Boutique Hotel

“I went to the Hotel of the Violet Hippopotamus and drank five glasses of good wine.”

― Anton Chekhov, The Prank: The Best of Young Chekhov

Elena had been working the night shift at the boutique hotel for six months before she noticed the pattern. Guests who checked into room 13 on the first floor always requested late checkout, but they never actually left. They’d pack their bags, promise to be gone by noon, then simply… stay. The manager, Mr. Chen, would just update their reservation and say they’d extended their stay. But Elena had seen their faces—the way their eyes would glaze over when they looked at the room number, how they’d stare at the lobby mirrors as if they’d forgotten their own reflections.

It was the guest registry that first made her suspicious. Every morning before dawn, Mr. Chen would erase entries from the book—names that had been written in handwriting that didn’t match any guest she’d seen. The pages would show signs of being written on, but when she tried to read them, the ink would blur and shift. Sometimes she’d catch glimpses of names that made her skin crawl, names that seemed to be written in languages that shouldn’t exist.

The hotel itself seemed to change during the night shift. The corridors on the first floor would stretch longer than they should, the numbered doors would sometimes rearrange themselves, and Elena would hear footsteps echoing from empty hallways. The elevator would stop on the first floor even when no one had pressed the button, its doors opening to reveal nothing but the same empty corridor she’d just walked past.

The lobby mirrors were the worst. During quiet nights, when the ground floor was empty except for her, Elena would catch her reflection doing things she hadn’t done—turning away when she was facing forward, pointing at doors she hadn’t noticed, sometimes just staring back at her with eyes that weren’t quite her own. The other staff laughed it off as fatigue, but Elena saw the way housekeeping refused to enter certain rooms on the ground floor, how they’d leave fresh towels outside the doors and hurry away.

The night everything changed, a couple checked into room 13. They seemed normal enough—tired travelers looking for a quiet night. But when Elena handed them their key, the woman’s hand brushed hers, and for a moment, Elena felt something cold and wrong, like touching something that had been dead for a very long time. The couple smiled, thanked her, and took the elevator to the first floor.

By three in the morning, Elena heard screaming from room 13. She called the front desk phone in that room, but no one answered. When she took the elevator up to check, the first floor corridor had changed. The hallway stretched impossibly long, and room 13’s door seemed to be in a different position than it should have been. Other doors along the corridor were open, revealing rooms that shouldn’t exist—rooms with angles that defied the building’s architecture, rooms that looked out onto views that couldn’t be real.

The couple never checked out. Mr. Chen simply marked them as extended guests and told Elena not to worry about room 13 anymore. But Elena knew something was wrong. The mirrors in the lobby now showed her a version of herself that looked tired, older, as if years had passed in a single night. When she tried to leave her shift, she found herself back at the front desk, her hand already reaching for the guest registry.

She tried to quit the next day, but Mr. Chen just smiled and handed her a new uniform. “You’re part of the hotel now,” he said, his voice low and final. “The ground floor and first floor are all that exist here. You work the night shift, or the night shift works on you.”

Elena returned that night because she had no choice. The hotel was waiting, and whatever checked guests into room 13 had been waiting for her all along. The exit to the street seemed further away each night, and she knew that soon, she’d forget there was anything beyond the lobby mirrors and the impossible rooms on the first floor.