Hotel at the Edge

Chapter 4: The Windows

Out of everything that was fucked up with the place that they’d found themselves in, if there was one blessing to be found in this place at all…

One thing, just one… 

It was the sun roofs that could be found sprinkled about the entire hotel, there weren’t many of them to be found, in fact it almost seemed like they were in entirely different places where they hadn’t been before. 

Opening and closing like the wide maw of a mouth that would yawn at different times of the day, it was interesting to see them close in upon themselves. Shrinking until they got smaller and smaller, until it disappeared like a raindrop on the windshield of a car. There was no telling where it would show up after that, or if it would just show up in the same exact place, only different somehow. They had chased one of them once, the very first time they had seen one of the windows getting smaller and smaller. The gapes of them had been closing all along the walls, sinking the entire hall into darkness. Moment by moment, until not even the faintest bit of light, outside of the harsh and fake sterile lights of the hotel remained. 

It with its own kind of darkness. 

They had continued rushing along the halls, completely looking for the next one, and the next, and the next. 

The housekeepers had glared at them, with their pupil-less red rimmed eyes. They fully believed that had the housekeepers not been stuck in their daily tasks, and their writhing bundles they would have grabbed them and shoved them right alongside those steaming hot bundles that would have scorched their skin with blisters. 

Lucky them. 

It had exhausted them though, running how they had. 

The hunger was already tearing at the inside of their stomach, demanding to be satiated. And the burst of adrenaline had left their legs a quivering mess, begging for some kind of rest or even just fuel to keep going. There was nothing to be had in this kind of place, no sleep and no food that would nourish them back to health. It felt like a damnation, like a slow and torturous death that would leave nothing but agony in its wake, there was no way that they weren’t going to die here. 

Alone, lost, and so very hungry. 

But in the very least they still had lots to time before then, lots of time to explore this weird hotel and everything that it held, and lots of time to see the monsters that laid in the very center. 

 As it turned out, a lot of the windows were like the ones that they had seen before, slowly vanishing until they reappeared, they were never the same as the other. 

One being off or just being an entirely different shape, and another just showing something utterly impossible to the human eyes.   

Honestly, they weren’t even certain if the cycles of day and night even existed here, that in itself felt just as impossible as the windows. Which even that in itself they knew not to be too certain  of something as simple as that, time in itself felt laughable here. This place just made them feel like that, like it would twist even the smallest of things just to watch even the most scientifically assured people crumble up and wither away. Like an itch that would leave you scratching your skin off, until all you had left was bone. This place felt like it would get satisfaction out of making that possible for every single person who walked those halls, if a building could even be alive at this point.

Truthfully, it wasn’t something that they’d put out of the realm of possibility. 

That being said...

The windows were there, giving just the slightest glimpse of the outside world to them. Giving them something other than the living breathing walls, that groaned with the breath of something that once was alive and moving. Something other than the unmoving receptionists at the desk, and something else other than the housekeepers that took things away in the blink of an eye into the hot sweltering room never to be seen again. Something other than… the other things that they had seen here. This was the one thing that seemingly wasn’t touched by anything that even remotely looked human, it was just a simple pane of glass with the stark whiteness of the building to hold it in place.