28. Hoight Dies.
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Room 809
Hoight woke up on the last day of his life in the same room he spent his first.
The dawn hit his wrinkled, ashen face. He rubbed his eyes as if to push it away, but soon gave up and got out of bed. This blast of early morning was why he’d kept the curtains open, after all. There was a lot to get done on his birthday.
His knees worked out the aches of their 65 years as he crossed the floor. He squatted down and lifted the pumpkin that he’d pre-gutted and set it on a thin layer of old Chronicles. He plunged a serrated knife into the pumpkin’s flesh and carved the eyes first, just like Aunt Harriett (no blood relation) had taught him years ago.
“The eyes will tell you what it’s thinking” she’d said, “then you just carve how it tells you.”
Aunt Harriett and Hoight mom, Alice, had been maids at the hotel under the first Mr. Palmer—Mr. Jonathan, that is. They’d mopped floors and cleaned ashtrays and catered to the needs of countless thousands of guests.
Alice had a long night back in ‘35 with a man passing through, and nine months later, she was leaving this world screaming as Hoight was bursting in crying. He’d only met her for a few moments before she passed. Aunt Harriett had taken over his official stewardship, but it was more of a family affair, with most of the staff pitching in, everyone using their breaks to dote on the tiny orphan. Mr. Jonathan set Room 809 aside for that purpose.
When Hoight turned 18, Aunt Harriett sat Mr. Jonathan down after hearing rumors about his passing the hotel down to his son, Mr. Jack. She had the boss put it all in writing, saying the maids would drop their brooms if he didn’t. Mr. Jonathan relented, and made it so Hoight couldn’t sell or rent the room, but he also couldn’t get kicked out of it either, no matter who took over, which ended up meaning Ms. Jacqueline then Mr. Joseph, then those outsiders.
The room was his. All he had to do was stay working there.
Hoight made alterations over the years. Stripped the wallpaper, put up wood paneling. Tore up the carpet, added Persian rugs. Installed shelves, put in a hotplate, added thick green drapes. He usually kept them open. He liked drowsing off to the city night trains as they clattered on by.
Over his Jack-o-Lantern making career, only twice had Hoight carved anything other than a face. Once in honor of Sneezers, the kitten he’d found in the kitchen one late fall night who stuck around a few seasons before disappearing, as street cats do. A few years back, he tried out a design of the hotel itself, as a present to new management. But he’d misjudged some angles and it collapsed on itself. He only carved out faces otherwise.
Hoight finished with this year’s pumpkin’s smile—making the fangs sharper than usual—then set it aside to get ready for work. He didn’t officially start until six that night, but Hoight liked going down early to soak in the “happy birthdays” from co-workers and guests.
He walked to his closet and pushed his front row of civilian clothes to the side to access the rear, where his bellhop outfits hung. For a while he’d donned costumes for the holiday, but Latham made a policy against that—something about not giving off the wrong impression. While he mostly wore an off-black or brown, sometimes a purple if he was feeling frisky, today was for something special, so he pulled out his burnt orange outfit, the one that really popped.
Hoight knew his uniforms were perceived as a little strange these days, but so what—they made him feel comfortable. And more than that, they set limits between when he was on the clock and when he wasn’t. As the Palmer’s only permanent resident, this distinction was important.
Hoight walked to the mirror and adjusted the uniform so it sat crisply on his shoulders. He ran his fingers over his collection of oval felt hats that hung on pegs, and snatched up the orange one. He straightened it on his head and hoisted the pumpkin in his arms. He looked like the damn President of Halloween, so he gave himself a wink in the mirror before departing.
He entered the elevator to a couple inside. It looked like they’d gone a few rounds with each other overnight with bad results. The man gritted his teeth; the woman stared off into the corner. Hoight had seen all this before. Late night joy swapped for early morning regret.
“Y’all heading down I hope?” Hoight asked.
They nodded and rode the rest of the way in silence. The doors opened onto the ground floor and the pair walked to their separate cabs.
Hoight approached the front desk. Stroud was behind, watching his shift tick away on the grandfather clock.
“They look like they had the wrong kind of fun,” Hoight said, lifting his pumpkin onto the desk.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Stroud muttered.
