“One hundred Euros,” said the bartender routinely.

Resi paid, took the key and picked up his suitcase and tote. The patrons at the bar had stopped talking and eyed him almost curiously. There were ghosts in here they didn’t know about that lingered with the cosmic dust of centuries.

He mounted the torturous stairs, the sweat suddenly seeping out all over his body. On the second floor landing there was a painting from the great, Alien War that had raged in Europe before his time, something Resi knew only from movies, books, and documentaries. The painting depicted a monkey-like creature having many chilling human attributes along with extraterrestrial ones. The Tomu beings, Resi remembered from grade school, were something out of the action comic books during his parents’ era. When the war wiped them all out not a trace remained, except scant skeletons that anthropologists still searched for, hoping to unearth another skull to sell to museums. A great controversy had raged after the war as to whether the Tomu actually were extraterrestrial, or just a strange hybrid species of man that had mutated on a distant earth-like planet once colonized by America.

A slight nausea possessed Resi with each step, for he realized his fears were not in the past anymore but up ahead. Struggling with each step for breath, he wondered if this damn hotel wasn't in control of him. He wasn’t drunk enough for this, not like in the old days.

A muffled dissonance became more distinct the closer he came to his room on the top landing. The sound was strident – resembling a child’s crying – and at first he wanted to believe it was just the mewling of an unsatisfied guest or one more jilted lover perhaps. But Resi knew it wasn’t that at all and this knowledge gave him a moment’s sour foretaste of things to come.

There up ahead was the room whose number matched the one on his key. Without much hesitation he fought whatever urged him telepathically to gravitate towards the room the crying came from. Resi’s body had become ice cold. Was it a boy or woman making the sound?

Get out of the hotel, another voice inside him warned. Drop the bags and get the hell out. Something was askew, the crying now became an evil clarion excoriating Resi’s nerve center, igniting his brain into a pyrotechnic dance of pixels and shifting shadow. His reason lessened with each step, as did his will.

Resi stood before the door, still fighting the implacable desire to seal his wretched fate. He fought monstrously, as did the crying, which evolved into ear assaulting and anarchic waves of insanity. He sensed the door was unlocked, but pressing down on its handle became an effort of labored agony. He was attempting to push down a glistening serpent cast in stone upon a building façade where there was no entrance. Finally the serpent dissolved into liquid matter in his hand and the door opened, revealing the abyss his mind now was, with all its once familiar objects before him.

The crying stopped. Resi’s tongue became a reliquary of dust inside his silent mouth. He was staring dumbly at a common hotel room in Holland, at the moment unoccupied by anyone. Nothing corporeal, nothing in the way of earthly spirits was there. It was not his room but some tremor inside warned him to enter and make it so – and shut the door.

Again he fought an overwhelming impulse and stood there stricken. Here before him was the most common hotel furniture: The large bed, the wooden closet, the writing table flanked by two non-descript chairs. The cheap chandelier emitted a fuzz of electric light from the ceiling’s center, but was so small it cast hardly any radiance into the room’s calcified gloom. Within its spun-glass ornamental goblet a yellowness was captured like some fading artifact. A fetal remnant, Resi reasoned, forever stillborn and listless. A metaphorical offspring of Anne Frank’s shadow, of all those incarcerated behind a reality of broken glass, sealed window cages and metal bars, all the structural remains of some ruin no longer habitable except by – what? Nothing really human was in the room, yet something beguiled Resi in a coy manner belonging to an unnatural evil desire.

He closed the door. The serpent was a plain handle again. But the faint stench of disintegrating matter remained in his nostrils as Resi headed towards his own room. Once inside it he hurriedly bolted its door and immediately collapsed next to his bags on the bed. He remained there listening to his own breathing, ruing having come to this watery city, and striving to banish the call that brought him there.

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