The Dark Somnium - "Something Keeps Sending me Strange Gifts"

Episode Date: September 16, 2023

This Creepypasta Scary Story ias from the nosleep subreddit, written by Christian Willis, make sure to check out the original story and support the author!"I live in an abandoned hotel, something keeps sending me strange gifts" https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/14n37rh/i_live_in_an_abandoned_hotel_and_something_keeps/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I don't have a home. I did once, but not anymore. My kids have sold it, and I don't blame them. I should have been there for them, especially at a time like that. But they only lost a mother. I lost a piece of myself. We spent 40 years together. She was my first kiss, and we were just nine years old, tiptoes under mistletoe.

Over a lifetime, we built something together, something beautiful and intricate, and just for us. us. And then she died, and I was left behind. Afterwards, I felt so alone. Other people's company, even my own children's, felt wrong, hollow and thin, like cardboard. No solace. I'd lost half of myself, and it hurt like hell. During the funeral, I had to sit there and eat sandwiches my daughter had thrown together

on a platter, listening to sad offerings from people who were aware of the whole my chest, but couldn't do anything about it. And like a black cloud, the thought of my empty home descended upon me. What was I going to do when everyone went back to their families, when my children finally returned to their lives? It was only on the first night after I checked into the Dunraven Hotel that I understood the gravity of my decision. I wasn't going back. I wasn't going to pretend that life still had meaning. I sat in my room, ordered a drink, and waited. And 15 years later, I'm still waiting. Even after they shut the hotel, even as the building crumbled, as wallpaper peeled, strangers

looted and wood began to rot, I remained. Aging, but still alive. This place has made me a different man. I've had to adapt. I'm a scavenger, a squatter, desperate, cold, and hungry. But it is her absence that I feel most as an aching in my chest. Even after all this time. Maybe I'm punishing myself.

I don't know. I know I just wanted to be someone else, and this place made that happen. It feels like a lifetime ago that I stood in my garden and cooked burgers on an open grill, listening to my future son-in-law prattle on about football while my wife and daughters laughed in the distance. I'm so far removed from that man, I'm not sure we were ever the same person. Now there is only this hotel. What a special little place, Dunraven. Fated brass handles on every door, patterned red carpets through the halls, cheap but upscale, bigger

on the inside than most people expect. I don't know how I found it, but I did. And now I'm its sole caretaker. Occasionally ghost hunters arrive at Dunraven thinking it's haunted. Stories typically focus on the victims of the hotel's most infamous killer, a man at who poisoned hundreds of guests and whose actions finally forced the building to close permanently. No one could quite figure out what she used or how she pulled it off. There were concerns over black mold, maybe some unheard of chemical or an hallucinogen.

Her testimony amounted to little more than babbling hysteria, and she spent her final days in an asylum. No one could say for sure what happened, but the damage was spectacular. Over the space of 18 years, tens of people died, and it wasn't from some mundane sickness. They imploded in glittering lunacy, fermenting in dark corners while their minds grew full of holes. It took months before the scale of the madness became clear. One guest hanged himself with a running jump from the roof, head first like an Olympic diver. One, a doctor, died trying to remove his own appendix in the dining room, while the other guest. kept on eating, and one group of 11-year-olds visiting the coast on a field trip gathered

one morning in the foyer and beat their smallest member to death while their teachers sat and watched, grading each child by their performance. Guess who stayed here during this period dreamt of boiling tar and blood-red oceans as far as the eye can see? They reveled in their own destruction, their minds melting at the edges while morality flowed loose like hot wax. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Even when it was open, the staff, an ever-changing rhoda of the town's adolescence hated and feared it in equal measure. Half the rooms were forbidden to guests and staff, even back then. New hires would sometimes break the rules, but only once. Those who served food to the woman in 312 found that she would whisper such strange things

to them through the closed door. Most found her harmless at first, but not after they'd gone home and glimpsed her pallid hands beneath her bed, or caught her folded up inside the refrigerator, muttering dark reflections of their own private thoughts. If you pay attention when you visit the Dunraven, you might notice that pin to the wall of every floor and staff room is a list of these barred rooms. A tentive hires would have noticed 312 was on that list, with an addendum the all food service request to this occupant were to be ignored. Ever since the hotel became derelict, I carry a copy of the list on me at all times, along with some amendments of my own. Some rooms are relatively safe. It's easy to go into 804 and avoid the red leather chair that has dissolved more than a few geriatric guests looking for an upright nap.

