Status: happy halloween

happy creep season, everyone! long time no see, i know. i decided i'll only write about the hotel when i actually go there, and usually there's a pretty decent gap between trips. i can't control it, so you'll just have to put up with me taking two months off between posts (i know i could go back to posting about other things in the gaps, but the hotel with no name seems to be what most people are here for, so unless you all start crying for other content this is what you get).

here's how last night's trip went. it was a fucking doozy, i'll tell you that up front.

the baseball bat wasn't in my room when i woke up this time. that didn't particularly bode well. i like my bat. it's weird and couldn't physically exist in the real world (seriously, try wrapping a strand of christmas tree lights around a glossy wooden baseball bat, without plugging it into some power source, and tell me if it stays attached and lit. i'll wait) and it's beaten the shit out of Rabbithead for me a good number of times. turns out i have a lot more upper body strength than i originally thought.

i scrubbed my eyes and sat on the bed for a minute, staring at the painting on the wall across from me. every room supposedly has unique art, which i think is kind of cool. i wonder if they're specific to each person. like, if the rooms design themselves for every individual who wakes up here, i wonder if the artworks are based on each individual's subconscious? i've always felt like mine is, at least. it's of an angel with all her organs showing through her skin, like the nirvana album cover but more grotesque, because her intestines are sagging a little and there's blood smeared all around the floor and speckling up onto her feet. but she's smiling, head tilted back a little like she's looking up at someone or something. it makes me feel weird, but i adore it.

Rabbithead has never made an appearance in my room, but i didn't want to take a chance, so i got up and headed out. one of the light panels on the ceiling in the hallway was flickering, and there was a little pattering sound coming from it, like an insect had gotten stuck in there and was smacking itself against the wall, trying to escape. making note of it because the lights flicker all the time, but i've never heard that sound in here before. i wonder if bugs also dream?

for some reason i decided to go to the lounge last night. it's actually been a long time since i've gone, so i figured i should check up on it. the tables were emptier than usual, the steady hum of human conversation reduced to a few trickles in the corners. i lingered in the doorway for a second, watching the men at the counter run through their idle animations and then glancing over my shoulder to make sure the hallway behind me was still empty. all clear.

a massive wave of blue-tinged smoke rolled in front of me, and i coughed. it smelled like burnt plastic and stung at my eyes. i waved my hand in front of my face and squinted until it cleared. once i could see - as far as you could ever really see in the half-light of the lounge - i noticed that the nearest table had a drink with no owner. ugh. across from the drink was a woman maybe a few years older than me, fingers laced around the top of a martini glass. when she saw me looking, she grinned and waved me over. ugh.

the wooden legs of the chair groaned against the floor as i pulled it out to sit down. one of the legs was wobbly, so of course being a twitchy nine year old, i started seesawing back and forth. i sneered at the drink that had been assigned to me: barely fizzy root beer in a frosted mug. at least the hotel respects the fact that i'm still 6 months away from legal drinking age, but the root beer here is the most watered-down-soda-fountain shit i've ever tasted.

the girl, at least, was pretty. she had rich brown skin and waves of coily dark hair, and her eyes seemed to shift in the low light between shades of blue and green. she was wearing a long-sleeve white shirt, unbuttoned to the top of her cleavage and tucked into wide pinstripe pants. chunky gold necklaces shone around her neck, and she had at least one ring on every finger. she looked like a gay pirate, which i was not opposed to in the slightest (gay marriage is legal in america now, suck it homophobes). she was still grinning at me, this knowing little smirk.

i tried to stop ogling her collarbones and asked, "do i know you?" i thought maybe she was one of you, dear deranged readers, which i was pretty stoked about.

"no, i sure hope not," she replied. she had a strange accent, like a cross between american, russian, and french rolled into an uncanny ball. "your name is Naomi Hudson, though, right?"

