Imagine the public spaces of the hotel— most clearly the lobby, gym, and restaurant areas— as a type of stage; a series of strictly bounded spaces through which various bodies enter and exit, and where some of them perform. The lobby is the largest by area but also the most sparse. There are pale, polished stone floors, dark timber walls with false inset frames spaced along their length at regular intervals, and a ceiling almost three stories high from which hang four small and tasteful electric chandeliers. In the night these clusters of cut glass and aluminium (pale metal, almost white) throw a soft grey light into the huge room— at night the business of checking in is slower but more intimate. There are tired faces of professionals pulling suitcases, taxis and international accents, and no children anywhere. The smells of cigarettes cling to jackets and gusts of cold air blow in from the wide front doors, which open onto frigid nights with no clouds where the cold and the clarity of the air draws haloes around the moon and the street lamps and the bright electric signage that covers the darkened city outside. The lobby is quiet. There are leather lounges placed along the walls but these do not impose themselves in any way on the openness of the room; in fact they recede almost into invisibility. The space stretches back almost thirty metres until it finally meets the three tall receptionist desks that are the point where official activity converges. They are made from the same dark timber as the walls. The bodies that arrive at nighttime and in the early mornings play for no audience and they are eager to partake in that strict discretion that is the rule that governs this space. There are slippages around entrances and exits. In the day things are different. In the day the space is lit by the sunlight that floods in through the plate glass wall that faces the high street, and makes every surface glow. People come and go in groups, day workers in business dress, families and couples on holiday, speaking over one another and the growing general noise of the place. The uniforms worn by the staff are bright with gold threading. There are conspicuous displays of wealth from the patrons who are on their way out, into the city, or who move across the wide floor towards the gym or the restaurant. The lobby takes the central position on the ground level, such that it is impossible to reach either of these other spaces except by traversing its width in full view of all of the others.
Through the eastward doors of the lobby is the gym complex, which is less open and more intricate— it is in reality a series of interconnected rooms and areas, each with a specialist function. There is the gym itself with its banks of steel equipment, the lap pool and sauna, changing rooms, a suite of alcoves for private massages, and the VIP spa area. Each of these rooms and corridors has walls and floors covered in brilliant white tile (barring the gym, which has a dark rubber floor and plainly painted walls). These tiles are heavily glazed to a gloss finish and the effect is classical, severe, controlled and tasteful, like a tuberculosis ward in a prestige period drama. The gym is open all night and is always fixed in the same white hard fluorescent light, which gleams off the machines that stand inert in rows like frozen cavalry. There are usually one or two people working themselves on treadmills, insomniacs or bored professionals. The heavier setups, the bench and leg presses and the free weights, are generally occupied only in the rush hours of the day, in the morning around nine and again after lunch and before dinner. Now and then an attendant in sports gear very unlike the uniforms of the rest of the staff will move from aisle to aisle with a cloth and a white spray bottle of disinfectant, making sure that the surfaces are wiped clean after each use. The bottles are also provided to patrons on entry, and most apply them judiciously. The air is recycled but still smells of alcohol and iron and sweat. There is only one television installed in the space, in a distant corner in front of one of the exercise bikes, as a something like a concession or an apology. Some patrons on entry eye it nervously, wonder if they can afford to take this risk in public, not knowing fully what the result could be, not knowing who would form the judgement if it came. But many more are totally impervious to this almost-imperceptible feeling and lay claim to the position whenever possible, fixing their attention on the twenty four hour news stations that cycle across the screen.
At the far edge of the gym, past the mirrored walls and the racks of dumbbells, are two exits. Neither has a door fitted, and both open onto corridors where the white tiling begins and marks the boundary to the rest of the complex. The demarcation is severe. Through the left entrance is the swimming pool, a fifty metre heated lap pool with eight lanes and neon blue water. The floors, walls, and the inside of the pool itself are all tiled uniformly and without discrimination. They continue over the lip of the pool without even rubber panels installed to mark the edge. The lights here are the same harsh fluorescents that are in use in the gym, and the hot air and the clouds of steam smell strongly of chlorine. The water is heated to thirty degrees. The pool is less popular than the gym but its patrons are more consistent and come to swim here at the same times each day and night. A bored lifeguard patrols the edge. Off to one side are the wooden doors of the sauna, which is dark and small and panelled with wood, like a pagan chapel or an antechamber in a hunting lodge, and next to this are the two changing rooms (the gym has its own separate set), marked for gender and also without doors but opening onto blind, tiled corridors. There are showers and wooden benches and towel racks, and several toilet cubicles set back from the main space. A series of clever runnels and angled surfaces direct the flow of water into discreet drains in the centre of each area. The cleaning staff are instructed to take extra care disinfecting and bleaching these channels, and also the showers, since over time and without proper maintenance they can build up accumulations of limescale and the other hard impurities in the city's water, which can discolour the edges of the tiles and cause them to degrade. The grout is dark and does not require the same level of attention.
Through the right entrance are the massage rooms. These must be booked in advance with one of the hotel’s in-house physical therapists, and offer several packages catering to different needs and means. Each is a small tiled cubical with a single large window and a bed with a tubular steel frame, like you would find in a hospital. In the day they are lit naturally with the sunlight, and after dark with a small warm globe lamp that is set into the wall. Unlike the other facilities, which are accessible at all hours, the massage rooms have strict opening times, and are generally booked weeks in advance.
