Under the dim light of one single bulb dangling from the basement ceiling, Eddie was doing his daily work. In front of him, on a wooden workbench, a wall heater waited desperately to be repaired.
His plain jet electronic watch beeped quietly, signalling that it was 10:30 am. Upstairs, somewhere in the bright Caribbean sun the party was about to begin. That was none of his business, though. He felt the rough wood of the bench when he placed his hands onto it and gazed on the spotless concrete floor, letting out a sigh.
How could a place like this need so much heating? He thought to himself. Where I come from, we mainly worry about air conditioning. And this is the Caribbean, for crying out loud! He remembered the heat of his Australian homeland, especially when the air condition units failed in over 30 degrees of heat. Compared to that, the weather on Gundersson Island used to be very mild, but for some guests, it still seemed too cold for their taste.
His work on the heater was done after ten minutes. A routine job. He left it on the workbench and made his way upstairs, leaving the basement behind. Strangely enough, the basement was the one place in this entire hotel or on this island that he felt comfortable at. It was dark and cool, no matter what temperatures were raging outside. And it was quiet. Even with the occasional visit from other staff members giving him new tasks and new things to fix, which they rarely did. Nobody liked to be down here except for him.
At the end of the staircase leading out of the basement, he opened the large metal door and slipped through, shutting it behind him with care. The clanking of the metal was silent enough to not disturb anyone. During his first year at the Southsea Hotel, Reginald, the concierge, taught him how important discretion was. In fact, the less he was seen by the hotel guests, usually the better. He was a ghost roaming the hotel, fixing everything from the shadows, making it seem like there never was a real problem.
The wedding outside was in full progress. Eddie could catch a glimpse of the bride in her beautiful white dress, almost gliding down the aisle as if she was on a cloud. He scoffed. Everyone gets their happy day, just not me. Painful memories of his once lost love crept back inside his head - a girl that he thought he would love forever, but she left him for a French guy who tried to be an actor and pretended to work on that career. Yeah, the French actor had more money than Eddie - that was not a good enough reason to leave him, god damn it! Bitch! All they ever want is money! At least all the girls I ever liked.
He then heard footsteps coming down the hall behind him. Reginald joined him in the shadows, where they both watched the wedding ceremony discreetly from afar.
"The good news," the concierge started talking after a brief moment of silence, "is that there are no severe injuries or damage of property so far."
"So far," Eddie echoed him, perfectly aware of what he meant by that. "Well, that is a pleasant surprise."
A loud crash behind them caught their attention. One of the kitchen staff members had dropped a huge pile of plates onto the floor - the good porcelain had shattered into a thousand pieces. While the young man still tried to save the rest of the dishes, he apparently startled himself and dropped the rest as well. Another crash echoed in the hallway, and Eddie wondered if the wedding guests outside had heard it.
"Spoken too soon," Reginald just said grimly and sighed. Eddie nodded. Mate, you should really know better than calling out your own luck like this!
The kitchen worker had retreated, probably out of embarrassment over the situation. But another staff member, this time one in the official uniform of the hotel security, approached the two men. "Eddie," he opened with the typical accent of the locals. "Could you please take a look at the security cameras in the main building? One of them on the third floor is having trouble."
"Alright, I'll look into it," Eddie assured him with little enthusiasm. Not that he knew anything about video surveillance, but he was the only electrician in the house. The security guy gave him a thankful nod and walked off again.
"While we're at it..." Reginald turned his attention towards the janitor as well. Eddie rolled his eyes. Here we go, another one of those tasks... "Mrs Gilmour has complained to us that her TV set in her room does not show the Korean cooking channel. I know it is in the premium package we booked for the weekend, so could you just..."
He didn't finish the sentence, so Eddie finished it in his mind. Do your thing? He did his best to suppress the sarcastic smirk. It was both funny and sad that the rest of the staff claimed to know what Eddie was doing here but didn't have the faintest clue about how he was doing it. To some he must have been a saint or something, performing technical miracles left and right. And all there was to it was the fact that he knew his craft. But sometimes it led to people giving him tasks and expecting miracles when there was nothing he could do.