"yeah." it was the first time anyone in the hotel had ever actually used my name, and it jarred me so much that i picked up the mug and took a sip of root beer.

while i was cringing myself into oblivion over how flat and stale it was, the woman continued, "and you've been writing a blog, yeah?" i nodded. she was a reader! yay! "can i ask you a few questions about it?"

she licked some of the salt off the rim of her martini glass and stared at me expectantly, her eyes winking and shifting, almost like water. god, i'm a disaster. "uh, yeah."

she grinned again and whipped out a microcassette recorder, clicking one of the buttons so it started rolling, and, yeah, that was fucking weird. my eyes must've been bugging out of my head or something, because she suddenly looked apologetic. "i'm sorry, ms. Hudson, but it's protocol. i'll be recording you whether or not you can see the device, and i'll feel like a slime bag if i don't at least let you know it's happening. please don't worry about it."

"who do you work for?" i was half out of the chair, hip twinging like a sonofabitch. she held out her hand in pleading. i thumped back down into the seat, mostly to make the pain stop zipping up through my ribcage and down my thigh.

"it's confidential, i'm sorry, but i promise i'm not here to do anything bad or creepy to you. we want to help you, actually. we were super excited when we heard about your blog, because no one's ever publicly documented a space like this before. it's kind of huge news for us! and you're more than welcome to write this up on there, for transparency." (don't mind if i do.) "but there's something..." she frowned and brushed a curl of hair out of her face. "something is just a little off about your blog itself, and we're trying to figure out what it is. so i'd like to ask you-"

"look, miss," i cut in. another wall of plastic-scented smoke was drifting through the room, barely missing our table, and through the haze i could see that the lightbulbs lining the little stage in the corner had flickered weakly to life. oh, goody, she was coming. time to take my leave. "i don't know what you're talking about, and i also don't really care. maybe you're not lucid, and you're having a really cool dream where you think you work for the nightmare FBI or something, and you read my blog so that's mixing in. whatever it is it's not my problem. if you'll excuse me i should really keep movi-"

now it was her turn to interrupt. "Rabbithead?"

i unstuck my palm from the fake wood surface of the table and glanced over my shoulder to the dark entryway. glasses clinked together and there was a low roll of laughter, soundtracked by whatever awful fucking music played in the lounge. all normal. no signs of Rabbithead. i nodded.

"she can't get you while i'm here," the woman said.

i whipped back around to look at her. "she?" my voice was embarrassingly shrill. "look, lady, that thing is not a she, please stop pushing gender norms onto my sleep demon, first of all. second of all, what is that supposed to mean? who the fuck do you work for?"

the woman rolled her eyes and downed the rest of her martini in one shot, tongue dragging languidly around the rim until she'd licked up all the salt. "i already said, babe, i can't tell you who i work for, and it also doesn't matter. i only have a handful of questions and they have nothing to do with your personal life or private information. we aren't tracking you, we're tracking your blog, and you deliberately asked people to come looking for you, so we did. fair's fair, right? we're just following directions. also, she is very much a she, and it has nothing to do with her tits."

speaking of tits, the lounge was filled with scattered clapping as a spotlight chugged to life from somewhere overhead and beamed down onto the tiny stage. there she was. i have no idea what her actual name or schtick is, but you read about her in entry 12 (if you haven't read entry 12 yet but you're reading this, wtf are you doing?). in my head i call her Lilith. she's a wisp of a woman, maybe a year or two older than me at most, with willowy legs and a very elaborate twisted-up bundle of white-blonde hair. her eyes are always half-closed and distant, like she's stoned out of her brains or halfway dead. she's always barefoot. tonight she was in a lacy white bralette and ruffly underwear, and she's so pale that the lingerie almost blended into her skin. in the light of the stage she was tinted purple. she padded to the center, wrapped one spindly hand around the pole, and then just stared out into the room at nothing.

something about her is perpetually wrong. off kilter. i can't put my finger on it. the first time i saw her i figured she was an invention of the hotel, to fulfill people's nighttime wet dream fantasies. if she wasn't on the stage, she was probably in someone's bed. which, hey, respect the hustle. i wouldn't get within six inches of some of these people, and we aren't even in the real world. whatever the hell is up with her, i figured she was serving an honorable purpose.

the problem is that she's real. she talks. she's talked to me. one night when i woke up here, she was stretched out on top of the covers next to me. naturally i freaked out and rolled off the bed, and was halfway to the baseball bat when she spoke. " ." her voice was sweet but tired, empty, too quiet. it made my spine quiver, but at least it forced me to register that she wasn't Rabbithead. i went to apologize, and then to ask what the hell she was doing in my bed, but before i could really get a word out she'd sauntered past me and slipped through the door without another sound. but her fingertips brushed my shoulder, just for a second. they were so cold i was surprised she didn't have frostbite, so cold that the chill lingered on my skin and echoed through the rest of my arm. i couldn't get warm for the rest of the night.