But other rooms are a death sentence. In 614, something strange lives beneath the bed and has an unnaturally long reach. Its twisted limbs are able to reach down hallways and stretch around corners and are adept at maneuvering the vent system to catch whatever poor soul left their scent in the room. On several floors, you may notice grates and vents with damaged coverings, and despite the manager's best efforts, you will almost always find a brownish residue hidden in hard-to-reach places, such as the thread of a screw or in the seam of a weld. This will be one of the places that 614's resident finally caught up to a victim with violent consequences. From what I've read in the then-manager's notes, it could wait for hours before striking. God, Dunraven is something special. A lightning rod.

A glass bulb amid explosion. A thousand stories make up a history so bizarre it raises questions about the town. How could anyone ignore this place? How could anyone keep its secret? You won't find references to this place online, and I suspect there's something of a conspiracy, a dossier, perhaps, buried deep in Westminster's archives. If so, it can only offer a sliver of the understanding I have gained from living here. Everything I need is in the hotel.

Nine stories, 600 rooms. Nearby, a crumbling Welsh coast and a gray sea where old things wash up on shore. Touch the soil or the same. stand anywhere in between the hotel and the water and know that staying here is to place yourself in the path of a story so old that it risks crushing you from beneath its tread. It is no surprise that the Dunn Raven still stands even years after its closure. Outside the front gate lay three bulldozers rusting. They came to bring it all down, but that was twelve years ago.

Where are the men? Yellow vests and hard hats litter the ground thrown there in a panic. What ever plans there were to demolish the Dunraven, I doubt they're still in motion. For the best, I think. What would they do with the stairwell? Bricked up when I first arrived, I have since opened it. Although it took a few breathy weeks with a sledgehammer. Back when there was staff, they bitched endlessly about the owner keeping it closed off.

They couldn't understand why they had to shuffle everything up and down the main stairs, where guests often berated them for getting in the way. Look down the forbidden stairwell and I understood perfectly well why it had been sealed. It was huge, far too large for a building like this. I dropped a brick, never heard it land. I shone a light and counted more than just nine stories, a lot more. It hurt to stare into the vanishing point. Suddenly, the floor beneath my feet felt a great deal less solid.

I was standing on something flimsy that overlooked a chasm deeper than anything I'd ever seen. I have climbed those stairs over a day and not found the bottom, but I found old expeditions, skeletal figures clutching their own necks, covering their mouths, faces frozen and whimpering rictuses. Most looked like lost teenagers, dressed in jeans and hoodies. On the lower floor, I even found a few that looked like military officers from the Great War. Deeper still, a few skeletons were draped in ancient chain mail. How do you bulldoze something like that? You drive a big yellow machine into that stairwell, and all that's going to happen is you're going to lose your big yellow machine.

I avoid that place like it's radioactive. Who knows what might live down there, subsisting on unseen things? Instead, I spend my days going room to room, scavenging the things that people left behind, listening to what the walls have to say. The history in this place is a haunting connection of so many forgotten. rotten lives, you can feel it like a sympathetic heartache. One room is charged with the heavy scent of sex. The bedposts have worn through the carpet, digging grooves into the wooden slats beneath. They still squeak with a rhythm that is familiar, but hurts the ears to hear, like a manic

rat scribbling its way through a tight passage. And it is dangerous to linger at the threshold, to even risk placing a hand on the door. You can lose days to its effect. A heady mix of confusing thoughts and emotions like being possessed by another's garbled dreams. The few times I've been unlucky enough to get caught in its effect, I've woken up days later, sore and sleep deprived. They locked the room up in the 30s after the fifth set of fatalities, and knowing what I do, I'm surprised it took that long. Victims died of dehydration, bed sores, foul infections, and septicemia contracted through unhygienic practices. On one occasion, the staff kicked the door down to find the guests gone, leaving behind

