I remember it like it was a dream. We were in a hotel, a nice one, a big one. There were people everywhere but no one near me. My family was there, but they were outside parking the car or getting our key from the front desk or asleep in their rooms.  Sheba was there, a streak of black against the ruby red carpet of the lobby floor.  This didn’t strike me as strange, which struck me as strange.

I turn to the marble column that hangs like a rope ladder down the well of stacked washer floors, where the elevator doors slide open at my approach. I feel compelled to wander. I feel like I need to find something.

I feel like I need to get to my room.

I get into the elevator with Sheba in tow. The circle for my floor lights up, six or seven or eleven, gravity twitches as the elevator takes off. Sheba looks up at me from the floor where she sits patiently panting against my pant leg.

She always looks at you.

To her you are God.

I step back and watch the dim lights cycle behind the numbers on the panel over the elevator doors. They don’t seem to go in any particular order, but such is to be expected.

You can’t ever read the numbers anyway, stop trying.

Sheba still sits (sits still) uncomplainingly beside me, wet breath soaking through the denim of my jeans.

Dogs pant because they don’t have sweat glands and have to cool themselves by circulating air quickly in and out of their mouths.

I wonder to myself what it is I could possibly need so badly, then-

-shrug-

-and edge my leg out of range of Sheba’s clammy breath.

Probably won’t ever find it anyway, you can’t even remember where you left your own car.

The elevator console pings as the doors open in innocent silence. As I get off the elevator, I glance down at the crack between the elevator car and the floor just as I step over it, knowing as I do that I am making a mistake.

Do you even have a car?

I wonder-

Bad idea.

Time turns to taffy between two big rigs going opposite directions on the superhighway of relativity. The moment my weight is in awkward limbo between right foot and left stretches into eternity. The terror seizes me like a cold syringe in the spine as I feel the cables silently scream in protest.

Too many bad movies have left me with a lingering subliminal fear that as I step across the space between hanging mass and solid surface, the elevator cables will break and I will be cut in half as the steel elevator ceiling moves past the concrete hotel floor.

Force equals mass times acceleration.

This is even worse when the gap is wide, because chances are I won’t be cut in half, I’ll be smeared in half, learning firsthand just how many feet of intestines I have. Any sane person would prefer to simply plummet to their death.

The human intestine is between 17 and 35 feet long, your feet might just barely reach the bottom. 

This is a wide gap.

I lean all the weight of my fear into it, concentrate on forgetting every horror film I’ve ever seen, and make it across. After verifying that I can still touch my toes, I look back at Sheba as she trots out behind me. She stares at me with her look of perpetual trepidation, as I suspiciously watch the doors coast smoothly back together, waiting to see where we’re going next.  The yellow line of light through the crack in the doors sinks slowly into the floor as the patient predator slinks off to stalk other, less wary, prey. 

I remember to breath.

That was close.

I remember my mission, ascension completed, now on to room reconnaissance.

I stand at the joining of two door lined hallways, each arcing off in opposite directions. They presumably meet somewhere on the other side of the hotel, but I know assuming that would probably just guarantee they don’t.

Safe assumption.

The yellow, wide-spaced ceiling lights running down each hallway give the walkways the red-black-red-black bands of a snake.

Red and yellow kills a fellow, red and black is safe for jack.

I glance at the dim yellow light above me and wonder if a rhyme I learned when I was young was exclusive in its specificity.

Just don’t turn over any rocks, you’ll be fine.

I abandon worry, and turn to logic: which looks more promising? I peer into the curve of the hallway to my left, hoping if I crane my head far enough I can see the end. There is no end in sight.

Don’t try too hard to see the end, because then you won’t be able to, and then there won’t be one. 

The elevator doors wait, crouched on supple haunches behind me, unhurried in their pursuit; they flaunt a virtue I have never possessed.

They smirk.

Ignore them; just go to your room, number…

I would learn to be patient if I thought it would help.

Don’t think about it.

I’d learn immediately.

You’re thinking about it, now you won’t know.

I don’t know which way my room is, so I breathe a mental sigh and start off down the hallway on the left.

