Excerpt from Hotel California

The desert highway stretched out beyond the horizon; Camryn’s weary eyes followed the wandering path out into the distance until it tapered off into the sunset. As darkness fell, the warm smell of a dusty desert nighttime rose up from the sable-and-burnt-orange sand blowing in small torrents around Camryn’s feet. Quiet undertones of lilies and lupines tickled his nose; a small desert lily stood defiantly beside the dusty roadway, alone in an otherwise barren landscape. Out on the horizon life flourished and flowers abounded, the pace of life increasing with each step that Camryn took away from the heart of the dusty abandoned landscape. He could smell it in the air – the barren landscape had a musty sent, mixed with the warm smell of lonely flowers and the evening breeze. With each step towards the horizon, the scent grew heavier with life – no longer an empty desert musk.

Up ahead on the horizon, a faint yellow light glowed steadily. The surrounding patch of desert horizon faded in and out, its edges seeping into the dark of approaching midnight and the hopeful glow of the little yellow light that spread to the horizon, the ground, and the sky. Camryn’s head became heavier with each step; he strained his neck to keep it upright. The light shone like a beacon in the growing darkness, offering hope of a soft bed and an air-conditioned room. Beads of sweat dripped from Camryn’s forehead; as he wiped them away, he wondered what had caused them. He was glad they were not drops of blood.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the light grew larger, his destination drew nearer. As he shuffled within sight of the ancient building that gave off such a glow, a mission bell rang out across the closing distance. Twelve bells. As Camryn set foot on the first faded-wooden step leading up to the doorway, he was vaguely aware that it was midnight. In a single moment of lucidity, strange images played out across the small stage behind Camryn’s eyelids. He saw strangers dancing at midnight, a courtyard alight with an eerie white glow, the translucent image of a person slinking silently down a long darkened hallway. This could be heaven or this could be hell – a soft voice, barely more than the soft sound of the whispering wind, rushed quietly past his burning ears. The words were no more than a whisper; they could have easily been Camryn’s imagination. As the images faded away, though, Camryn suddenly felt the urge to run, to pick up his feet and hurtle himself as fast as he could to a place far away from this old abandoned-looking building. At that moment, a figure appeared in the doorway; she opened the door and stood silhouetted against the glowing torches inside. The image froze Camryn in his place; his feet had suddenly turned to hot lead.

“Come in.” Her voice was soft and fluid; it drifted out towards Camryn on the breeze, no louder than a whisper. He thought he heard her finish with ‘I’ve been expecting you.’

As his feet slowly regained sensation, Camryn gathered the courage to steadily place one foot in front of the other until he had carried himself up the stairs and into the darkened landing. His eyes gradually adjusted to the dim glow of the deep yellow light; all around, torches lit up the sprawling room that lay in front of him. The place had an almost medieval feel – a spiral staircase gently meandered from the landing up to a balcony, leading to the second floor, at the back of the room; between the staircase and the front door where Camryn stood, the dark polished wooden floor shone with the torchlight, spreading out for what seemed like an eternity to his left and right; all around, attached to the wood paneling of the walls, torches glowed with enclosed flickering flames; as Camryn breathed deeply in, he felt the atmosphere of the strange place fill his lungs – an almost tangible change of place, change of time. As Camryn scanned the room for a second time, he wondered if time simply stood still in this room; nothing dynamic gave away the passage of time and the polished décor seemed to reach back into antiquity.

“Welcome to the Hotel California.“ The words rolled passed her lips as her voice stretched softly across the room, flowing over and around the soft torchlight.

The words sent shivers crawling across Camryn’s skin. His mind immediately reeled back to the lyrics of the song he used to listen to over and over; images of a desert landscape flowed up from subconsciousness, glimpses flashed across the back of his eyelids of a soft-lit courtyard filled with dancing figures and a mysterious white glow.

The woman softly touched Camryn’s arm and sent the flickering images back into the shadows of his mind. “My name’s Sorena.” The words floated past Camryn’s ears, barely more than a whisper. “I’m in charge of this place.” As she turned and signaled for Camryn to follow her, he felt drawn to her as though he had no other choice. “You can check in at the front desk.”

The polished wooden floors stretched out in front of him, making Camryn’s head spin contemplating their expanse. From outside, the hotel seemed of average size, but upon entry the shimmering wooden landscape seemed to stretch out into eternity. A few meters away – or a few hundred, Camryn found it hard to tell – the front desk lay almost hidden in a corner to the right of the entrance. A young woman stood behind the desk – tall, not quite slender, with dark hair cascading down her shoulders and obscuring the preoccupied look in her eyes, making her seem almost lost. Her electric blue eyes caught Camryn’s as he approached the desk. “Can I help you?” The lost expression in her eyes seemed to fade beneath the surface, making way for a practiced look of hospitality.