so, yeah, whatever her deal is, she's real. i think she might be like me, a regular, probably even more regular than me, but i don't think she's lucid. no one can be awake with eyes that dead.

when the woman at my table saw Lilith, she cringed. "ah, shit. okay, you win. let's get out of here."

i stood up and turned my back to the stage, and to the woman. there was a weird-shaped shadow in the corner by the entryway that was making the hair on my arms stand up, so i closed my eyes. "i'm not going anywhere with you, sorry." i marched (limped, schlepped, etc.) out of the lounge, its music still ringing in my skull and the scent of plastic still burning in my lungs, and hurried as best i could down the hall, taking turns at random, going up stairs and down stairs until i was practically dragging myself on my hands and knees along the concrete steps. once i was pretty certain that neither Rabbithead or the woman were close behind, i started picking my way back to my room.

no one else was in the hallways tonight. the stairwell was always empty, and pitch dark, but it felt desolate even for being the stairwell. whatever. it didn't matter. the night was so weird already that i didn't need more shit to ponder.

once i made it back to my room i flopped belly-first onto the bed, hissing as i tried to rearrange myself for sleep around the sticky throb in my hip. what they don't tell you about chronic pain is that it follows you in your sleep. at least this pain, in this sleep.

when i woke up in my real bed, there was a dead wasp shriveled up next to me on the pillow.

i guess that explains the thing with the light, at least.

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Note the fact that this entry is labeled as the fifteenth, despite it being the sixteenth. The numbering system, along with the time and date system, is computerized and automatic. The numbering corrects itself for the following post, but this, along with the fact that she makes no mention of it, indicates that Naomi was unaware that the entry from September 27th existed at this time. Some commenters called attention to this, and she replied to all of them with a string of question marks.

It has never become clear why the line of dialogue from "Lilith" appears as a blank space. The first three comments, left within a couple of hours of the post's debut, all take note of this issue. Either Naomi herself omitted the dialogue or the post was tampered with during the upload process. Lilith's dialogue never appears like this again. Her name is also not Lilith, which Naomi learns later on, but for the sake of continuity we will refer to her as Lilith here.

This entry, more than any of the ones prior, led many people to believe that Naomi's story is a piece of fiction. This is due to the dialogue, the somewhat gratuitous descriptions of Lilith and especially the woman at Naomi's table, and the incredulous nature of the described events. We happen to have inside confirmation that this event did happen, though not exactly as Naomi described; she was writing the dialogue from memory and embellished certain details. Some key discrepancies include:

1) The woman never told Naomi that she could prevent Rabbithead from coming, and in fact Rabbithead was in the room, near the door, when Naomi walked out. 2) The woman was drinking a margarita with a sugared rim, not a martini with a salted rim. 3) The song playing in the lounge during Lilith's entrance was "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" by Sylvester; Naomi seems to have a pointed dislike for disco music. 4) After the brief argument described, Naomi consented to being recorded and answered the woman's questions, which were as follows: "Why did you start your blog?" (Naomi's answer was, "because I wanted to feel less alone, I guess. I've dealt with this privately my entire life. It's nice to know other people do get it.") "Are you aware that someone besides you has been posting about the hotel with no name on your blog?" (Naomi's answer was, "well, yeah, I sure as hell have no memory of writing the first post about it, and I definitely would've remembered doing that, right?") "Do you feel safe?" (Naomi's answer was, "No.") At this point, Lilith entered, and the woman told Naomi to leave. 5) The woman stood up from the table first , and was walking over to the stage when Naomi left.

It is unknown why Naomi's account differs; whether she misremembered, deliberately omitted information, or was simply taking creative license and selecting the parts of the conversation she felt relevant. It could be a combination of all three.

The artwork in Naomi's room is a key example of the "disturbing" art we made note of on the August 2 entry. Based on the photo we have of this artwork, we have determined that it is not a drawing or painting, but a real photograph of a naked woman wearing artificial angel wings. As far as we can tell, her organs are also real.