The only way to make sense of a book is to read it from start to finish, and one should always begin on the left, and move to the right.

The first door I come to on the left has the word ONE on it in brushed bronze, picked out in condescending calligraphic letters, just above the scuffed dome of a peephole.

They always put a map of the floor with room numbers just inside the door, so you can find the nearest exit in the event of an emergency.

I try to turn the handle. It tells me it does not want to be turned.

How very helpful.

Frustrated, I lean forward to look in the peephole; maybe I can see the map from this side.

I suppose you would look down the end of a gun to see if it was loaded as well.

My adrenaline takes over, I throw my head sideways as I dart backwards, landing in an awkward pile on the floor. I look up at the door as it stares down at me. I can almost see a wisp of smoke spiraling ghostlike towards the ceiling from the still hot barrel. I exhale frozen razorblades.

Your worst fear would have been looking right back at you, knowing you better than it knows itself.

I silently thank the disobedient handle for watching my back.

You’re right, it would have come at you from behind; ripping you apart before you even knew it was happening.

I glance nervously over my shoulder. Sheba looks up at me and starts thumping her tail against the carpet of the hotel floor, tongue hanging loosely over her pointed teeth.

She loves when you look at her because you do it so rarely.

Inspiration dawns, I reach for my wallet to see if I have a key with a number on it. My wallet is gone, but I don’t care, because I find a magnetic keycard with the word “two” written in fading black ink on a line next to the printed words “YOUR ROOM NUMBER IS”.

Great, your room must be right across from this one, odds on the left, evens on the right.

I turn around, and just a few steps further down the hallway am greeted by the words THIRTY SEVEN hanging on the door, their patronizing bronze letters laughing at me as my confidence dies like so much wind in a forest. 

No bother, this must be the last door in this hallway, the numbers must go down one side and up the other, rather than hopping back and forth as haphazardly as they usually do.

I check my room number one more time.

These numbers play it safe, nothing wrong with playing it safe.

The card definitely (defiantly) says “two”, and the person who wrote it must have really liked the letter “o”, because it is a nearly perfect circle.

You’ve reached the right side, now go to the next line and start over on the left.

Having picked up as many grains of confidence as possible from the thick shag carpet of my mind, I turn to the next door on the left, hurriedly slip the key into the card reader, and glare in frustration at the despicably flashing red light.

Damn hotel card readers never work the first time.

I slide it again, slower.

Maybe you demagnetized it with your excitement.

One last try.

No dice, soldier.

Exasperated at the futility of the circumstances, I slip the keycard back into my pocket, and take a moment to reconsider the situation.

What now?

Did you miss something?

I step back and take a look at the door, at the words ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY SIX picked out in that now familiar brushed metal, over the same translucent peephole. Without thinking I take one step sideways.

Always treat a firearm as though it’s loaded.

I sigh.

You should have read the number on the damn door first.

I fall back on my original plan: let’s read this hotel like its due back Thursday.

It’s like an asthma attack, the more you focus on it the worse it will get.

I don’t want any fees, after all.

Just breathe slowly, pace yourself, and don’t think about it.

So I start walking down the hallway, all the while watching the numbers passing by, careful not to take my eyes off them until I’ve made sure they are not my room, knowing that if I miss it I will be lost forever.

Why are you doing this again?

Sheba wanders behind me, sniffing at the bottoms of doors with lights on inside or glows of late night TV whispering underneath, never getting too far behind. She silently satiates her lifelong ambition to sniff that which has never been sniffed before.

Sniff it, if it smells alright, lick it, if it tastes alright, eat it.

The numbers on the doors are random, but I knew they would be. I am beginning to suspect that this is going to be a very unremarkable trip. The moment this thought snaps across the synapses of my brain I reach door number two.

Let’s see what’s behind door number two!

The room is unremarkable; at least if it is remarkable I don’t take the time to notice.

I make a beeline for the table with the microwave oven and the ice bucket, I feel that it is there, something, something important.

Sheba also makes a beeline, but it is for the wounded half of a candy bar sitting alone on the floor beneath the crumb covered field of battle, a lone deserter thinking himself finally safe from the carnage.