Past the cubicles and further down the corridor are the double doors that lead to the spa, which are always closed and barred to casual access.
Back across the lobby towards the opposite end of the hotel are the double doors that lead to the restaurant, where there is a waiter standing ready to welcome guests and seat them. The atmosphere inside is generally subdued, but gets louder later in the evening when the families have left and office workers begin to congregate around the bar and the private booths. The ceiling carries on from the lobby and so is almost twelve metres high, and the designers of the restaurant took advantage of this to install a kind of interior arcade that bisects the room and forms a second story over half of the space. The columns that support the platform are thin dark iron with decorative arches that stretch between them, and they are ornamented with cast iron figures; roses, fruits, twisting vines, and figures posed in dramatic conflict and mischief; demons, sprites, and satyrs. The room and its flows of guests and workers have been organised around the arcade, and there are tables for diners arranged in the space beneath the platform, as well as in the open part of the floor. On top of the arcade is another dining area, accessed by a narrow iron stairwell placed near the centre of the room, bordered by iron guardrails, and housing two huge oak tables. Normally these are used individually for large group bookings and events, but once or twice a year on special occasions a team of kitchen hands and waiters (each one requires at least six people to move) will be bought in to shift them together lengthways, and set up this way the platform area can seat forty comfortably. Along the back wall of the lower area are the bar and dining booths, and besides these are the entrances to the kitchens, which service the restaurant and also the rest of the hotel with room-service orders at all hours of the day and night. All of the productions and working schedules in the kitchens are designed to continue uninterrupted— the cooks and chefs and waiters and cleaners all work on rotating eight hour shifts with covers for breaks, during which they disappear into hidden access tunnels to sit and relax and text partners and children, smoke from small windows, wipe hands scarred by work across pressed white uniforms, bitch about management, about their pay, small jokes to pass the time before they will be called in again, hair tied back from faces that are oddly still, fixed in small moments, small reprieves. Their fatigue is the proof of their labour among the steam and fire and the flashing blades of knives, and they are contained in this professionalism, that comes with the discipline of schedules learned over years. The pragmatics of twenty four hour activity mean that the kitchens and their storage areas are much larger than all of the dining spaces of the restaurant combined, and this vast volume and humming activity unfold invisibly back from the rear wall. The staff enter using entrances that are not visible or available to the dining public, and their movements cannot be tracked using vision. On the other end of the room the glass front that lights the lobby continues along the building’s facade and makes up one entire wall of the dining space. The tables set closest to the glass look like architects’ drawings from mid-century design magazines— they are sized in reference to bodies and small groups and are dwarfed by the humanist Modern architectural features that enclose them inside a world of form and surface, where buildings and their pristine interiors are sketched out in light. A world where you might find yourself (finally) welcomed by the anonymous community that understand the goodness of your small domestic order. They will watch for you by the entrance, the one that marks your coming back into the necessary commerce of the city. And the city is the world. It is dimmer now outside. They wait for you without judgement; without vulgarity or sentimentality or any facile kindness that would let you be again the individual. You will come into their loving and their common grace, and you will be faceless like the rest in the darkness, caught up in the great and secular choir. It is nighttime. The rooms that have been locked away behind these great transparencies are unlit and devoid of movement. Further inside there are the quiet sounds of others, small groups unknown to you, still eating and working, still making their time as best they can (survival). But even though you can hear them, from this perspective you cannot see another living creature moving, not one in this entire city, and the empty rooms that unfold from you in blank series are as still and silent as black tunnels that stretch away forever into the obscurity and stillness at the frozen dead centre of the earth.
-
When they wake it is in darkness. The air is hot and stale. They perform a quick verbal check of those present, and, finding the group intact, move together to feel out the contours of their immediate environment— stone floors and walls, shelves with plastic bottles, a mop and bucket, probably cleaning storage of some kind, but a storage room with stone floors and walls? Eventually someone locates a box of matches and lights one. The four of them are standing inside a cleaning room, proportioned like a corridor, about two metres by six. The walls, floor, and ceiling are heavy stone masonry, and double rows of white plastic shelving line both walls at just below head height. The shelves hold brightly coloured plastic bottles, oven cleaners, glass cleaners, mould sprays, four five-litre bottles of bleach, sponges and scourers in shiny plastic packaging. There is a door at the end of the room; a strangely ornate and ancient door made from dark antique wood with black iron hinges and filigree. The match burns out and the room is plunged back into darkness. They light another and move to open the door, which is locked from the outside, so they beat and kick it down, which takes over a minute, and which they do in total blackness to conserve matches. When the barrier finally splinters open they can see that the wide open space on the other side of the door frame is as pitch black as the inside of the room. The ground outside the room is packed dark earth. They set one of the shattered door timbers alight and use it like a torch, and then they begin to move out from the room, following along the wall that extends off in both direction from the door frame, and which is made from the same stone masonry as the storage space. Whatever this stone wall is it is tall enough that the ceiling it supports is lost in the darkness at the edge of the flickering circle of their makeshift illumination.
