The Way Inn (37 page)

We were entubed in the skywalk. It rose gently as it crossed the motorway, and at the summit of this rise, above the central reservation, was the break: a twenty-foot drop onto concrete and crash barriers and speeding juggernauts. A yellow plastic membrane covered the hole, pulsing obscenely from the wind's movements beyond.

The tempo of the traffic was the steady, fast beat of the small hours, not the constant heavy roar of the day. But while it could be heard, it could not be seen: the lower half of the glass tube was frosted to obscure the view. The idea, perhaps, was to make the skywalk true to its name and show only the sky, so conference-goers could imagine themselves drifting through the heavens without being disturbed by the reality of the heavy-duty infrastructure that made their seminar, their espresso and their muffin possible. As long as they could ignore the constant bellowing of it, and I knew they could, with their meaningless prattle and performance laughter. I hated them, I hated them all. They had been churned into a mass by their environment; they had let it happen, becoming an industrial sludge to be processed in industrial facilities.

In the thunder of the motorway there was another gathering sound, a splitting shriek with an unmistakable note of triumph. Rushing up behind us came the darkness, limned with improbable chroma, gasping with overloaded bandwidth. Pulling it like a parachute was Hilbert, his eyes the standby diodes of Hell, his skin awash with sweat and blood, erupting with lesions, the flesh vehicle collapsing under the supernatural forces being conjured through it.

“The bottom line,” he said, words hissed through dripping, fraying lips.

“Here we are, Hilbert,” I said, failing to conceal my fear. Dee kept glancing to the end of the skywalk, and I could sense her calculating the survival odds of a jump. I knew those odds were poor. “No more running. Nowhere else to go.”

Come closer
.

“Negotiation is a thrill, but in the end there always has to be a decision,” Hilbert said, advancing, plainly savoring his approach. “No more tricks or tactics or breaks. You are no longer dictating terms. Due diligence is done, the books are open. Are you in or out?”

As I had suspected, the wild sensation of potency, of influence, that had been gathering within me since donning the pinstripe suit had dissipated with our arrival on the skywalk. It was gone. This wasn't the endlessly flexible and rewarding inner hotel, that glorious, vigorous, unquenchable labyrinth. It wasn't even the outer hotel.

I wanted to be back in the hotel. I wanted that feeling, that capability. I wanted to be back inside Way Inn. Always.

Dee was staring at me. I was, I realized, not answering—I was undecided, and she knew it. Courage was leaving her expression and with it whatever faint affection she held for me. I was losing her, and I wanted her back. More than I wanted the hotel.

“In or out?” I said. “Hilbert, I'm already out. So are you. This isn't Way Inn. We've left the hotel.”

If Dee and I were above the central reservation, Hilbert had reached the inside lane, a National Express coach-width away.

He stopped, flexed his hands, looked down at them. The darkness had receded, sucking back into the hotel, leaving him behind.

“Unresponsive,” Hilbert said. “Can't . . .”

Without a sound, a terrible wasting took hold of him—he thinned, his body reducing to a wire outline under his suit, then little more than a two-dimensional image. “My God,” he breathed, the lines in his face multiplying and deepening, his eyes sinking into shadowed sockets, their fire extinguished, his hair graying and withering. In a second he aged six decades.

“Way to go,” I said, giving my best service-industry smile.

In obvious panic, Hilbert wheeled back toward the hotel and took a couple of frail steps down the incline of the skywalk. The effort of that modest maneuver was too much for his drastically impoverished body. He crumbled; he did not fall or break apart but simply disintegrated. His suit lost cohesion along the line of every white pinstripe, separating into a mass of black ribbons that writhed around the diminishing man within, consuming what was left. Faint UV trails snaked out of the resulting heap and streamed together, neat and parallel, back to the first-floor reception, seeking corners and edges.

I ventured toward the black tangle that was all that remained of Hilbert. The ribbons were profoundly fragile, nigh weightless, already further deteriorating to graphite dust from the touch of a draft. An incinerated video tape, scorched residue needing nothing more than a stiff broom. A faint smell of acetone.

“Did you know that would happen?” Dee said. She stayed where she was, as close as possible to the yellow plastic barrier.

