1. Mary Falls to Her Death.
To read the story so far, visit the Table of Contents.
Room 750
Mary Watter woke to a tapping sound that rattled around and around in her brain.
She shook off her hazy drunken sleep and saw that the hotel’s cheap flat screen TV, bolted to the wall, was broadcasting a commercial for some new slick generation of computer servers. She must have left the TV on. The signal suddenly cut to black.
The room was pitched back into darkness. Mary heard the sound again.
tap. tap. tap.
It was coming from the ceiling.
From her seated position in bed, she squinted her tired eyes and looked up. The sound again, louder.
Tap! Tap! Tap!
She huffed and blew a raspberry with her lips, and when she did:
TAP! TAP! TAP!
The TV came back on and snapped to an image of a shiny man in a pristine blue suit behind a news desk. He was mid-sentence.
“—e’ll see here,” he said, “a graphic that is surely on everyone’s mind.”
The next image showed an electoral map of the United States, split between blues and reds, previewing next week’s election between Obama and McCain. Then, a cut to a roundtable of political hacks, filling time with simple speculation. Like uncles around the barbecue bullshitting their way through quantum physics, Mary thought.
The tapping sound came again through the ceiling.
It was quieter, but at a frequency that, once she’d tuned into its wavelength, was impossible to block out. One of those sounds that gets into your head and rattles around, chipping away at the inside of your skull.
With a huff, Mary twisted off the bed, planting her feet on the thin green carpeting. She grabbed the remote control off the bedside table, muted the TV, and there it was again.
tap. tap. tap.
She walked to the light switch and bathed the room in a wash of yellow-orange. The light caught the full-length mirror outside of the bathroom. She paused to take a look at herself.
She ran her fingers through her long brown hair, a few more strands a shade greyer, it seemed, every time she looked. She examined the cobwebs of wrinkles that flanked her aqua blue eyes, the burst capillaries on her nose. She was still wearing her short red dress from the party.
It was the start-up’s first Halloween shindig. They’d rented out the entire Palmer for the weekend, flown everyone out, given everyone their own rooms, all expenses paid. Which meant of course that attendance was mandatory, even if it wasn’t officially stipulated.
All employees were allowed one guest, and Mary had considered taking Joel, a friend of a friend of a friend whom she’d met at a party and had just started more or less “seeing” a few weeks back. It’d been going well enough, with no immediate red flags. But she didn’t need to be mixing her work with her life so soon. That was what she’d told herself, in any case.
Anyway, this whole thing was a giant waste of money, an affront to Mary’s accountant sensibilities. But what wasn’t in this dumb industry? Everything in the tech world was basically a dick-measuring contest between founders, and these office parties were no different. Spend money to make money, or something.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
“The fuck,” she muttered and looked at the clock.
Twenty-eight minutes before midnight. The rest of her young coworkers were still no doubt partying away in the downstairs ballroom, but Mary’s age-bestowed wisdom had impressed on her the benefits of a good night’s sleep. And that wasn’t happening as long as that fucking sound was still rattling in the ceiling.
She picked up the phone and dialed downstairs.
“Front desk, this is Colleen, how can we help you,” drolled a young woman’s voice.
Mary told her about the noise, and Colleen said she’d have someone check, so Mary turned off the light and crawled back into bed. The TV anchor was offering his analysis of the electoral map as Mary pressed OFF on the remote and drifted again toward sleep.
Her mind recycled images from the party. A band costumed in suspenders and checkerboard pants that took requests but played none well. Her kicking off her shoes anyway to dance with her coworkers, none of whom could keep up. Her boss Peter giving her that blank-eyed smile as he commented on sales figures before skulking away to talk to someone else. Now that she thought about it a little, it would’ve been fun to have Joel around, at the very least to make fun of Peter.
TAP! TAP! TAP!
Mary opened her eyes and saw shadows like writhing demons on the ceiling. She jumped out of bed. She realized they were being cast by flickering red lights coming from outside.
She walked to the window and saw that the neon sign on the hotel’s rooftop, announcing PALMER HOTEL
to the city. It was quivering and popping. It must have a short.
TAP! TAP! TAP!
She ran to the phone to try the front desk again, but the line was dead. She’d have to take care of this herself.
She grabbed her key card and left. Halfway down the hallway she realized she was barefoot, but she continued ahead anyway. She pushed open the stairwell door; her feet hit the cold concrete. She ascended a floor and pushed open the metal door that led into the Palmer’s eighth floor hallway.
