The Hotel at the End of Gravity
(A bedtime broadcast for anyone still pretending to fall asleep.)
It starts with an elevator that shouldn't exist.
I found it one night at the edge of the city, half-hidden between two buildings arguing about rent. No sign, no button, no reflection in the glass beside it — just a brushed-metal door humming faintly, as if it were thinking about opening.
The air there was too still. Even the traffic noise thinned out, like sound itself didn't want to intrude.
I stood watching the door until the streetlights began to flicker, their glow bending inward toward the metal like moths choosing a god. Then, without my help, the door slid open.
Inside, there was a carpet patterned with constellations I didn't recognize and soft jazz leaking from nowhere, as if the building itself were exhaling music.
A sign on the far wall read, in polite gold script:
"Welcome, esteemed guest, to The Hotel at the End of Gravity. Please check your belongings and your physics at the desk."
I remember smiling at that. It felt like something written by someone trying too hard to be charming.
The woman at the front desk looked like she hadn't slept in years but had made peace with it. Her smile was perfectly aligned, but her eyes never blinked at the same time.
"Name?" she asked.
I said it, or something close to it — the word came out like static, rearranged halfway through. She nodded as if she'd heard it before and wrote it in a ledger that seemed to breathe when the pen moved.
"Lovely," she said. "You're in room zero. Elevators are imaginary but functional."
She handed me a key — heavy, brass, warm to the touch. It hummed faintly in my palm.
"Breakfast is served when you remember it," she added, then turned to the next invisible guest.
The lobby stretched upward without stopping. Chandeliers swayed in slow, deliberate arcs as though underwater. A grand piano played itself in the corner, missing just enough notes to sound human.
I didn't walk toward the stairs. The floor moved me instead, gently sliding like an escalator dream. I blinked, and I was standing outside a door marked simply: 0.
I don't recall taking the key from my pocket, but it turned easily.
Inside, the room was luxurious in an apologetic sort of way. A bed large enough for several regrets. A window looking out onto a city that floated slightly above itself. The ceiling seemed to inhale with me.
There was a note on the nightstand:
"Welcome, guest. Do not jump. Gravity is currently out for maintenance."
I laughed — too loudly, I think — because that was easier than wondering what it meant.
Then I looked out the window and saw everything rising.
Shoes. Lampposts. A lone pigeon flapping in perfect stillness as the air carried it upward like a saint.
The world had let go.
I opened the window. The air was thick, syrupy, moving in lazy spirals. Furniture floated past — tables, umbrellas, papers folding and unfolding themselves like they couldn't decide on meaning.
And then I saw a cat drifting by in a dining chair, a pair of round sunglasses perched on its face.
"First time?" it asked.
I froze. I thought it was a joke of the mind — sleep deprivation, oxygen, something. But it tilted its head as though waiting for an answer.
I nodded.
"Don't panic," it said. "Gravity's on strike again. Happens every few eternities."
"Who's management?" I asked before I could stop myself.
The cat pointed upward toward nothing. "Whoever's still listening."
Then it yawned, stretched in midair, and drifted into the haze.
I closed the window, but the room kept moving. Slowly, almost politely, as if the building itself were breathing me upward.
The bed hummed. The floor tilted. Somewhere beyond the walls, something large exhaled.
I stepped into the hall. The air was colder. A bellhop floated past upside down, carrying a tray of teacups that refused to spill.
He tipped his hat as he drifted by. "Morning turbulence," he said. "Please fasten your expectations."
Doors opened as I passed. One room spilled a faint rain of paper poetry, another glowed red with the shadow of dancers moving without sound. In one, I thought I saw someone who looked like me sitting at a desk, head tilted, waiting for something to happen.
The walls felt warm beneath my hand. Almost pulsing.
An intercom crackled above me:
"Attention, valued guests: gravity is operating at seventeen percent. Please refrain from existential leaps until further notice. Complimentary flotation devices are available in the lobby."
The voice paused just long enough to let the silence answer.
Then the speaker clicked off.
The elevator waited beside me — I hadn't pressed a button, yet the doors slid open anyway with a sound halfway between a sigh and an apology.
The cat was there again, now wearing a bellhop cap.
"Going down?" it asked.
"Is there a down?"