“No,” I said, returning to her. “Not exactly. I thought tricking him out of the hotel would deprive him of his special abilities. Weaken him. Give us a straight fight. Not this.”

“Liminal space,” Dee said. “He didn't see the exit because there was no exit. No threshold. He didn't realize the extent to which the world has adapted itself to Way Inn.”

I smoothed the jacket of my suit, an action Dee watched with odd intensity. I wanted to be jubilant, but her manner stopped me.

“So that's that then,” I said, wanting to prompt some recognition from her of what we had achieved. “All over.”

“Not quite.”

She thrust out her arms and grabbed my shoulders. For a second I thought she was about to embrace me, but her seriousness was all wrong, threatening, and she grabbed with force.

“What—”

In a fluid, practiced movement, she stepped past me, hooked her leg behind mine and, pushing from the shoulders, knocked me to the floor. Any protest I might have made was stifled by the air again being forced from my lungs. The eruption of agony in my side was so severe I felt consciousness waver. She straddled me, pinning my arms. A hand into an inner pocket of the leather jacket.

The steak knife emerged, streaked with Hilbert's blood. She must have taken it from my jacket when I changed clothes. It was raised it over me, point down.

“What the hell are you doing?” I gasped. Somehow I freed an arm from under Dee's knee and with it grabbed her wrist, staying her hand.

“You hesitated,” she said. There was no emotion in her words, it was nothing more than a plain statement of fact. “In or out, you didn't know.”

“I was scared! I couldn't think straight!” She was strong, stronger than I was, and she had gravity and poise on her side. As she shifted her weight she sent paralyzing waves of pain through my chest. And at just the moment I wanted to prove my lack of temptation to Dee, to myself, I found I yearned for the power the hotel gave its servants.

“You wavered.”

I wavered. My arm buckled and the blade came down. I closed my eyes.

I opened my eyes. No impact, no pain. Impossibly, she had missed. The knife had gone under my armpit, into the space between my chest and left arm, piercing only my jacket and the carpet.

Pushing down on the knife, Dee cut with it, opening a long tear in the back of my jacket. She then stood, grabbed the jacket by the tear, and pulled. More tearing, more pain from my ribs.

“It's ruined,” Dee said. “Take it off. We're getting rid of it.”

I sat up, cowed, and slipped the jacket off my shoulders.

“Trousers too,” Dee said, working the knife into the seam that connected one of the sleeves to the jacket, amputating it. “All of it. You have a change of clothes, don't you?”

I nodded. A damp suit, but also the travelling clothes I had arrived in, the outfit I had been wearing when I first saw her in the bar. Those would do. I undid the fly and slipped off the trousers. Dee took them, stood on one leg and, holding the other leg, started sawing through the crotch with the knife.

“That's a disturbing sight,” I said, dressing.

“Castration imagery got you down?” Dee said, raising an eyebrow. “It's for your own good.”

“Not all that reassuring.”

Once the suit was no more than shreds, Dee pierced the yellow membrane and cut a slit into it, revealing the constellation of white lights adorning the MetaCenter. She stuffed the remains of the suit through this hole, more mystery rags for the roadside. Then she turned to me and made a “hand it over” gesture.

There was no doubt what she wanted. I gave her the black keycard. Without ceremony she bent it back and forth until it snapped and flung both pieces out into the rain-streaked motorway air.

We stood in silence. Not silence, not with the song of articulated freight beneath our feet, but with no words. Then Dee took out her own keycard, the white one, broke it apart like mine, and it, too, disappeared through the hole, along with the steak knife.

“Souvenirs are for serial killers,” Dee said.

The ill-mannered breeze that elbowed into the skywalk through the tear in the plastic scattered the fine black particles that marked the spot where Hilbert had ceased to be. The sky above us was primed for dawn.

Crystalline cubes of pulverized safety glass scrunched underfoot as we returned through the first-floor lobby. Panels of drywall had been crushed and heavy furniture tossed aside by Hilbert's final charge. I paused to straighten a painting.

“This had better not end up on my bill.”

“Maybe we should leave another way,” Dee said. “We have many exits to choose from. Where's home for you?”

By the time we reached the lobby of the Royal Docks Way Inn in East London, breakfast was being served in the restaurant. As suits queued up for their sausages, more suits waited at the front desk. Trestles were set up, scaly with laminated credentials. Flat-screens scrolled through schedules of talks and seminars in the business center.