only soddened clothes and pissed served in wine glasses. Whatever happened in there, I don't know and don't want to know. Like all of the barred rooms, it has a dumb waiter, an ancient mechanical elevator that plums the same depths at the stairwell. I suspect whatever forces our play in that abyss leak upwards through the open shaft and into the hotel. It may even be the source of all the strangeness. I can find no record of the dumbwaiters ever being installed, or even used for their original

purpose. I've checked, and the dumb waiter in my room should descend straight through the bar on the ground level. Cutting through several stools in the countertop, but whatever route it actually takes seems to circumvent traditional space. It sends me gifts, or something does, down there in the dark. Throughout my time in the Dunraven, I had always heard something shuffling around down there. Nothing as severe as footsteps, but it was never particularly quiet either.

It could have been a great opening up in another room to access the same shaft, or maybe something coming loose and falling down. But once the hotel was abandoned, the sounds grew louder, bangs and clatters, muffled thumps, and maybe even grunts. I couldn't say for sure. Sometimes they might wake me, but I would lie there with groggy eyes and only the vaguest hint of what the sound had been before drifting back off. I thought nothing of it for months, until one night I awoke much like I described, confused and exhausted, but something was different. I was instinctively afraid, staying still, I scanned the room which was lit faintly by moonlight and noticed the dumbwaiter's grate was open.

It was cold, and in my sleep I had pulled the covers up to my chin, but the window was shut, and I soon realized that the draft was coming up through that ancient shaft. Shivering and afraid, I pulled the covers up closer to my face, and then there came a sound from the darkness, an awful metallic screech, shrill but thunderous, some ancient mechanism being forced back into life deep in the guts of the building. It passed quickly. And I wondered what it was. But before I could summon the courage to get up and close the dumbwaiter, the sound repeated.

By now I was wide awake, and I quickly processed that whatever it was, it was far, far below me. This gave me some relief, but only a little because the sound came again. And then again, and again. I realized with mounting horror that someone was operating the elevator, heaving hand over hand on the wince to raise the platform, rattling the chain and shaking rust off the centuries-old machine. Again and again it came, one pull after another, until soon there wasn't a break between the heaves, and then, freezing cold and terrified in my bed, I could no longer deny what my ears were plainly telling me. The dumb waiter was getting closer to my floor.

For some reason, my brain picked this moment to remind me of all the children who had gone missing and Dunraven over the years, of countless parents who'd idly spent a few hours in the bar below, only to return to their rooms, finding nothing except ruffled sheets and the other subtle signs of panic struggle. And I imagined what those children went through. I imagined them, like me, lying in bed, hearing the dumb way to reproach with a wailing mechanism, unable to shake the thought that something had entered the enclosed space and pulling itself inexorably up, up towards them.

Did they pull the covers over their eyes to hide it? Did they crawl under the bed? Did they wait with breath held as the screeching sound came to a halt? And there came the quiet sound of inhuman muscles climbing out of that tiny metal box. Did they imagine that if they stayed still, perfectly still, it might move on to gobble up some other child? Did these strategies ever actually work? By now my nerves had thoroughly conquered me. I couldn't move.

I could only watch until the last lift came into view. A pitch black box. In those handful of seconds, I found eternity, each one stretching out far beyond what any human mind could endure, as I stared into the shadowed recesses of the dumbwaiter until, at last, something stared back, a pair of yellow eyes, and a single three-fingered hand reaching out to clutch the open hatch.

For a moment, the world felt dizzingly unreal, but I couldn't break the tension. I could only lie there and shiver and wonder if my heart was finally going to give in and burst inside my chest. I'm not sure how long it really lasted, but in the end, the arm reached out and pulled the great shut, and the sound of tortured metal began again. Slowly, the mechanism lifted itself out of sight. When the sun rose, emboldened by the light of day, I ran over. over and made sure the damn thing was shut firmly, that nothing else lay in wait just out of sight. Briefly, I wondered if it might have been a dream, but the fresh scratch marks on the inside of the dumbwaiter shaft said otherwise.

