's bigger than mine.”

“What the hell are you doing?”

Dee was staring at me, aghast, holding her tablet so limply I feared she might drop it. A terrible quality in her voice flushed me with ice water.

“Do I have to take that fucking card away from you? You idiot. You fucking idiot.” Without waiting for a reply, she lunged toward me. I had already withdrawn the keycard from the lock and was seized by a superpowered instinct to protect it from her.

“No, it's mine!” I said in a squawk, stuffing the card back into my jacket pocket. Dee stopped, hands raised and eyes wide, visibly surprised by my reaction. It had come as a surprise to me as well.

“You have raised a big, black flag over our location,” she said. “Again. How many times is that? You want that damned piece of plastic, you keep it, Gollum. But you use it again in my presence and I swear I will snap it in half and insert it in you, broken edge first.”

“OK, OK, I'm sorry,” I said. The card radiated shame through me and I considered breaking it myself as a gesture of regret. But a tendril of desire uncurled from an unseen place within me and suffocated the idea. “How can Hilbert know where we are? Do you know where he is?”

“He's been doing this longer than I have,” Dee said. “Much longer. Decades longer. Maybe since the start. He has material advantages. And a natural affinity for the work.” A smile, the flash of a scalpel under the lights of the operating theater. “Like you.”

Winded, a knot of agony from neck to knees, I suddenly felt the heat of possible tears, not sadness or hurt but frustration, exhaustion—our acquaintance had become a recursive loop of distrust, with me continually returned to square one. “No affinity, not from me, not any more. I just want to go.”

“And yet you keep betraying our position,” Dee said. Maybe this had started as a casual barb from her, but she continued to think it over, testing it for plausibility. She stepped away from me. “You're not Hilbert, but maybe you're a drone, doing what the hotel wants without knowing it. All that time in the conference rooms . . .” Another step away.

What if she's right?

“I'm not, I'm not,” I said, fighting to master my inner doubt and panic. “I've made mistakes, that's all. I'm an idiot.”

“You had better be.”

“I promise, I am. Shouldn't we be on our way?”

Dee blinked a couple of times. “Yes. Yes. Now.” She glanced at the tablet then at the three nearest paintings in succession.

“Huh.”

It wasn't a sound that inspired confidence. “What?”

“Alteration,” she said. “I didn't notice anything, did you?”

I looked at the painting she was staring at, to the left of the door I had unwisely opened. And as I looked it moved. A flock of cocoa spots migrated and swelled, their edges meeting. Beneath, a caramel ocean rolled.

“Oh dear,” Dee said, and the quiet detachment in her voice disturbed me only the more.

A stiff breeze, scented with clean laundry and new carpets, struck through the door of the open room, produced by its aircon, which had activated with a bellow.

“I'm always the smartest person in the room and I'm always right,” Dee said. “And that always
really
sucks.”

In the darkness of room 378, every angle glowed. Wherever a wall met the floor, the ceiling or another wall, there appeared a needle-thin ultraviolet seam. The shape of the room stood out like a blueprint. Along these lines, the room split apart, walls sliding against walls, furniture slipping from view, the whole space stretching away, growing from a room to a gallery to a night-filled fathomless tunnel. The wall before me folded back like cardboard, the door in it slamming shut, revealing a corridor that receded to a point, a point that bored to the center of the mind, a singularity through which sanity drained until it dropped below a horizon.

“Oh dear,” Dee said. “Oh dear God.”

Hilbert was in the corridor. From nowhere, he had slipped himself into the emerging space. The very matter around us screamed under the outrages being perpetrated against it. He smoothed the aurora incandescence from his pinstripe lapels. The lines, the angles, in his suit and in the walls: he had come together out of the hotel itself.

“First order, explicit, nontrivial spatial kinesis,” he said, walking toward us quite unhurriedly. “Do you know how that impacts on me, on Way Inn? Pronounced meta-structural curvature. Laminar flux. Random decoupling. Perception Dopplering. I wouldn't be surprised if every single guest has a nightmare tonight. And as for me”—he looked down at his shirt, which was sodden red—“executive stress takes its toll. You know how weak flesh can be.”

He raised his hands—black lightning arced between his limbs and the walls, UV luminescence pulsing in the white of the pinstripes and in the muted hotel colors. An architectural spasm raced toward us, striking me as a physical force and knocking me down. A deep groan, part sound and part tremor, followed the pulse through the building.