1408/2

I’ve done this job for a long time and I’ve had some tremendously odd guests, including one guy who wheeled a taxidermized dog into the reception area and kept telling it to “sit” and “behave”. In fact, I have a long, long list of truly strange people who’ve visited my hotel and it’s a great way to make small-talk at a party because we all love a good story about creeps and weirdos. When I speak to other people in the hospitality industry there’ll always be a swapping of stories… but in some ways it’s never quite right. Recently I had one guy from a few towns over say,

“I have two main concerns with each new guest: what mess will they leave? And will they try and attack me?”

And I laughed, because it’s true. But it’s not the whole truth, at least not for me. Because my main concern isn’t someone leaving behind smelly sheets. It’s that sometimes, around once or twice a year, at least one of our guests will never actually check out.

They just vanish.

It’s gotten so bad now that every day I sit and wait, watching whoever comes down the stairs hoping that everyone due to check out, actually checks out. It’s not that it happens often, just that when it does happen we know there’s going to be a tough few days ahead of us. It’s the clean up, you see. First time it happened I wondered if maybe there was maybe a pervert convention around the area or something. I know that there are some people out there who get off on knowing others are cleaning up their mess. But it’s not like that. I mean it’d be one thing if we were going in there and finding crunchy towels and a DIY Pollock in the shower… but it’s not. It’s worse.

We had one yesterday. It came time for 12 o’clock and like normal about half a dozen or so of our latest guests came down ready to check out. Like always, except one guy didn’t. I had to pull up his file just to remember his name and the receptionist gave me a half-decent description. I got the lift to the 14th floor with a dry mouth and nervous stomach, hoping to God that he’d just overslept, but when it came to knock on his door there was no response.

Sure enough, the room was empty and in a terrible state. I stepped over the ripped up carpet, ducked below the torn out ceiling-fan, and tried not to wretch at the smell and the revolting mess in the corner. The bed had been flipped and turned into some kind of children’s fort, except the bedroll within was soaked in blood, and every mirror in the room had been smashed. When I walked up to the patio door (he’d sprung for a room with a view) I noticed bloody streaks by the handle, and a few torn fingernails on the floor.

I hate it when it happens. I hate it not just because it takes weeks to repair the damage, and not just because some guy skips out on the bill, and not even because I have to call the cops who never seem to take me seriously… I hate it because of the tally. Almost everyone does the tally: sometimes it’s scratched on the floor with a loose screw, sometimes it’s written in blood or other stuff, or scrawled over whatever paper they brought with them. But it’s always there, dozens and dozens of tallies stacked up in counts of five. Sometimes it’ll be as few as twenty, sometimes as much as 800.

I’m still not sure what it is they’re counting.

One time I found a photo. I didn’t show it to anyone because, well, it made no sense and I didn’t want to freak anyone out. This guy, a photographer, had booked a room after we hosted a wedding here. He took the pictures then stayed and had a few drinks and spent the night in room 704. I remember he gave out a polaroid camera to some kids and let them run around the reception taking photos of everyone. He told me he was going to put them all in a book and send it out to the couple and I thought it was a pretty cute idea.

Except he never left in the morning, and sure enough the room he stayed in was torn to pieces, and all the cameras he’d taken were smashed to bits on the ground. The tally—this time scratched into the bathroom tiles—went up to 73 and there was a whole bunch of polaroids burnt to a crisp close by. One, however, had survived, slipped into a crack in the window, and it showed the wedding photographer. His face was close to the camera and all blurry, and his eyes were glassy and bloodshot, with tears streaming down his cheeks. Somehow, he’d grown a beard. There was a look on his face that just… he was thin, super thin and, I don’t know, he just looked insane or maybe terrified. He looked like a meth-addict, his eyes fixed on something behind the camera.

Things like that can make me question my sanity. That photographer had torn the soles of his shoes free and tried chewing on them and the guy from yesterday had jugs filled with his own fermenting urine. One woman, years ago, had even grown cress in the toilet cistern. I had to tell people that she’d brought it with her. It helps that we have so many weirdos because if any of the younger staff ask or hear any rumours, I just shrug and blame it on the crazies. But I’ll admit that me and some of the older staff know better than that.

That’s why only a few of us handle the clean-up. It’s not right to send a young person to clean it all. When you find diaries filled with these notes about how they’d fended “it” off and how “it” wasn’t going to win… When you read the desperation in their notes and the messages they leave to loved ones, or find their excrement filled with the chewed up remnants of their pillow-stuffing, or the make-shift weapons made out of smashed up furniture… It stays with you and over time it starts to mess with you.

I spent years hoping it was all an elaborate prank. It was the way they all describe being trapped in their room and the sun never rising…I just know that can’t be possible.

It just can’t.