After several minutes of tracking along the base of the wall they come across a broad flight of stone stairs set into the structure. When they climb these they discover that the stairs lead up onto broad battlements at the top of the wall, and also that there is no ceiling containing this structure, only the endless blackness stretching upwards and out from the wall in all directions, as though the moon, stars and sun had been put out or permanently banished from the sky. From the battlements they can smell salt water like the sea, but they cannot hear any waves or anything at all. They decide to explore along the battlements. After an hour or so they have mapped out the structure in which they find themselves— a small stone star fort, with thick low walls arranged into five points that jut out into a black void that their torches cannot illuminate from the top of the wall. Every twenty minutes or so they must return to the smashed door frame and make another torch, since without the firelight the darkness is so total that they cannot see their own hands held to their faces. They make contingencies— to save matches, and there are now only seven matches left, they light a small campfire by the door. This will consume fuel faster than they would like, but they realise exploring the space that there is plenty of wooden furniture around and as yet no more matches. They leave one of their number with the fire at all times while the others track out and away from the circle of light carrying burning pieces of wood, in an effort to more quickly explore the space and see if there might be something they could use to effect an escape. But an escape to where? Where is it that they have come from?
Eventually the floor plan of the fortress is mapped comprehensively. Inside the walls are three stone buildings— a barracks full of bunks and cots, a kitchen and mess, and a small stone church with an iron bell built into its tiled roof in Spanish colonial style. There is also a tiny gate house at the entrance of the fort, which houses an electric motor and control box that appears to control the raising and lowering of a steel car bridge from the island fortress down to some invisible mainland. The bridge is raised, and the mechanisms are unpowered. One of them has the idea of following the power cables from the control box and gate mechanism back to their source. This is not easy, as some effort has gone into concealing the cables and blending them into their environment with a relative seamlessness. At two points the cables track directly into bore holes drilled into the stone masonry and it takes them almost twenty minutes the first time, and several hours the second, to locate the emergence points. Everything shifts and moves in the torch light. Nonetheless they are eventually able to follow them all the way back to a small room next to the cleaning supply storage where they woke up, a room with a trap door that leads down into a concrete basement that houses a generator and seven ancient steel jerry cans sitting on a rack. Five contain fuel. They fill the generator and switch it on and at once banks of searchlights clustered around the floorpan of the fortress blaze into illumination. The lights have been hidden with professional skill, in blind corners and mounted high on walls, sometimes in small boxes that have been textured and painted in camouflage to match the stone masonry. When switched on they light up the fortress strategically— not to provide easy illumination for walking or day to day tasks, but to present the stone architecture as beautifully as possible.
Still, the light is welcome, and even when it is not aimed directly at the courtyards and walkways the ambient illumination allows the group to explore the space without smashing up any more furniture. They quickly realise that on the other side of the ramparts there is a large body of water, maybe an ocean, certainly the smell is salt, but an ocean without any movement at all, no waves and no tides, flat as an endless sheet of glass. The water is opaque and glossy and has the feeling of profound depth. The surface is like a precious stone, a green so dark it is like black. They throw down torches that are extinguished immediately. They imagine the ripples from the disturbance distributing across that perfect surface for vast distances, silently, and unseen in the darkness. The generator also powers the mechanism that lowers the car bridge, and they are able to work the controls without any trouble at all.
The lighting installed in the fort does not extend out past the battlements, but one of them has the idea of unscrewing the brackets and other fixings and repositioning the lights, as far as their wiring will allow. They use a knife to work the screws loose, and pull up the cables as far as they are able, being extremely careful not to snap or break them since they do not have the equipment necessary for repairs. It is while they are moving one of the larger spotlights up on to the ramparts and trying to angle it down to illuminate the far side of the lowered bridge that they notice the sheet of etched dark metal that has been fixed to the exterior of the stone walls with large bolts at its four corners. It is clearly ornamental— an addition to the architecture, similar in feeling to a mosaic or bas relief. The etching on the surface is light, but the cuts in the metal show up brilliantly under the illumination of the spotlight. It shows an animal or a human-animal hybrid of some kind, obscure and twisted over itself, in a confusing landscape of clouds and steam and eruptions of earth. It is not clear what is sky and what is solid or liquid; everything has been mixed and twisted together, or reduced back down into something fundamental and obscure. The body seems held in place in this semi-permeable medium, or it is clawing its way through or perhaps being birthed— it is really difficult to tell exactly what is being represented. There is no visible face or head, but the neck that is visible is elongated and strange. It thrusts upwards and into the top of the metal sheet and is lost by the crop of the frame. An odd choice of composition. They wonder if perhaps the original panel was larger and included a head, maybe a face; if maybe this crucial missing element might have provided the image with something concrete to relay or communicate. If the cropping was some deliberate act of containment or neutering. One of the group realises that there is no way this strange object, which they realise after several minutes is made from a single enormous sheet of lead, could be seen from the inside of the fortress hidden away in the dark like this. None of the many lights installed around the complex hits this patch of the outer wall. And then they come to the conclusion that actually this strange icon was installed intentionally between the illuminated spaces, and that it must be something best suited to obscurity.
