A Thousand Hands
I was having dinner with my girlfriend and her friends when the assignment arrived. The maitre'd silently left it on the outdoor table. It was printed in thin gold letters on a thick piece of paper, the size of a business card. My employers considered it stronger security, after all nobody thinks twice about a business card, and you can't hack a piece of paper. The extravagant printing was a reminder that my employer considered themselves quite cultured.
Mr. Melvin Steward jumped from the balcony of the convention center at 3pm. Recover all storage devices from his vacant room at the Hotel Crimson by 22:00. Contact concierge before retrieval. Room number: 723.
"Is that work?"
My girlfriend surfaced from her friend's ceaseless stream of conversation, but only as a courtesy. She knew I kept strange hours at the consulting job I told her I have. Our relationship worked because neither of us asked many questions. She worked for an investment bank, toiling away as her bosses and the market demanded. This was nothing new.
"Yup." And I was gone. I'm not sure her friends even knew I left. That's how I prefer it.
Consulting a mental map of the city, I could see Hotel Crimson was 3 blocks south and 2 blocks east. It was 20:00, a cool spring evening. Couples walked close down the sidewalk, men with little ponytails and open collared shirts waved down cabs, teenagers ran between everyone. I was a normal person walking down a normal street on a normal night. That's how I prefer it.
* * *
There's nothing particularly interesting about my job. It's retrieval more than anything. Grab a hard drive or USB stick without anyone noticing. Ideally, they will assume they lost it. Important documents don't just sprout legs and walk off, right? My targets are so busy that things fall through the cracks with numbing regularity. Does corporate espionage even happen anymore, they wonder, while screaming at their army of assistants.
* * *
The Hotel Crimson was a fairly bland mid century 10-storey brick monolith meant to evoke the Neoclassical movement of the late 1800s. The corners bulged with rounded bay windows, giving a panoramic view of the city. The rest of the windows were narrow, giving pedestrians the impression it was taller than its modest size.
I breezed through the revolving door of the Hotel Crimson without touching it. A convention must be in town, as the lobby teemed with figures in collared shirts, everyone with a name tag on a lanyard. I took one out from my inside jacket pocket and put it on. The name was blank.
Amber-colored frosted sconces bathed the lobby in a golden haze, but the check-in desk had a severe array of fluorescent lights casting harsh shadows over the clerks.Despite the modern features, nothing could hide the hotel’s age, or how the countless lives that had floated through it had worn it down to the bones. There’s a thick, lived-in smell that carpet cleaning can’t cover. The walls here don’t meet in 45 degree angles, the hallway floors have a slight grade to them; almost like it’s alive.
It didn’t take long for the concierge to clock me, we're both professionals after all. A glance that lasts a little too long, a set jaw, a serious look that's easy to spot with knowledgeable eyes.
"Follow me, sir."
She led me through a throng of convention goers loosening up after a long day of seminars, workshops, and presentations. Glassy eyed and sweaty, they exchanged dull pleasantries and firm handshakes. They appeared to be a single mass of hands, holding phones or the stem of a wine glass.
"Have a nice evening, sir." She led me around an anonymous corner and to the freight elevator.
***
My next most common assignment is sabotage, though it's never anything as cinematic as blowing up a bridge or taking down a plane. It generally consists of nothing more than a malicious line of code inserted into a computer at the right time, or switching out someone's laptop while they're pissing in an airport restroom. Anything to give one rich person a leg up on another rich person. At their level, the benefit lives a few places to the right of the decimal point.
***
The elevator hummed and creaked. I like old hotels like this one. They have character, style, and are easier to navigate. The cookie cutter monstrosities sprouting up around the world all have the same beige tone, the giant lifeless atriums, the hallways always curving slightly to the left so you can’t see the end of them.
***
Termination is always a part of the job, but those assignments are rare. Killing someone is a very messy business, even for experienced technicians like myself. Garroting or sniping is too messy and raises too many questions. Better to make it look like misadventure, or natural causes. A drunk passes out in a puddle and drowns. Heart attack. Aneurysm. Those don't leave puncture wounds, or ballistics, or my DNA all over the scene. Just another guy who pushed himself too hard and punched his ticket. Authorities won't even bother with an autopsy, and by then the substance I put in their Folgers crystals while they slept has already broken down in their body.
