Room 112, The Red Room
Rinaldo stared at the bouquet of flowers with disdain. That real estate agent, she kept sending them along as though he personally was going to get her new clients thanks to her obvious attention seeking. It was gauche. He shuddered over the yellow daisies and her childish script announcing ‘Congratulations’ on the grand opening, a feat that took way too long and from what he could see was astronomically over budget.
What was this silly cow thinking? The Broken Hill Hotel was too large and rich an establishment to be wowed by a collection of weedy flowers in a tacky vase. The vastness of it was overwhelming. The rooms went on forever.
There was no end of guests and keys already.
This day marked two weeks of his employment as concierge. After an online scanning of his resume and a zoom meeting with a bland Asian secretary he’d been left in charge of the place. The owners mysteriously remained unknown and hidden, managing it from some distant shore well outside of the country. It screamed corporate but the meticulous details he constantly found were a point of question for him, since the hotel seemed to possess oddly personal touches. Artwork, for one, stubbornly regional and clashing with the Scandinavian ice theme of the front foyer. There were a few scattered tacky remnants from the good old days still clinging to the decor and the clash didn’t fit. A brocade chair from the 1970’s, perched near a large, overly decorated fireplace, its mantle so ornate it was going to be a nightmare for housekeeping to keep polished.
He’d arrived with most of the staff hired already and the formal grand opening had been his design, devoid of guests and more of a meet and greet with his staff. As concierge all responsibilities for the place fell on his shoulders, and he had to admit he was getting an ample salary for it.
His employers didn’t ask too many questions, either, which suited him just fine. The gap on his resume that lasted ten years was completely glossed over. They didn’t ask questions about his constant change of address that came with every new job in a new city or town or country.
There were a lot of past jobs. He definitely listed too many.
They didn’t check his references.
So far, so good.
“Excuse me, sir?”
He looked up from his inspection of the pathetic bouquet to see a young woman with straight, dark hair and impossibly huge dark brown eyes staring up at him. He didn’t understand why, but her presence at his counter irritated him and instead of affording her the usual formality he gave all paying customers he averted his gaze and pretended to be very busy with the keyboard of his computer.
“Name and reservation number, please.”
“Um. Uh…” She looked around as though searching out the air for her own name. Stupid girl. “Patricia…”
“Patricia Persons?”
“Yes.” She slumped, relieved.
He handed her a key card, barely looking at her as he did so. “Room 112, the Red Room. It’s on the main floor, three doors down from the left side elevator.”
“Oh. Um…The main floor?” She glanced down the hallway as though he had given her the most complicated instructions in her life. He bristled at her indecision, hating the way she held the key card, in a careless grip as though she was about to drop it at any second. “I just…”
She turned her abnormally huge eyes on him, and he was reminded of those creepy paintings from the 1970s of children with eyes larger than their faces, and always unhappy. “If someone comes to this desk and says they are me…And they look just like me, only…Well, they *aren’t* me…Can you make sure they don’t come to my room? Maybe just tell them to wait and call me first?”
Great. Annoying and a whack job.
There are so many places in the forest to hide a body.
No. No. No. He wasn’t letting his thoughts go there. No.
“Of course,” he said.
~.~
Patricia didn’t trust the concierge. He was too skinny and his flesh had a clammy texture that was visible in that doughy way people with bad diets possessed. She held the key more firmly in her grip and walked down the white hallway with a sense of determined purpose, every echo of her small heels on the ash wood floor making her shoulders jerk inward as though expecting a blow. She didn’t dare look behind her and by the time she got to her door her hands were shaking and the key card had to be slid through twice before she was able to open it. She slid in and locked the door firmly behind her, her back pressed against it as she caught her breath.
So far so good.
Her sister thing wasn’t here.
She was sure the concierge thought she was crazy, but after the month she’d had it was uncertain if he wasn’t right. But she wasn’t a person who was overly imaginative and in fact she’d been described by teachers as dull and conforming, so much so that in third grade her teacher had forgotten she existed at all and didn’t fill out a report card.
Her parents were delighted they’d had such an ‘easy’ child.