On the other side of the car bridge is a city that sits abandoned in the darkness. There are other lead panels and other fortresses, other figures that they cannot understand. Over time, it could be months, they are able to map them these spaces and to know them. Eventually they realise that their search will lead them inevitably to the ancient and massive cathedral that dominates the centre of the city— they find tourist maps and road signs everywhere that point to it, and they read about its history and its public use from the time before the city was reduced to its current chthonic state. They begin to think that they know this building too, even as every attempt that they make to penetrate further into the interior, into the dense urban fabric, fails. They scavenge supplies, which are plentiful in the abandoned supermarkets. One day they run out of timber to burn and are forced to tie themselves together with rope and search by touch for something flammable, for anything that might bring them light. The cathedral holds the key to their escape. They fantasise that the great gothic stone building houses a power station hidden beneath the areas of worship, that it will light the whole of the city again if only they can access it. There are barrels of oil in the underground room and corridors, fountains of oil that collect darkly in stone basins and that stain the stone floors, and that will bring them a final, perfect illumination. But exploration is agonisingly slow. There are strange road blocks, and fences of steel and razor wire, and sinkholes that have swallowed whole sections of the city, and every path that seems like it should lead straightforwardly to the cathedral turns them back eventually to the silent beach and to the fortress that is still lit up under its spotlights, and that from a distance looks like an architectural model or a children’s toy. They are able to find opiates and other drugs in old pharmacies, and use these to pass the time with one another when they lose hope of reaching their goal. A group of them get high on the beach beneath the panel of lead and speak with the headless long-limbed figure that boils in its obscurity of cloud and smoke. Then finally one day they are successful and they break down the doors of the cathedral. The vaulted ceilings are forty metres high, and the walls are covered in gilt gold; there are reliquaries and a treasury where the bones of saints are kept as proof against evil. They smash everything apart, every piece of the alter, every single painting, the dais, they strip the walls, they burn what will burn. They flood the floor with black oil and set the building alight. The stone walls do not burn but the flames and the smoke deform them, stain them with rippling curtains of soot thirty metres tall. Paintings for giants or monsters. In the tunnels bellow they find the banks of machines that have kept this world in darkness. They find the bodies of the citizens stripped naked and stacked in rows, covered in the black oil that shines thickly in the flashing light of the torches. They destroy the machines with true hatred and with the frustration of denial or rejection. From the broken components they are able to construct their own contraption, one that will send them back, and they work quickly to do so before the rivers of oil are set alight and the catacombs are smothered in choking smoke and dirty black fire.
-
When she gets back to their room and realises that M isn’t there she is very still for a few minutes, and then she sits down on the edge of the bed and waits in the darkness, thinking. She is still drunk, and the emotions and thoughts that well up from inside her are dull and muted. She sits that way for a long time, and in the darkness of the room she is silhouetted in the reflected light of the city that spills in from the window. She looks like a statue. Then she takes off her shoes and lies back in bed and turns on the television, searching for a movie to watch. In the light from the screen her face is neutral. Eventually she finds something and turns the sound down low enough that the voices are difficult to understand. Then she gets up and moves to the bathroom and starts to run a bath, without switching on the light. She runs her hand beneath the jets of water and feels for the right temperature. Steam rises up. She returns to the bed to watch the film and after a few minutes the steam begins to leak into the hotel bedroom through the open door. As it moves into the room it is cut into by the light from the city that comes in at the window, and also by the brighter illumination from the television screen. She is lying on the bed, heavy and unmoving. She is like some ancient stone decoration, a funerary idol or a demon set at the entrance to ward against lesser evils. Steam fills the room slowly but completely. The picture on the screen begins to soften and fade. There are muted sounds of female laughter, murmured conversation. When she can hear the bath getting full she gets up again and turns off the taps. Then she returns to the bed to watch.
After another half an hour she feels that if she watches even one more second of this film she might try to throw the television through the plate glass window. Then she realises, with some surprise, that she is really hurt by M’s absence, and this realisation comes with a restlessness and a vicious, vindictive boredom. She turns the television off and drains the bath, finds her swimwear, and exits the room, laking care to lock the door, taking care not to make too much noise, aware of her clumsiness, aware of the thickness in her movements, finds the lifts, rides one down to the ground floor, and makes her way over towards the gym complex and the sauna. As she passes by the restaurant she tries peeking in to see if the conference goers are still celebrating at the bar but the angle of her passage across the lobby cuts that space off from her view. She enters the gym and breathes in the familiar scents and feels herself relax. With confidence swelling she begins to walk towards the sauna, but when she gets to the two exits she stops and thinks that perhaps she will see what the spa room is like instead, since she has not had a chance to visit it yet. The tiled corridor is unlit, which is so unusual in the twenty four hour atmosphere of the hotel that she almost stops and retreats back into the light. But then she sees the double doors up at the end of the dark corridor and makes towards them. The white tiles are blue in the shadow, and the openings for the individual massage rooms branch off the side of the corridor like cells in an isolation ward. The doors are marked ‘spa’ with a brass plaque, and they are roped off with an actual red velvet rope, complete with polished brass loops and fittings. She tries the doors and when she finds that they are locked she gives the lock mechanism a short push, cracking outwards with the full strength of her chest and shoulders and breaking the mechanism open, forcing the white painted doors first just a crack and then fully open with a soft squealing of metal. There are two metal bolts at the top and bottom of the door that have also been forced inwards and she can see that one of them has scored a shallow groove into the stone or faux stone floor in the interior. In the darkness this fresh damage stands out slightly whiter than the rest of the white marble. Then she steps over the rope and into the pitch blackness of the spa, closing the doors behind her and squatting down to find and pick up the broken pieces of brass and mechanism that her violent entry has scattered across the marble floor interior with blind hands and fingers.
