We find it very hard to turn down a story about a sketchy little hotel, especially when there's some shenanigans going on with the five boys on the fourth floor.
Welcome to the Mayfly, and do enjoy your stay (like the characters here, you'll never forget it).
-The Editors
Some of the rumours about the guests Wendy let slip away. Laughing about that stuff made the job bearable, and she’d recently started thinking that was a bad idea. She wanted the impetus to leave it, after all.
Inevitably, some stories snaked through her defences. She was even curious enough to verify a few for herself. That was how it went with the boys on the fourth floor.
There were five of them, all roughly the same age and appearance, with only the blue shade of their suits and the sparkle of their hair products to differentiate them. They came across as everyday business youths, not quite Wendy’s favourite people walking the planet. If they’d been older and more successful, they would’ve put up somewhere swisher than the Mayfly, which she considered to be well on the way to becoming a horrible tip – but here they were, their rooms all in a row, staying for a week.
Wendy worked in the bar, and also the club when money was tight, which it often was. She heard about them via Lola from the night shift, who was always first in with the irresistible tittle-tattle. They’d been here two nights; she said it had happened on both. That third night, when she finished work, Wendy took a wander up in the lift and verified.
The next night, co-ordinating their breaks, she told Freddie. Freddie worked in the kitchen. He wasn’t the head chef, but he was the best cook in the place, so a lot of his moody ways were tolerated. He didn’t listen to rumours from anybody else, but he trusted her and knew that if she was relaying it, it had to be worth hearing. She couldn’t wait to tell him, had almost texted him through the day, but they’d had a brief thing the year before, and though it had ended well, she preferred not to get in touch outside of working hours.
After the kitchen closed, he came to the club and scoped out the situation. Luckily, the boys had a fairly early night by their standard. Even so, she gave Freddie a few free drinks to make sure he stuck around, but not so many that he was stumbling when they went up so he could carry out his own check.
Wendy leant against the wall opposite. Freddie pressed his ear to the doors and stepped back to peer at the cracks along the bottom. He did this in a practised way, looking over at her with a half-smile. The sounds were softly slapping thuds, plus tickings and chitterings that made Lola, Wendy, and now Freddie think, somehow, of laughter in church. A pale red light pooled onto the hallway carpet. Perspectives felt like they shifted, so that the door pulled away and became smaller, then swam forward bigger than before. The ends of the corridor looked like they were narrowing to a point, then opening up again. It was a shame the days of keyholes were gone, even in an old dump like this, but Wendy had never known those days to start with.
When Freddie had heard and seen enough, they left and stood on the pavement outside, looking up at the windows to see more of that red light around the edge of the curtains. It radiated from all five of their rooms, and went from pale to deep and pale again.
Wendy raised her eyebrows at him. He knew what she was thinking.
—
It was a stark fact: Freddie robbed the Mayfly’s guests. Wendy had known this for some time, even before they had their brief get-together, and had gratefully accepted a few quid from his gains when the rent was pressing down on her. Once she may’ve had reservations about it, but after a few years working there, she found it funny.
It helped that he had self-imposed standards. He liked there to be a challenge to it, a risk, as he felt he proved something that way. His method was to slip into their rooms with a handy master key while they were in the club. He would then hide underneath the bed, wait till they came back and fell asleep, and then chloroform them. It wasn’t exactly chloroform, rather a concoction of his own mixed from cleaning fluids stored in the bowels of the Mayfly, but it encouraged the symptoms of a hangover, leaving the guests with the sense that they must’ve been a little too carefree the night before. Wendy liked to tease him about this, saying it would pose even more of a challenge and risk if he simply left them sleeping while he pocketed their goods, and although Freddie took her point, he still used his chloroform.
He always targeted young men – business types being a favourite, in fact – as opposed to tipsy middle-aged women, despite the latter being more likely to have cash and jewellery. He also restricted himself to three robberies a year, that year being the financial year. It was late October when the boys checked in, and he’d relieved a young male sales rep of a laptop in June, so he was due another shot if you asked Wendy.