“I’d like a room for the night.”

“Will that be for just the one night?”

Camryn nodded before really thinking about his response. He had planned originally…as Camryn tried to recall his plans, they seemed to slip from his mind and fall to the floor, unattainable, irretrievable. He no longer remembered what his original plans were. In fact, he no longer remembered where he had come from or where he was going. He remembered the arid desert air, the humidity bearing down on him, making each footstep more of a challenge, but he didn’t remember from where he had been walking.

The young woman placed a set of keys on the polished surface of the desk. “That’s room 316. The elevator is just down that hallway.” She nodded towards a darkened corridor just to the right of the front desk and across the lobby. “Enjoy your stay.”

Camryn grabbed the keys from the desk. As his fingers grazed the cold plastic, just before grasping the keychain firmly, the same shivers he had felt earlier ran down his spine, accompanied by a haunting image of a translucent figure standing alone in a long darkened corridor. Clutching the keys in hand, Camryn managed to banish the image from conscious thought and head towards the elevator and the prospect of a comforting and refreshing night’s sleep.







Camryn stood in the middle of an empty, darkened hallway. A noise had awakened him – a soft knocking accompanied by the sound of footsteps, a soft clack-scratch sound like that of high heels slowly walking and dragging-scratching on the hard wooden floor. Now, the darkness absorbed him. All that met Camryn’s curious gaze was a blackness that seemed to completely envelop and erase the depths of the hallway; all that he heard was the soft silence of a deep nighttime.

He turned back towards the door he had closed moments ago. The darkness seemed to grow colder as he turned his back on it, chilling his exposed skin and raising goosebumps across his bare forearms. For a moment, his mind raced back to the image that had flashed through his mind when he had picked up his keys: the translucent figure standing in the darkened hallway. Slowly, the image then became real, sliding from its place behind his eyelids to the consuming black landscape that stretched out to his right – or maybe it hadn’t slid; Camryn could no longer recall the image existing only in his mind. Maybe it had existed always in this hallway, in this outer world, and not behind his eyelids at all. As he tried to remember the incident with the keys, his mind began to spin, images whirled about both in front and within him. Time lost its meaning; he could not tell if he had been standing there for a few seconds, or for an eternity. Just as his head started to pound, the image of the figure standing before him seemed to fade out and slip to the floor, reclaiming its stake in the darkened land of dreams from whence it had come.

Covered in a thin sheer of cold sweat, Camryn managed to fumble with the doorknob, open the door, and escape into the safety of his room.





Daylight streamed in the partially-parted, faded-cream curtains hanging loosely in Camryn’s room. He awoke to the warmth and comfort of morning, the fog of the past night fading into the world of half-forgotten memories.

As Camryn rolled out of bed and felt the warmth of a sun-warmed carpet on his feet, he felt almost normal again. His daily routine further rooted him in reality. As he showered, shaved, and brushed his teeth, he felt each mundane action anchor him into the real world that had somehow slipped from his grasp last night.

Walking down the hallway, daylight spilled in from the picture windows at each end of the long corridor. The shadows slid into the corners, hid within doorframes, and waited again until the evening. In the light of early morning, Camryn could not reconcile the atmosphere of last night with the reality of the morning. The hallway that stretched out in front of him now in no way appeared menacing or mysterious. The wooden floor shone in soft rays of sunlight; Camryn ran his fingers along the cream and chocolate coloured walls, which now seemed nothing more than ordinary.

As he reached the first floor and walked toward the main lobby, Camryn noticed a different face behind the front desk. This morning, a young man stood behind the large oak behemoth, looking no more alert, but at least less lost, than the young woman last night. Camryn approached the desk and placed the keys on the shiny surface.

“I’d like to check out.”

As he spoke the words, Camryn felt awkward, almost betrayed. He distinctly saw the corners of the young man’s pale lips creep up, almost into a smile. The young man’s light green eyes seemed to shimmer with a hidden knowledge, a secret that only the corners of his mouth knew.

“Alright. Sign here.” The young man pulled out a massive burgundy tome from beneath the counter and slid it towards Camryn, open to a page half filled with signatures. A pen lay in the centre crease; as Camryn picked it up and scrawled his name in the designated space, he felt oddly as though he were signing his life away.