"Sure, I'll take care of it," he responded. "Probably just didn't find the right channel and was too lazy to zap through three hundred of them."
The concierge seemed satisfied with that reaction and went about his business. Eddie would have loved now to retreat to the dark comfort of his basement, but instead he made his way to the security room. Typical! It's always me who has to fix the simplest of things. He could have had a real job, a better job - back in high school his goal had been to study engineering at the university. But his parents hadn't been able to afford that. Now he was stuck on this island, fixing TV sets and heaters.
The security room was empty. This was a surprise to Eddie - usually at least one staff member should have been at this post. The screens showed the live feed of the cameras spread around the building, and everything looked quiet - except for two of them. Eddie frowned. The screens were just bright white and blank. Yet the cameras were recording footage. He hadn't seen anything like this before. With a few buttons he shut them down remotely and restarted them, but to no result. The picture was still the same - like someone was just shining a bright light at the camera itself.
This was something he would have to check out later - the issue had to be the camera itself. He took a note where to find the two defective cameras and left the security room. Both were on the third floor, connected by the same hallway. But he wanted to solve the TV issue first, since the guest that complained about it was preoccupied with the wedding outside.
Back to the basement then... In theory, he could just get the hotel room keys and take the official route, but that was not how he did his work here. The hotel provided him with alternative access to the suites. At the workbench he grabbed his tool belt, just in case he needed it, and headed towards the wine cellar. A few steps into the darkness later he realised that he indeed needed the tools - the lights in the corridors didn't react to his movements like they were supposed to. Oh, great... Either the bulbs were all shot to hell, or the motion detector was malfunctioning. He pulled out his flashlight and found his way through the maze of corridors, storage rooms and maintenance areas in the underbelly of this hotel.
In this part of the basement the lights were working again. Which was good - the wall panel, which to others was nothing more than a wooden plank, would have been much harder to find otherwise. Eddie removed the small metal hook that kept it shut and pushed it aside, revealing the entrance to a maintenance tunnel half his height. It was completely dark - a light source would have been an intolerable fire hazard, and the hotel owners had forbidden him to put some lights in there. So he had to use his flashlight again. At the end of the crawling space, a metal ladder headed upwards. Time for my daily workout, he thought grimly.
His flashlight had a special feature that allowed him to put it on like a headband so he would have his hands free. He felt like a miner or cave explorer as he climbed the ladder to the ground floor. There were different ladders between each floor, which at first had annoyed him. Until he had realised that one false step on them would only result in falling down one floor instead of several and risking severe injury. It also gave him the opportunity to catch his breath between floors. Why did they build this hotel with such high floors? Dropping down one floor from the ladder was bad enough already.
Naturally, the room in question was on the top floor. When he arrived, he definitely needed a break. Panting and sweating he looked around with his flashlight on his forehead. Which one was the suite of the Gilmours? Presidential suite, right? Three ways led from here to the different suites on this floor. He took a mental note to put up some signs for them and turned left. The small tunnel ended in a dusty hidden alcove right behind the hotel room wall. Eddie looked through the peephole to make sure that the room was really empty before he unhooked another hidden panel and gained access to the room.
What were they thinking back when they built this? He had often wondered about it. Those tunnels seemed very fishy and could be abused for many things. And probably were back in the days before ownership had changed. What had they been up to? Eddie imagined a bunch of thieves and peeping toms crawling all over each other in these small alcoves. Hell, a professional killer would have it that much easier with a hidden entrance like that. No wonder only a handful of people knew about those tunnels, and he was the only one who had permission to use them. Some of the younger staff had inquired what this wall panel in the basement was all about, and maybe one or two had seen him crawl through it, but afterwards, he had made it absolutely clear that the panel was all "Hands Off".
A few minutes later he crawled back again. Called it! The lady had obviously not switched to channel 259, expecting that an obscure TV station like this would be in one of the top spots. He had programmed it for channel 12, replacing BBC News, and had left a note on the side table. Then he crawled back behind the wall and shut the panel behind him, leaving everything like it had been before. It was a good thing that the guests didn't know about these hidden tunnels - let them just believe in the magic of the hotel room service here!