***
The elevator doors struggled open and I entered a dim, musty hallway. The wainscoting was falling apart, the carpet was a patchwork of previous repairs, and the lights hummed and spat. Was this the same hotel I entered? At the far end of the hallway was a sharp turn, illuminated by a bright light coming from further down. I could hear the dull roar of partygoers, but no music.
Room 723 was on the far end of this strange hallway, so I started walking. The voices grew as I increased the distance between myself and the elevator. I hadn’t taken more than a few steps when the elevator dinged and shook. That’s a normal sound in any hotel, the heartbeat of the building. People come and go. At that moment I felt like my ship had sunk and a sliver of land was slowly disappearing over the horizon. The elevator doors were already shrouded in darkness.
I turned to face the end of the hallway, which seemed no closer even as I put more distance between myself and the elevator. The far wall was tiled with large, smooth white rectangles with dark gray grouting. As far from rotting wainscoting as possible, a bizarre choice that I pushed to the back of my mind as I prepared for whatever was around the corner.
I stepped into a large, circular room filled with parallel rows ofl bookcases. They took up the majority of the center of the room, leaving a narrow ring around the outside edge. The room was full of mingling conference attendees, each still in their collared shirts, dress shoes, jangling jewelry, smart business attire, and the ubiquitous nametag on a lanyard. As I stepped into the light, they all simultaneously went silent and turned to look at me.
The figures were motionless, eyes following me as I inched along the circumference of the room. The floor was a dark, tight, high-traffic industrial carpet. The walls were black. There were no windows. The light came from a series of concentric fluorescent lights mounted in the middle of the ceiling and radiating outwards. The only sound was the soft whoosh of my loafers on the carpet.
I spotted a hallway entrance and quickly ducked through it. Immediately those strange people began talking again, wine glasses clinked, a distant laugh was heard. I could feel my heart in my throat. There were no exits besides where I came in. The layout of the floor was all wrong, and seemed much bigger than the footprint of the building. The bizarre combination of architectural styles, the room full of strange people. The situation had gotten out of hand. I was no longer in control of the mission, the hotel seemed to be in control of me. I made the decision to abort.
***
Every job has its challenges. Even figuring for every variable, people are apt to behave in irrational ways. I've had to abort missions, but not without cause. It's normal for professionals. Explanations are made, money is returned (minus deposit), clients are unhappy but satisfied that our business is concluded. We are not soldiers for hire, eager to finish a job out of some sense of honor. We're professionals, working stiffs in our own way, relying on word of mouth and a very stringent vetting process. Emotion is regarded as anathema. Good business people know this. By the time we get an assignment, the client is fully aware of what it entails, and what the consequences could be. No one is excited at the prospect of failure, but the alternative is much worse.
***
This new hallway was different from the first. Tacky complicated carpeting, beige walls, doors that took a key card. The smell was different too, not thick and musty, but bland and stuffy, like a perfume was being pumped through the air ducts specifically to not trigger any olfactory memories. It was an odor that did not want attention. The party still roared behind me, but sounded like it was being heard through a closed window. The room numbers ticked by on either side, even on the right, odd on the left. 701, 703, 705.
I could see the dim end of the hallway in the distance, but as I walked, it never seemed to get any closer. There was a table with a vase full of fake flowers against the far wall. I began to feel disconnected from my surroundings, like my head was floating a few inches above my body. 713, 715.
Nothing made sense. My loafers made a soft swoosh on the tight carpet. The evenly spaced lights cast the palest shadows. Foreground and background mixed together into the same blurry middle distance. 721, 725.
No room 723.
The opposite side of the hallway was correctly evenly numbered, but this side was missing a door. There wasn’t even a space where a door could be. I felt this movement inside me, like there was a sudden seismic shift beneath my seams of sanity. There was a rustle of movement to my left.
