The Dark Hotel (Part 4)

The Grey Boy. At first, Gesson pointedly pretended not to hear.
Of all of the men in the Bureau, why had he been assigned to investigate the Grey Boy? Gesson retroactively detected a hint of gloating in Bakermitt’s tone. Why was that large and balding man so gruff toward him, so lacking in the respectful tone and demeanor one expected of a seasoned Bureau official?
“Why wasn’t I given the Grey Boy dossier?” he asked Bakermitt, the columnar hotel phone feeling foreign and geological in his hand, like a cold and unfriendly underground rock formation that some freakish gnome had shoved in his hand.
Bakermitt laughed again, his laugh sounding dismissive and caustic, the laugh of a man who would shove his way through a crowd at a gaudy candy store to grab the last blueberry taffy stick for himself. But then, Gesson doubted if Bakermitt was the kind of man who had ever even tasted a blueberry taffy stick.
“The Grey Boy. So elusive. And yet here I am without a dossier.” Gesson sounded sullen, his shoulders slumping in his overcoat.
Bakermitt immediately took on a business-like tone, without a trace of his former false amiability. He was suddenly frigid, like a hunk of potato salad left in the freezer by mistake. “You’ve been in the Bureau over a decade, Gesson. Do you really think a dossier will help you deal with the Grey Boy? It’s time you turned into a man of your own age. We’ve done half of the work for you. You’re at the Dark Hotel.”
“You know the Grey Boy’s in the hotel?”
Bakermitt was silent for an interval, an interval in which a repulsive worm could have wriggled over a crack in a wet sidewalk. “We have an informant in the hotel.”
“And he’s told you the Grey Boy is here?”
Gesson heard a sultry woman’s laugh come from somewhere in the background on the other end of the line.
“I won’t do all of your work for you, Gesson.” There was a trite click and then silence.
Gesson was left alone in the Dark Hotel room, with the sounds of the creatures under the bed again skittering into his hearing.

The Dark Hotel (Part 3)

Gesson faced the large mirror that occupied an expansive place above the sink, a mirror that extended to the ceiling and flaunted a maroon-and-rust-painted frame that bulged and warped around the edges and was studded with gold knobs and buttons. The mirror was awkwardly large, far larger than the sink itself, and Gesson found himself planting his shoes firmly on the blood-red bathmat, anxious not to be drawn into a dizzying contemplation of the mirror’s depths.

A sharp, stabbing noise cut into his contemplation of the bathroom and its various provocative fixtures. He shook his large head, with its unshaven chin and wrinkled brow, and turned to face the main room. The noise was coming from the phone on the nightstand, a curiously columnar phone the color of a rotted red apple. It was a piercing, angered-bird-like ring unlike any Gesson had experienced before emanating from a phone.

He picked up the receiver.

"This is Gesson." He stood there with the mouthpiece to his mouth, still wearing his deep-pocketed overcoat the color of damp earth and his sturdy raw sienna shoes. To anyone who happened to observe him, he would appear to be a normal middle-aged man, dressed in attire appropriate for an overcast urban environment, with thick brows and a serious, business-like mouth.

"Gesson. You are at the Dark Hotel." It sounded like a statement, not like a question.

"Who is this?"

"You know it’s Bakermitt!" Bakermitt gave a hacking laugh. Gesson could picture him, in some narrow ill-furnished bureaucratic office, crumpled folders and torn notepaper littering his desk.

"I was confirming, Bakermitt. Confirming." Gesson was in no mood for Bakermitt’s rough sense of beerhall humor, his poorly timed efforts at camaraderie.

"You’re a careful man, Gesson," Bakermitt responded, in an ambiguous tone. Was he engaging in mockery or mere description? "Perhaps you’ll be as careful in finding the Grey Boy."

The Dark Hotel (Part Two)

Gesson knew before long, from the unsettling sounds of scuttling and the outlines of shrill cries that he heard, that there were small forms under the bed moving in unexpected directions.
They were forms that were short and fast and liked to remain hidden, keeping under the bed frame whenever possible. He didn't want to bend down, to look under the bed at them, at their animal shapes and whiskers. It was enough to imagine them and their scuttling and scurrying, their brown and gray shades and dark eyes.
"Dance in your own circles, little creatures! You are just invisible dervishes to me." Gesson tried to straighten himself up and look a little less like he'd been yelling at an unmade bed, running his hands over his white shirt in efforts at maintaining smoothness.
Lurking in the bathroom, Gesson felt the unfamiliar shadows. Shadows beneath the heavy sconces that adorned the walls with their imperiousness and shadows beneath the thick avocado towels that loomed above him on the door of the gigantic shower stall.
Gesson stood in the bathroom doorframe, afraid to be drawn too intensively into the bathroom itself with its strangely deep and unfathomable arrangement of heavy fixtures and the recessive shower stall that went back further and further into the reaches of the bathroom than he would have imagined.
It was a shower stall that provided an all-inclusive environment for an epic shower unlike any he'd experienced before in an urban hotel, a shower stall potentially full of unexpected encounters and relationships with tiles that were unfamiliar, surprising and exotic in their coloring. A stall where he would need to be cautious about laying in plenty of soap provisions before venturing out into a fresh cleansing.

The Dark Hotel (Part One)

“Excuse me, miss chambermaid, but the hall seems to be a little dark?”
The sullen chambermaid, with her unwieldy large bow, turned her large face to Horace Gesson as he stood outside the door of his room. “This is the Dark Hotel.”Gesson chuckled a short, dry chuckle. His white shirt was uncomfortably wrinkled from the long, musty day and he wanted only to splash his face with water as quickly as possible. “Yes, I know that’s the name of the establishment. But I hardly see . . .”
The maid interrupted with axe-like ferocity. Her face jutted forward with the momentum of a large wasp. “That is the name and that’s the way it is. I advise you to take it for an advantage.” She began marching down the hallway, her ebony-clothed backside quickly disappearing in the dimness.
“Take it for an advantage!” Gesson stood at a loss in his grey trousers and puzzled chin, miffed at the chambermaid’s odd locution.
He turned back to his door and inserted the large antique black iron key that took up a large part of his hand as he held it.
The key made a wheezing sound as it entered the keyhole, a wheezing like the moan of a small rubbery artificial animal. Gesson winced slightly. He wasn’t sure if he had ever heard that precise sound come from a keyhole, but it had been a long time since he’d used an iron key, so he couldn’t say for sure. Upon entering the room, Gesson saw nothing particularly noteworthy. There was a large, almost monstrously large bed, that spanned the breadth of the room with a heavy authority, covered in a dark lime blanket. The room had a smell not uncommon to large and infrequently visited hotel rooms, an urban smell of dense population masses and unwashed clothes.