“Well, this is my stop,” I said.

“For home?”

“For a start. Then the emergency room, I think. Then I might visit my mum. How about you?”

“I might as well leave here as well. Been awhile since I've been to London. If you don't count ExCel, Earl's Court, Olympia, Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted . . .”

“But you have somewhere to go?”

She fixed me with a mocking look. “I've got three postgraduate degrees and four years' salary in the bank. I'll be fine.”

“Won't Way Inn want you back?”

“I don't think so. I think Way Inn has achieved exactly what it wanted to achieve. Two unreliable servants gone at once. You, however—it might miss a promising prospect like you, if it's capable of regret.”

“No. It lost three unreliable servants at once. I think it knew that. I've changed.”

“I know.”

“It'd be great to see you again some time.”

“Maybe I'll give you a call.”

“I'd like that.” Was there any more to say? All around us was the self-satisfied human meshing of the first day of a fair: the hellos, the hugs, the shrieks and backslaps, boasting and teasing. Jokes known by their punch lines, haka of feint and dodge. In that froth of reunion, we were saying good-bye.

“Are you going to the station?” Dee asked.

“This is what I hate most of all,” I said. “At the end of an event, there are all these people you half-know from spending a few days with them and you say good-bye to them. But you're all going in the same direction: check-out, bus, airport, train . . . you run into the people you've just said good-bye to, and you have to linger in their company while you wait for the shuttle to arrive or for your bags to come around the carousel. There's no fixed point where you can say a proper, real, final good-bye. You can't make a clean break, it's all smeared out.”

“Liminal.”

“Quite.”

“And what you want is a proper, real, final good-bye?”

“A proper one, yes. From you, however, maybe not a final one.”

Dee smiled. Then she hugged me, firmly and warmly, her chin cupped against my shoulder. My ribs howled complaint and I didn't care.

“Good-bye, Neil.”

“Good-bye, Dee.”

She released me, but was still looking over my shoulder. “Isn't that your friend?”

I knew exactly who she meant before I turned to see. Maurice had been queuing at the front desk, three bags attached to different parts of his body, brow shiny with sweat. He was leaning out of the queue, looking at us, mouth slack. When he saw my face he gave an open-mouthed smile and darted toward us with surprising speed.

“Neil! What a delightful surprise! Or is it? A surprise, I mean—of course it's a delight!”

“Hello, Maurice. Nice to see you. How have you been?”

“How have I been?” He ostentatiously examined his watch. “In the, what, twenty-four hours since we last met? Not much to report, old thing. Same old, same old. You look like you've been in the wars—she been beating you up?”

“No, we . . .” I looked to Dee, but she was gone. My heart stopped and raced at once. But she was gone, gone from my side, gone from the lobby. No lingering.

“Away like a grayhound,” Maurice said, seeing my astonishment. He winked at me. “I'm beginning to take it personally.”

“We had just said good-bye.”

“I'm sure you'll run into her again. Always the way with these things. The usual suspects. I take it you're here for the conference?”

It was impossible to answer. All I could think of was Dee's voice, her face.

“No,” I said. “No, I'm not.”

Never was Dee more beautiful than when she gazed deep into the patterns and tessellations of the hotel. In those moments she lost the wariness and hardness that had built up during years alone. She lived for harmony and recursion. Not to leave something incomplete.

Maurice creased his brow. “So what are you doing here?”

I smiled at him. Nothing. That was the answer. Nothing left to do but leave.

“I'm checking out,” I said.

I owe my agent, Antony Topping, far more than just thanks. His advice and moral support have shaped and buttressed this book since its earliest stages. I'm grateful also to Chris Wellbelove at Greene & Heaton and Jim Rutman at Sterling Lord Literistic in New York. At Fourth Estate, Mark Richards put his faith in the book and made excellent edits; Nicholas Pearson guided it toward publication with much kindness. Thanks also to the rest of those on the publishing side at Fourth Estate and elsewhere: Stephen Guise, Michelle Kane, Tara Hiatt, Anne O'Brien, Jo Walker and, at Harper Perennial in New York, Barry Harbaugh.