The table is a bloody battlefield of junk food wrappers and soda cans. It is impossible to tell which side suffered more casualties, but both sides have to know that they’ve been in a fight. I shuffle through the rubbish, and behind a bag of popcorn sits a smooth LED flashlight, which I move to scoop up without delay.

Sniff it, lick it, eat it.

I wrap my fingers around the smooth titanium barrel, lifting its weight with a smug sense of victory.

You can’t get away that easily.

I thumb the metal slide on the side of the barrel, pushing together the contacts along the inside of the shaft, straining to keep my frustration in check as nothing happens. Sheba shoves past my legs and mercilessly executes the deserter dessert.

That’s alright, there are batteries in the microwave. Don’t think, just open it.

And there are.

I can hear Sheba drinking noisily out of my toilet through the dog sized crack in the door. Once quenched, she pads back over to and sits back down by my feet.

More like her toilet, she uses it more than you do.

As I stand there trying to guess why I might have needed this flashlight so badly, I absentmindedly unscrew the end and drop out the four dog treats that were in the battery housing, and replace them with the two AAs from the microwave. I set the dog treats on the table as I screw the cap tightly back onto the battery housing.

Mine?

After short consideration, I decide the best thing to do now is go back down to the lobby. Sheba sits and thumps and looks up at me excitedly, delicious toilet water drips from her mouth and hanging tongue in a sporadic waterfall of diluted saliva. She drools some of the bubbly syrup on the top of my left shoe and I shove her away.

Maybe if you find the front door, you can get out of this hotel and do something fun.

I am feeling kind of bored.

Like drive a fast car or go skydiving.

I stroll towards the door to the room, whistling for Sheba. She jogs over wagging her tail, spinning in circles like she always does when she realizes she is going to get to go outside. She sits, just as I trained her to do, barely resisting the urge to stand up and spin in circles again, impatiently waiting to have her leash put on.

She tries hard to please you, and you know you’re not easy to please.

I don’t care about her leash because, well, she isn’t even supposed to be here. I’m not even sure where it is. She never leaves my side anyway.

I reach for the doorknob, and she stands and presses her nose against the crack between the door and its frame.

She hasn’t been on a leash this whole time anyway.

I pull the door open and she shoves through, using her hard head to help me do it more quickly. Once in the hallway, she sits on the floor and waits to see which way I am going to go.

Whatever.

I look to my left and peer down the endless hallway, which gives me no hints. The right side has the same poker-faced visage. I turn left and start walking, three doors down on the left is the elevator, the call arrow already lit up with its orange yellow glow. The ping sound comes from nowhere in particular, and I step through the doors while they are still sliding open, chuckling at the gap between the floor and the car.

Sometimes laughing at your fear is the best way to overcome it.

I go to the console to push the lobby button, and notice that there are now only 2 buttons to choose from. One has a black, raised L printed on it, the other the words SIX OR SEVEN OR ELEVEN. I reach out, slap the L, and step backwards to lean against the fake wooden panel in the rear of the elevator, arms crossed.

Don’t think about it, distract yourself and you will be in the lobby.

Gravity hiccups again as the elevator starts moving, Sheba sits down and opens her mouth to pant.

She learned long ago that when in a moving vehicle, sitting is almost always preferred to kissing the inside of the windshield.

She informs me that she appreciates me letting her be there by trying to thump her tail, the end of which just twitches due to the fact that she is sitting on it.

I am [laughing quietly to myself].

The console pings and the doors open.

I look out of the small cubicle of the elevator into total blackness. The only thing visible through the doors is the pale crescent of sterile halogen light given off by the frosted rectangles of glasstic lining the ceiling of the elevator, showing just enough of the neon red hotel carpet for Sheba and I to stand on.

Screw that.

I step forward to the console, ready to head back into the never ending hallway rather than set foot on that lifeless, blood-soaked, island.

Arterial blood is bright red because it is full of oxygen, venous blood is dark, because it has offloaded all of its oxygen to the body and has absorbed the carbon dioxide left over from using the oxygen.

I consider my options as Sheba remains considerately silent.

