The Passion of The Nine Story Hotel
YES: WE ARE OPEN DURING RENOVATIONS
Rule # 1.
Arthur had just returned to the sanctum through the hidden side door after manually flipping the lock on the right front door of the hotel. Monsoon was battering the whole city, state, everything. When he’d unlocked the door he peaked out, the streetlights flickering, people trying to cover themselves with newspapers, jackets, their own soaked arms, just ants he considered, trying to escape drowning. Back at his post he straightened his tie and pulled his “I’ll be back whenever the fuck I want” sign down. Not his words those, just what some people called it. shuffled the sign under his desk with so much other detritus. The unlocked door, during monsoon storms, it Kentucky screen door smacked every time the wind picked up. Looking for a note he had been trying to find since everything went to shit, Arthur noticed the door opened, but he didn’t hear it slap shut. If there’s a customer in the middle of this storm before noon, I swear to god I’m going to skin them.
No one checked into the Nine so early who knew better. Mornings before checkout at 1pm were reserved for yelling at the staff on his daily walkthrough and admin for Pinch’s own battered sanity.
Pinch pops just his head above the desk. This, his eyes clenched vice grip tight for a whole short breath, cannot be fucking happening.
Beyond the window and brass bars of the Sanctum, down the stairs, across the grand lobby, the rondels, the now that he noticed wilting floral arrangements, in through the unlocked door a woman in a dull plastic brown raincoat wearing red heels and a man in a cheap poncho carrying a camera on his shoulder beelining directly for Arthur in what felt just as soon as he saw that pair like an oversized coffin.
The cameraman had a battery pack and was trailing a thick black and yellow braided cord behind him, getting sweeping views of the lobby, the wreckage therein, the plastic sheeting and construction materials, the scaffolding, the ruined north great staircase, the bullet holes in the fucking great pillars, the ruined bar, the white tarp covered lounge. “No, absolutely the fuck not, get out,” Arthur stood to his full height and pointed them back out the door.
It doesn’t stop them. They’re the fucking news. "Nous ở trong Hôtel Nine Story, và có vẻ có xung đột, lobby bị phá hủy, có construction và sửa chữa ở mọi nơi. Moi nghĩ có thể có vết máu trên floor." Miss Yvonne Marseille, pretty young investigative reporter for Chaîne 13 Tin Nóng True Maintenant. Bitch is just as pushy and surreally beautiful in person as on a tiny screen covered in bars of static. The simple fact of that beauty annoys Pinch even more.
Yvonne Marseille looks back over her shoulder into the camera, "Người duy nhất ở lobby là concierge, allons đối mặt với lui bây giờ!" she says to her 11am audience of half the universe, at least half the city with TVs or mobiles, and probably a quarter of the rest of the entire goddamn state.
"Không, không, anglais, chỉ nói anglais, chỉ nói anglais!" Arthur yelled. A new timbre for him; authority, rage, shock, all shredded and mixed together, drizzled with a dash of terror. “We only speak English in the Hotel, no Patois Đông-Tây!”
Rule # 3.
Pinch closes the book as he finishes his lunch. It’s obvious this is some sort of vanity publishing endeavor. He wipes his mouth with a paper napkin and tosses it in the bin before writing the author’s name on a pink sticky note and slapping it on the cover of the book. Arthur takes a step back towards the green door from his personal office back to his sanctum and the lobby beyond, but turns back, picks up the marker, and underlines the name on the sticky note three times.
“So many pathetic little people in this world,” he says and looks up at the gold plate on the wall, the house rules scratched in it giant crow claw deep, rabid, sloppy. The lines of each letter carved into the soft gold hundreds of times. How these pathetic little people with their slander never seem to get what they deserve.
At least, not outside the walls of Arthur’s beloved hotel.
Protocol takes backseat to everything else and Pinch bursts out his hidden side entrance to the Sanctum, but on camera, and who knows who could be watching?
“No you get your pretty little nosy round ass and your microphone and your camera and the lanky cunt attached to it, and get the fuck OUT of MY hotel,” yelling, his bullet train pace cuts them off less than halfway to the stairs to the sanctum. He points at the door behind them when he says out, and he points at his own chest when he yells MY hotel.