‘I don’t see,’ she said, ‘how you can’t not do it.’
He took a long draw on his tab, smiling his inward smile. They were outside the kitchen on another break, Wendy standing in the heat from the door, Freddie keen on cooling down, pacing around as he mulled it over.
‘Do they go to sleep, do we know?’ he asked.
‘No one knows or can say.’ She shrugged. ‘But if not, so what?’
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘So what?’
He paced some more, distractedly scrutinising the end of his cigarette, as if he wasn’t sure it was still lit. Wendy didn’t know whether or not this was a bad sign. He’d never talked about an upcoming robbery before, but he’d never needed to.
‘Are you worried your chloroform won’t work on them?’ she asked.
He snorted. ‘Whaaat? It’d work on a whale, that shit.’
‘They don’t look dangerous in the club,’ she said. ‘They’re always laughing and carrying on. They don’t bother anyone. They look like typical business bores.’
‘Typical?’
‘Typical up to a point.’
‘Yeah. It’s beyond that point that matters. That’s where I’ll be. Beyond that point.’
‘I suppose.’ She shrugged again. ‘I just can’t see how you can’t.’
He flicked his cigarette over the wall. They went inside and got back to work.
That was Friday night. The boys came to the bar for a few, and then dutifully filed into the club. The weekend didn’t lure them to the city centre, which wasn’t bad if you knew where you were heading and what you wanted. It also didn’t provoke them into drinking any more thunderously than the steady, moderate pace they’d taken over the previous days.
She didn’t know how this looked to Freddie when he came in. He absorbed a lot about them without it being obvious, even on the occasions when he walked extremely close to them. She didn’t offer him any free drinks that night.
She found herself observing them afresh, like playing a song you’d loved all your life for someone special and hearing it differently. Not that her opinion of them underwent any massive change. She didn’t like them, even though their conduct had given her no strong reason to feel that way. She considered the world of the rich to be opulent but hopelessly narrow, missing all the best toys they could’ve had, and therefore it wasn’t jealousy befouling her. She had no political stances, so viewing them as agents of capitalism didn’t bother her much. She supposed she was jaded, that was all. Mainly she noticed that they never approached women, and more to the point, women never approached them. It struck her as significant, but she didn’t know if it really was, didn’t know if Freddie would factor it in.
When he wasn’t looking at them, or his phone, he spared Wendy a few glances. She stared back. In turn, she made her face expectant, lightly mocking, understanding, hopeful, and pitying. She’d saved that one for last, aware of what worked on him. She didn’t know if anyone else at the Mayfly, those recent dalliances he’d had with exotic cleaners, was aware of his robberies. Freddie wasn’t the confiding sort even when shagging was involved, so she doubted it. She doubted it doubly when it came to this effort.
He waited till the boys bought what would be their last round. He drained his own bottle, gave her a ‘here goes nothing’ grin, and left for the fragrant bowels.
Half an hour later, the boys got ready to leave. Wendy found her breath shortening at the sight of them slipping their suit jackets on. It was hard to keep from staring at them, hard to keep from following.
She dawdled for a while when the club emptied and the lights came up. She hung around in reception, joking and chatting with Cancer Phil on the desk. She drifted away and back a few times, then drifted away and upstairs without him noticing.
The fourth floor was silent except for the train rumbling in her ears. She wondered if she could correctly judge how loud her footsteps landed on the carpet. She walked the full length of the corridor and back before she found the nerve to stop. Freddie should’ve left signs indicating which room he was in, but there were none that she could see.
She listened at every door. She made herself stay for a count of ten at each, which was the least she could do. Those wet but chunky sounds were the same, as were the shades of red. At the end, she put her fingertips to the middle door and gave it a push. It didn’t open, but it felt warmer than it should have. Unless that was her body playing tricks.
She went straight home, avoiding the after hours places that would’ve shown the boys a time or two. There was a sensation stopping her from the possibility of enjoyment, and it took a while before she could name it. It was guilt, guilt that she’d coaxed Freddie into this. That he probably would’ve gone ahead even without her input didn’t let her sleep any easier.
