Random Floors


Published 'Gothic Net' 2002

The building was a mile high but the lift had only two buttons. One was a panic alarm, the other an unnumbered floor button. From the wear evident on its surface, the panic alarm had been used most frequently. The floor button took the lift wherever it needed to go.

You could have used the panic button, there was nothing stopping you at all. But you didn't, did you? You preferred the spicy tang of danger every time you waited for the unlit numbers to light, the floor to reveal itself, then whatever was standing beyond the lift doors to reveal itself as well, sometimes in the most obvious, schlong-swinging way. Those few times the doors opened on darkness; or swamp; or hellish scenes of rotted corpses or empty breakfasts -- they never put you off. It would take more than that. Your question was: did death come first? Or ground or mezzanine or basement or the highest story of all.

Well, that is for me to answer. I am your own personal hitman, hired on purpose to remove the apartments of your soul one by one till reaching the nothingness you were always meant to be. In truth, though, I'm only here for the money, you must know that. I've nothing against you -- you're quite a nice chap really, though your dress sense is prehistoric, your long hair harbours all manner of ecosystems and your halitosis would give NATO commanders nightmares. So, only the money. Remember that. When you feel my hands in the small of your back -- when you see the lift doors opening on nothing -- when you face ten minutes of falling -- remember all that. It's only the money.

The hotel reception could not be persuaded to give me a room key when they did not know what room I was in. "Could be one of millions," they said. "How the hell are we supposed to know?"

So I took the lift and found myself on floor 746. Room 91 was unlocked, so I took it. There was an old chip fryer in the corner and a campfire in the bathroom, neither of which instilled much confidence in me being able to find a meal. The mummified remains of a rat in the corner of the bedroom was even worse, so I decided to go in search of food forthwith.

The rat remains are just someone's ploy to keep me company. Better than a colour TV with or without remote. Still, don't forget, I had the whole hotel to roam, before I'd even begin to know whether other lift shafts carried service staff or management flunkeys to boardrooms in the sky. In a sense, I suspected there were further floors between the floors I knew -- only reachable by finding vertical chimneys with ragged gaps or complex pulley-systems (dumb waiters?) from kitchen to kitchen. Nothing grand. Indeed, there was nothing grand at this grand hotel, short of the mock one in the piano bar.

I found food on a floor called mezzanine. A middle-of-the-order feeding place with an eat-as-much-as-you-like buffet, in the hope the rat had already-got-yer-appetite. I eyed a full guy at my own table, one who drooled sooner than drink. Was that you? I didn't care -- I relentlessly feasted on platters and platters of pizza laced with chili sauce, until there were earwigs of it squeezing out the corners of my eyes. A random restaurant in a haphazard hotel. So, surely, you were not that second guy with the nifty ivory toothpick who sat just out of sight beneath the huge curved mirror. A third guy, behind me, was not even noticed as being there at all, let alone given the credit of invisibility. The waiter crept up and prattled so endlessly of weather I wished I was deaf ... or dead.

After feasting there was a sudden whistle from an old, unused PA system. Spider-webs and insects scurried from the unfamiliar sound, and dust provided a visual semblance of sound-transference through the spice-tinged atmosphere. But the music died before it was born, and all I was left with was a memory of a song I thought perhaps I may have wanted to hear. The lack of possible sound made the silence suddenly quieter, and I was sure that my few fellow diners could hear my heart, my gurgling stomach, my nasty thoughts. There were coughs and shiftings in the restaurant, and a ping as a toothpick flipped through the air and impacted upon my wine glass.

Maybe that was you. Perhaps you were trying to catch my attention. I wish I'd listened, or looked, or gone exploring among the dusty table settings for you. Waiters with sweat towels draped across their forearms questioned me with raised eyebrows, but I did not want any more wine or coffee or mints, and the meal would go on my bill. I wondered whether I'd find the same room again.

The stairs led up, down and around, but you always knew they were there. Didn't you? Why, then, did you use the lift again? Why not throw yourself at the mercy of steps and stairs, where workings cannot be sabotaged and risers and treads are sure and firm ... but where true direction is sometimes harder to find than true love? Ah, maybe because the lift represented what you had never done with your life, painted a false picture of falser hopes. The stairs ...up, and down, and around ... were just too dependable.