Stroud was always an enigma to Hoight. Despite working three decades together, they’d only ever bonded once, when new management came in. But even that conversation, over a few rounds in The Anchor, felt to Hoight like Stroud was sizing him up. Trying to find weaknesses.
Hoight dipped his cap goodbye and walked into the hallway storage closet. In back was his bucket of decorations—fake cobwebs and cut-outs of skeletons, witches, black cats. He pulled them out and started pinning them along the walls.
He spent hours placing them just right, pausing whenever the elevator dinged with another guest’s exit, doffing his cap and bidding each “a pleasant journey.” When he finished, he went to the dining room for his late birthday brunch of black coffee, eggs benedict, and a morning paper. For dessert, the kitchen staff—Harvey and Georgia today—brought out a muffin with a lit candle. He devoured it in two bites.
A few hours still left to go until his shift, so he walked back into the lobby, bustling like every Halloween. More so now than before, even. Hoight passed Stroud, handling the influx and outflux with his standard mechanical demeanor, and opened the wooden door with the anchor carved into it.
“My birthday boy!” Barbs called, wiping down the bar.
They hugged and she sprayed soda water into a glass, dropped a few ice cubes in, and slid it over. Then she poured two shots of whiskey.
“Here’s to another year,” she said.
“One more down,” he smirked.
They tapped their glasses on the bartop and threw them back. Hoight closed his mouth and exhaled from his nose, feeling the whiskey burn deep in his throat. He didn’t drink on workdays, but made an exception for his birthday.
They bullshat for another hour. Complaints about new management. A couple’s loud dispute on the 9th floor that Stroud had to break up. Changes happening around the city, that new constant they were still getting used to.
The clock ticked to five—Hoight’s cue to head out. He kissed Barbs on the cheek and walked into the evening’s chilled air.
A train car clinked overhead as he turned the corner and crossed the street into Lou’s Candy Shop. He set an elbow on the glass case and chatted with Lou. About the shooting across town, about dreams of the ball team's chances next season. When they were done, Lou lifted the giant sack of candy up to the counter. Hoight set down two $20s, but Lou only took one like always, and Hoight cradled the bag as he hauled it back to the Palmer.
He walked through the revolving doors as Stroud walked out, the two nodding curtly at each other through the glass dividers, just as they always did at shift change. Hoight walked through the empty lobby and ducked into the break room to grab a metal bowl. He filled it with candy, set in on the desk, and lit the candle inside the pumpkin so that its spooky face came to life. Then, he waited for the trick-or-treaters.
It was another tradition new management wasn’t fond of. Something about insurance concerns. But he’d be damned if he was going to send those kids away.
The first came in around seven. A tiny tyke dressed like a ghost, the classic design of eye holes cut in a sheet. But the flowers on the linen made it appear somewhat less chilling than likely intended.
“I got a joke, kid,” Hoight said. “Knock, knock.”
The kid behind the sheet stayed quiet until his mom, a short woman with a brunette bob, nudged him.
“Who’s there?” the kid said from behind the sheet.
“Interrupting ghost.”
“Interrupting ghost wh—”
“Boo!” Hoight shouted.
The kid shrieked and giggled, candy spilling from his pillow case. Hoight let out his barreling whopper of a laugh that echoed through the lobby, then pushed the bowl of candy forward. The kid grabbed a handful and they were off to the next score.
The next hour was alternating check-ins with trick-or-treaters until Hoight ran out of candy, this year’s lot being particularly greedy. With Lou’s closed, he put up his handwritten “Back in 5” sign and went into the hallway closet to dip into his auxiliary stash. As he refilled the bowl, Hoight heard a deadened metallic clank down the hallway. He looked up.
The door to The Tabor ballroom was cracked open, its stopper caught on a piece of carpet.
He walked to the double doors and peeked inside. For an instant he saw a faint light being cast from underneath the stage. Then suddenly, it blinked out.
Hoight mulled over the ramifications of leaving the front desk empty for more than his promised five, then considered the possibility of an electrical short. Maybe it was a problem that needed fixing right away. Maybe the ancient wiring could make the whole old place go up at any moment.