“Thank you for choosing the Hotel California. We hope to see you again soon.” Again, Camryn had the sense that the young man was hiding something; his words were veiled, as though he knew something that Camryn did not. As he trekked across the lobby and pulled open the heavy door, Camryn didn’t know whether to feel chilled or affronted by the young man’s words. Either way, the quick blast of desert heat that welcomed him into the outdoors came as a relief.





The desert seemed to absorb Camryn in its heat. Already, after the first few steps down the staircase, beads of sweat began to form on his forehead. Ahead of him, the burnt-orange desert stretched on for miles, reaching out to the distant horizon and disappearing over the edge of the world. As he left the hotel in the distance, he failed to notice the single pair of eyes watching him from a third-floor window. He was already consumed by his trek, determined to leave the burnt-out desert world behind. His thoughts began to swirl, though, with the heat, with the dust, with the swirling demons appearing and disappearing in the clouds of dry desert air. His destination did not show itself, instead it rose and fell with the arid sandstorms in a realm just below conscious thought. Although he steadily placed one determined foot in front of the other, he could no sooner remember where it was that he was going than he could remember from where it was that he had come or even how he had got here. Suddenly, it seemed, he had found himself in this desolate landscape without any knowledge of the past or any sense of what he hoped the future would hold. As his mind wandered, the dust swirled circuitously around him, his only companion on this increasingly lonely trip.

The seconds passed quickly, turning themselves into minutes which slowly began to creep into hours. Time seemed to flow over and around him, fluidly, absorbing the entire day both ahead of and behind him into an eternal moment of desert dust. The arid landscape floated through Camryn’s mind, the only occupant of his thoughts. As the sun began to set behind the endless horizon, Camryn registered nothing but a faint sense of defeat. The entire day had passed by, in one hot blustering moment it seemed, and now nightfall once again approached. Camryn continued to shuffle his weary feet, unaware of where he was going or where he would spend the night. His mind swirled, twisted, until the feeling became one of almost physical loss of balance. Ahead, the hotel loomed on the horizon, seeming to materialize out of the swirling chaos that threatened to overwhelm the weary and near-defeated traveler.

Camryn blinked – once, twice, three times. He shut his eyes for a moment, willing the desert landscape to fade away, desperately hoping to wake up anywhere but here. Opening his eyes, he was met with only the dry sting of the desert heat. The hotel remained. Reluctantly, Camryn approached, shuffling ever closer to the horizon over which the sun was setting, towards the looming behemoth that seemed to be his destiny.





Once again, as Camryn stepped up onto the stairs that ascended to the hotel’s main landing, an old bell clanged out its sorrowful tune, sending the sound of midnight sprawling out through the desert. In the midst of the ringing, the heavy oak doors opened almost magically and the same woman from the night before stepped out onto the staircase.

“Welcome back.” Camryn could not read any emotion in her voice; her words rang hollow and carried an eerie emptiness that seemed to chill Camryn to his bones, to his soul. Again, he wanted to run from this place, to turn and take flight until he could not longer see the old hotel, until it disappeared over the horizon just as the setting sun had crept into the dark of nightfall. Again, though, his legs felt as though they had turned to lead. He stood, immobile, transfixed by the images that rose up in front of him.

“Come in.” The woman stepped aside, as light as a summer breeze, and motioned for Camryn to come inside the old building.

Camryn gulped. For a few more fleeting moments, he remained stranded in the fuzzy boundary between the sharp physical sensations of the desert and the fluid reality playing out in and around the hotel.

“You can’t leave.” The woman seemed almost to be reading Camryn’s thoughts. “So you might as well come in.”

Slowly, Camryn lifted his heavy feet and laboriously placed them one in front of the hotel, inching himself closer and closer to the hotel, all against his better judgment.

Just as it had last night, the hotel seemed to stretch out to infinity, the dark, polished wooden floors forming a vast landscape that made Camryn dizzy just considering the potential edges of it. Nothing had changed inside the hotel: the floors still shone with the eerie gleam of the deep torchlight; the walls still stood, magnificent in their size and design, like sentries watching over the inhabitants of the rooms; the torches still burned with a deep glow, alighting the sprawling rooms with an almost tangibly melancholy atmosphere.

As Camryn walked slowly passed Sorena – the strange woman standing in the doorway – he whispered, “Where am I?”

“Darling,” she grasped his arm in the short pause between her words. Her touch seemed almost electrifying, setting the nerve endings that lay under her soft fingers on fire. “You’re dead.”