Week 9 Story: A Hotel in the Woods

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The man has been traveling for some time and has run out of food. He's walking through a dense forest, when suddenly "Thank goodness, something to eat!" he proclaims as he starts ripping mushrooms out of the ground.

The sun sets, it becomes very dark and cold. "Those mushrooms weren't enough, I need more food." He walks around with his eyes toward the ground, looking something else to consume. So concentrated on the ground, he bumps into a sign hanging above that reads "Welcome to the Cortez Hotel".

"That's weird. It seems too far from the main roads for an inn, but maybe they have food inside". He walks through the main door into a lobby where the lights are flickering. The lobby is empty, so he rings the bell for service.

"What?" speaks a woman suddenly behind him. The man says, "I need somewhere to stay, and I am terribly hungry". The woman looks at him with an unfazed expression, gazing at him with the coldest blue eye's he's ever seen. She smells likes smoke. "I have no food to spare as I am preparing for soldiers who booked the night here, but we do have one room left." She hands him the key, and he stares down at it. It is very cold in his hand. He looks up to find the woman is gone. The key has a tag with the number 64.

The silence from the hotel is deafening. He can hear himself breathing very loudly and he is sweating despite it being freezing. He lays down on the small cot in the tiny room numbered 64. Slowly, he falls asleep.

***

The man is woken by laughter. Peeping through his door, he sees the soldiers the woman was speaking of. In the lobby they have assembled a buffet with lots of hot food and beer. His stomach growls and his mouth waters. Right before he decides if he will wander out and try to steal some food, the doors to the lobby slam open. "Hey, there he is!" The cries of joy from the soldiers and the metals on this other man's chest indicate he's their leader. "Celebrate tonight, for we have won this battle. I am going to bed early. I suggest you all get a good nights rest, for this war is not over yet." The man closes the door to his little room quickly, as he realizes the soldier's leader is in the room next to his.

Curious still, he then looks through a crack in the wall. The general calls in his assistant to the room "I would like to be put to rest now" says the general and removes his head.

The man jumps back from the wall "what in the world is going on, what horrible people inhabit this hotel?" He opens his door again to find all the soldiers gone. The tables are turned over, and there is red liquid on the floor. "I didn't see them drinking wine" he thinks. Back through the crack, he watches terrified as the assistant begins removing the generals limbs one by one until he is in pieces. "I have to get out of here" the man thinks.

He cracks open his door, and sees all of the soldiers again - but slaughtered and scattered across the lobby, dismembered and disemboweled. Not wanting to walk through the room of corpses, he locks the door and breaks the window. As he teeters on the window's ledge, he hesitates because he can't see the ground. "Where is the ground? I was on the first floor!" Behind him, he hears the door creak open.

Twisting, he finds blue eyes staring down at him. The woman who gave him the key to his room standing inches from his face. She reeks of the smoke smell that only lingered before. "I wont tell anyone! Please! Let me go!" she shouts. Suddenly, she shoves him out the window.

The man is falling, flailing rapidly trying to grasp on to anything for support. He can't see anything as he's falling except the light of the window getting smaller and smaller as he falls. The man hits the ground with a thud, knocking him unconscious.

***

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Birds are chirping and sunlight streams through his eyelids. He opens them slowly to realize he is laying on his back, staring up at trees in a dense forest, surrounded by mushrooms. He sits up, and notices a sign that reads "We honor the men who died on this ground, where the massacre of the 64th division was committed".  He stands and runs to the main road, going to another hotel - this one he is familiar with.

"What happened in those woods? What's the 64th division?" he asks the clerk. The clerk replies "There used to be a hotel in those woods that catered to soldiers during WWI, it was off the main road to give some privacy. The 64th division was a band of soldiers who went there to rest after winning a particularly gruesome battle, but they ate the mushrooms growing around the property and went mad. They thought the enemy was attacking again, and slaughtered each other after killing their general."
"They killed their own general?" said the man. "Yes," replied the clerk, "they cut off his head, and his arms and legs before turning on each-other. Rather than admit their soldiers went crazy and killed everyone, the government sent people to burn down the hotel and claimed it was a massacre committed by the enemy. Legend says they set fire to it when there was still a civilian inside, some poor woman working the front desk who survived the soldier's attack. I guess they didn't want any witnesses."

"God, that's horrible. But, those mushrooms out there, they make you go crazy?"

"Yeah, but that's not the worst part. You sober up for a while after, only to have your heart stop and die."

Authors Note:

Here is the original story. I really liked the idea of ghosts on an old graveyard, and my story starts the same as the original but he is so hungry he eats mushrooms on the ground - he sees the ghosts, but it's because he ate the same mushrooms the soldiers did that killed them. Instead of seeing a light, he runs into the hotel sign. The general's assistant is still seen taking him apart, and I reason that he came apart not really by an assistant but by his own soldiers who went mad from the mushrooms. This time, the man leaves the hotel instead of staying the night. I added the lobby character and made the hotel name the same name as the hotel in the TV show American Horror Story - where half the residents are ghosts who died there. The room 64 is where a bunch of crazy stuff happens. The falling scene was one that I took from the movie, Get Out, where the main character is in hypnoses and falls through a tv screen only to be falling farther and farther seeing the screen shrink in "the Sunken Place". The man goes to a near by hotel (just like in the original story, I wonder why he didn't just go there in the first place), but I gave the place he was in a slightly new background with a government cover up and a twist ending for the main character - indicating he is about to die.