The Map That is Not a Map

A Rough (Incomplete and Unverified) Layout of the Nine Story Hotel

The 9 Story Hotel, March 24, 2011

The Lies

The 9 Story Hotel is a Horrornoir setting originally created by Will Christopher Baer that exists in the real world sometimes, and in a real location sometimes. Looking at it from outside the place looks like a hotel with two doors, grand windows above and set to either side of them, and a shitty little sign in three languages stolen off some rundown hostel in Bangkok. Baroque, Rococo, Mid Century, Motel 6, Holiday Inn, a boutique hard to find Hilton owned purgatory. Walk inside and the rules outside don’t always apply.

The First Lie.

It has thirteen floors, or eleven, or no one can tell, and calls itself the 9 Story Hotel. The Second Lie. Once you cross the threshold The Lies will only get harder to count.

The Lobby

You come in through the lobby, the center of the hotel, through two solid doors wide and tall enough to make you think you’re Catholic. Deco bones decaying. Beaux Arts rot. Brass oxidized black and brown. Water in the walls. Dust. Decay playing dress up as grandeur. Old Money and the lingering smell of coagulating platelets under everything, patched over a thousand times like every shit apartment you’ve ever rented. The light refuses to behave no matter the time of day.

The main floor. North and south curved staircases rise from the lobby into the Hotel’s two wings. Between those staircases, Between those staircases, down a worn row of rondels—circular banquettes with a single round back and bench seating all the way around—and up a short run of steps is the front office.

Arthur Pinch’s Office (The Sanctum)

Arthur Pinch, the Head Concierge lives there, works there, waits there, or isn’t there, a sign hung in the window saying he’ll be back shortly. The distinction is not useful. He stands behind curved teak at the check in desk, boxed behind brass bars and glass, black ledger open. In front of him a key board, cabinets, a PA system. A brass wall of mailboxes behind him over left shoulder, a gold serving plate with the hotel rules carved into it mounted on the other, and right below the desktop where he stands a switch that kills cell phones, WiFi, Bluetooth, and whatever other little string of dental floss you thought still tied you to the real world.

At the back of the office, which anyone in the know calls his sanctum, is a battered gold or green door. From the public front of the Hotel, behind bulletproof glass, metal bars, a hidden side door you don’t have the key to, the green or yellow or golden door at the back of the office is the only way into the bowels of the hotel: the real first floor, and the labyrinth beneath.

The door goes down.

Most things in the Hotel go the same direction.

The Bar and the Lounge

The north side of the lobby has the bar and dining room. White tablecloths, but dirty glasses. Meat if you ordered meat. No promises if you didn’t. Behind the bar is Bishop, the hotel Bartender. A dwarf with a cockney accent who’d stab you over misquoting Milton or De Sade; the best bartender in town. The south side is the lounge: couches, chairs, sofas, side tables, all mismatched. Mood lighting, crimson, velvet, dust mites, a grand fireplace. Dirty business is conducted under the kind of quiet means everyone knows someone’s listening.

The Rooms

The rooms on each wing run north and south, 1N through 99N and 1S through 99S. Every floor. Every floor admits to being a floor anyway. Nine stories, two wings, 98 rooms a side. 392 rooms a floor. If it’s really a Nine Floor Hotel, that’s 3,528 rooms, give or take. The math is fucked though. Point is there’s more rooms than there should be in any goddamn hotel outside a thought experiment.

The Elevator

Up the grand stairs the elevator waits at the front of the long hall of rooms. It opens on both sides, north and south wings of the hotel, an antique cargo or freight elevator obedient only to the Hotel and the elevator man, Valentine. Black, French accent, and blind, always beautiful silk wrapped around his milk white eyes. He knows more than he tells, like how he doesn’t really control the elevator. He just takes guests where they need to go, rarely where they want. He is proud of this and he will tell you, but you won’t understand. He always carries an umbrella, but the umbrella has a sword in it. He will lie to you about it.

The Floors

The Eighth floor is strictly off limits unless you want to die, and even then it’s impossible to get to but by permission from the owner or the Devil, if they’re not the same thing.

Because of course it is.

The seventh is where long-term and permanent residents tend to themselves and their business mostly. Mind you, tend to. The fifth floor is where the staff stays. Don’t ask. The Hotel has a loose relationship with keeping, staying, leaving, entering, and the human dignity of maps.

The Rooms Again

A room may have an original clawfoot tub and perfect hardwood under a dusted threadbare rug. Another may have linoleum, a dead appliance, pink mold in the shower, and furniture bought used, bulk, in the middle of a decade nobody wants to remember. One room is old luxury, the next is a motel suicide scene. One is a kitchen pretending it was always a bedroom. Another room you’d swear was not there yesterday.

The Hotel moves things.

Hallways. Doors. Floors. People.

You can be on the fifth floor and not the fifth floor. You can take the north wing and come back south of yourself. Open a door looking for ice and find the boiler room if you’re just a black hole for bad luck, or the roof, a storage closet, a woman you owe money, a plastic barrel full of thick industrial solvents eating what used to be a man down to liquid. Worse, a whole room stacked full of those plastic barrels under one bare flickering fluorescent bulb.

The Underbelly

That’s down the rabbit hole Lucy, behind Arthur’s golden/green/yellow? door. The lower levels, Hotel’s underbelly: boiler rooms, storage rooms, old service passages, rat tunnels, hidden rooms, abandoned renovations, cells, dental offices, torture chambers and video cameras, and none of that sounds as bad as it is.

That’s the underbelly, then there’s a roof with a pool.

There are fire stairs past the ninety-nines on each floor but unless you know how to, never take the stairs.

Service halls and fake walls for spying; rat tunnels between every room. Halls remember you before you arrive because you’ve always been in the hotel, you just don’t know it until you walk in.

What the Hotel Is

The 9 Story Hotel is not haunted because ghosts would be too simple for her. Not a trap because traps have designs. Not a game, because games have rules. The Hotel has pronouns long term residents and staff know, she/her, and she’s not alive in any way would make you feel better.

It is a place with rules.

But even rules scratched in gold have their exceptions.

She’s a place where guests, staff, killers, thieves, victims, ghosts, saints, collaborators, and the damned all come through the same doors and learn the same thing:

The Hotel gives you what you need. She can disorient, derange, confuse, punish, shelter, reroute, or keep you. She can give you what you want. And the Nine can give you what you deserve.

That’s not mercy, and not every guest survives what they need, want, deserve, because fuck logic, it’s always only ever now of forever now.