He crossed to the stage and dipped into a crouch, his muscles aching with the motion. He discovered a loose panel at the bottom, shifted it aside, and turned on his small flashlight, something he never regretted carrying around.
He scanned the crawl space, seeing nothing out of place. But then his light caught the glint of metal. A small ring hung from a concrete slab. It quivered as if just struck by some hidden breeze.
“Ah, hell,” Hoight said.
He considered getting someone to cover for him. At least dip into The Anchor and let Barbs know. Or, hell, head upstairs, take off his uniform, and tuck himself into bed for a long sleep before finally escaping this place entirely to begin some new chapter in his life, however late in the game it now was.
“Ah, hell.”
Hoight took off his orange cap and laid it down to protect it from whatever dust he was about to encounter. He ducked into the crawlspace. The musk of stale mold stung his nostrils and made his eyes water. The metal ring flickered in his quivering flashlight.
It looked like the tab of a soda can. There was an insignia etched onto it. A circle or maybe a spiral.
Hoight flicked it, and a soft metallic ping hummed for a moment until the cramped space settled back into silence. He grabbed at it and pulled. The wall slab moved toward him on a hinge.
On the other side was a corridor, narrow and dark, with wooden beams jutting out amidst broken cobwebs like wisps of an old man’s hair. Chairs lined one side.
Hoight thought once more about crawling out and taking the next train out of the city.
“Ah, hell,” he said begrudgingly, and crawled into the passageway.
His arm brushed against something—it rustled, and a shiver went down his spine. When he found the guts to look, he saw a notebook pinned to the wall. He angled his flashlight—“108” was scrawled on the cover.
Inside was a collection of dates and names and descriptions, but nothing that made much sense. Looking up from the pages, he saw a small hole of light coming through the wall. As he leaned forward to see, he heard another metallic clang from further down the corridor.
Hoight flashed his light into the darkness toward the sound and began to approach. More chairs, more notebooks, more pinholes of light. And then another corridor to his left, the end of which held a half-circle of orange light that filtered in through some kind of window.
He slowly walked to it and soon made out the lobby’s ornate ceiling through the other side. He was looking in from behind the face of the grandfather clock—the one that’d been ticking away in the lobby for as long as he could remember. No one was at the front desk except his lit Jack-o-Lantern, smiling devilishly back at him.
A notebook hung near the glass window. He opened it. Nearly every page was scrawled with tight, tiny penmanship.
He flipped to the beginning. His eyes happened upon his own name:
October 31st, 1968 / Hoight dressed like a child.
The notebook swung from its strings as he left it behind to retrace his steps back into the original corridor. At the end was a metal ladder that stretched up far up past the reach of his flashlight beam.
“You dumb motherfucker,” Hoight said to himself as he set a foot on the ladder’s first rung and began to pull himself up.
He clambered one foot over the next until he came upon a round portal that glowed between the gaps in the ladder’s rungs. A small window looked out into the courtyard; white light from the dining hall blared in. As he climbed, he saw that every floor of this vertical tunnel had such a portal, the white giving way to the hazy red of the rooftop sign the further he ascended.
The sweat on Hoight’s forehead stung his eyes; he wiped it away with the back of his arm. A number was carved next to each portal, growing by one the higher he traveled. When he got to 8, he played a hunch and twisted his body to step over the small gap into the corridor.
The red light of the rooftop sign was shorting again. It flashed through the portal like a strobe. Hoight recalled his constant requests to management to fix the loose connections, but put it out of his mind as he approached the pinhole marked “809.” He leaned up to it—and sure enough, there was his room.
His bed was made, his closet door open to reveal the row of unused bellhop uniforms. On the desk was the balled-up newspaper that held bits of pumpkin gore and seeds.
He opened up the notebook that hung nearby and read the most recent entry:
10/31/00: Carves pumpkin, orange uniform today.
Hoight flipped back to the first page:
12/1/67: Wakes at 5am, blue uniform.
A shuffle behind him and the stuttering red light disappeared. Hoight glared down the corridor. The light was blocked by a shadowed silhouette.
Then, a familiar voice.
“Not my fault you’re the most boring motherfucker in this place,” Stroud croaked.