Once she has pushed the doors closed again she switches on the torch on her phone, and sees that the room is actually quite small, and that it is dominated by the massive tub, sunken into the centre of the floor. She is standing quite close to the porcelain edge and would have fallen in if she had taken a few more steps in the blackness. The walls and floor are white marble and the spa itself is porcelain and brass. It is deep and wide, easily big enough for five or six people to bathe together. It is empty, and she can see a narrow band of brown residue along its bottom. She sweeps the light across the space and sees that as well as the spa itself, the room includes a champagne bar with a freezer and counter, and also a small open section at the far end of the room that houses a table and six chairs, presumably for private dining. The room is not being heated and the air is freezing cold. She watches her exhalations light up in the white light of the phone. She realises that the table and chairs are of a different style from the rest of the room, with its white marble and brass fittings, and that actually they must have been made by the same people who designed the arcade in the restaurant since they are made from the same dark cast iron and decorated with the same Art Nouveau motifs of vines and curling leaves. The tabletop is a single sheet of thick transparent glass supported by decorative cast iron legs. In the high contrast light the iron looks black against its pale surroundings of white stone. The torch is reflected in the glass of the table and the glare difficult to look at directly. She moves to the spa and quickly strips naked, shivering, but registering the cold distantly. She watches with interest as the the skin on her chest and arms puckers with goosebumps, then she climbs down into the great hollow space of the tub. The spa mechanisms seem to be automated. After trying several of the buttons on a grey plastic console, she notices that the system can be activated with a switch at the side, which illuminates the controls immediately when she tries it. She sees a display for temperature, and another that starts the flow of water. She sets the temperature to forty five degrees and switches the unit on. Heated water begins to flow into the huge tub from four jets spaced around its rim, and the chilly room is filled immediately with sheets of boiling steam. She realises that she is still holding her phone which could be damaged by the water, so she sets it down on the floor beside the tub. The directional torch now lights the ceiling only, and the billowing clouds of moisture that fill the empty room. Then she splashes her shivering body (shivering which has now become intense and uncontrollable) with the hot water that is collecting quickly in the bottom of the tub and that scalds her skin. It is almost too much to bear. Her feet and buttocks are covered quickly, and then her legs, her belly. The water burns on contact. She thinks that the water is too hot but does not make a move for the console. After a minute or two her skin acclimatises and the burning stops and she can feel her heart rate quicken and hear the blood roaring and pumping in her throat and temples. When the water fills up past a certain point the spa jets activate automatically and fill the room with the rumbling sound of the disturbed water. Steam is still rising violently up into the room, and she thinks that by now it must be escaping out through the broken doors, into the dark corridor and the massage rooms, maybe even out into the gym. She thinks of geological movements, of vast pressures, explosions of hot mud and oil from between curtains of rock kilometres deep, of buried lakes and rivers, saline and dead, crystals of salt forming on black granite shores over centuries of darkness and unending heat. Her chest would contain the oil and the boiling mud and her heart would pump it through all of her internal systems of tubes and valves. Teeth and bones and hair are extruded out from these subterranean workings over centuries. The outer layers of the skin calcify and crack apart under the stresses of movement. She breathes the way a furnace breathes. She realises suddenly that there is another person standing in the room, looking down at her from just inside the doorway. She cannot figure out how this person, a middle aged woman in a dark uniform who she realises must be a cleaner at the hotel, can have entered the room, opened the broken door, and then closed it again, without her realising. But this must be exactly what happened because the woman is standing there and staring down at her through the steam. She says that she must get out of the spa immediately, and then she says, with a quick look towards the door, that she has already called the hotel security. She stares up at the woman for an extended instant thinking about what to do and then collects herself and says yes of course, of course I’m sorry, and stands to her full height glistening wet and sheeting steam and climbs out over the porcelain lip with boiling water cascading from her body. Her muscles are swollen and her skin is deep red. For some reason the cleaner has not turned on the lights and is simply standing and watching as she retrieves her gym clothes and, because she has no towel with her, begins to sluice the water from herself with her hands, and then dry herself down using the nylon fabric. Then she puts on her underwear and the two women wait in the semi-darkness for the hotel security to arrive. While they are waiting she feels an irresistible urge to laugh, which she is nonetheless able to resist. She wonders how it is possible that she is still drunk after all of this time; how the cold and the small drama of her discovery have not sobered her up; how on the contrary she feels more wasted now than she did an hour ago on the steps of the hotel, or after that in her room, watching tv and letting the rest of the night spin away into obscurity. She sees suddenly that her phone, which she keeps switched to silent, is lighting itself up, which means that it must be receiving messages. The light pulses on for a couple of seconds and then winks out, and then it comes back, again and again.