I decided to change rooms, but this would not be the end of it. If I chose a room without a dumbwaiter, it would take less than a week before another appeared in the wall. No matter how much I moved, all I accomplished was spreading the damn things all over the place. There was no avoiding that thing. Most of the time it would pass by my room, wheel screeching as it dragged itself up from the basement to God knows where. But some nights, the grate would open, and those yellow eyes would leer at me from the shadows. And while it never crept out and brought my worst nightmares to life, I could not stop it glaring at me,

nor could I stop the paralytic fear it instilled in me. I have obviously been at risk of the Dunraven in the past. But that is always because I have gone trespassing into one of the many forbidden rooms. This was the first and only time that something in the Dunn Raven seemed to take notice of me, and even worse, to give pursuit. And it did pursue. No matter what room I chose, a dumb waiter would soon appear, and not long after, that thing would follow. Not every night.

Sometimes as infrequently as just once a month, but how often would you need to go through that for it to affect you badly? I found it increasingly hard to sleep, and yet somehow, impossibly, it got stranger. About a year after it began, I awoke to find the dumbwaiter already at my floor. Lid as it was by the morning sun, I could immediately see there were no yellow eyes lurking in wait, but that didn't mean it was empty. Something had been placed carefully among the platform, neatly centered, almost presented, A broken-down old pocket watch and a faded brass lid. Filth and grime caked it inside and out, but still, I got the impression that it had once been valuable to someone.

After a bit of polishing, I found an old inscription on the inside. It was my Christian name. But I had never seen the damn thing before, and attributed it to a coincidence. After that, the gifts kept coming. A peculiar range of sentimental keepsakes from God knows who. an album with photos of a young man in the RAF, a missionary statement from the same man's time spent preaching in Africa, judging by the common name. None of it meant a damn thing to me.

Sometimes there were even practical effects, like a woolly hat in winter, or a good pair of boots after mine fell apart. It would take years of me collecting these strange things before I noticed an odd relationship. If I displayed the most recent gift anywhere in my room where it would be visible from the dumbway, later, the creaking nighttime visitations would stop. In this way, I think I found the only real gift that I wanted, which was simply to be left alone so that I could sleep soundly. Around this time, I noticed that some of my own personal effects went missing. Most of them were things I didn't care about, and the thefts were so infrequent that

they were hardly worth worrying about, especially considering the sleepless nights spent staring into its eyes for what could be hours. The one that distressed me the most was a tin box filled with the last letters I received from my daughter. I hadn't read them. Things had turned sour between us after I left, and I knew where they were headed. Still, it was nice to have them, to know they existed. Other than that, the thefts were minor and soon stopped, but the gifts still came around

once or twice a week, even to this day. In a way, it only deepens my connection to the place. I don't know why, but out of all the first. the strange occupants of the Dunraven, I fear that thing the most. It's the way it looks at me. I don't know how to describe it. I've only ever seen its face once, a living nightmare that haunts me to this day. It began with three film students who I stumbled across as they wandered the lobby, cooing at all the pretty destruction. I caught them as they joked about returning to the Dunraven to shoot a full-blown horror movie, childish cackles echoing down the halls. The sounds paused

when they heard me approach. Then, a moment of hesitation, as I squeezed past one of the half-blockaded doors in search of these noisy intruders, and we all came face to face. Two of them, young men, looked suspicious to me. One even clenched his fist while the other tightened his grip on the camera, like he might use it as a bludgeon. But the young woman amongst them waited only a beat before smiling, reaching out one hand, looking for a shake, and declaring, Hi. She bore a passing resemblance to my daughter, but that was enough to explain what happened, I suppose. We talked, unlike all the others, when they asked to interview me, I actually agreed.