The entire party of conference attendees were at the mouth of the hallway, silently staring at me. They looked like mannequins, completely motionless, not even their lanyards slowly swinging to betray that they had just been moving. It was a wall of blank faces. I looked back at the door to room 721 and weighed my options. Back the way I came was impossible. The other way was a dead end. I stifled a gulp. My stomach felt like it was in my throat. Then my decision was made for me.
The group of people simultaneously began marching towards me. Equally spaced, shoes hitting the carpet at the same time, making an echoing shush with each step. With their even paces and eyes aimed directly at me, they seemed to move like a single organism. Their arms began to rise, reaching out for me like the millions of legs of a prehistoric insect. That’s when I decided that rather than go left or right, I’d have to go forward.
The handle to room 721 slipped out of my hands, which I realized were covered in a cold film of perspiration. The people kept walking, closing the gap between us, their simultaneous breathing becoming louder and louder. After some cursing and flailing, the door gave way and I leapt in, closing it behind me.
The room was dark, but a stale breeze washed over me. Despite the dark I could tell the room was much larger than a standard hotel suite. The great black maw in front of me felt like touching the infinite. Then the lights clicked on. I was teetering on the edge of a building.
There was no door behind me, I could feel the regular lines of brick and mortar on my back and arms. Ahead of me stretched a daytime city skyline, with skyscrapers pushing up between smaller buildings, all set on the grid of city streets. It looked real, but something was off. The sky seemed… closer than it should. Like it was a ceiling painted blue. The buildings in the distance didn’t seem blurry, just smaller, like someone built a giant diorama using forced perspective. I looked down, slowly, so as to not upset my balance, to see the street below me.
It was a busy midday, cars and taxis slowly grinding through traffic. They didn’t seem far away, though. I was on the 7th floor, but it looked like I was peering down into a miniature model city placed just below my feet. The cars moved forward, but with a weird jerking back-and-forth, like a hundred sets of invisible children’s hands were pushing them along. Or perhaps a single, giant hand, guiding me through this nightmare. Everything looked like it was made out of cardboard and felt: building windows didn’t line up properly, what should have been right angles bulged slightly. The sun was too dim despite the lack of clouds, like the world was illuminated by a dying light bulb.
I needed to get back into the building. My back still against the wall, I scooted sideways, my arm reaching out for balance and to feel for a window casing, the corner of the building, something. I felt the sharp edge of the bricks, and the cold smooth pane of glass, and allowed myself a tiny breath of relief.
The narrow ledge did not allow enough room for me to pivot to face the window, so the task of opening it had to be done blind. Slowly crouching down, I felt the sliver of a handhold in the middle bottom of the window, and pulled up. It was tight, but eventually it gave way and I had an opening just big enough to duck under.
The room was old. Ancient. It looked like what one of those rooms on the 2nd floor of old Western movies saloons must have looked like. There was a modest bed and a table with a large, empty bowl on it. The floor was bare boards that creaked with each step. Stucco walls, thick oak beams on the ceiling. I looked back out the window and it was night. No cityscape, no sun. Stars, sure, but nothing else. It was like I was stuck in some primitive lodging on a space station.
There were stairs. Well, a staircase, going down. There was a square hole in the floor, and a bannister emerging to waist-height. The stairs quickly turned counter-clockwise, the steps disappearing into darkness. Descending would have made the most sense, right? I was high up, I wanted to be at ground level. So far, nothing I’d seen gave the impression that things would work in a logical way. There was also a door, imposing and wooden. I decided that if nothing was going to make sense, my next decision should be equally illogical. The door creaked open.
I was back in the circular room. I had emerged from one of the bookcases that filled the center of it. The concentric circles of fluorescent lights radiated above me; I was dead center. Besides the hum of the lights, it was silent. Then I saw the hands.
They came out from every side of the bookcases, blindly feeling their way across them. A Medusa’s head of hands, each at the end of a smooth black tendril. I couldn’t see where they came from, what nightmare had birthed this creature. The lights were soon dimmed by the pulsing, criss-crossing mass of arms, each hand silently searching me out. Each hand was unique, each suggested an individual entity, though they worked together as a hive mind.
Was this my final punishment? Was I still being toyed with? What dark, ancient evil had decided to push and prod me through this makeshift Hell?
Then they were on me, and the darkness was total.