There was a remote village in Asia where a pocket of CO2 came out of a fissure under the lake their village was built around, sweeping through the valley like a rush of water down a canyon.

I wonder if she knows she is breathing air.

Nobody knew it had happened until some kid rode his bike six miles over from the next town, discovering over 1000 people four days dead.

I wonder if she is breathing air.

I bet he rode that six miles home faster than he’d ever done it before.

There is only one button left on the console to the right now, but I knew there would be.

Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you.

I wait to see if the doors will close on their own, so of course they don’t.

Maybe there’s something cool out there, maybe you’ll find a switch and when you flip it you’ll see that you’re in a sports car showroom, and all the keys are in the ignitions.

I stare at the insolently raised L that sits unconvincingly on the dome of the glowing button.

Yeah, right.

I squint apprehensively into the impenetrable darkness.

Dream on.

I lift the flashlight’s reassuring weight in my right hand, sliding the switch and praising the triple LED beam of sunlight that pours out the end in a cylinder of blinding photons.

Do you think Edison could have imagined?

I hold it with both hands, drawing it across in an arc while making a light saber noise, pretending I am one with the force, hoping to distract myself away from here, off to  wherever it was all that fantasy took place. Sheba still waits next to me, bored now, having long ago grown accustomed to my periodic bouts of weird.

But still, why go out there at all, why not just wait here and let this (us) all die of boredom?

I roll the flashlight in the palm of my hand.

Because you are cornered in an elevator and when the nightmare comes you will have nowhere to run.

I squint, trying to see what I can see in the humming emptiness of the heavy space

Why not just sit here and close your eyes and wait to wake up?

I glance at the cozy room of the elevator behind me.

Because if you close your eyes it will be right in front of you and you won’t wake up, then you will be sitting on the floor, with your eyes closed, cornered in an elevator, genius.

I sigh.

Life’s a b1tch, because if it were a s1ut it’d be easy.

Resigning myself to the inevitable, I sigh and step out into the lobby.

Welcome to the dark side, Luke.

I know there is nobody out there, at least it’s better if there is nobody out there, so I don’t bother asking the silent black wall of the lobby. Sheba whispers out behind me and sits next to me on the red life raft of light.

I’m thinking about it.

The doors of the elevator scrape shut behind me, sweeping away our boat, leaving us wading miles from shore in a sea of velvet darkness. As they close, they sound like they don’t quite sit right in the frame anymore, they wobble against their housing with the monotonous mocking laughter of my inevitable doom.

They sound almost like the bosses laughter from Mario 64.

I wonder if I should be afraid.

Nobody was afraid of the bosses; there were many worse ways to be killed in that game than by an overweight turtle or a ghost with dimples.

I stand there, Sheba sits.

They would just put you on a platform with your back against a wall, in front of a hundred kinds of moving flaming spinning death, and let you figure out a way to kill yourself.

Despite my self-assurances, I am nervous. I feel like I am hanging by two fingers of one hand over the black pit of nightmare, with only the light of my flashlight and the panting of my black dog keeping me tethered to calm.

Find the way out, you don’t have the strength to hold on much longer.

I start walking, keeping the flashlight beam close. Sheba stays right by me, not wanting to wander too far, sensing my nervousness and keeping alert.

She knows she is keeping you sane.

We walk for what seems like ages.

She may be stupid, but she knows you better than you know yourself, because you are all she has.

I am becoming increasingly aware of the fact that we should have reached the other side of the lobby by now. The beam of the flashlight seems less of a sunbeam and more of a moonbeam now, the darkness leeches the energy from it before it hits the ground.

If you didn’t have the light she would be the only left thing to keep you from falling.

I freeze.

Someone is there.

I stop and sweep my flashlight around me in a wide arc, squinting, trying to pick out the predator from the forest of darkness all around me.

Some thing is there.

I stand stock still to take stock, holding my breath, trying to hear. Anything. Sheba stands next to me, looking straight forward and panting.

Doesn’t she always sit down when you stop moving?

I remember I am still holding my breath and let it out in a shaky gasp. My lungs burn with effort as I try to force them to calm, wishing I could hear over the heartbeat pounding against the inside of my eardrums.

You know what it is.