And stranger still, it went well for the majority of it, at least up until a certain point. I suppose you'd be interested in the story of the manager? I asked, as I brought them their cups of tea. They thought I didn't notice them inspecting the mugs. I think they were surprised to find them clean, but I've learned not to take that kind of thing personally. Actually, we're interested in just one room. It's a part of a project we're working on about family history. My grandfather's brother, he went missing here when he was young. They were a bit of a conservative family. So my mom didn't know any details. No one spoke about it, basically, but Craig here.

One of the men waved. He did some sleuthing and found my uncle's name recorded in some old digitized police files. Turns out my uncle went missing while staying here. Isn't that amazing? After that, we started reading up on all the history of this place and we thought it would make a great project. So, well, here we are. A common story, I remarked. You don't happen to know what room he was staying in.

614. She answered with a smile. So that will be the focus of our project. My heart dropped into my throat. Everything I had read about the thing in 614 told me it was a relentless killer, and there was nowhere in the hotel where you were safe. I remembered reading the manager's account of one young maid being torn through the toilet's plumbing on the ninth floor. His hand had shaken as he recorded the details.

The look on her face, the sound of her bones breaking, the moment where viscera had flowed from her mouth and all light finally extinguished in the those eyes. You can't go in there. I stammered. Why not? One of the men asked defensively. The young woman flashed him a little look.

Hard to say what it was, but there was definitely disapproval in there. It's barred. No access. And besides, it isn't safe. Why would you say it's not safe? Asbestos. I answered a little too quickly. I wouldn't have convinced anyone with that bit of acting.

We'll have to go to the doctors then. Craig added. He had a self-sathing. satisfied look about him, and he clearly didn't like being told what to do. Slowly, based on that expression and his answer, I realized where this conversation was going. Or rather, where it had already been. Why would you need to visit the doctors? Well, you caught us on our way out.

We've been here since five in the morning, and we'd shot everything we needed to of the hotel and the room where my uncle went missing, when we heard... You need to leave. Now! I stood up and immediately put on my best impression. impression of a crazy man, which in truth may not have been that much of an impression. I think it was around the third mug I threw at their heads, smashing it against the wall and a spray of ceramics, that they finally got the message. Still, I gave chase, out the door, down the hallway, then down one of the sets of stairs and another, until soon the lot of us

were working our way through the lobby. The young men shouted back at me, but couldn't quite bring themselves to lash out at an old man. While Rachel merely cried in the arms of who was particularly proactive. But I didn't relent, not even when a pang of regret ran through me at the sight of that young woman's tearful face. She wasn't so much scared, I think, as just distraught to see someone she seemingly trusted turn on her. It was an ugly scene.

I had to play an ugly part, but the regret didn't last long. They didn't have long. In all the excitement, it was only me who noticed the strange muffled sounds that ran along some of the vents in the corridor, or the way that they stood in the hotel's door, momentarily defiant as I shouted obscenities. There was a slither of movement in the piles of rubbish that had been collected in the lobby. Something was down there with us. They might have mistaken it for a rat, but I knew better.

Eventually I got them out, but not before one of the young men and I finally came to blows. Nothing severe. I pushed him, one final shove across the threshold, and instinctively, His hand whipped around and caught me on the lip. Bleeding, I made sure he cleared the exit, then pulled the door shut and spat at the grimy window. Blood and saliva streaming down the glass. They stood there on the other side, horrified, before finally turning and leaving. I watched as the two men consoled the young woman on their way back to their car.

Then I turned, ready to go back to the room and begin feeling sorry for myself. I was halfway towards the nearest stairs when I heard the door open. It was no excuse. Jesus Christ, Craig, he's probably 80. We need to make sure he's... She must have been surprised when she saw the strange glistening hand that gripped her ankle because she made a slight noise so quiet that it was easy to miss. Then came the screaming.

She was pulled onto her back and slowly dragged. By the time her two protectors barged in after her, they barely had enough time to register her position before their own cries for help began. They went down with almost comical thumps. arms thrashing in the ankle-high pile of trash that covers the floor as something unseen pulled all three in one direction. The stairwell. The secretive door hidden in the staff room behind the check encounter. By the time I realized where they were going, Rachel's fingers were already clutching the wooden paneling in a desperate bid to stop herself.