As I came out of the lift on an indeterminate story, the sliding doors did a fine job of indecisive wanking. But when they had eventually eased to a tentative halt in the open-handed position, there you were, at last, standing brightly silhouetted against the hotel corridor's mock flock walls, amid a dirge of musak piped straight from the foyer. You had long hair, yes, but not, I guess, harbouring every eco-system under the sun. It looked as if multiple shampooings had permanently flossed your blonde undulations into a cross between soft lazy sensuality and urgent power-dressing. You were a hitman's dream. A suitable celebrity case for surreptitious silencers. And yet, it was me that was surprised by the sex, not you.

I was soon to learn that nothing was random. Well, nothing, except the fatalistic way you went about seducing me, in that very corridor, without bothering with the privacy of a room. I vented my spleen at the heavy-handed approach, before arriving at a far too easy an ejaculation all over your face. I guess you were pre-empting my mission. Fooling me into believing that if I had a gun, it spent its bullets far too wildly.

Back in my room, via several staggering flights, I recouped the plot. I would never now be able to recognise the true target of my mission. That floosie with the exploded follicles, well, she was merely a decoy, a scapegoat ... a metempsychosis (big word) for the prehistoric guy with tangled locks whom I really pursued. His soul was transmigrating, then, from body to body, and where would he turn up next? I shrugged and crashed out on my two-sleeper.

There was a floor that no story recognised. A truly random floor that neither hotel staff or guests visited: a floor with thick-pile car pets nodding away in the back windows of the soul -- and shuttered windows. The other floors were well known, recognised and fully occupied by the transitory traffic that is so important to an establishment's profits. They even got dysoned from time to time to keep the beams and motes at bay. Aurally disinfected, too, for musak removal. The single floor that remained random, as haphazard as the reservations and bookings themselves, was never cleared of darkness or the invisible dust that darkness tended to incubate. I saw this floor in my dream and determined to visit it, come waking. You were there, of course, on that middle of middle mezzanines, making mock of my attempts to track you down.

I was the only hitman that slept in late, a slug-a-bed non-urgency besetting my body and soul: till with rancid mouth and sore, bleary eyes, I slumped from between duvet and mattress into a further lying position on the floor. There I slept on till the draughts ate my bones. I reached the bathroom, sodden at groin and armpits, ready to see, by means of shaving-mirror, whether I was already hit before I'd hit. How many times had I woken up dead? A question I may, one day, not be able to answer.

The breakfast, that morning, was as empty as ever. I knew where the bacon joints were buried though. And I had laid the eggs myself.

Now to the floor of my dreams. For the final reckoning. With you.

Could be one of millions. How the hell was I supposed to know.

The lift was still shuttling in its strangely persistent search for sex with one of its kind; it was a pity the revolving doors were only to be found at the hotel's entrance, otherwise I would have only been too pleased to do a spot of match-making. No point in depending, however, on its easy-going shafts to reach the random floor of floors. I needed serendipity, not mayhem.

On the walk from floor to floor (and back again) I met fellow guests galore all pretending to be you, with a friendly Good Morning or surly reciprocation which was healthier indeed than false bonhomie or ill-humoured turnings away of the head which pleased me no end. They were all you or none of them were you. I could never be sure.

I reached the dark-clogged floor with very little trouble. I was amazed how I had never found it before. I gripped my gun. I felt the tiny heads of creatures underfoot, squelching with each pace. Their bleats finally dying out as I scoured every corner of my blindness. Despite this, I knew you were there. Waiting in the last oubliette of the hotel, where neither dumb waiter or thinnest lift could reach.

I heard your breathing.

The building was ... how many miles high? And only two buttons on the bell-boy's uniform. I remembered that huge head of blonde hair, that massive mane being whipped back like a fly-fisher casting off with a million rods. The shutting and opening of the synaptic valves made some meagre strobing sense as I fell from floor to floor of my consciousness until reaching the archetypal way-station. I saw your leonine features forming from a darker darkness than even solid night. I pulled the trigger: and the roulette wheel spun.

And the unanswered question was finally asked.