But I don’t know what to think. I mean, could that guy have climbed out the window and shimmied down six stories of gutter piping? Sure, someone out there could be capable of doing that. But I doubt he did. And it’s not uncommon for me to find signs of suicide. I’m talking blood-soaked baths and gory razor blades nearby, vomit filled with dozens of half-digested pills, even bloody and frayed nooses that hanging off have-torn out light fixtures. How does any of that make sense? How does anyone lose that much blood and not leave a body?

I live here in my own room and sometimes I wonder if the guys’ll come in and find nothing but a tally to mark my disappearance. It terrifies me. The things I’ve been seeing in the mirror lately when I wake up make me consider therapy. Sometimes it looks like there’s a hand pressed up against the glass, other times it looks all dark and I just catch glimpses of faces in the void, screaming and crying and all gaunt with hunger. Other times it’s like I’m looking down on the sickly green waters of some lake and just beneath the surface I can glimpse shifting shadows.

And every now and again there’s a hand, often pressed up against the glass, sometimes looking like it’s gripping the very frame of the mirror. It’s not a human hand… just these long black fingers that in the darkness I can barely resolve with my groggy sleep-deprived dyes.

Every night there’s something new and it never makes any sense. Once I woke up and I swear I watched a small ball come rolling right out of the mirror and onto my floor. I fell back asleep straight away but sure enough, come morning there it was on the floor. It reminded me of the kind of thing you’d find in a child’s ball-pit.

But the worst has to be the tallies that I occasionally wake up to, drawn on the mirror, sometimes in soot, sometimes in lipstick, sometimes in the rusty brown of dried blood. Every time I leave the room and come back they’re always gone. Something I’m secretly glad of, if I’m honest, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to wipe them away.

You see, they’re drawn on the other side of the glass.

I’ve taken down a lot of mirrors in this place and I’m not sure that, if anyone were to ask, I’d have a concrete reason why. It’s just they’re always smashed to pieces whenever someone disappears and sometimes people make weird complaints. One girl came storming down the stairs screaming about us all being perverts. She made a huge deal about the creep and the one-way mirror and the breathing she heard, but even when I pointed out that her mirror was on a wall that faced a seven-story drop, she still wouldn’t believe that it was just a mirror. She was convinced someone was on the other side.

“You’re sick,” she told me. “The whole fucked up game you’re playing with me is sick.” And with that she left. Sometimes I think she had the right idea.

Another time a guy came down screaming about the woman in the parking lot. He grabbed me and told me that she was out there, wandering down by the cars with blood dripping down her chest and an arm missing. He was so convincing I ran out there with him, thinking that maybe I’d be faced with the scene of a grisly car-crash. But there was no one there. The guy was shocked and confused, even a little embarrassed. He was so insistent about what he’d seen he took me up to his room to show me the window, except it wasn’t a window at all. It was a mirror.

I told him he was just sleep deprived, and he agreed, but left regardless, both of us disturbed in some wordless way.

You can’t take all the mirrors down though. People complain, and that’s fair enough. It’s not like I even have a good reason, sane or otherwise. There’s just a feeling of general unease I try to avoid by taking down any of the big ones. You know, the funny thing is it didn’t even dawn on me to take my own mirror down until recently. In my head this was something that only affected guests but, like I said, lately I’ve been seeing things in there. So I went to, I went to pull it down but… and I know this sounds stupid…

It terrified me. The thought of touching it made my skin crawl and my stomach turned to lead and I just… I couldn’t. I mean I physically couldn’t. I keep telling myself it was just fear but it felt worse somehow. It felt like I was looking into someone’s eyes that weren’t my own. All I wanted to do was to turn away and ignore it so in the end that’s what I did. It was better than the alternative, better than quitting and leaving someone else to deal with it. Every time I go to leave that’s what holds me back.

The next guy below me, he’s a good man but he isn’t up to it. He has kids. I mean, how would he have coped with what happened a few years back? Although I guess an equally good question is how have I coped? Because it was after that one disappearance that I started seeing things in the mirrors.

They were a nice couple, sure enough. It happens to couples sometimes, rarely but it can happen. As soon as they didn’t check out my heart sank and I made the long walk up to their room. Of all the things that I expected, the drawings weren’t it. You see, all over the walls were these kid’s doodles. I’ve never seen a room like that. It was different, somehow. All around the mirror they’d set up a barricade, complete with spikes made from bed posts, and a broken down rifle with the barrel bent ninety degrees. Shell casings littered the floor, and a hunting knife buried in the floor. I later found a load of survivalist equipment, complete with leaflets for a nearby shooting range. I never did find a diary or journal to get a sense of what happened to them, but the tally they had took up a whole wall. That was the longest one I’d ever seen.

811. There were so many of them that the first few had started to fade. I still don’t know how any of it had happened. But I know the woman who went in… she was pregnant. No, I couldn't let anyone else see the things I have. Finding what I found in that bath tub has left me in ruins, and I couldn't leave anyone else to do the same. I see that little girl in my dreams every night, lying in that tub, cold to the touch.

It took me weeks to scrub every mention of the word “Mommy” off the wall.