Part 1

Part 2

For adults, it must’ve been great: four stories of quiet hallways and immaculate rooms with a spa, made-to-order breakfast, cocktail hour and valet service.

But from a kid’s perspective, there was absolutely nothing to do. No pool, no game room, nowhere to play outside.

The manager marched us up to our father’s room just for laughing in the lobby.

Embarrassed and fearful that his company would find out that we were traveling with him, our father kept us on a shorter leash than ever. I suspect he’d also probably had a nasty shock at the motel–

Where that kid had disappeared.

Cayden and I found ourselves longing for another visit from Merry, Holly, and Wendy, but we didn’t even have to wait a full day before we got our wish. When I awoke in the night to use the restroom, there was a faint tapping on the door. At first I wasn’t sure that I was hearing it at all, but when I got closer, the sound was unmistakable.

Since I couldn’t see through the peephole, I opened the door just a crack–

I was greeted by a silver-green eye and half of a grinning face.

“Pardon me, but wouldn’t you and the young one like to come out and play?”

Behind me, Cayden had already clambered out of bed, rubbing sleep from his eyes. His face lit up when he saw Merry, and I knew that if I denied him this, he’d throw a tantrum that would wake our father. And what might happen then? I didn’t like to think about it.

“Okay, okay…” I whispered to Merry. I wasn’t surprised to find Holly and Wendy waiting silently on either side of the door as we slipped outside.

“Where are we going tonight?” Cayden asked. The three of them looked at each other and grinned.

“Tonight? Why, tonight we’re going to take you on the Grand Tour!” Merry clapped his hands and pulled open our door. To my surprise, however, it didn’t lead back to our bedroom.

Instead, we were looking out over the skyscape of a city that I later learned to be Rome.

People speaking a language we’d never heard swam in a dizzying rooftop pool and sipped colorful drinks in white lounge chairs…and it was daytime. Cayden and I looked at each other, mouths agape, and then jumped into the aquamarine water.

Ordinarily, we would’ve worried about what the adults might say, or where to get towels to dry off later–but we both knew that as long as we were with Merry, Holly, and Wendy, we could get away with anything.

Once we’d splashed around, sipped a few of the adults nasty drinks, and wrapped up in the fluffiest towels I’d ever seen, we were excited enough to ignore the patient, quiet stares of our guides–the hotel people. We barely had time to dry off in the Mediterranean sun before they’d shepherded us off to the next leg of our journey.

For the hotel people, it was as easy as opening a door.

We experienced the best the world’s hospitality industry had to offer that night, but it wasn’t enough for the Merry, Holly, and Wendy. Even after Cayden and I were sick from eating cakes at a Dubai wedding before playing Dance Dance Revolution at an arcade-themed hotel in Tokyo, they kept insisting that we continue on to just one more.

The truth was, I was afraid to say no.

What if they just ditched us someplace where we couldn’t even communicate with anyone, thousands of miles from home? Soon, however, I realized that there were worse possibilities.

Everything Merry, Holly, and Wendy showed us was inside a hotel; in fact, it seemed they couldn’t leave hotel grounds even if they wanted to. As the night wore on, however, they began to take us places that didn’t feel like real hotels at all.

The first time, we pulled ourselves up through a door, instead of walking through it.

We were standing sideways on the shade-lamp lit wall of an ordinary midwestern hotel. The carpeted floor was to our right, and the hotel people ran their fingers along it excitedly as they led us to the corner ahead.

There, the wall plunged downward into nothingness.

We were looking at endless rows of sideways doors that opened into empty space.

“Watch this!” Merry announced–

Then pushed Wendy off of the wall and down the bottomless corridor. The shriek felt like it echoed upward forever. Cayden and I had to hold ourselves back, as though that carpeted pit had its own gravity. Had…had they just killed Wendy?

Merry and Holly stood as still as always, staring at us with those awful silent smiles.

When I heard the pounding noise I nearly jumped…and nearly fell backwards into that hungry hallway pit. A long-fingered hand pushed open a door on the floor and Wendy climbed out. Their face was a blend of rage and exhilaration.

“Now, wouldn’t you two like to try?”

I noticed that Merry, Holly, and Wendy were moving closer to us, ever-so-slowly…

And that wasn’t all. Here, in this bizarre wrongly-angled hotel, I could see the three of them more clearly. It wasn’t just that their fingers were oddly long. Their heads were oversized too, and their faces–

Cayden let out a low whimper. My eyes locked on the horizontal door that Wendy had left open. Before the hotel people could react, I scooped my brother up and leapt into the darkness, thinking only of my father’s face.

Thinking that home would be wherever he was.

We collapsed onto the floor of our own hotel room.

“Kids…it’s not even six A.M.…” our father groaned from the double bed beside our own, “can’tcha try to get some more sleep?” His exhausted words were the sweetest sound I’d ever heard. We were back.

Once I heard our father’s snores resume, I hugged my little brother tight. He was numb from fear and exhaustion, and I was too.

“Let’s make a promise,” I whispered. “Let’s never, ever go anyplace with the hotel people again.” Although Cayden didn’t say anything, I could feel him nodding against my chest before we both drifted off into a dreamless sleep.

I thought that would be the end of it.

I should’ve known better.

Cayden and I spent almost the entire next day in the hotel room. Neither of us liked the thought of what we might find if we went exploring alone…or what might find us. Our father could tell something was wrong, but of course he couldn’t imagine what.

He took us to a library and out to dinner in an attempt to raise our spirits, but we were too tired and frightened to stray far from his side. Every time I opened a door, I was terrified that I’d find a nightmarish hallway to nowhere on the other side.