But it was useless. They could scream or struggle all they wanted. 6.14 was going to get them. It would pull them up through story after story in that dark twist. stairwell until it could drag them into the room above. For a moment, I wondered how it might do that. All the other entrances were still bricked up, then I thought of the tooth I'd once found in an impossibly small vent.

Nothing said they had to still be alive on the other side. It might have just punched a small hole in the bricked up entrance that allowed it to slither down, and that was all it would need to get them back. Rachel's eyes briefly met mine. I'd read so much about the fate of people who were dragged into it. 6.14, I wasn't ready to see it happen to someone in front of me. I needed to do something. I tore through the trash until I found the closest thing to what I'd hoped, an old broken bottle with a jagged edge. When I looked up, the three figures had disappeared through the open doorway, but I had to

hope that there was still time. When I entered the stairwell, I noticed some of the railing had been bent and damaged and was smeared with hair and blood. I wondered if it was already too late, but then above me I heard Rachel's muffled sobs. I'm not sure I've ever climbed any steps so quickly in my life. One floor up and I found her upside down, clinging for her life to another set of rails. Behind her lay the two men, broken and mutilated. I quickly realized that the arms had dragged them through the small gap in the railing, killing them, but making enough room for the smaller woman to pass safely.

The sight of them was horrific. They reminded me of the way moths hang, trapped. in spider webs, cocooned and broken, limbs spayed, wings half torn. Even as jaded as I am, I couldn't help but wince when I looked down at Rachel and saw the blood and gore she was covered in wasn't her own. By now she was a good floor or two away from my reach, so instead I ran up another floor, and, using a nearby broom, I pulled the arm itself closer and grabbed it with one hand. Then with another, I began to saw.

The glass was jagged but effective. The hand itself wasn't really all that human. It was soft and mushy, its blood the color of mustard. And while its soft, almost amphibian flesh meant it molded perfectly around her leg to give it a great grip, its skin gave way quite easily to the glass. With only a few harsh cutting motions, it was forced to let go and slither away. I have to wonder, even now, if what happened next was done on purpose, an act of spite. It flicked Rachel away, and she fell like a stone out of sight. She didn't cry.

She might have even fallen unconscious by this point, but she fell so quickly into the darkness that I stood there, jabbering, unable to process the brutal loss. I waited as the minute stretched on, shouting down below and desperately hoping for a reply, but there was nothing. Just silence. Haunting, brutal silence. In the end, I simply had to be able to be. to accept that she was gone, lost. I left, and that night I lay in bed wondering if she was going

to fall forever, screaming desperately into the void. No one was there to catch her, and if there is a bottom in that nightmare, she wasn't surviving any meeting with it, not at those speeds. I fell asleep hoping there was a bottom, that she would strike it so fast she would end her suffering in an instant. But I was left uncertain of this, even when just a few days. days later, I awoke to find the dumbwaiter, ready as usual, with a new gift. Her camera. Not a recording device like the ones the guys had. This was a digital one she wore around her neck.

She only used it once or twice around me, using it to take the odd snapshot of graffiti or an empty room. By the time it reached me, it was half broken, but it wasn't hard to find a charging cable so I could see the photos she'd taken. The first dozen were standard fare, but after that, well, it showed the stairwell. Somehow she'd made it to one of the railings and from there a landing. She must have been lost because these photos showed new doors and places I'd never seen. How far had she fallen?

