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Lobby Boy
The lobby is quiet, tonight… I can tell even before I leave my closet. There’s a soft electrical hum, and a distant dripping of water, but I can’t hear anything else… I know she’s out there, though. My Manager. I can feel her close. She’s… waiting… For the guests.
They haven’t arrived yet. I would know if they had. S-so when I hear the sound of the front desk bell ringing softly, I’m not completely ready to come out. I have to shove my hat down over my hair quickly, smoothing down my shirt with my hands. I’m dressed in a blue polo shirt tonight and tan slacks, and white sneakers. There’s something embroidered on the shirt… It’s some kind of sea animal, maybe a… Shark…
I put sharks in… In the room, tonight. They will… The guests… T-the room, I built it so it’s going to slowly fill up. With water. At first they might worry about d-drowning, but once it’s halfway full, once they have to tread water, it’ll stop filling up. Maybe they might feel hope? Relief? It won’t last long, though. Not when they see the sharp triangular fins slicing through the surface of the water. Not when they look down and see glistening teeth and empty dark eyes gazing up at them…
The first guest’s death will be p-painful, but quick. It’ll be slower for the others, though, because they’ll probably try to escape. The blood from the… From the first one will start a feeding frenzy. I think, maybe, they might try and swim for the walls, the door… But by that point they won’t be able to see the walls, won’t be able to even tell that they’re in a room… Just a flat ocean, and… And triangle fins. Then the sharks, they’ll… The s-sharks will…
The shark on my shirt isn’t like the sharks I put in the room. It’s round, and fat, and looks up at me with a grin. As I walk across my lobby, I try to smile back. I’ve been practising my smile. It isn’t perfect, but it doesn’t make the guests look at me funny like it used to.
My smile drops when I get to the desk and realise my Manager isn’t there. I try to look around, but I can’t see her. The lobby is dark, lit only by round blue lights studded into the wall, like portholes. The walls themselves are blue, too, with elaborate gold trimming around the edges that shines in the dim light… I can see the door to the private office, oval-shaped and made of metal with a big round handle in the middle. T-there’s no sign of The Owner… Maybe he won’t come out tonight… The elevator and the closet are more f-familiar… Just metallic golden doors in a rectangular frame. There are paintings all over the walls, glittering fish with long flowing fins that seem to wave lazily in the darkness… I can’t see my Manager a-anywhere... I want to call out for her, I want to know that she’s there, that she’s not… Gone, that that… Man isn’t here again. The darkness is pushing in on me, and I open my mouth, but then I see her.
On the opposite wall from my supply closet, there’s a huge… Fish tank. It almost makes up the entire wall. It’s dark inside, and more pale blue lights illuminate the water below. I can see my Manager standing in front of it. She’s dressed in black tonight, a black suit with a little shimmer of blue, so she almost disappears into the darkness, into the water, b-but she’s there. I can see her. I shuffle across the lobby, making sure to stand where her good eye is, so she can see me.
She isn’t looking at me, though. Her hands are clasped behind her back, and she’s watching the aquarium… She looks… Calm. Focused, and relaxed. I don’t… I don’t think I’ve seen her face look like that before… She almost seems… Peaceful…?
The Manager
My Lobby Boy comes to stand beside me, quiet as a mouse. I know he doesn't want to disturb me, but after a few moments he gets nervous, shifting from foot to foot. He’s uncomfortable with my lack of acknowledgement.
I ignore him.
Somewhere close by, water drips steadily. The dripping and the darkness reminds me of a cave. My Lobby Boy's breathing is the only other sound, and soon that will be silent, too… I wonder if we stood here for long enough, if stalagmites would rise from the floor, built up by years of dripping water. I wonder if we could stand here for long enough that we wouldn't even be in the Hotel anymore. If enough time could turn even her into just an ordinary cave. If the bones of my Lobby Boy and I would ever be found… If whoever found them would wonder about who we used to be.
It's a silly thought, of course. The Hotel is not bound by time, not as we are, not as the… Guests are.
The guests… My hand in my pocket, I rub the reservation card between my fingers. As always, the paper is thick and crisp, smooth to look at and yet bumpy when touched. Golden twinkling ink on it simply reads “The Greenlakes”. A family. They haven’t arrived yet. I would know if they had. Families are loud, and right now the lobby is quiet. Serene.