The first hints of her sister thing didn’t show up until long after she’d finished college. She was sure that’s when it happened. There were those strange conversations she didn’t remember having with her mother. The coffee bar friend she didn’t remember making. “You’re easy to talk to,” the stranger, who was her friend, said.
Patricia was never one to talk much. Or take up human space.
Just like that third grade teacher most of the universe had forgotten her.
But not sister thing.
A wet plop made her heart hammer in her thin chest and she inched her way into the red room, its crimson interior a madman’s idea of interior design. Every inch was drenched in red, with several art pieces on the walls depicting splatters of red paint on white surfaces that reflected pink due to the overwhelming dominance of that blood shade. It was silly that a designer had taken the idea so literally, and she sat on the edge of the silk covered bed, her shoes still on, her handbag clutched tight against her chest. How ironic that this is the room she ended up in, after what sister thing had done, and she fought the urge to weep.
She pulled her cell phone out of her handbag with shaking fingers but there was no one left to call her now, and the small amount of people within it was a sad testament to how few people she knew in life. Her mom, her manager at work at the library in her small town. Her boyfriend.
James.
~.~
“You’re too sensitive.” James, good looking in the way all guys who hand out at the gym are, sat across from her at the cafe next door to the library where she worked. “All I said was that beige is hardly a colour. It’s no big deal if you’re wearing pink socks.”
But it was a big deal. They were garish pink and they clashed with her conservative, nothing of an outfit, a mistake she had never made before. She didn’t remember putting them on. They were soft and silky and weird.
James chewed around a BLT and checked his phone for the hundredth time, laughing at something he’d seen but he didn’t share it with her. He put his phone back in the pocket of his jeans.
She wanted to go over the wedding plans, as it was happening in less than a week and she really had to get the flower arrangements just right. Classic roses, nothing garish. He needed to get his navy blue suit fitted properly, her dress was just a simple beige, because it seemed silly to wear white when they had been living together for the past year and besides, it was a dress she could wear again, maybe to work in the summertime.
But these bright pink socks…What the hell?
“So the work conference is over at five o’clock, that will give me plenty of time to get ready. I don’t know why this is such a sticking point for you, it’s not like we’re having a ton of people there and it’s just a small chapel ceremony, nothing extravagant.” He wiped crumbs from his jeans.
Patricia really needed him to understand. “It’s the day of the wedding and you’re going to be gone on a work call for three days and I would prefer you’d be focused on our special day. You’re making this ceremony feel like an afterthought of your day. I wanted it to be special.”
“We’re getting married.” He finished his BLT in one bite. “That’s special.”
A strange sensation wormed its way inside of Patricia’s gut, and to her horror her stomach felt as though it was harbouring an actual fish, flopping around searching for water. She clutched her abdomen with both hands while James snapped for the waiter to top up his coffee.
“I’m at a very delicate point in my career,” he explained to her. “I cant just take all the time off I want to. I’ve built up too much within this company and I’m eyeing that promotion, the one that gets me the company car.” He gave her lopsided smile. “Don’t you want to drive around in a Ferrari?”
’You don’t fucking care about cars,’ her gut said, the growing flopping fish inside of her wriggling madly, searching for a way out. ’You want to smash his head in with a chair, smash a plate and slice his throat ear to ear. He’s checking his phone again. Who is calling him? Not you. He doesn’t smile like that when you call…’
“James? I’m not feeling very well.”
“I mean, it’s blue, but when you get the chance to drive a car like that you don’t quibble over colours. It could be hot pink for all I care. I’m wearing my navy power suit to our wedding, I’ll popping to the chapel directly after the conference, and I know I’ll look good. I always have to give my best performance, you know how it is. What’s wrong with you? You should have ate something.”
The squiggly fish feeling extended past her stomach and into her arms and legs, overtaking her body. She felt as though she was silently convulsing, every cell in her body taken over by this..this…
What was that THING in her head?
’Kill him. Put him out of his empty misery. He doesn’t want to marry you. He just wants to check the box for his boss. ‘Family man’. Ha! He’s got hookers on that phone, he likes rough S&M sex and does nasty things to squirrels. Ask him about the rabbit…’
“What happened to the rabbit?” Patricia asked It. Aloud.
James suddenly paled. He gave Patricia a studied once over and then tossed some bills onto the table. “I need to get back to work. That should cover it. I’ll see you on Sunday.”