After several minutes of tracking along the base of the wall they come across a broad flight of stone stairs set into the structure. When they climb these they discover that the stairs lead up onto broad battlements at the top of the wall, and also that there is no ceiling containing this structure, only the endless blackness stretching upwards and out from the wall in all directions, as though the moon, stars and sun had been put out or permanently banished from the sky. From the battlements they can smell salt water like the sea, but they cannot hear any waves or anything at all. They decide to explore along the battlements. After an hour or so they have mapped out the structure in which they find themselves— a small stone star fort, with thick low walls arranged into five points that jut out into a black void that their torches cannot illuminate from the top of the wall. Every twenty minutes or so they must return to the smashed door frame and make another torch, since without the firelight the darkness is so total that they cannot see their own hands held to their faces. They make contingencies— to save matches, and there are now only seven matches left, they light a small campfire by the door. This will consume fuel faster than they would like, but they realise exploring the space that there is plenty of wooden furniture around and as yet no more matches. They leave one of their number with the fire at all times while the others track out and away from the circle of light carrying burning pieces of wood, in an effort to more quickly explore the space and see if there might be something they could use to effect an escape. But an escape to where? Where is it that they have come from?
Eventually the floor plan of the fortress is mapped comprehensively. Inside the walls are three stone buildings— a barracks full of bunks and cots, a kitchen and mess, and a small stone church with an iron bell built into its tiled roof in Spanish colonial style. There is also a tiny gate house at the entrance of the fort, which houses an electric motor and control box that appears to control the raising and lowering of a steel car bridge from the island fortress down to some invisible mainland. The bridge is raised, and the mechanisms are unpowered. One of them has the idea of following the power cables from the control box and gate mechanism back to their source. This is not easy, as some effort has gone into concealing the cables and blending them into their environment with a relative seamlessness. At two points the cables track directly into bore holes drilled into the stone masonry and it takes them almost twenty minutes the first time, and several hours the second, to locate the emergence points. Everything shifts and moves in the torch light. Nonetheless they are eventually able to follow them all the way back to a small room next to the cleaning supply storage where they woke up, a room with a trap door that leads down into a concrete basement that houses a generator and seven ancient steel jerry cans sitting on a rack. Five contain fuel. They fill the generator and switch it on and at once banks of searchlights clustered around the floorpan of the fortress blaze into illumination. The lights have been hidden with professional skill, in blind corners and mounted high on walls, sometimes in small boxes that have been textured and painted in camouflage to match the stone masonry. When switched on they light up the fortress strategically— not to provide easy illumination for walking or day to day tasks, but to present the stone architecture as beautifully as possible.
Still, the light is welcome, and even when it is not aimed directly at the courtyards and walkways the ambient illumination allows the group to explore the space without smashing up any more furniture. They quickly realise that on the other side of the ramparts there is a large body of water, maybe an ocean, certainly the smell is salt, but an ocean without any movement at all, no waves and no tides, flat as an endless sheet of glass. The water is opaque and glossy and has the feeling of profound depth. The surface is like a precious stone, a green so dark it is like black. They throw down torches that are extinguished immediately. They imagine the ripples from the disturbance distributing across that perfect surface for vast distances, silently, and unseen in the darkness. The generator also powers the mechanism that lowers the car bridge, and they are able to work the controls without any trouble at all.
The lighting installed in the fort does not extend out past the battlements, but one of them has the idea of unscrewing the brackets and other fixings and repositioning the lights, as far as their wiring will allow. They use a knife to work the screws loose, and pull up the cables as far as they are able, being extremely careful not to snap or break them since they do not have the equipment necessary for repairs. It is while they are moving one of the larger spotlights up on to the ramparts and trying to angle it down to illuminate the far side of the lowered bridge that they notice the sheet of etched dark metal that has been fixed to the exterior of the stone walls with large bolts at its four corners. It is clearly ornamental— an addition to the architecture, similar in feeling to a mosaic or bas relief. The etching on the surface is light, but the cuts in the metal show up brilliantly under the illumination of the spotlight. It shows an animal or a human-animal hybrid of some kind, obscure and twisted over itself, in a confusing landscape of clouds and steam and eruptions of earth. It is not clear what is sky and what is solid or liquid; everything has been mixed and twisted together, or reduced back down into something fundamental and obscure. The body seems held in place in this semi-permeable medium, or it is clawing its way through or perhaps being birthed— it is really difficult to tell exactly what is being represented. There is no visible face or head, but the neck that is visible is elongated and strange. It thrusts upwards and into the top of the metal sheet and is lost by the crop of the frame. An odd choice of composition. They wonder if perhaps the original panel was larger and included a head, maybe a face; if maybe this crucial missing element might have provided the image with something concrete to relay or communicate. If the cropping was some deliberate act of containment or neutering. One of the group realises that there is no way this strange object, which they realise after several minutes is made from a single enormous sheet of lead, could be seen from the inside of the fortress hidden away in the dark like this. None of the many lights installed around the complex hits this patch of the outer wall. And then they come to the conclusion that actually this strange icon was installed intentionally between the illuminated spaces, and that it must be something best suited to obscurity.