"Toi muốn giấu gì từ public? Chuyện gì đang xảy ra trong hôtel? Toi có gì giấu?” She stuffs the phallus of the live mic at his face, the foam windscreen dildo may as well be a dagger. Pinch grabs her hand holding her weapon of choice, pointed at him, yanks it sideways to her waist, and yells ENGLISH! I SAID WE SPEAK ENGLISH IN THE HOTEL! All of his blood rushed to his face, red as fresh spilled blood, the always composed decomposing in seconds. WE ARE HIDING NOTHING FROM THE PUBLIC! THIS IS A PRIVATE BUSINESS, YOU ARE ON PRIVATE PROPERTY, AND THE ONLY THING GOING ON IN THIS HOTEL-
Rule # 2.
“The voice on the other end is a raspy hard edged whisper like frozen black volcanic ash with a faraway French Canadian accent. The voice is the sound a particularly sharp blade might make if used to peel long pale thin near translucent fragments from bone.” - Evangeline
In a dark room illuminated by a television too big, too tremendously wide for anyone who isn’t a villain is the silhouette of a man sitting behind a desk, dark but for the cold illumination glowing from the screen, he’s unidentifiable from this angle.
On the set Pinch is assaulting the local pretty young investigative reporter for channel 13. That’s not my Arthur Pinch is it? Indeed, that cannot be MY Arthur Pinch.
“This is so very displeasing,” the man says, one hand grabbing a fountain pen and the other a paper with a stamped gold leaf inlaid Nine Story Hotel letterhead. “My Arthur,” the sigh of Pinch’s name a cold wind above a whisper. Disappointment so cold it burns itself into a deranged love, cold enough to freeze meat solid and char it burned and black in the same second.
Displeasing, unforeseen, vexing, the proprietor, the Deus Ex Machina of the building he sits atop with his tendrils dug deep and spreading underground for subterranean homesick miles in all directions sighs, tests the pen on a square of blotter paper, and starts to write a terse note in an elegant staccato hand.
Rule # 4.
‘Arthur, your brain, your propriety, your utter pompous seriousness about this bitch of a hotel.’ Has Arthur ever seen Valentine sitting? ‘You yell at everyone in this aftermath like I didn’t hear those two come in, and how you treated them.’
A lazy cat grin settles onto Valentine’s face and he lies back on the rondel next to Pinch, umbrella lying in his lap, he reclines, arms stretch wide, bones crack, and he pats Arthur on the back.
‘This one time, Mr. Arthur Pinch has gotten both what he needed, and what he deserved.’ Valentine’s featherweight French accent comes out of his mouth and weighs a ton. ‘And I never thought I would see the day it happened. But my brother, Pinch, here we are.’
Arthur reached into his vest pocket and pulls out the note Xenia left him, unfolds it and reads it again.
‘Make peace with them. They work for the man up there.’ Valentine points with his cane. ‘And no one scares Arthur Pinch but the man upstairs.’
‘Her note,’ resigned. Arthur sighs and his voice drops low. ‘It’s a polite note for a bitch.’
‘Better to have friends who can turn your lobby into this scene yes?’ Valentine points around the lobby’s carnage with the end of his umbrella, other hand still on Arthur’s back, the ants trying to clean it, the blood, the exit wound in the sanctum, the spot where one of those Greek sisters, the older one, Calypso’s head was beaten into the floor. Blunt bottle bottom smashed with so much force bone lodged into the floor and the hardwood underneath splintered. ‘They who can do this here and stay, consider allies, consider.’ He pauses a beat. ‘Consider a scene like this, anywhere but your lobby.’
Pinch surveys the carnage. Malick is wheeling the platform truck down the deep back corridor, one wheel squeaking, srkik skrik skrik. The maids are calling the services.
‘And you make it sound like they were not injured, this is just veneer my friend. We needed a new coat of paint anyway. The Russians are both at the Barber. But they put Bosch in a hospital bed.’ No one knows how Valentine knows, but he knows everything. Bosch? Arthur asks. “Quite seriously, he has been injured.” Valentine puts the umbrella back in his lap and holds out his hands balled into fists in front of him. ‘Need,’ he says and opens his right hand palm towards the ceiling. ‘Deserve,’ and he opens his right hand, palm down, towards the bowels.”
"Ôi mon dieu, dừng lại, toi làm đau moi!" Miss Yvonne Marseille whines, somehow composed and professionally demure, if she was training to be a K-Pop idol it would play, it plays worse with Pinch twisting her arm so hard it’s about to tension snap from not being a twist tie, mid shot, full action, from behind. After she whines she looks over her shoulder, back at the camera, tears as rivers sliding down screen ready makeup so she looks even younger, more appealing, lighter skinned, more plastic.