—
It was hard, but Wendy stuck to not getting in touch outside work. Every time she picked her phone up for something else, the guilt pinpricked her, worse and worse. She drifted through Saturday afternoon more idly than she liked, then got the bus in, her breathing awry once more.
The hotel was still standing, the fourth floor windows weren’t lying in a twinkling spray on the pavement, but she didn’t relax and was right not to. Freddie didn’t turn up for the start of his shift.
Her phone came out when she heard, but again she held back, though the guilt made her legs flighty. She thought of asking for the night off and running away.
He eventually came in, half an hour late. They said his boss shouted at him and he took it, which was so not him it could scarcely be believed. In a while, at the normal time she would’ve done it, she texted him to arrange their break. He took a good few minutes to reply, and it was a terse one, but he agreed to meet. She nearly dropped to the floor with relief.
She was full of nerves, as bad as the guilt in their own way. She forced herself into joking mode, as she often did when anxiety swooped, but couldn’t get there that night. It had never felt less like a Saturday to her, and she was too young to feel like that.
Freddie paced round, smoking. He looked pale, but so did everyone this far away from summer. She thought he also looked thinner, a lot thinner, but couldn’t see how he’d lost a couple of stone in less than twenty-four hours.
‘Hi there,’ she said.
‘Hi,’ he said. Steam came from a vent, and he blew smoke at it.
‘So … did you get anything nice?’ she asked.
‘What I expected,’ he told her, his voice sounding fainter. ‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing? What a con. My rent’s … anyway. Did they not go to sleep or what?’
‘They did not go to sleep,’ he said.
‘Oh shit. How long were you stuck there?’
‘Pretty much all night. I think.’
‘You think?’
He looked at her a little more steadily. ‘They did something with time,’ he said.
He’d picked the middle room of the five. He found it aesthetically pleasing to be in the middle, there was no more reasoning behind it than that. He gave only a cursory look around, as it went against his rules to locate anything worth filching before he’d employed the chloroform. His first impression was that the room was too neat, the bed not even sat on before going down to the bar, the shower not dripping, the biscuits untouched, no sex toys exposed. This was fine. He’d been expecting stranger than that.
He slid under the bed, feeling the old potency. The door opened twenty minutes later, and he enjoyed thirty seconds of never being more alive, which usually gave way to the boredom of waiting for them to kick off their shoes, desecrate the toilet, drop their clothes, sink the mattress, laugh and tut at their phone, then deepen their breathing. But none of that happened. He wasn’t given the chance to grow bored.
The walls on either side of the bed vibrated, shimmered, and then melted away entirely. This went for the corresponding walls in all the boys’ rooms, bar the furthest away to the left and right, so Freddie was left in one giant room with his bed smack in the middle. He wondered, mildly, if the ceiling would come down.
He could see feet in shoes, but then the shoes and all the clothes were thrown off. The feet stayed as normal for a few seconds then became deep brown, something thickly barked and three-clawed. Ten such feet clumped together near his bed and commenced what Freddie took to be dancing. They slowly spun around, occasionally bumping into one another. He couldn’t see where the red light emanated from, but it washed over everything, even under the bed. It couldn’t have been prettier.
They spoke, sometimes in English, mostly in raspy clickings. He wasn’t sure about the English part: perhaps they spoke their language but his brain translated a few lines. He gathered they were celebrating, if that was the word, a sad festival.
He was listening hard, hoping for more clues, when he noticed the feet had stopped dancing. They lined up on the right of the bed. He instinctively budged over to the left, but it didn’t help. The bed began to rise, to float, the headboard grazing the ceiling.
The boys looked to be made of wood, a wood that splintered to reveal white before closing over and splintering elsewhere. Pink balloon-like extrusions grew off them and shrunk wetly. Bumping them together explained the impact sounds. The faces were long, crude approximations of the human, mostly immobile and sombre. Their eyes were bright blue and their tongues like a dog’s. They had thickly curled black hair that looked as though it was swaying and billowing deep underwater.
