The thirteenth floor

‘That’s the hotel, please pull over’, I asked the cabbie. I pulled out my luggage and walked across to the reception.

‘14th floor, sir’, the guy said handing me over the keys and called a waiter to assist me.

‘This way sir’, the waiter led me to the elevator.

He pressed a button numbered 14, when I noticed a queer thing.

‘We don’t have an elevator stop at the 13th floor as it’s considered unlucky in this part of the world’. And the doors closed slowly and the elevator started to ascend under the tension of the metal strings pulling it.

‘So the 13th floor is rechristened to 14?’ I asked him.

‘There is no 13th floor sir, in our hotel. You cross the 12th floor and we reach the 14th floor’, he said.

‘That’s not logical. How can that possibly be?’ I grinned, and he looked at me in distraught fury. ‘When I say there is no 13, you got to believe it. If you want you can check for yourself!!!’

9….10….11….12…. ….14 and the door slowly slid open, even as I exited out of the elevator and the doors slowly closed again behind me with the waiter saying a bye. It took time to cross the 13th floor, yet no number appeared on the digital display. All this looked very absurd.

‘That guy must be nuts’, I thought even as I changed into my night clothes and rang up the reception for dinner. A few minutes later, one more guy turned up to serve dinner. I asked him about the 13th floor after paying a hefty tip. What astounded me was the same answer given to me by this guy.

‘Have all of them gone nuts or is it me who’s gone crazy’ I looked at the mirror and spoke, ‘I am gonna check out the same thing in the night’

It was around 11 O’clock when the knob slowly rotated and my room door opened slowly. I slowly came out of the room and started to walk towards the stairs. I looked out of a window on the way and saw the advertisement hoarding fixed outside the hotel, peeped my head a little out of the window and counted the number of floors. ‘1…2… .. 13, yes 13 floors below me’, I told myself.

As I approached the stairs, I looked down and my eyes started to reel under acrophobia. Holding onto the railings I slowly walked down the stairs before looking at the placard on my floor which read 14th floor and then walked down to reach the 12th floor.

I proceeded to walk towards the window, peeping my head out I looked up. And I began to tremble under fear. The advertisement hoarding which was fixed on the outer side of the 14th floor seemed to look 2 floors away from here, now. I climbed down only one floor, I was very sure about that. But…

And I counted the number of floors below me. ‘1…2… ..11, 11 floors, that means I am at the 12th floor. Actually I should have been on the 13th. And I started to climb back. Expecting to see the placard 14th floor, the lights suddenly went off when I have almost reached. The whole place was dark and I dint even have a torch with me. Holding onto the walls, I slowly started to walk towards my room. ‘These walls seem to be pretty old, with the plastering coming off at a lot of places and I could feel the blisters on the walls.

Suddenly I heard a cry, the cry of a woman and I turned back. Even with fully dilated pupils, I couldn’t see a thing as it was pitch black. And I turned to walk in the direction of my room. I suddenly heard a whisper and started to tread along even faster. As I reached the third door, I reached for the knob, when I felt something soft and fleshy. And I immediately retracted my hand from that thing.

‘I sense many eyes watching me, or is it just my delusion?’ I asked myself not knowing that I would be answered in a few more minutes. I decided to go back to the stairs and turned around running in that direction. Judging by the distance I walked to this place, I knew I was very close to the stairs when I suddenly trampled across what could have been a human body and a pair of hands holding my feet, tripping me over.

A sticky fluid was all that I could feel on the floor amidst obnoxious odours. And I could feel the pair of hands grabbing my feet when I tried to kick them off. Back on my feet again, I was about to run when I rammed into a huge silhouette blocking my path and again falling down. I could see the light at the stairs a few feet away. Pushing the silhouette, I made a dash to the stairs gathering momentum. As I neared the light, I screamed in fright.

My skin started to peel over and the flesh on my feet started to rot exposing the bone and I collapsed onto the ground only to see the decay spreading slowly from the feet towards the abdomen and I looked back to find many partially decayed beings moving towards me before my eye balls dropped out from the sockets and distinctly heard ‘Welcome to the 13th floor’, before I stopped to hear……