On the other side of the car bridge is a city that sits abandoned in the darkness. There are other lead panels and other fortresses, other figures that they cannot understand. Over time, it could be months, they are able to map them these spaces and to know them. Eventually they realise that their search will lead them inevitably to the ancient and massive cathedral that dominates the centre of the city— they find tourist maps and road signs everywhere that point to it, and they read about its history and its public use from the time before the city was reduced to its current chthonic state. They begin to think that they know this building too, even as every attempt that they make to penetrate further into the interior, into the dense urban fabric, fails. They scavenge supplies, which are plentiful in the abandoned supermarkets. One day they run out of timber to burn and are forced to tie themselves together with rope and search by touch for something flammable, for anything that might bring them light. The cathedral holds the key to their escape. They fantasise that the great gothic stone building houses a power station hidden beneath the areas of worship, that it will light the whole of the city again if only they can access it. There are barrels of oil in the underground room and corridors, fountains of oil that collect darkly in stone basins and that stain the stone floors, and that will bring them a final, perfect illumination. But exploration is agonisingly slow. There are strange road blocks, and fences of steel and razor wire, and sinkholes that have swallowed whole sections of the city, and every path that seems like it should lead straightforwardly to the cathedral turns them back eventually to the silent beach and to the fortress that is still lit up under its spotlights, and that from a distance looks like an architectural model or a children’s toy. They are able to find opiates and other drugs in old pharmacies, and use these to pass the time with one another when they lose hope of reaching their goal. A group of them get high on the beach beneath the panel of lead and speak with the headless long-limbed figure that boils in its obscurity of cloud and smoke. Then finally one day they are successful and they break down the doors of the cathedral. The vaulted ceilings are forty metres high, and the walls are covered in gilt gold; there are reliquaries and a treasury where the bones of saints are kept as proof against evil. They smash everything apart, every piece of the alter, every single painting, the dais, they strip the walls, they burn what will burn. They flood the floor with black oil and set the building alight. The stone walls do not burn but the flames and the smoke deform them, stain them with rippling curtains of soot thirty metres tall. Paintings for giants or monsters. In the tunnels bellow they find the banks of machines that have kept this world in darkness. They find the bodies of the citizens stripped naked and stacked in rows, covered in the black oil that shines thickly in the flashing light of the torches. They destroy the machines with true hatred and with the frustration of denial or rejection. From the broken components they are able to construct their own contraption, one that will send them back, and they work quickly to do so before the rivers of oil are set alight and the catacombs are smothered in choking smoke and dirty black fire.
-
When she gets back to their room and realises that M isn’t there she is very still for a few minutes, and then she sits down on the edge of the bed and waits in the darkness, thinking. She is still drunk, and the emotions and thoughts that well up from inside her are dull and muted. She sits that way for a long time, and in the darkness of the room she is silhouetted in the reflected light of the city that spills in from the window. She looks like a statue. Then she takes off her shoes and lies back in bed and turns on the television, searching for a movie to watch. In the light from the screen her face is neutral. Eventually she finds something and turns the sound down low enough that the voices are difficult to understand. Then she gets up and moves to the bathroom and starts to run a bath, without switching on the light. She runs her hand beneath the jets of water and feels for the right temperature. Steam rises up. She returns to the bed to watch the film and after a few minutes the steam begins to leak into the hotel bedroom through the open door. As it moves into the room it is cut into by the light from the city that comes in at the window, and also by the brighter illumination from the television screen. She is lying on the bed, heavy and unmoving. She is like some ancient stone decoration, a funerary idol or a demon set at the entrance to ward against lesser evils. Steam fills the room slowly but completely. The picture on the screen begins to soften and fade. There are muted sounds of female laughter, murmured conversation. When she can hear the bath getting full she gets up again and turns off the taps. Then she returns to the bed to watch.
After another half an hour she feels that if she watches even one more second of this film she might try to throw the television through the plate glass window. Then she realises, with some surprise, that she is really hurt by M’s absence, and this realisation comes with a restlessness and a vicious, vindictive boredom. She turns the television off and drains the bath, finds her swimwear, and exits the room, laking care to lock the door, taking care not to make too much noise, aware of her clumsiness, aware of the thickness in her movements, finds the lifts, rides one down to the ground floor, and makes her way over towards the gym complex and the sauna. As she passes by the restaurant she tries peeking in to see if the conference goers are still celebrating at the bar but the angle of her passage across the lobby cuts that space off from her view. She enters the gym and breathes in the familiar scents and feels herself relax. With confidence swelling she begins to walk towards the sauna, but when she gets to the two exits she stops and thinks that perhaps she will see what the spa room is like instead, since she has not had a chance to visit it yet. The tiled corridor is unlit, which is so unusual in the twenty four hour atmosphere of the hotel that she almost stops and retreats back into the light. But then she sees the double doors up at the end of the dark corridor and makes towards them. The white tiles are blue in the shadow, and the openings for the individual massage rooms branch off the side of the corridor like cells in an isolation ward. The doors are marked ‘spa’ with a brass plaque, and they are roped off with an actual red velvet rope, complete with polished brass loops and fittings. She tries the doors and when she finds that they are locked she gives the lock mechanism a short push, cracking outwards with the full strength of her chest and shoulders and breaking the mechanism open, forcing the white painted doors first just a crack and then fully open with a soft squealing of metal. There are two metal bolts at the top and bottom of the door that have also been forced inwards and she can see that one of them has scored a shallow groove into the stone or faux stone floor in the interior. In the darkness this fresh damage stands out slightly whiter than the rest of the white marble. Then she steps over the rope and into the pitch blackness of the spa, closing the doors behind her and squatting down to find and pick up the broken pieces of brass and mechanism that her violent entry has scattered across the marble floor interior with blind hands and fingers.