The beam of my flashlight is jumping spasmodically with the shaking of my hand, the motion becoming even more exaggerated as I point it further into the inky blackness.

It’s the most terrifying thing you can imagine.

The light flickers.

One is slipping.

I shake it and it stutters increasingly less frequent bursts of illumination as I jostle the batteries roughly against the copper contacts inside.

You are going to break it.

I quietly curse the simple technology, and it’s failing.

You have broken a hundred flashlights doing this.

I am shaking it more gently now, hoping I can jostle its internal organs into a working configuration, then hold it steady.

You know that never works.

I hear a sound, faint through the rushing rivers of blood in my ear canals.

SQUEAK

Sheba hears it too and perks up her ears. I hold my breath again, straining to hear over the red-water roar in my ears.

SQUEAK SQUEAK

I stop to think. She does not.

That sounded almost like one of Sheba’s…

SHEBA HEEL!

I lunge for her collar, letting the flashlight go without a thought, but I’m too late. She bounds off into the darkness after the razorbladed candy apple, leaving me alone with the sound of the flashlight hitting the carpet, the rush of silence as I sink into the velvet ocean of darkness.

She’s already dead.

I can’t move, I know moving is useless. I can only wait for it to take me.

She trusted you to protect her, and you didn’t.

I close my eyes.

You should have just let the elevator smear you.

I don’t even bother pinching myself.

You deserve it.

It comes from behind me. I feel an enormous weight clamp with indescribable pressure around the upper part of my arm, just below the shoulder, like a giant cigar cutter closing down. I feel my entire arm go fuzzy with numbness just as a misshapen tentacle tightens around my midsection, pulling me closer to the death that awaits me. Slimy hot somethings wander across my face, and I squeeze my eyes shut as hard as I can.

Make it quick, merciful.

I swing my free arm around, trying to keep whatever is on my face out of my mouth, and instead find Sheba’s furry head.

What?

I push her away from me and she stops licking my face and goes back to her spot at the foot of my unframed mattress, to sigh, and lay her head back down on a pile of my discarded clothing. I try to sit halfway up on my elbow, but my right arm is asleep from it’s hibernation underneath my pillow, and I slump awkwardly back down to the sweat soaked sheets. As I roll onto my back, my fiance groans and rolls over, dragging her arm from around my waist.

Welcome back to Kansas.

I lay there awake, and Sheba comes to the side of my mattress again, sensing that I am not going back to sleep. She curls into a ball on the floor by the edge of my mattress, and I let my hand slide off onto her head as it rests on her paws. I sit there staring at the white cracked ceiling of my darkened room.

She knows she’s stupid, but doesn’t care because she has you to do the important thinking for her.

I sit up and drop my feet the full seven inches to the economically favorable carpet of my room, feeling the cool cement underneath push back against the warmth of the bottoms of my feet. I can hear Sheba getting up and feel her excitement as she shoves past me to get to the door, wagging her tail in anticipation of hanging out with me upstairs.

I open the door, and the moment it is wide enough to accommodate one black collie-lab mix she wedges her head through and runs noisily upstairs past her bowl of water to drink loudly out of my toilet. I resist the urge to scold her.

More like her toilet, she uses it more than you do.

I sit down on the dilapidated couch that is the centerpiece of my apartment and flip on the TV. I glance at the clock, its four am. Sheba comes out of my bathroom, strolls over to the couch and sits down and looks at me.  She starts panting. Delicious toilet water drips from her mouth and hanging tongue in a sporadic waterfall of diluted saliva.

She drools some of the cold syrup on the top of my right thigh and I shove her away. She pads a few feet off to the side of the couch and sits, and pants, and thumps her tail between the carpet and her foot, looking at me just like she always does.

That was a really bad one.

I turn the television to channel six or seven or eleven, keeping the volume low, reading the subtitles so as not to wake my sleeping fiance,

Left to right, left to right.

Before I even know it, I’m walking back down the hallway, searching for my room, chasing after something real, something necessary.

Sheba is there, a silent wisp of darkness trailing behind me on the incarnadine highway of the hallway floor.

She always stays with you to make sure you don’t get lost.