Except for the incessant breathing and nervous shuffling of my Lobby Boy.
"M-Manager?" He breaks the silence. His voice trembles. "Do you want me t-"
"Look at the fish with me." That's all I can think of to say.
"T-the fish?"
"The fish. You need to stand here for a while, and let your eyes adjust."
He nods, and stares into the water with me.
The Hotel is beautiful tonight. Dark, so it doesn't hurt my eye, with lights glowing like bioluminescent fungi dotted along the walls. But the aquarium is... It’s… Beautiful.
It hums. Maybe it's the lights, or maybe the living things in the water... I've never seen things like this before. I don't know if they make sounds. The soft buzzing hum could be their way of communicating with each other. They might even be trying to communicate with… Me. More probably, it's not them making the sound at all, and just the Hotel's electricity flowing to the little blue lights. I wouldn't know. This is beyond the knowledge she has given me.
The tank was the first thing I noticed when I appeared in the lobby tonight. Usually I would explore, locate the supply closet, get my bearings, but… This time I just came straight here. I was… Am… Drawn to it.
After letting myself grow accustomed to the darkness, I saw the… Things. There are lots of things in this aquarium, in more varied shapes and sizes than any guests or monsters I've ever seen. There are grey-shelled things with many legs, not unlike some of The Vermin, but twenty times larger, crouched on the sand at the bottom of the aquarium. Their antennae waft lazily in the current. At the top of the aquarium, fish dart in and out of the dark light, fins flashing silver for the briefest of moments. Below them, a huge eel hangs suspended in the water column. I have to squint to see it. Occasionally I can just barely see its beady eyes, full of malicious intent. Evidently, the silver fish have their reasons for being so fast and cautious.
Smaller things flash and sparkle in the water, but before I can even properly look at them, they're gone. Initially I couldn't make out a pattern, but the more I looked, the more I realised that one of them is… Different. It's attached to something. It's a lure, I think. Dangling and shimmering tantalisingly in front of rows upon rows of impossibly long sharp teeth, and blank dark eyes like gaping holes.
I feel an affinity with this half-hidden dark thing and its glimmering lure. My role at the Hotel is not so different. Something familiar, perhaps even alluring, to lull the guests into a false sense of security… Something to pull them in deeper for her. A pretty shiny lure belonging to something huge and terrible. With no autonomy of its own…
… Red tube worms slowly fan out of their strange white casings, gills fluttering in the current. Beside me, my Lobby Boy shifts slightly. I glance at him. His eyes are fixed straight ahead, but he isn't really looking. Not like me.
I feel a pang of anger and disappointment. I wish he could see it properly. See it how I see it. I wish I could make him part of it, make myself part of it, rather than an observer on the other side of the glass.
I look away from him again. From here, the aquarium seems to stretch away forever into the darkness. Endlessly. Perhaps it does. The Hotel herself is endless, after all.
What would it be like, to be a creature in a real ocean? To not be a Manager, or a Lobby Boy, but to just be… Something. Something dark and writhing, without a pretty lure or shiny scales, something silent and strong and barely visible. Something like myself, and yet not myself. Something that belongs in the cold black water.
I close my eyes. I listen to the hum, and the dripping water, and my Lobby Boy's breathing, and I try to imagine it. I try to imagine myself as something else.
In my mind, the sounds fade away, and I am no longer here. I am no longer at the Hotel. The ocean is almost as infinite as her, and far deadlier, but it lacks malice. It does not watch, it does not interfere. Here, I am free.
In my mind, there is bone white abyssal sand below me, blue darkness above.
I imagine myself as that silent, slippery, dark creature. I flex my fins and twirl effortlessly, stirring the flakes of marine snow hanging in the water column into whirlwinds around me.
I imagine my Lobby Boy is there with me, too. Not in the form he takes now, but as another writhing dark thing.
In the ocean in my mind, we glide above the abyssal plain together. Copepods flash in the darkness. Although our eyes are huge, I can't find him by sight. Vision can't be relied on in this lack of sunlight. I find him by the electricity of his body. The firing of his nerves sends signals into the water that make my own nerves tingle in response. We can't speak, but we know one another, and we know each other's intentions.
We are both searching for something, the same thing, but I don't know what it is. It pulls us through the water. Despite being separate, we move as one. Seeking something unknown. Something tickling our nervous systems enticingly, tugging us toward it.
