The Hotel Listens

20250710

Prompt from the "Kev's Odyssey" series.

“Oh, yes, the manager said you were coming.” Andy pushed the prepared keyring across the counter. “Now, I’m sure she’ll have told you already, but whatever sounds you hear in the upper floors, there’s nobody up there. Staff’ll be staying on the ground floor of the hotel, out of your way. If someone needs to go up we’ll tell you ahead of time.”
“Er, yeah, about that…” The head builder, Carla, eyed the keys warily. “What ‘sounds’ should we be expecting, exactly?”
“Footsteps, mostly.” Andy shot the group a reassuring smile. “Oh, and it often sounds like the elevators are running even when everything’s turned off. Showers and aircon and stuff too. They don’t actually turn back on, it’s not… It’s just echoes. Sort of. Same for the voices. It’s nothing, honest. We think the building just gets lonely during the off-season. There’s no actual ghosts.”
“You’ve had it checked?”
“On the regular. Betsy’s got paperwork if you ask her.”
“Mm. Think I will.” But Carla picked up the keys. “So. Double-check that everything’s actually turned off before we get started. Anything else?”
“Well, um, this isn’t necessary, but… if you, like, chat amongst yourselves, maybe play music and stuff, that helps a lot.”
“Helps how?”
“Helps the hotel feel lived in. When it doesn’t feel quiet and empty it doesn’t make the noises as much.”
“All… right?”
So the crew collected their tools and materials and headed up. ‘Start at the top’ was Carla’s motto, and while she felt a bit uneasy about everyone being so far from the exit she decided it was better to follow standard practice. Just… act like everything was normal. While staying alert.
A bubble of silence followed them, making the distant ‘lived in’ noises eerier. Elevator dings, a medley of carpet-muffled footsteps, snippets of mundane conversations.
“Does sound haunted.” Carla muttered.
“Nah.” Young Manuel said confidently. “There’s too many. Too spread out. You’d need an army of spooks. No way that’d slip past inspection.”
“Hm. If you say so…” Carla eyed the walls. “If the building’s… alive… think it’ll object to us updating the wiring?”
“Um. Dunno. Maybe… be gentle, like?”
“Right.”
Hard to be gentle about routing out plaster, surely. But fine.
As they started pulling out the first set, the noises got louder. Closer. More frequent. Footsteps gave way to echoing arguments and shrill fire alarms. Everyone was jumpy. Carla insisted that they remove and replace in sections rather than doing the whole floor at once. Just in case they… had to leave partway.
So the new wires went in. Were tested. Plaster put back.
And the noises settled.
They all braced before starting the second set, but… nothing. Carla started wondering if they’d managed to pull out the one bit of haunted wiring, or something.
But then, as they started moving to the sixth set, a shrill beeping went off from one of the walls. One that, based on the wiring diagrams, didn’t need anything replaced. But the beeping sounded exactly like the tool they used to locate wiring.
Just noises? Right. But… due diligence…
Carla slowly walked over. Ran her scanner across the plaster. And it lit up and beeped. “Huh.”
Ten minutes later she was furiously cussing. “What idiot ran a spur off there?? And why - they DIDN’T - this is a FIRE HAZARD! Can’t believe it…”
A weary murmur echoed down the hall. “I know, I know…”
Carla clicked her tongue and shook her head and patted the wall.
“Wonder what that feels like?” Pat mused. “To a building, I mean.”
“Doesn’t matter how it feels, it needs to come out. And we now need to check everywhere in case whatever dunderhead responsible worked on anything else!”
Someone cheered. Carla automatically looked over, but… empty hallway. Right. Just noises. Except they clearly weren’t random, were they? Not all of them, at least.
She bemusedly muttered “It’s like trying to have a conversation with a parrot.”
“Didn’t know you own a parrot.”
“I don’t, but my granddad…” Carla shook herself. “Doesn’t matter. I think. Let’s get on, this means there’s even more work than we thought.”
Turned out there were several more spots where the wiring didn’t match the diagrams… and each started beeping as the crew got close. Carla quickly got into the habit of saying “Right, that should be everything…” and then pausing to listen before they moved on to the next section.
When the crew broke for lunch, Carla went to track down the manager. “Bad news is, this project’s looking a lot bigger than we expected.”
“Oh.” Betsy winced. “How much bigger?”
Carla put the amended diagrams down and pointed to the scribbles. “We’re talking probably twice as long as quoted, maybe more depending on what the other floors look like. Gonna have to go through the whole place and give you a new quote.”
“Alright. Fair enough.”
“Good news is, your building’s been real helpful so far, and if we can train it to alert us to a few more problems-”
“Train it?” Betsy fixed her with an odd look. “Oh. You haven’t been listening to the noises, have you? It’s best just to tune those out. You’d go mad trying to make sense of them.”
Carla squinted right back at her. Either I’m mad, or you’re daft. We’ll see. “…Fine. We’ll still need to do a full scan through. It’s not just degradation - we found a bunch of wiring that was never up to code. I’m amazed this place hasn’t caught fire.”
“Oh dear. Our old caretaker did always complain about the electrics…”
I’ll bet. Poor sod. “Well, by the time we’re done here, I can promise it’ll all be perfectly safe.”
The sound of a joyful crowd (a party?) swept down the empty hall behind her. Betsy didn’t even blink. You really did learn to tune them out, huh?
“Thank you, dearie. It’ll be such a relief to have it all sorted.”
“Yeah. I’ll bet. For all of you.”

Prompt was “Footsteps”.