One of them beckoned for him to stand up, hands the same claws as the feet, and Freddie did so, more meekly than he’d done anything since childhood. He still had the chloroform bottle and rag in his hand, but they took no notice of it and he was embarrassed that he’d ever thought it might work on them. They asked, in English with one inner voice, what he was doing here.
Freddie saw no other option than to explain, honestly and thoroughly. When he had finished, they didn’t seem to mind very much. They were more put out when they asked if he knew any poetry and he had to admit he didn’t, not so much as a single line.
He found the courage to ask where they were from and what they were doing here themselves. The first question was answered with a gesture towards the outside that Freddie intuited meant more than the merely outside. As for the second, they said they were honouring the death of one of their gods. He stood for the same notions, filled the same space in their sky, as Adonis. They often visited on this week, they said, though this was their first time at the Mayfly. Freddie helplessly asked if they liked it, but they only laughed.
He also asked, in a croaky voice, if he could leave. He was frightened. He’d gotten into something unexpected and would like to go home. They laughed again, though without any sadism in it. They said they were afraid that, no, he couldn’t leave. He had invaded their celebration; it would be an insult to their god for him to leave before it was finished.
Freddie sat on the bed, now back on the floor without him having noticed the descent. He thought about chloroforming himself, but when he checked he was no longer holding the bottle. It was on the windowsill, the liquid now red. Tears rolled down his cheeks.
They held out their hands and had him dance with them till the sun came up. They spun him slowly round, and they bumped into him with their sacs, warm to the touch. He thought patches of his skin hardened then returned to normal but his mind was carrying out all sorts of strange experiments. He learned something about their departed god, who was a good man, his tale full of drama and fight and romance, and it was saddening he was dead even if it was tens of thousands of years ago. He told them he was sorry about it, and he cried for that reason, not the old one of fear. They appreciated his words. They were good boys and so was Freddie.
At times he was floating, and at times it was as though the rising sun had fooled him and dipped back down. Then everything finally went dark, he was unspeakably exhausted, and when he came back to life he was in his own bed and it was a bright noon.
—
‘I wandered lonely as a cloud,’ Wendy said.
‘Uh?’
‘Poetry. That’s a line of poetry. You must’ve known that one.’
‘I do, now you mention it, but I couldn’t think of it there and then. You know. For some reason.’ He looked at her sharply. ‘That’s your takeaway from this?’
‘Just trying to get my head around it,’ she said.
‘I’m still sad about their god,’ he said after a pause. ‘He was great. I can’t get my mind off it.’
‘It’ll pass,’ Wendy said.
‘I’m not sure it will, if I’m honest.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Wendy said.
He sighed and flicked his cigarette up and away. It was long past the time they should’ve been back at work, so after a quick hug he initiated, they went inside.
The boys, if she could still call them that, came to the bar and went to the club as per their routine. Wendy was too scared to look at them, and made certain she was at the other end of the bar when one of them wanted to be served, in case they divined her part in it and made her dance and float with them all night as well.
At ten o’clock, a mild buzz went round the staff, and Wendy knew what was coming before she was told. Freddie had walked out, never to return. He did it quietly, not with the volley of abuse and thrown crockery everyone expected would be the way. He took off his whites and slipped through the door, his head down. Wendy texted him a few times, but got no reply.
She had Sunday and Monday off. The boys checked out on Monday, leaving big tips. Cancer Phil was a happy man. The new guests voiced no complaints about their rooms.
Wendy worked on. Once a week, she grew sad about their god – she pictured him pining away, full of lost love on a windswept crag under a green sky – and though she waited, it never quite passed for her either.
-30-
Barrie Darke has had several plays performed, and has worked with the BBC, but prose was always the main thing. He lives and writes in the north east of England, and teaches Creative Writing in a basement. He has also worked in a prison, where he learnt more than the students. He has been published in the US by Menda City Review, Nossa Morte, Demon Minds, and Infinite Windows, among others.