It doesn't take us long to find what we’re looking for.
It's a whale. A dead one. Its carcass is immense. It would’ve lived a long life, ate thousands of tons of krill, perhaps sired or birthed many of its own calves.
In its death it gave birth to a new ecosystem. Red crabs scuttle across its sickly white skin, digging their claws in to make millions of tiny lesions. Isopods rasp the flesh from its bones with their mandibles. Schools of eel-like fish salvage what they can from the body, occasionally fearfully darting beneath a large white coral growing nearby. A shark is shaking the flesh at the whale's belly violently, tearing pieces of it away with sheer force. It’s making the smaller fish nervous, but there’s little need for them to be. There is plenty of flesh left on the whale, and soon the shark will be full of blubber and satisfied.
We seem to be the first of our kind to arrive here, but I know we won't be the last. Together we glide down to the colossal corpse, and begin to feed. We don't have jaws, so we have to work away with our teeth in horizontal movements until the flesh comes free. Our taste receptors spark with pleasure, signalling our brains to take more, and more, and more.
Soon others arrive, attracted by the same force that brought us here. We squirm and bite in competition for access to the soft rotten meat. Thick slime sloughs off our skin, and we tie ourselves in knots around each other's spineless bodies, desperately fighting to reach sustenance. And yet more of us come, and more.
It takes a startlingly short amount of time for the final scrap of flesh to be rasped away from the whale. Soon it will be buried under layers of silt and sand, but for now its skeleton protrudes from the ocean floor, white and curved like a strange mycelium. A few small creatures still scrape at the bones. The larger animals take their leave, one by one, until it is just him and I.
He is curled up in the whale's eye socket. White bone cradles him like a nest as he rests on the black sand. I go to meet him, and he watches me with milky white eyes. The tendrils next to his mouth twitch nervously.
He doesn't need to be nervous. I won't hurt him. I wriggle into the eye socket as well. The whale's skull is like a strange cave of bone. Not too long ago, its brain was here. It used to think from here, dream from here. Now it is gone. As all things eventually are gone. And, for now, we are here instead.
I settle on the seafloor and once his nerves have settled, he comes to greet me. We intertwine, but not frantically and competitively like we did when the whale still had flesh. This is… Different. We aren't hungry anymore. There are no other fish nearby. Nothing watching us. We are completely alone, together.
There are no guests here. No tasks to do, no check-ins to complete, no floors to mop, no rooms to build, no cramped conversations preceding inevitable death.
Here, we will die when we need to, months or even years from now. Our deaths will not be punishments, and the ocean will derive no pleasure or grief from them. We will die as all things do, when we’re ready.
For now, we are alive. We leisurely spin around each other inside the clean white bones of the whale. I catch glimpses of him, his pale eyes, his wrinkled belly, the tendrils around his mouth, but even when I'm not looking I can feel him there. That… Pleases me. I like knowing that he is there, that I am there with him. I prefer it when we are together than when we are not. We are surrounded by death and cold dark waters, but in this moment we are warm, and alive, and free.
Lobby Boy
She is quiet and still. I want to watch the fish, like she told me to, b-but my eyes keep on drifting back to her. Sometimes, when the blue light flickers on her face… I think it's my imagination, but I can almost see her smile. A real smile. Not that forced toothy grin she makes for the guests. Just a twitch on her lips. It's always gone by the time I try to see it more clearly, a-and I don’t know for sure if it was even there at all, or if I was just… Seeing something I want to see.
W-we’ve been standing here for a long time. At first our breath was fogging up the glass, and I could see her chest rising and falling. Then her breathing slowed. Mine did too. I watched her until it stopped. I watched her die.
Now she’s stiff, a-and pale, her skin pulled tight over the rotting muscle and fat under it. Her silver eyes look huge in their sockets. She’s still looking at the aquarium, though. My Manager usually hates wasting time, but this is different, I think. For her, I don’t think she feels like she’s wasting time at all. It's like she's looking at something far away… Something I can't see. In the aquarium, things twinkle in the darkness like stars. Like starlight. My Manager’s eye reflects the light back, sparkling. I wonder what she sees…
The Manager
There is a click, and suddenly the lobby is full of harsh cold light and sound. The ocean in my mind disappears along with the darkness.