It felt different. Colder, disinfected and sterile.
Walls with fresh coats of white paint. Instead of carpeting, the floor was lined with white tile. Sawdust collected in mounds, doors torn off and replaced with sheets of plastic that billowed in a wind of mysterious origin.
“Hello?” she spoke. A white puff of her breath spread from her mouth.
She rubbed her hands together to warm them as gooseflesh formed on her arms.
“Hello?”
Another faint cloud puffed from her lips, then disappeared.
She steeled her nerves and stepped forward once, twice, again, her momentum carrying her to Room 850, the one right above hers, where a plastic sheet floated in the doorway. Even so, Mary knocked on the frame to be polite.
“Hello?” she called through the cloudy plastic.
No answer.
She pulled the sheet aside, and her eyes adjusted to the shadowy new environment, lit only by the flickering red from the hotel’s sign. She flipped on the room’s light.
It was similar to her room downstairs in basic footprint, but the amenities were largely missing. No bed, no desk. The bathroom was gutted, stray tiles strewn across the floor, pencil marks on the walls. A fridge and washer/dryer set-up were stashed away in the corner, wrapped in plastic.
“Well, shit,” she said, and flipped the light switch off.
She waited a moment, hoping to hear the sound again. But it didn’t come, so she returned down the stairwell, her red dress flowing behind her as she descended.
She used the key card to unlock the door to her room, crawled back into bed, and thought about the sound for a moment, then another. But soon the stress was dissipating, and she finally drifted off to sleep.
Tap! Tap! Tap!
“Son of a fucking bitch!” she screamed.
TAP! TAP! TAP!
That mix of moonlight and flickering red still came through the window, so she walked over to snatch the curtains shut. As she did, she saw the black metal fire escape outside her window, part of the network that hugged the Palmer’s exterior, connecting the rooms of the hotel’s two wings from the rooftop all the way down to the courtyard.
Tap! Tap! Tap!
Mary lifted open the window, pulled her hair back into a bun, and stepped barefoot onto the fire escape and into the cool night air.
She looked across to the hotel’s other wing. A few TVs were still flickering at this late hour. Below, in the middle of the courtyard, she saw an all-glass enclosure, almost like a greenhouse with a small pyramid on top. That must be the dining hall she’d heard about.
In the night, the nearby elevated train followed its clattering predetermined path, same as ever, tracing the same arcs that’d been set in place so long ago.
Mary climbed the fire escape steps one floor and was again outside of the curtainless window of Room 850. She pressed her hands against the glass and saw no movement inside. Just as barren as she’d left it. She started to descend back to her room, but midway down, she noticed a piece of glass.
A small, oval window. Like a portal embedded in the wall of the building. Nearly indistinguishable from the brick, somehow between floors.
She stepped onto the fire escape’s railing to get a better look and leaned forward. She pressed her forehead against the glass and felt its cold, but the glare of the rooftop sign’s flickering red neon reflected and obstructed her view.
She cupped her hands around her eyes to block out the light—and saw movement on the other side.
It wriggled and squirmed in sweaty commotion. She saw an elbow, then a knee, and realized they were all limbs, some hairy, some bare, writhing like a rat king of human appendages and wet flesh.
She heard a soft tap on the glass.
Suddenly, the chaos of limbs parted, and in the pane appeared the face of a man.
Sweaty. Deep-set eyes, dark skin. His smooth forehead crinkled into a look of wonder, then fear, then pleading and desperation. His mouth opened, and the cracked edges of his dry lips bled as he let out a scream that shook the glass.
Mary leapt back in terror and felt her foot slip off the fire escape railing.
She swiped a desperate hand, finding metal—but only for a moment, before she was grasping at nothing but air.
She was somehow unafraid—as if she’d instantaneously resigned to her fate. As she fell, she saw the glow of a TV in a window across the way. She watched its light create odd, mysterious shadows against the ceiling of a room. Placidly, she used the span of her final precious moment to look up, so she could see the stars.
But her view of the night sky was obscured by the shadowy shape of a man above, falling too, a few moments behind.
Mary watched the man’s arms flail and then steady, and the flickering red caught his face for a moment. He was older, distinguished looking, staring right back at her with a look of serene calm. It seemed for an instant that he made a slight smile.
“Weird world,” Mary thought, then thought no more.
Artwork by Tiffany Silver Braun.
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