"Not anymore," it said, pressing a button labeled Probably.
The elevator began to hum. The walls flickered like film trying to remember its own order. The jazz returned, but backward this time, each note bending slightly too long.
"Why are you here?" the cat asked.
"I don't know," I said.
"Good," it replied. "That's the only qualification."
When the doors opened, we were somewhere else entirely — a café suspended in midair. Tables drifted, anchored by thin chains that vanished into mist. Waiters floated between them, pouring coffee that hovered obediently in the air.
I sat, because the chair expected me to.
A menu appeared on the table:
Continental Breakfast: dreams lightly buttered with logic
Full Gravity: not recommended for beginners
Espresso of Enlightenment: comes with sudden realization and mild nausea
I chose the espresso.
It arrived humming Beethoven through the steam. I drank and immediately felt the memory of almost understanding something important, just out of reach.
The cat passed by with a tray of pastries. "Careful," it said. "That stuff sticks."
"What is it?"
"Momentum," it replied. "In liquid form."
I looked around the café. People — if they were people — floated at their tables, murmuring softly to one another, though their mouths didn't move.
Outside the windows, the horizon began to bend upward, as if trying to swallow the sky.
The cat landed lightly beside my table. Its fur bristled. "You should go," it said.
"Why?"
"It's starting early this time."
Before I could ask what it meant, the lights flickered — once, twice — and the floor lurched beneath me. Cups slid silently across tables, but the coffee didn't spill; it simply stayed in place, trembling like frightened glass.
A bell sounded in the distance — deep, heavy, and wet, like metal struck underwater.
The cat's voice came from behind me now. "Don't look down."
Naturally, I did.
The café floor was gone. Beneath us was open air — or something worse than air. Layers of the hotel, floating, inverted, repeating endlessly.
And between them, shapes that moved too smoothly to be human.
They climbed the spaces between floors, their hands reversed, their faces missing all the features except a mouth that whispered things I couldn't hear but could somehow feel.
I backed away, but the cat only watched, unbothered.
"They're just the guests who stayed too long," it said. "They forgot which way was out."
"What happens to them?"
The cat smiled — or at least showed teeth. "They're management now."
The floor shuddered again. The lights flared to white.
When my eyes cleared, the cat was gone.
I don't know how I got to the ballroom, but I was there — standing among a crowd of floating bodies dressed in formalwear that didn't fit quite right.
The chandelier spun in a lazy circle, dripping molten glass that never touched the ground. On the stage stood a figure wearing a suit made of equations, its outline blurring at the edges.
"Esteemed guests," it said in twelve voices layered into one, "we thank you for your patience during this period of gravitational instability."
Its hands folded, bending like reflections.
"In the meantime, please refrain from confronting your doubles or attempting to redefine up."
Someone nearby whispered, "What if we already did?"
The figure turned its head toward the sound. "Then you have my condolences," it said.
The air trembled. The chandelier clapped once.
Music began — a slow, uneven waltz. The guests moved as if pulled by invisible strings, rising and turning, faces blank and radiant.
Something brushed against my shoulder — a hand, cold and rubbery. I turned, but the person attached to it was me. My face. My mouth forming the same apology I didn't say.
I ran.
The hallway stretched ahead, impossible, doors multiplying faster than I could count. Each one whispered in passing: Stay. Stay. Stay.
I burst through the first door that gave way.
The roof.
The city below was bending, folding, pieces of it peeling off and floating away. The moon hung low and trembling, like it was about to cry.
The cat was waiting near the edge, grooming its paw.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" it said.
I didn't answer.
"It's about to invert," it added casually.
I looked up — or maybe down — and saw a crack forming in the sky, thin as a smile. Through it, another world stared back: same city, upside down, glowing like a pulse under glass.
"What's happening?" I asked.
"When gravity's gone too long," said the cat, "the reflection tries to replace the original."
Pieces of light began to fall — delicate, deliberate. Every one that landed became something that shouldn't exist: a clock bleeding backward, a bird made of paper screaming in a human voice, a child's drawing breathing through its crayon lines.
One of them landed in my hand. A tiny fish of folded paper. It whispered my name — the correct one, the one I hadn't said — and then disintegrated into ash.
"They never last," the cat murmured. "Too much memory."
