The Way Inn by Will Wiles

Author:Will Wiles
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

PART THREE

THE INNER HOTEL

All hotels are an interface between the known and the unknown. You inhabit one room on one floor. What does the rest matter to you? You are in an unfamiliar place surrounded by strangers, and the hotel must make you feel comfortable and in place. They are structured illusions. Sculpted psychoactive environments. Mirages.”

After we met in the impossible corridor, the woman and I walked a short distance and down a flight of stairs to the hotel bar. A hotel bar. The bar of a Way Inn in a Canadian city, where it was snowing and the sun had not long set. Some early diners were in the restaurant. Men and women came in from outdoors in bulky jackets, stamping slush off their boots. They all looked hearty, red-cheeked and wholesome. I was not dressed for snow but I was not cold. The lobby was the same temperate climate as all the other Way Inn lobbies across the world, neither too hot nor too cold. And why not—they were all the same building.

She was explaining, or trying to explain. A divergent pseudostructure. A non-Euclidean manifold. A prism projecting a hypersurface onto our space-time from a point . . . a point outside. It flowed past me. She clearly did not come close to understanding it herself. Her explanation mixed in generous measures of hypothesis and speculation. She was throwing concepts at the wall, seeing what stuck.

“There aren’t five hundred branches of Way Inn. Well, there are, but they’re branches in the literal sense, sharing a single trunk, the inner hotel. One hotel, going on forever. And new branches all the time. New promontories.”

“It’s not possible.”

“It’s evidently possible. I just showed you. You see, I had to show you. If I did nothing more than told you, you wouldn’t believe me. You’d say ‘it’s not possible,’ but you’d look all smug and certain while you said it. Now you’ve got that cute wide-eyed expression. That’s what I was going for. You’ve seen it.”

There was some mockery in her words, but it was the friendly kind. She was more relaxed and pleasant than I had ever seen her. A great mass had been lifted from her, it seemed. And laid on me. I felt obliged to rebuild the world of fact around me, carefully verifying every detail. The measure of whisky in my hand, the hardwood floor under my feet, the existence of the woman in front of me.

“Canada. This is Canada?”

“Right. Want to go outside and make sure? It’s minus five or something.” She smirked. “We could go back. We could go somewhere warmer. The sun never sets on Way Inn.”

My whisky, so far untouched, went down in a single gulp. Heat rushed down my throat, flared in my stomach. It was welcome, very welcome.

“Somewhere warmer. Show me.”

We walked and I watched, wanting to register and remember every detail, every turn taken, every door passed. I wanted to see the seams. Stairs, corridors, fire doors. The migraine-fuel alarms of the latter didn’t seem to have any effect on my companion—perhaps she was used to them.

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