I slept fitfully that night, and woke up cold. The blankets had slipped off of me somehow–

And Cayden wasn’t beside me. I patted the mattress frantically, but only when I looked up did I see his small, shadowy form, standing in front of the closet.

Tap tap tap.

Something was knocking on the closet door–

From the inside.

“Won’t you let us in, dear Cayden? We miss you and your brother EVER so much…” Cayden paused, doubtful. Then he reached forward like a sleepwalker, as though that gentle, cooing voice had hypnotized him. “We have such WONDERFUL things to show you…”

The carpet stretched beneath me as I sprinted toward my younger brother. Although I was running with all my might, he was only getting further and further away...

The walls and ceiling bent, making it hard to know just where I was sprinting to–but I kept my eyes fixed on Cayden.

I rammed my shoulder into him. We fell to the floor with a cry, but it was too late.

He’d slid the closet open just a crack, and I saw a softly-lit line of rooms that stretched on forever on the other side. Long, pale fingers reached blindly through the gap–

I flung the closet door shut. A piercing shriek retreated into an infinite distance.

Cayden and I lay shaking and panting in the blackness.

My father’s bedside lamp flickered on.

“What’s gotten into you two?!” he groaned, staggering sleepily over to help us up. “Did you have a bad dream or something?” he asked Cayden, as kindly as he could. Cayden shook his head. This was no dream, and we both knew it. “Well, let’s not have another night like last night.” He sighed. “C’mon. Back to bed.”

No sooner had our father’s snoring began then when heard it again:

Tap Tap Tap.

This time, the tapping came from outside our fourth-storey window. I realized with horror that the sound was just loud enough for us to hear it, but too quiet to wake our father. A whisper seemed to come through the air vents:

“Come now, at least open the curtains. When we see each other face to face, I’m sure we’ll all be friends once more…” Merry, Holly, and Wendy whispered in unison. “Or perhaps we should take your daddy away. How would you like that? Then we can play together forever…”

The hotel people had touched on the thing we feared most.

There was something wrong with our mother. We both knew it, even if we couldn’t put it into words. Living on the road wasn’t ideal, but neither of us could imagine a life without our father. Who would take care of us? Where would we go?

Taptaptaptaptap.

“We only want to play. But if you anger us, a black mouth will open in the floor and swallow your daddy whole. The hotel will digest him, and we’ll use his guts for a trampoline while he’s still alive. We’ll run his nerves through the floor so you won’t be able to walk without causing him unbearable pain. Oh, how he’ll SCREAM then! And only YOU will hear it…” The awful whisperings went on and on. As if in a dream, I felt myself feeling for the floor with my bare feet. I couldn’t endure the horrible descriptions any longer. All I had to do was open the curtains. If I just gave them what they wanted, maybe they’d leave us alone…

I was vaguely aware of a weight dragging on my leg. Cayden. I tried irritably to shake him off. I was so close. The curtains were almost within my grasp, and then I’d get to go play with Merry, Holly, and Wendy one last time…

“ARGH!” tiny teeth bit into my ankle. My little brother wasn’t letting me go without a fight. My scream woke my father, and as his light switched on, the whispering stopped.

“THAT’S IT!” our father yelled. “No more messing around. Bed. NOW! I gotta work in the morning…”

“We can’t sleep.” Cayden whispered. “Not while the hotel people are around…”

“The what?!”my father asked, exasperated.

As Cayden told our story, I watched his face change from irritation to disbelief, and finally to fear. He rang the front desk and marched us downstairs in our pajamas.

I thought for sure that we’d open the door to find ourselves in an upside-down hallway, or that the elevator would plunge us to the lightless depths of some bottomless hotel pool…

Instead, we found ourselves face to face with a tired man with a combover and a green manager’s vest.

Our father was telling him our tale–with some important details omitted. It was clear he didn’t believe in cold-skinned, child-like beings that could walk between the world’s hotels at will.

What was important to him was that three ‘hotel people’ had been following us from place to place and trying to abduct us. When he mentioned the boy who had disappeared in the pool at the last motel we stayed at, the manager started sweating. By the end of their conversation, he had called the police.

We spent the next several days in the suburban home of the CFO of the company our father was consulting with, a kindly woman with three children our own age who played basketball with us, shared their game systems, and generally made us feel welcome.

Shortly after, my mother called to say she’d checked herself in for treatment after a brutal drunk driving accident. We returned home, and life returned to normal.

I didn’t set foot in another hotel for over twenty years.

As time went on, however, my nightmarish childhood memories faded and blurred. I only revisited them in late-night drinking sessions with my younger brother, during those rare moments when we could slip away from the demands of family life and reminisce about the past.

Cayden doubted that any of it had happened at all. His theory was that–just as our father had feared–we’d been targeted by predators who abducted kids from hotels. He pointed to articles about kidnappers who disguised themselves as children and even enrolled in schools as proof. Our childish minds, he argued, had invented the ‘hotel people’ to protect us from the truth.

Eventually, he brought me around to his point of view.

My wife was dying to take our daughter to Disneyland, and my “irrational” fear of the whole hospitality industry was the only obstacle. Finally, I relented–on the condition that my daughter Kiera never got out of my sight.

By the second afternoon, I was leaning on the poolside Tiki bar, with a warm breeze on my skin and Kiera right behind me. I had a happy, boozy smile on my face and was just thinking that maybe Cayden had been right all along when I heard it–

A familiar voice whispering to my daughter Kiera.

“Pardon me, but what are you doing?”

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