There were strange and out-of-focus shots, blurry, dark, hard to make sense of. I saw a cathedral on a barren concrete plain, stained glass windows with unrecognizable saints doing awful things, hidden rooms with old gramophones and Edwardian furniture, paintings on the walls of people with too many or not enough eyes. One photo, the best in terms of clarity, showed what looked like a lobby of an old apartment building at night, sealing tiles falling to a derelict floor while an old man glared at the photographer with horror. Strange still was the shape looming over his shoulder, a terrifying specter of a long dead woman. The photos went on and on, sights like these and more. I could not describe them all, except to say it gave a terrifying insight into the

impossible worlds contained below, alien skies, strange moons. Perhaps worst of all, a child's bed glimpsed through the crack of a closet door. God knows what lurks down there, but it wouldn't surprised me if that labyrinth was the source of all of mankind's nightmares. But it was the last picture that captivated me most. It showed the stairwell, but looking up into the dark, only the vaguest hint of a pale light flickering down with a smattering of dustfall. And I realized if there was light from above, she had to be quite near the top. Maybe after her wandering she'd found a way to safety. I had to see if she was alive. If she really was that close, I might be able to reach her and help, provided she hadn't moved anywhere else. But first, I had to make sure

it really was her that was still down there. As much as hope had seized me in the moment, I'm not an idiot. None of the photos showed clearly who had taken them, and the fact the camera arrived in the dumbwaiter meant that at some point it had likely fallen into the possession of the yellow-eyed thing. I needed a way of checking the stairwell without putting myself in harm's way. This is hardly the most tasteful thing I've done, but I went back down to the lobby, found the car keys one of the panicking boys had left on the floor, and rifled through their belongings until I found what I was looking for. Another camera, this one able to record video. Then, after some careful planning, I took to the stairwell on a safe floor and lowered the camera down using the rope.

I had only one way of knowing what I saw. I had to figure out if she was down there, and if she saw it, she'd cry up. Otherwise, I'd just have to pull it up, watch the footage and see for myself. I had about a kilometer of rope, which I figured was enough to do the job. Wherever the camera had taken the picture, there was still enough ambient light from above to see something. Surely, a thousand meters down, there'd be nothing but pitch-black darkness. Still, I lowered it all the way down, tied it off, and left it there a few minutes while

I let my arms recover. It wasn't exactly heavy, but it wasn't nothing either. I was about to lift it back out when something changed. My fingers barely grazed the rope when the knot tightened. Fibers groaned. The tempo of its swinging changed. With one hand, I tested the load. It didn't budge an inch.

Whatever was hanging off the other end was far too heavy to be a camera, and there was something deeply wrong with the way the rope was grinding left and right across the rail. Something was down there, and it was climbing the rope, fast. Way too fast for me to take any more time processing it. I grabbed a knife I had made sure to keep on me and began to saw it furiously, but the rope wouldn't stay still. It moved with so much force it threatened to pull the knife out of my grip. It was a nearly impossible task, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't stop my eyes tracing the thin rope that disappeared into the empty dark below, expecting any second now that this terrible thing would appear.

How fast can it move, I wondered. How quickly can it climb a thousand meters, and what if it jumped just a few stories down? It might only have ten, twenty or thirty meters to go. How long did I have? Sweat trickled down my back. It pricked my forehead and made my palms slick. Made it even harder to keep hold on that flimsy kitchen knife. I bit my lips so hard it bled just trying to keep my concentration.

to stop it drifting again and again towards the dark. In the end, there was just a few tight strands left holding when the knife fell from my clumsy hands. Without even meaning to, I cried out, desperate and afraid, and leaned over to try to catch it before gravity carried it away forever. As the knife fell glittering into shadow, two yellow eyes emerged, bright and eager, a light with a malevolent intelligence I'd never appreciated before. They were tiny, smaller than a pea, and embedded in a misshapen head covered in sparse, white, stringy whiskers,

making it look both unnaturally young and old at the same time. Human once, perhaps, who knows? Over one hunched and muscled shoulder, it carried poor Rachel's body, while it used both its three-fingered hands to grab the rope and heave itself upward one after the other. With one of those enormous hands, it reached up and, For a second, I saw my own future. I saw it clamp those grotesque, maggot-like fingers around my head and crushing it like a melon. Or even worse, I saw it pulling me down into the depths below, alive, but not dead.

