The Curse of the Hotel Mystique

The Hotel Mystique was encased within the beating heart of a big city. The golden doors revolved in eternal continuity, inhaling and exhaling assortments of life in clouded blurs. The hotel was a refuge for midnight rendezvous, glittering starlets, sweet ingenues and Hollywood Has-Beens slipping and stumbling in dizzied drunkenness. Inexhaustible life occupied every room, except for one. 

From the golden doors a slippery cool wind blew in, climbing slowly up the stairs and seeping under doors. It crept up behind the concierge as he journaled in his diary, and lingered silently in dim corners of the bar, watching people sip sparkling Martinis. There was an omniscience in the wind, like hidden eyes blinking carefully in the mist. A detached observer beholding a phantasma of human interaction.  

In room 202, a woman was getting ready. She was an exhibition for the doting eyes of the observing wind, whose misty body pressed up against the peephole on her door. Her body was a silver slither of light, burning a cool flame against the still air. A kaleidoscope of articles paved a glittering trail behind her as if charmed by a perfect contour. At her feet began a decorative train of silver sequined slips, diamond embellished shawls, chromatic slingbacks and rich floral pochettes all in their place as they climbed the woman’s naked silhouette. She stared at her reflection in the mirror- an image of incompletion. None of her fineries melted onto her skin as sweetly as her lover. 

As the moon drew further into its nightly cove, the small windows of light from within the hotel rooms flickered off in sedated blinks. The parties had finally crashed in heaps of jewels and gems, drifting off from their lustrous world into hazy dreamscapes. The eyes in the wind fluttered down deserted halls, descending the spiral staircase, and settling once more behind the shoulder of the concierge in the grand foyer. The concierge never left this dutiful position. In his hands, he studied his small moleskin journal. A messy cursive script sprawled across each page. He flicked through before stopping on one, his posture stiffening with perplexity. The page read: 

Checked in: 31st October 1999. Room 222. Woman accompanied by a young gentleman. 

Checked out: 1st November 1999, the young gentleman alone fled in haste.  

***

Room 222 was directly opposite room 202. Inside, the eyes of the wind spied a man entangled with a woman. Their bed was large and lacy and the couple slumbered in it like two suns slipping under the horizon. The woman wore a black slip. Her skin was a smooth alabaster plane, her eyelids closing over her eyes like shells encasing pearls. Her companion was much older than she was. His skin much coarser. His eyelids were heavy and creased over his eyes like leather. It was almost unsettling to observe something so pristine beside something so tainted.

From the peephole at the other end of the hall, the woman was almost ready. Her reflection no longer produced an empty image, for she was now draped in her mystic fineries. Around her neck hung a long satin shawl blossoming with an opulent purple shade. Speckled across it like stars were small pearl embellishments, glowing in the soft light of the chandelier above her. Beneath the shawl, she had drenched herself in a pleated cloak scintillating with the hue of liquid gold. She was the brightest thing in the room. Her garments, so precisely selected, could give anyone the impression that she was real. She almost fooled herself when she peered at the ghoul in the looking glass. She looked alive. She looked like she did when she was nineteen and on the brink of life. 

***

There was a queerness to the late-night air that confused the wind, stretching its misty body out into a flat, warm fog that made the halls feel thick and hypnotic. The woman from 202 opened her door and floating cooly to the inside of 222.  

The wind was paralyzed in room 222. So still, it stuck to the walls. The woman gazed at the couple from the foot of their bed. She was not moving much, but there was a glimmer from something sharp and metallic that shifted from within the pleats of her dress and attracted the light from the door. She followed the gleaming stripe up the wall, to the chandelier above them, and then back down to the man in the bed. She knew that rugged face.  

Swiftly and carefully, the woman raised her dagger from within the ruffles of her gown and inserted it in one motion through his heart. He did not struggle much. However, he did open his eyes. And the woman found delight in knowing that the image of her ghost would forever haunt his lifeless body. 

The girl beside him woke up with a start. Though, she did not tremble when she peered over at her departed lover. Instead, she held the woman’s cool hand and followed her downstairs. 

For the first time in 22 years, the woman from 202 felt the magnetic city breeze on her skin. A breeze containing the promise of life. She felt her lungs expand. She felt her heartbeat pumping through her body. She felt her blood warm her up, flooding through her veins like water rushing through dry riverbeds. The woman had freed herself from the curse of The Hotel Mystique and saved the young girl from an afterlife of eternal loneliness within those halls. The incarnation was complete. 

***

The concierge was not often dazzled, moved, or surprised. He possessed the eyes of the observer in the wind. Yet, the shifting golden glow of the woman and the girl escaping through the revolving doors would enchant him for the remainder of his eternal duties at The Hotel Mystique. Here the concierge would remain, sustained only through his diary of revolving life. 

William Nicholson (1872-1949) The Black Mirror