He hurried out of there as though she’d just vomited all over the table.
She didn’t. She puked in the alley after the bill was paid and she’d hurried out, her shocking pink socks betraying her. People walking past on the street noticed her. It was an alien, unpleasant feeling.
The floppy fish THING in her tickled around her brain. ’I’ve been slowly getting stronger over the years. We were supposed to be twins but you were greedy in the womb and you ate me up. So I ate your creativity and your voice and your place. You’ve drifted through this life unseen because I’ve made you invisible.’
“So what now?” Patricia got strange stares as she talked to herself, her heels clipped as she headed for the condo where she and James lived, a bland glass building with trees so trimmed they looked like CG. “You’re going to take over?”
’No. I’m going to become. I’m going to be you, outside of you. I’m going to show you what you can be and then I’ll come back. And we will live together, understanding how important each of us is.’
Patricia walked brusquely through the front lobby and headed for the elevator, the doors opening as if they had been waiting for her. “Look, I don’t know what you want.”
But IT knew.
A weird, stripping pain coursed through Patricia and she doubled over the condo elevator, spasms wracking through her body. She opened her mouth wide, as if to be sick, only there was…It was some THING crawling up her throat, allowing only the tiniest amount of breath to seep through as she gagged and gagged until finally, her stomach heaving with a strength that could have squashed her lungs out of her mouth, IT plopped out, wet and sticky, onto the floor of the elevator.
It looked like a hot pink slug.
It shimmered and flexed and moved, warping into itself until it expanded, becoming a full sized naked and exact replica of herself.
’I’m going to fix everything, Patricia, don’t worry.’
“I don’t want anything fixed!”
’Yes. Yes you do.’
“You can’t just go out of the building naked!”
IT cast a glance over ITs shoulder, and smiled the way a hungry lion does. “Yes, sister. I can.”
~.~
That night she tried to make sense of it all. Of course it had been a hallucination, brought on by stress about the wedding. Perfectly normal. It was perfectly okay to hallucinate you’d just vomited a human slug in the elevator and that it was now roaming the streets of the city, completely naked and alone.
Worry and guilt. What were those emotions doing there?
Patricia spent a sleepless night wondering what her Sister Thing was up to or worse, if it was even real. Surely she had hallucinated the entire thing?
The phone call at midnight convinced her otherwise.
“Patricia, what the fuck! You are spying on me?”
Her fiance was livid, she could feel the spittle from his lips as he shouted into his cell phone. Her small flip phone beeped and beeped and beeped as it spewed out a novel length’s series of accusations and complaints.
There was another message.
Check your email.
Her computer squatted on a small desk near the balcony window, the same clunky beige hue as everything else in the condominium. She turned it on and listened to it hum as she did as instructed and checked her email.
Subject: This is what you know now
CC: JamesTheMan@geocities.com
The seven images took a while to download. When she dared to take a look it was a picture of her future husband a la flagrante getting peed on by a woman (or the facsimile of one) wearing impossible red high heels.
“What…What am I looking at?”
“What am I looking at,” he sneered. “Fuck you, Patricia, the wedding is OFF.”
Her phone glowed in the dark as she wiped sleep from her eyes. The images slowly erupting onto the screen were of increasing violence. There was one of her fiance, tears in his eyes, pleading. Then another where she could barely see him through a red, splattered haze. A set of grotesque, ragged, rabbit ears, torn from the poor animal, were in his tight grip.
Sister Thing suddenly spoke through her phone, the connection unnecessary since she was already in Patricia’s head.
”We can’t keep making these mistakes,” said the slug that looked like her with too pink skin. ”He wasn’t good for us. Come and join me, my sister. Come and take this town apart with me. You know you want to. For all the times you were forgotten, for all the space you took and no one wanted to let you have and kept running over you. What is next, Sister? Join me and we’ll be whole and no one will forget you ever again.” Sister Thing grinned. “Unless we need them to.”