“You’ve been busy,” Hoight said.
“Could say that,” Stroud said, taking a step towards him. “I imagine you’re not going to head back down and forget about all of this.”
“Don’t see that happening, frankly,” Hoight said.
Stroud nodded curtly, then reached into his pocket and pulled out an object.
Hoight countered with a shrug by holding out his flashlight.
“Better than nothing I suppose,” Hoight muttered.
“What do you think would’ve happened if you’d have found the passageway first?” Stroud said. Hoight knew he wasn’t exactly expecting an answer. “I picture you cementing the door shut the very next day.”
“Don’t think you’d be wrong.”
“That’s your problem, Hoight,” Stroud said, taking a step. “Can’t see a good thing when it falls in your lap.” Another step. “Depressing to consider—you giving up all this power, all this freedom.”
“And what power and freedom do you mean?” Hoight said.
“Power over those who make this city,” Stroud said. “And so the freedom to do whatever you want.”
Hoight remained silent.
“Need a ticket to a ballgame to show off to a client, I can call in a favor to Harry Drake, who has seats behind home plate. Saw him having an affair in Room 309. Want to start hauling yourself up the public office ladder? I got a machine fixer who spent nights in 487 shooting black tar heroin,” Stroud said, striding close enough that Hoight could make out the pockmarks on his face in the residual glow of the flashlight. “Need someone killed on the cheap? Got a few guys for that. This is power.”
“And what freedom did all that get you?” Hoight said.
Stroud lifted a foot to take another step, hesitated, set it back down.
“What did it get you?” Hoight calmly repeated.
“Anything I wanted,” Stroud said.
“Looks like all it got you working was here for the past thirty years,” Hoight said. “Nothing much else to show for it.”
“At least I’m not stuck here,” Stroud said.
Hoight inhaled deeply. He raised his forearm in defense and gripped his flashlight, feeling its heft, imaging how it would feel to bring it down upon Stroud’s bony head.
“Aren’t you though?” the old bellhop said.
Stroud lunged. His knife caught Hoight’s forearm and carved through flesh, then muscle to bone. Hoight swung his fist and felt Stroud’s cheek give way, then a hot flash of pain in his own stomach. Hoight stepped back and grabbed at his belly—he felt the hot liquid and viscera pouring through his fingers.
Stroud stood back with his shattered face as Hoight stumbled and fell to his knees. He wiped his bloody knife across his pants.
“Do you want company or privacy?” Stroud asked, his cheek already puffing.
Hoight smirked.
“Always liked my alone time,” he coughed.
Stroud stepped back into the darkness.
A moment later, Hoight heard the metallic clang of the ladder as his executioner departed down.
Hoight sat, bleeding out on the corridor’s wooden floorboards. After he built up the energy, he crawled toward the ladder with vague notions of finding safety or help. A trail of blood slicked in his wake.
All at once he felt exhausted, and his head fell. He noticed a pinhole on the ground. “750” was etched next to it. Too exhausted to call out, he lay face down and started tapping out in desperation.
Tap-tap-tap.
His thoughts went to his mom, to Aunt Harriett, to Barbs, to everyone else he’d known and loved in the Palmer over all those years.
Tap! Tap! Tap!
He slept and woke, slept and woke again. Somewhere in between consciousness and whatever was next, he began to feel the presences surrounding him. They were angry.
They wriggled and squirmed, squeezed and grabbed at him, trying to consume him, to absorb him into their dead flesh, their wretched selves.
Seized by terror, Hoight found a reserve of energy and lurched out of their grasp. He crawled to the corridor’s end, to the portal. He peered into the courtyard. A peaceful night sky. Red flickering against the iron bars of the fire escape.
Hoight felt their clammy hands grasping at his ankles, his calves, his thighs. He took in one last gasp, then unleashed a scream that shook the windowpane and made the red light quiver.
And then they dragged his body back down, deep into the corridor, to somewhere in the world beyond our own.
Artwork by Tiffany Silver Braun.
If you like Tales from the Palmer Hotel, tell a friend. If you really like it, the suggested donation for the series is a one-time payment of $6.66. Venmo (@Rick-Paulas) or Paypal (rickpaulas@gmail.com).