God knows what for. At the last second, the rope finally snapped. The hand missed my face by mere centimeters, yellow nails, blunt and hollow swallowed by inflamed flesh, nearly grazed the tip of my nose. Its strange little eyes expressed just for a moment, a sort of sad surprise before it began to fall. I wasted no time in leaving. I ran faster than I have in years for the hotel and after that to my room, or I bolted the door and began pulling furniture across the entrance. In a dazed panic, I saw the dumbwaiter and remembered those yellow eyes and that strange hand, and I began to panic once more. It was surely the same creature.

So I spent the rest of the day bolting that damn thing shut. I nailed planks of wood, I screwed, I hammered, waded down. In the end, I even grabbed a wardrobe from another room and slid it across. Still, it didn't feel like enough. And it never would. I couldn't get the image of that damn thing out of my face. It looked sad. It looked lost.

Jesus Christ, all those gifts had been coming from that damn thing. The mere thought repulsed me. Somehow, impossibly, the reality was worse than anything I could have imagined, and I was suddenly thankful for the years it had stayed hidden in the shadows of the dumbwaiter. To have seen that monstrous thing leering at me in the pale moonlight, I might have never slept again. I had to wonder what it was and why it had come for me, so I waited in the room and tried not to sleep, but that's not easy for an old man like me.

For all the excitement, the adrenaline, and fear, I fell asleep just before midnight and awoke in the morning, still upright in my chair, face turned toward the dumbwaiter. All my preparations were for nothing. The planks had been torn off, the gray unbolted from the wall, the wardrobe tipped aside. There, waiting for me, like it so often did, lay the lift with a new day's gift. Although this one had not fitted so neatly inside, it was red. Rachel, folded, compressed, bones broken, skin pale. Blood dripped thickly from the platform and into my very room, and with a heavy heart,

I realized it was time to move again, because I would never be able to sleep soundly in that place again, knowing what stained the carpet. I wanted to be sick, I wanted to run, but there was no forgetting a lifetime of experience. That thing had presented me with a gift. If I hit it, threw it away. I knew what it meant, a nightly visit, the screeching of old gears, a sleepless night spent staring at the dark, and now I knew what lay in wait, it would be a thousand times worse. After perhaps the worst and most strenuous four hours of my life, I finally removed her from

the dumbwaiter and had her sitting in my chair, there in full view for that awful freakish thing. After that, I felt confident I never wanted to step foot in that room again, and I began my preparation to move. I'll never understand that creature. Its wants and needs are beyond my understanding. Its bizarre obsession with me is sickening. It wasn't even enough to torture me with poor Rachel's corpse. It had shoved the old tin box of my letters into one of her hands. For a moment, I was delighted to have them back, but then I opened it and my heart sank. They'd all been torn to bits. All except for one piece of paper, onto which something had scrawled words in a nightmarish hand that was barely legible. The words come off to me as gibberish, fine on their own,

but together the meaning is lost to me. I'll tell you them here, only to give you a sense of how derange that thing must really be. The best thing you can do is take the girl's body and leave, give her parents closure. It is too late for the young men. The lost child in 614 has already eaten them, but I have kept this one close. I have kept her safe and done what little I could to see her body home. I tried giving her to you directly but failed. This was the best I could do. It is up to you to go the rest of the way. You must take her and leave this place. Dunn Raven changed me on the outside, but you it has been changing on the inside. My job is to feed Dunraven, and I have done so for over a century, stealing people and depositing them below. But I could not understand

how you lived above so long, almost as if the hotel desired it. Over the years, it has slowly made it clear to me what your role really is, and I am giving you this one final chance to walk away. I hope this letter helps you see the truth. You have been manipulated. Like me, you have been rewritten to suit the hotel's needs. Why have you been writing yourself these letters? They are gibberish.

I have seen what you do day after day. I watch you. You take photos of other people's children and frame them. You wear a wedding band stolen from one of the soldiers' bodies in the stairwell. You stroke photos of people you never knew and miss a daughter that never existed. I understand now why you're here, and I hope you take this letter seriously. When the Dunn Raven closed, it lost one caretaker. In you, it has made itself another.