“Hurting you, Miss Yvonne Marseille, is indeed the point,” spit from Pinch’s wet mouthed hiss showers her face. “Now you,”
Still that mid shot. Her torso and that beautiful pained and painted face, Pinch’s frame looming monster large in the entire right side of the shot. If the cameraman stopped rolling right now, Marseille would kill him herself, even with him biting his lip and his cheeks blushing, the poor boy about to cry over her pain. She knows her cameraman lives for his huge crush on her but right at the apex of the action, before she knows from previous experience in her line of work, before this crude thin giant with his grip tighter than a giant python will have to let her go or face dire consequences, because she is-
Enter from her POV looking over her shoulder into the live feed lens, right side, behind her cameraman, from the shadows they’ve walked across, no noise, no wasted motion, no words, no pause, no hesitation, no beat, no time to breathe, Vladimir with his AK 105 raised, a suppressor on it big as a black metal fleshlight. She doesn’t have time to register anything but the approaching image of the giant with the matte black carbine. CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK, her cameraman’s face explodes all over the camera, her, Pinch, the lobby floor.
Behind Vladimir Xenia has cut the braided yellow and black wires, kicked a coil of it out the door, which she pulls closed, and locks, “Secured Zajka” she yells.
Countless screens across the city go to static for two blinks before a Channel 13 “TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES, SINCEREST APOLOGIES” comes up and stays there. Might as well be modern art.
“CLEAR,” Vlad yells. The cameraman collapsed, the parts of his brain that controlled any and all motor function just so much meat spray on the scenery.
And Yvonne Marseille screams.
And Pinch screams louder.
The 9 Story Hotel was opened in 1941 (closed in 1955)
Rule # 6.
“At the back of his sanctum is a green door. above the green door is a sign that says ‘staff only.’
Behind the green door is Pinch’s office.
Headache green walls. Buzzing lights. Drop ceiling. The cheapest rattiest parts of anywhere are places only staff see. Arthur’s bag lunch is still on the little round cheap formica imitation wood top table, twin to the one in almost every room in the hotel.
framed pictures, a conspiracy nut pinboard six feet wide. An accompanying white board. Cheap truck stop folding knife on a ledge in smoky branch camo.
Cheap cabinets. Grey. scratched. Completely out of place.
The pictures on the walls, on the cabinets and the boards, the polaroids, they’re not of Arthur’s fucking family. Bone white. Hot lipstick blood red. Fresh sticky yellow fat. Shining rubber. Pictures of the abattoir blues. Waiting for a True Crime documentary.
The next door, the door to what’s beyond his office, is yellow. Yellow painted on yellow painted on yellow. Chipped and painted over again.
Pinch would call it the Van Gogh door, but never out loud.
A worn brass plaque in the door reads ‘KEEP OUT’
Six locks of all configurations keep the door shut.
A sign above it hangs from the drop ceiling, flickering red in a metal frame:
‘THIS IS NOT AN EXIT.’
A lone rusting seven foot tall locker stands to the left of the door.
Inside the locker, among many things, is a shiny vintage gas mask, well worn, well cared for, lying on the top shelf, where you put all your pictures from magazines and stash your weed in highschool. But the whole compartment, the inside of the locker, is lined.
The gas mask sits on red velvet.”
Pinch screams and the newswoman’s arm finally reaches an inflexion point under his twist, snaps, crackling and popping, bones breaking, sprouting up through her skin. Blood splatters. The microphone falls out of her useless hand and smacks on the floor. It starts to screech, sick, dying robot noises and stuttering static. The worst spiral fracture you’ve ever seen, an arm with four extra joints and bones sticking out, broken toothpicks in well chewed up pink gum. Her scream turns into a shriek.
“WHY THE FUCK DON’T PEOPLE JUST LISTEN!?” Pinch yells and headbutts her. Crack, liftoff, she’s in space. He lets go of her wrists and she falls, knees atop each other, one heel askew, her good arm lying dramatic on the floor stretched out and bent over her head at a perfect photo ready angle, her mangled arm only touches the floor in places. God, she even looks beautiful, screen ready with a cracked skull seeping blood from Pinch’s contact and an arm that no doctor could save for her.
“Arthur, my friend,” Vladimir has stepped over the body of the cameraman. Pinch’s breathing slows, he spits on the newswoman’s face, he moves to stand straight again, that rod for a back, squaring his shoulders, checking to make sure his suit is alright aside from the spackling of gore he’s been splashed with. “Arthur, I think you may have had a snap.”
Bullshit Vladimir, he’s straightening his tie, they were simply not listening to me.