The guests are here. The… Greenlakes. A family, of course. Already the children are clamouring and screeching. Their voices echo painfully off the walls.
When I turn back to the aquarium, now lit up by artificial light, it’s… Different. All it contains now are a few sickly looking tropical fish, tacky pirate-ship themed decorations, and rainbow coloured pebbles. It’s like all of the strange creatures were never there at all.
I step away, my stiff joints and brittle bones cracking and grinding in complaint with the sudden movement. I am not alive anymore. I must have rotted while I stood there and watched.
The family doesn't notice my drawn face or my bruised, peeling skin. The guests never notice unless the Hotel wants them to. I give them a smile that tears at the skin on my cheeks. While the children watch the sad little fish drift around listlessly, their parents sign the guest book, making pointless small talk with me. I respond welcomingly and politely, but part of me still feels adrift, somewhere far away. Some part of me is still in the cold dark water.
My Lobby Boy is crouched and fearful in the light. He is rotting too, bloating and souring. When he takes the guests’ many bags, his knees audibly crack. As always, he doesn't complain. Just obediently leads them towards the elevator, leaking black fluid onto the floor behind him. Each step brings clicks and snaps from his bones, yet he dutifully continues to the elevator. As he always does.
Once the guests are on their way up to their room, I feel my own decay accelerating. I have to grip the desk to stay upright. There is blood and pus and thick black fluid trickling down my face, my neck, my chest, my stomach, my legs. It won’t be long now.
I look over at the aquarium.
A fish is floating belly-up on the surface. It isn't dead yet, but it can't move, and its scales are pallid and grey. From below, the other fish come to bite and nip at the flesh under its scales. It’s too weak to struggle as they take it apart, piece by piece.
It will be a long time before it dies, but death is so inevitable now that it could have already happened, and it wouldn't change anything.
The elevator dings. The doors are blue and metallic, etched with golden designs depicting seaweed and coral and the fish amongst them. In the dark, they looked beautiful. Now, in the light, the lobby just seems tacky. Old.
When my Lobby Boy steps out of the elevator, he is barely able to hobble. He makes his way to me, joining me in my white knuckled grip of the desk. I nod at him. There is something in his rotting eyes that I can’t quite read. I wonder if he’ll have time to voice it before the night is over.
Lobby Boy
She keeps on looking over at the aquarium. It’s different, now, in the light, but… I can tell she wants to see it again… We’re both rotten now, but maybe I can…
The Manager
My Lobby Boy speaks, although his vocal cords are rotting away so it comes out in a deep gurgle. "D-do you want to see the fish again?"
"No, don't trouble yourself."
"It's no trouble, m-ma'am."
"It won't be the same in the light." My voice comes out petulant and uncertain. I cringe at the sound of it.
He reaches wordlessly and matter-of-factly over to the wall, and flicks a light switch I hadn't even noticed. The room goes dark except for the small blue lights again, but I can see the hint of a smile on his face. It could just be the rot pulling at his skin, but I allow the corner of my lip to twitch upwards in response, and stagger from out behind my front desk. I offer him my arm, even though I need to cling to the desk with my other hand to steady myself.
He takes it. We lean on each other on the way over to the tank. It’s a slow journey, and a few times we almost fall, but we just barely make it there.
As we settle in front of the glass, my knees buckle. He sits down beside me casually. I think he wants me to think that he thinks I collapsed down here on purpose. I’m too weak to protest about it, so I just turn my head to the glass.
The strange, dark things are back. The fish with its glowing lure drifts in and out of the shadows. Smaller fish with tiny blue lights along their bodies flicker, speaking to each other in a language we are not privy to. Soon they will all be gone, dead. But right now they are here. Right now we are here. Nothing can take that away from me, from us. It is ours.
The Lobby Boy slumps over beside me. Dim blue light dances on the bones showing through his skin. They almost seem to glow, and it reminds me of the whale.
There is no sound from upstairs. No doubt the guests are screaming, but we can’t hear it from down here. The Owner is silent. We are quiet too. The Lobby Boy's head thumps onto my shoulder, his neck no longer able to support the weight. My head is heavy, too. Full of spoiled meat it can no longer hold. We collapse into piles of rot together.
As I go, I feel him beside me, like electricity in the water, and just for a moment I can see us without seeing us. Two creatures intertwined in the eye of a dead behemoth. Free and alone together.
Then we are gone.