~.~
The thing is, she didn’t even call in sick to work and no one thought to contact her. She used her fiance’s car and it took three times to find a remote enough location to escape to since her phone kept kicking her offline. She drove haphazardly down the main highway and people passed her as though they couldn’t see her, cars cutting in front, not signalling. She felt a further disorientation on the long stretch of road leading to Broken Hill with no one ahead or behind her and she wondered if she was driving in an endless loop, up and down the same stretch of road with no sense of North or South. By the time she got to Broken Hill she felt more like a ghost than a person, and it was a relief when the concierge treated her badly. He assured her she exists enough to annoy someone.
But the danger was still here. She could feel it. Slithering against the backside of her consciousness was that Thing she had thrown up and out into the world, a Thing that had killed her fiance and maybe a few people more by this point.
She’d never felt the urge to go on a rampage. What was her Sister Thing on about?
She never really felt much of anything, when she really thought about it, save for fear and a vague sense of panic, maybe a need for order that bordered on pathological in the way it made her even more invisible, her place in the world not leaving behind so much as a dirty dish.
’You’ve never been whole, Patricia,’ Sister Thing said to her. ’You need to let me in and let us become. Your bland, beige world needs to end. If you don’t exist, neither do I.’
“You killed James,” she said aloud.
’You saw what he was. A creepy douche. We don’t want that.’
The blood soaked rabbit ears were an unbidden mental visual and Patricia gagged. There was a distinct plop sound, like a bowl of pudding had spilled onto the ceramic floor and she felt Sister Thing slithering along the cold tiles, seeking her out, its hot pink slug body leaving a thick trail of blood behind it.
“I won’t be a good person if I let you in,” Patricia told it.
’Doesn’t matter,’ Sister Thing replied.
“People will die.”
’They already do.’
“If I let you in I won’t be myself.”
’When you let me in you will Become.’
“How do I trust you?”
’You need to trust yourself.’
“But who am I?”
’I am you and you are me and we are what we Become.’
Patricia sat on the edge of the bed, her hands clasping the rose patterns embroidered into the bedspread in tight, small fists. No one was looking for her. Coming out here to this desolate, strange hotel and paying a stupid amount of money for a single night on her fiance’s credit card had been careless, but then, she had an alibi this way, didn’t she?
But if she was a person divided, like Sister Thing insisted, then a half a person doesn’t really exist and then, well, neither of them killed him, really. Just the idea of themselves did. A vague outlined sketch of person that no one would think to look for.
Was that why James was attracted to her in the first place?
Because she was as empty as his entire soul was?
“If I let you in, do I disappear?”
’No,’ Sister Thing assured her. ’We both Enhance. We Become.’
“It’s a kind of disappearing, isn’t it? For you and for me?”
Sister Thing was quiet.
Thinking.
’We can always move apart when needed.’
“That way when bad things happen no one remembers us.”
’I am very memorable.’
“You are a bright pink slug who sometimes looks like me.” Patricia frowned. “Maybe don’t do that in future.”
~.~
Rinaldo checked the room again, on Gladys’s insistence. Being the afternoon head maid gave the woman a sense of ownership of the hotel, and while her work ethic was exceptional, her anal attention to detail was getting on his last nerve. He gave the red room a good once over, the key card in hand as he marched through, investigating every nook and cranny.
“Someone was in here,” Gladys insisted. “I had to clean up red paint off of the floor.”
“There is no evidence that anyone has been here,” Rinaldo tersely answered her. A nagging half formed memory tried to tug at the back of his skull at the mention of red paint, but it was too much like those other invasive thoughts he often had and he pushed it away with a firm lock of his inner vault. “It was probably just leftover paint from a touch up job. Please, Gladys, leave it alone. I have a lot of work to do.”
“Not as much as I do,” she muttered under her breath, the pail of water waiting for her to wash the ceramic floors a tenth time. The room felt overly hot even with the A/C blasting through it. It was the overuse of red, he realised, drenching them in its hot tones, giving the room a thick pulse.
Rinaldo left her, irritated she had disturbed his day with her paranoia. He had a busy day ahead.
He had guests to attend to.
Broken Hill Hotel is a horror web serial written by M. Jones. Please subscribe for periodic updates, news, and links to other works, WIPs and general musings. This is a LGBQT and Trans friendly place. All maggots will be exterminated in the hotel basement and the kitchen will be alerted. Thank you for your patronage.