Hotel at the Edge

Chapter 3: The Housekeepers

 The walls belched and swelled against the damp wallpaper that was just barely holding it back.

It was like a tissue trying to hold back the ocean, and everything inside it.

 As if a mass of sweat, flesh, and meat was protruding outwards eagerly trying to break the confines in which it was being held. If they looked close enough sometimes they could almost see what looked like faces, smashing and pressing against the wet walls. Mouths open in endless agony, screaming cries that they couldn’t really hear and very much didn’t want to. There were hands, or what looked like hands. With the nubby fingers reaching out blindly, tugging at anything that happened to make a noise as it passed by them. 

The house keepers were immune to the sight of the wall thing, it seemed. 

They pushed their carts, always at the same pace. Never rushing and never trying to stay out of reach from the thing that reached out when their rickety wheels squealed in protest of the large load of laundry that had been loaded onto the cart. Occasionally the laundry would shift and moan, the farther that it was carted down the hallway, always ending up in the laundry room, where billowing steam poured out of the doorway and not a single thing could be seen past it.

The weary faces of the cleaners told them many things. 

The way that their eyes were deep set, staring blankly ahead, unseeing of the other guests who were endlessly searching for their room number unable to find it among the normal numbers presented among the doors. Their nearly black clothed bodies seamlessly moved just out of sight a majority of the time, it almost felt like in order to see them, you had to be looking for them to begin with. They ambled onward with their big carts, carrying towels so scorching hot that they could be felt radiating heat down the hallway. Sometimes it felt as if the purely human like warmth that came from the walls, was merely just the after effect of whatever those housekeepers were doing. 

That the heat from their chores was so intense that even after they had left, even after dozens of hours must have gone by...

The heat still lingered, casting a sheen of sweat onto the back of their neck that constantly dripped down their spine dampening their shirt with a near constant line of sweat. 

The fingers of the housekeeper’s hands were thin and boney, with cracks along the skin of their almost transparent flesh, from what they assumed was the heat that they had endured almost every day for however long they had been there. Even their eyes seemed to be effected by the heat as well. With their white pupil-less eyes, rimmed in a harsh redness that looked like fresh blisters and sores crowding the spaces around their eyes. It was the only spot of color on them, and it seemed to pop in just about the worst way possible to their eyes. 

Despite how frail those looked, there was no denying the fact that there was some invisible strength there, similar to that of a still snake looking invisible until it came time to strike. Even with that though, they almost felt sorry for them, they were sure that at least some of the staff here were akin to the wandering people who had been in search of their room for who knew how long. 

But in the very least, the house keepers had a purpose here, unlike the countless people with a key in their hands. 

They cleaned things.

Just not visibly. 

But if the vacant open doors were anything to go by, and the struggling masses of blankets in their carts said anything… They cleaned. Just not the messes that most would assume a housekeeper to stay on top of. They reckoned that these housekeepers were strong, even if they looked thin, fragile, and worn to the bone. Their unassuming demeanor would fool many, before anyone would truly know the strength that laid in those bones of theirs. 

They had seen them.

Heaving bustling loads over their shoulders, the fabric of their uniform stretching and warping with each movement. Those bony fingers sinking into the bundles they were carrying like a hot knife through butter, making the writhing masses squeal and cry out like some kind of pig. 

It was like the sounds one would hear at a slaughterhouse. 

It was quick too, like you had to want to see it if you wanted to even get a glimpse of it before they were all walking away. All of them single file into the laundry room, each of them carting their own struggling pile of wrestling moaning piles into the steamy room where only silence reigned afterwards. 

Perhaps trying to get into the wrong room wasn’t exactly worth the struggle it would lead to, not with them lingering in the shadows just waiting for someone to try something untoward. 

Their strength wasn’t what it seemed, and the end the death that they would meet what they would considered unknowable, would was sure to be blisteringly painful to the very end. 

Definitely not worth the trouble.