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CW: Child abuse, self-harm.
There is a place that doesn’t exist. Or rather, the hotel exists only in the moments where existence itself hesitates: between one time zone and the next, between the breath then the decision, between the life left and the one not found yet. It appears at the stroke of midnight for those who are neither here nor there. There are travellers mid-journey, refugees between borders, insomniacs caught between yesterday and tomorrow. Those who know of it call it The Hotel Between.
There’s only one rule. Stay while still in transit. But the moment a destination is chosen, the hotel vanishes.
• • • •
Christie has been neither here nor there for fifteen years. They know the exact weight of a Boeing 787 cabin at cruising altitude, the way recycled air tastes after twelve hours, the muffled silence of a hotel room in a city where they don’t speak the language. They have no apartment, no plants, no pets. Their life is held in a single rolling suitcase, their friendships maintained in thirty-minute layovers and texts from different time zones.
“You’re a ghost,” their ex had told them once, half-admiring, half-accusing. “You don’t leave traces.”
Christie likes it that way. They want nothing more from life. Until the night they see the hotel for the third time.
The first sighting had been in Reykjavik, a flicker in the corner of their vision as they dragged their suitcase through the empty arrivals hall at one a.m. The second was in Dubai, a door where their hotel bathroom mirror should have been, just for a heartbeat.
But this time, Christie’s been drifting in and out of a half-sleep, lulled by the drone of the engines, when turbulence shakes the plane like an angry child, jolting them awake. Outside their long-haul crew bunk window, the night is endless, a black ocean of clouds, then a flicker of a neon sign, glowing faintly against the darkness.
Christie blinks. It’s still there. A building, impossibly suspended in the sky, its windows warm with golden light. A revolving door turns slowly, as if waiting.
But then the plane lurches again, and the seatbelt sign dings on. They grab the intercom without thinking. “We’re experiencing some unexpected weather. Please remain seated.”
Christie looks back out the window. The hotel is closer now.
When the plane lands, they don’t follow the crew to the usual airport hotel. They walk past the taxi stand, into the space between terminal and parking garage where the light is thin and the air smells like static.
And there it is. The Hotel Between, reads the sign, the letters rearranging themselves when Christie blinks. The door opens before they can knock.
The lobby is both vast and claustrophobic, the ceiling too high, the walls too close. It smells of old paper and distant rain. The carpet is the colour of blood, worn in patches where countless footsteps have passed.
Behind the front desk stands someone who is, unmistakably, the Concierge. To Christie, he looks like their grandfather, round-faced, kind-eyed, the way they remember him before his stroke. But his features shift. A younger man. A woman with a kind smile. A stranger who makes Christie take a step back.
The Concierge smiles. His teeth are very white. “Checking in, Christie?”
They don’t ask how he knows their name. They mean to say no, but instead hear themself ask: “How long can I stay?
“As long as you’re still travelling.” He slides a heavy ledger closer. “You’ve been a guest before. Unintentional stays, of course. But now you’ve chosen to visit. That makes you special.”
Christie touches the ledger. The pages are full of names, some crossed out, some glowing faintly. “What is this place?”
“The in-between. The pause before the step. The breath before the scream.” He leans forward. “You’ve always lived here, Christie. You just didn’t know it.”
A key appears in his palm. Room 602.
“Stay as long as you like. But you can’t leave until you decide where you’re going.”
• • • •
The hallways stretch in impossible directions. Room 602 is next to Room 412, which is next to Room 109. The numbers don’t matter. The doors open onto whatever the guest needs most.
When Christie turns the key, the door opens into a perfect replica of their childhood bedroom. The narrow single bed. The boy band posters taped to the wall. The dog plushie sitting on their pillow. It even smells like home, a mix of floral laundry detergent and the jasmine incense their mother had always burned.
But it isn’t quite right. The window doesn’t show the garden; instead, it looks over a bridge, suspended over an abyss surrounded by swirling fog. A lone figure stands at the centre, silhouetted against a sky that is both day and night.
Christie knows, somehow, that the figure is them.
• • • •
Christie explores. In the lounge, a handsome pilot sips whisky that never runs out. “I’m waiting for my wife to forgive me,” he confides. “She will. Eventually.”
A girl clutches a stuffed bear. “My father forgot me, and I don’t remember which home was real.”
And at the end of the hall, reflected in the mirrored walls, lurks a young woman with Christie’s face but hollow eyes, who hisses, “Don’t stay too long.”
The Concierge finds Christie at the bar. “They’re all deciding. Or not deciding. That’s the beauty of this place. No consequences. No endings. You’ll have to leave soon.”
“My next flight isn’t for hours.”
“But you will leave,” the Concierge says. “You can’t stay once you’ve decided where you’re going.”
Christie thinks of the bridge. Of the figure waiting at the centre. They drink something that tastes like nostalgia. “What happens if I stay?”