“Arthur, I heard you from my room,” Vladimir says. “We came as fast as we could, but”
But what? Arthur sounds off. Recalibrating, but off. But what? They only had a news camera running IN THE FUCKING LOBBY! he bellows in the middle of finding his true self.
Arthur stomps on the microphone twice, smashed until dead, not making feedback screeches. The reporter in her broken and blooded beauty is still breathing, shallow, not about to come to.
“What did they see?” Vlad asks and steps forward, slow, calm, approaching Pinch as he would a pissed off apex predator. CHUNK CHUNK, he reflexively puts two rounds into Yvonne Marseille’s face as he steps over her, one red hole in her forehead, and another down towards her nose. The empty cases hit the ground and tinkle. They saw too fucking much, Pinch responds. A flutter under his regained Pinchonian control of himself. Too much, he mutters again, turns on his heel, and heads back into the sanctum, leaves Vlad standing there. I need to get Malick, Pinch yells over his shoulder. The Plumber. more muttering Vlad can’t make out.
Situational control, if it ever existed, is lost. “Nyx,” Vladimir addresses his wife by her callsign. “Prometheus,” she responds, and he tells her to take the cable, get the news truck, clean everything she can outside the hotel.
Malick walks into the lobby from a service entrance no one ever notices as soon as the door closes behind Xenia.
“Is that the girl from channel 13?” Stoic and on task, he heads for the bodies.
“Yes, my friend, make sure they never leave the hotel.”
Rule # 5.
The 9 Story Hotel was opened in 1962 (closed in 1968)
Malick crouches on his knees and surveys the scene. Vlad’s hand clenches his shoulder.
“They don’t go down the drain.”
Not down the drain, Malick repeats, but deep in what the fuck do we do with this.
“They, especially her, never leave the hotel.” Vlad says, and points the barrel of his rifle at the ruined and dead beauty on the floor, blood spreading in a halo from his two killshots.
Yeah, I got ya.
“They can’t go to the vats,” Vlad says. Malick follows his line of thought; yeah, sort of my first consideration. “Make them a part of the hotel.” and Vlad walks towards the sanctum leaving the plumber to what he does best, solve impossible puzzles. Behind him Malick is nodding, surveying his early afternoon job.
At the front desk, behind the window and brass bars, Pinch is rubbing his temples. The clockwork brain running fast enough it would look like any watch they were connected to was time traveling. The minute and hour hands would be helicopter blurs. “Are you good?”
No, but I will be, Pinch says.
“We will contain the situation as well as we can,” assurances from the Russian don’t mean much right now.
I will be GOOD once I hear from the man upstairs.
Vlad nods and walks off. Pinch needs time to Pinch. The worst is rarely something he fears, since returning to The Nine more than ever, but a black hole is opening where his stomach should be.
“I don’t know, I don’t really notice the hotel even if I walk past it every day.”
“That place is evil.”
“I see men coming and going from this hotel all night into the morning, surely these men must be criminals, but some are government officials.”
“Inside that building the devil lives”
“That’s a hotel?”
- Street interview excerpts by Ahn Yvonne Marseille, The Nine Story Hotel: Devil’s Hilton
She chants relentlessly how you like how you like me how you like me now. How you like me.
How you.
Fucking.
Like me. Now.
COMING DIRECTLY: NEW STORIES/ THE FRESHEST INNOVATIVE AND TALENTED VOICES IN HORROR AND NOIR/ BEHIND THE CURTAINS/ CONTRIBUTORS PAGE/ INTERVIEWS/ WORKSHOP/ CAST PAGES/ SYNOPSIS/ A MAP/ AND: AN OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS TO WORK ON THE PROJECT, INCLUDING - SHORT STORIES, SERIAL STORIES 3-6 POSTS LONG, AND COLLABORATORS, SO GET IN THE MAZE AND READ UP.
This is an experimental publishing project created by and with creative oversight, direction, and contributions from Will Christopher Baer
Chair Emeritus: Craig Clevenger
EIC: Emil Ottoman
Core Conspirators: CJ Stockton, Edith Bow, Ute Orgassa, Zani Derp, Kristin Peterson, Wrong Dimension… And maybe you
And a huge thanks to
for his contribution that helped kick off the party.On a metal plate in Arthur's office are scratched the following house rules
1.everyone at the 9 gets what they need.
2.some get what they want.
3. some what they deserve.
4. some leave in a box.
5. some disappear down a drain in the boiler room floor.
6. some never leave at all.
There are no other known possible outcomes.
The Vacancy light is on. Come check in and Arthur will find you a room.