Once she has pushed the doors closed again she switches on the torch on her phone, and sees that the room is actually quite small, and that it is dominated by the massive tub, sunken into the centre of the floor. She is standing quite close to the porcelain edge and would have fallen in if she had taken a few more steps in the blackness. The walls and floor are white marble and the spa itself is porcelain and brass. It is deep and wide, easily big enough for five or six people to bathe together. It is empty, and she can see a narrow band of brown residue along its bottom. She sweeps the light across the space and sees that as well as the spa itself, the room includes a champagne bar with a freezer and counter, and also a small open section at the far end of the room that houses a table and six chairs, presumably for private dining. The room is not being heated and the air is freezing cold. She watches her exhalations light up in the white light of the phone. She realises that the table and chairs are of a different style from the rest of the room, with its white marble and brass fittings, and that actually they must have been made by the same people who designed the arcade in the restaurant since they are made from the same dark cast iron and decorated with the same Art Nouveau motifs of vines and curling leaves. The tabletop is a single sheet of thick transparent glass supported by decorative cast iron legs. In the high contrast light the iron looks black against its pale surroundings of white stone. The torch is reflected in the glass of the table and the glare difficult to look at directly. She moves to the spa and quickly strips naked, shivering, but registering the cold distantly. She watches with interest as the the skin on her chest and arms puckers with goosebumps, then she climbs down into the great hollow space of the tub. The spa mechanisms seem to be automated. After trying several of the buttons on a grey plastic console, she notices that the system can be activated with a switch at the side, which illuminates the controls immediately when she tries it. She sees a display for temperature, and another that starts the flow of water. She sets the temperature to forty five degrees and switches the unit on. Heated water begins to flow into the huge tub from four jets spaced around its rim, and the chilly room is filled immediately with sheets of boiling steam. She realises that she is still holding her phone which could be damaged by the water, so she sets it down on the floor beside the tub. The directional torch now lights the ceiling only, and the billowing clouds of moisture that fill the empty room. Then she splashes her shivering body (shivering which has now become intense and uncontrollable) with the hot water that is collecting quickly in the bottom of the tub and that scalds her skin. It is almost too much to bear. Her feet and buttocks are covered quickly, and then her legs, her belly. The water burns on contact. She thinks that the water is too hot but does not make a move for the console. After a minute or two her skin acclimatises and the burning stops and she can feel her heart rate quicken and hear the blood roaring and pumping in her throat and temples. When the water fills up past a certain point the spa jets activate automatically and fill the room with the rumbling sound of the disturbed water. Steam is still rising violently up into the room, and she thinks that by now it must be escaping out through the broken doors, into the dark corridor and the massage rooms, maybe even out into the gym. She thinks of geological movements, of vast pressures, explosions of hot mud and oil from between curtains of rock kilometres deep, of buried lakes and rivers, saline and dead, crystals of salt forming on black granite shores over centuries of darkness and unending heat. Her chest would contain the oil and the boiling mud and her heart would pump it through all of her internal systems of tubes and valves. Teeth and bones and hair are extruded out from these subterranean workings over centuries. The outer layers of the skin calcify and crack apart under the stresses of movement. She breathes the way a furnace breathes. She realises suddenly that there is another person standing in the room, looking down at her from just inside the doorway. She cannot figure out how this person, a middle aged woman in a dark uniform who she realises must be a cleaner at the hotel, can have entered the room, opened the broken door, and then closed it again, without her realising. But this must be exactly what happened because the woman is standing there and staring down at her through the steam. She says that she must get out of the spa immediately, and then she says, with a quick look towards the door, that she has already called the hotel security. She stares up at the woman for an extended instant thinking about what to do and then collects herself and says yes of course, of course I’m sorry, and stands to her full height glistening wet and sheeting steam and climbs out over the porcelain lip with boiling water cascading from her body. Her muscles are swollen and her skin is deep red. For some reason the cleaner has not turned on the lights and is simply standing and watching as she retrieves her gym clothes and, because she has no towel with her, begins to sluice the water from herself with her hands, and then dry herself down using the nylon fabric. Then she puts on her underwear and the two women wait in the semi-darkness for the hotel security to arrive. While they are waiting she feels an irresistible urge to laugh, which she is nonetheless able to resist. She wonders how it is possible that she is still drunk after all of this time; how the cold and the small drama of her discovery have not sobered her up; how on the contrary she feels more wasted now than she did an hour ago on the steps of the hotel, or after that in her room, watching tv and letting the rest of the night spin away into obscurity. She sees suddenly that her phone, which she keeps switched to silent, is lighting itself up, which means that it must be receiving messages. The light pulses on for a couple of seconds and then winks out, and then it comes back, again and again.
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