The Concierge’s face flickers for a second into a woman with hollow cheeks and hungry eyes. Her grin widens. “Then you never have to choose.”
• • • •
Christie sleeps without dreaming for the first time in years. When they wake, their suitcase is gone. In its place hangs a flight attendant’s uniform, not their current airline’s, but the one they’d worn a decade ago, the navy-blue skirt smelling faintly of lavender, the way their mother used to wash it before she died.
“The rooms adapt,” says a voice. The girl stands in the doorway, clutching her eyeless teddy bear. Her skin is threaded with faint scars, like cracks in porcelain.
“Mine’s a quarantine room,” the child whispers. “Plastic sheets. They thought I was contagious.”
Christie follows her to breakfast. The dining hall stretches like an airport terminal, tables set with silver domes that contain whatever the guest most craves. A man in a 1940s suit weeps into a plate of pierogis that smells of ruined childhood. A tiny toddler crawls before a cake inscribed with “love from mummy.” A woman with translucent skin and dark shadows nibbles on ashes.
“She chose to forget her name,” the child explains. “Now the hotel eats her memories instead of time.”
The Concierge watches from the doorway, his fingers steepled.
• • • •
On the third non-day, the hollow-eyed Christie who lurks in any reflective surface murmurs, “Don’t touch the doors that glow.”
Christie finds one that evening, a pulsating crimson door labelled Maintenance. Behind it is the sound of wet, rhythmic chewing. The Concierge materialises beside them, smelling of jet fuel and burnt sugar.
“That’s where we keep the ones who tried to leave without choosing. The hotel recycles them. New carpets. New guests.” His teeth glint. “Sustainability is important.”
• • • •
Days pass. Or maybe minutes. Time doesn’t exist. But one thing Christie does notice is that the hotel is sick. Christie spots it first in the mirror when their reflection blinks a second too late. Then the walls begin breathing. Guests vanish mid-sentence, their half-finished drinks left behind.
The girl with the bear tugs their sleeve. “It’s eating them. The ones who can’t pick.”
Hollow-eyed mirror Christie rasps, “It’s eating me.”
The girl unravels at the edges; yarn-like threads drift from her sleeves. “It’s happening faster now. The hotel’s hungry. It wants you to stay forever.”
She presses the teddy bear into Christie’s hands. Inside its stuffing is a keycard stained with blood. “Room 000. That’s where they keep the ledger. Where you can cross your name out.”
The hollow-eyed Christie hisses a warning. “He’ll offer you a deal first.”
Christie searches for Room 000. The halls twist, doors slamming shut, but they find their way with their bones. The keycard burns against their palm. Room 000 exposes the hotel’s guts. Walls pulse like diaphragms. Ceiling pipes drip fluid that whispers in languages they almost recognise. The ledger floats in midair, its pages fluttering like trapped birds.
Christie finds their name, not just Christie, but every variant:
– Christina at seven, hiding in the closet as her parents screamed.
– Chrissy at twenty-one, stepping off the plane in New York, turning her back on her past.
– Chris at twenty-eight, sobbing after cutting off their father.
– Christie at thirty-one, secure and confident in themselves.
The Concierge appears. “Stay. You don’t belong out there. Most guests cling to one regret. You’re made of them.”
He opens his jacket. Instead of a heart, there is a miniature airport terminal where faceless figures board flights to nowhere.
“I . . . ” Christie hesitates.
“Stay as my successor. I’ve been here since the first traveller hesitated. Here you can be anything. Everything.” Her face flickers.
For a dizzying moment, Christie imagines it: eternity as the hotel’s new keeper, welcoming the lost, feeding on their indecision. Then the child’s unravelling face flashes in their mind.
“I don’t want to be everything. I’m happy as me.” Christie grabs the ledger and tears out the page with their names.
“You’re alone out there,” the Concierge shouts.
“I can live like that.”
They run. The hotel screams. The Concierge lunges but his fingers pass through Christie like they are already gone. Because they are. They have chosen.
The walls dissolve as their borrowed time runs out. And as the darkness takes the guests, Christie feels the Concierge’s foetid breath on their neck, his voice slithering into their ear: “You’ll be back.”
• • • •
Christie wakes up in their crew jump seat, the plane descending through storm clouds. Their hands shake. Their uniform sticks to them, trousers damp with sweat.
A passenger eyes them, recoiling slightly. “Rough flight?”
Christie almost laughs but feels the tears that haunt their eyes. “I think this might be my last one.”
They settle back in their seat, then glance at the safety card in the seatback. They freeze. The illustrated exit door is wrong. It shows a familiar lobby, a person with too-white teeth waving from the threshold. And in the corner, tiny but unmistakable, is their own face. Smiling. Waiting.
“Definitely my last one.”