Far below, the city tilted again. Whole streets began to slide upward, houses turning silently in the air. People leaned out of windows, waving like tourists leaving a cruise.
The cat stood. "Time to go."
"Where?"
"Lobby. Basement. Dream. It's all the same here."
It jumped. I followed.
For a moment, we fell upward.
I hit the lobby floor and kept falling through it. The air turned thick and cold, full of whispers that weren't words. My body slowed without stopping, drifting through layer after layer of the same hotel repeating forever.
The chandeliers here were bones. The pianos played themselves with no keys left.
And then I stopped moving.
I was standing again, somehow, in front of the reception desk.
The clerk looked different now. Her smile was wider. Her eyes were the wrong color, reflecting not me but the empty hallway behind.
"Welcome back," she said. "Check-out is when you remember who you were."
I looked down. I was holding a suitcase I didn't recognize. When I opened it, it was full of small, sleeping versions of myself.
The clerk's expression softened. "Ah," she said. "Your baggage."
"What do I do with it?"
"Most guests let it float away," she said, gesturing to the glass ceiling above. Hundreds of glowing suitcases drifted there like stars, bumping gently against the edges of the sky.
I let go. Mine rose to join them.
Something inside me felt lighter, and worse for it.
The clerk handed me a receipt. The words shimmered: Payment accepted in wonder.
But underneath, almost invisible, another line appeared as the ink dried:
Nonrefundable.
I wandered the halls again. The café was gone. The rooms whispered. The air pressed softly against my chest, like the hotel itself was trying to slow my heartbeat.
One door stood slightly open. Inside, a garden suspended in darkness — flowers blooming upside down, petals glowing faintly blue.
At its center, a fountain murmured with no water — only orbits of tiny glass marbles, each containing a reflection of me.
A sign read:
"Do not disturb the reflections. They bruise easily."
I reached out anyway. One marble floated up, bumping my fingers, trembling. Inside, a miniature me pressed its palm to the glass.
Then the others began to spin.
A low hum filled the air — the sound of an elevator starting somewhere beneath the earth. The marbles turned faster, light spilling out, and I realized I could hear voices in them. My voices. Every version of me I had ever been, whispering: Stay. Stay. Stay.
The cat's voice drifted through the static. "Sorry, guest. The hotel's rebooting. Happens every dream cycle."
The floor cracked like ice.
Light poured out, and the garden folded in on itself like paper.
I woke up — maybe — on the same bed as before.
The clock said 3:07 a.m.
The key hummed faintly on the nightstand. The note still warned: Do not jump.
Outside, the city floated calmly. The pigeon was back where it belonged, pretending not to remember.
I rolled over.
The pillow purred.
I froze.
The cat was there, smaller now, curled beside my face.
"Did we fix it?" I whispered.
Its one visible eye glowed faintly. "Define fix."
I didn't answer.
It yawned, showing too many teeth. "Good guest," it murmured, curling tighter.
I stared at the ceiling. The breathing had stopped. That should have comforted me. It didn't.
From far below, the elevator hummed again — that same polite, eternal tone, rising through every floor.
Then came the sound of a bell.
One ring.
I still don't know if it meant check-in or check-out.
But the air shifted. The bed tilted.
And in the corner of the room, the ceiling started to crack — the same thin, glowing line I'd seen in the sky.
Something on the other side began to knock.
Slow. Polite. Patient.
I wanted to scream, but the room exhaled first.
Now the air hums in rhythm with my heartbeat. I think the hotel is learning the pattern.
If I sleep, it will know.
If I don't, I'll keep floating.
The cat lifts its head.
"Good," it whispers. "Stay awake. Someone has to manage the place."
When I woke again, it wasn't morning.
The clock said 3:07 a.m. just like before. I think it always will.
The cat was gone. The air tasted new but stale — like someone had replaced it while I slept. The note on the table now said:
"Welcome back. Complimentary déjà vu included with every stay."
I sat up. The ceiling crack was gone, smoothed over like an apology. But I could still hear something faint — a ticking that didn't match the clock.
Not fast, not slow. Just deliberate.
I got up. The carpet felt softer, too soft — like walking on breath. When I opened the door, the hallway waited exactly as I remembered it, except it was breathing. Every few seconds, the walls seemed to sigh inward.
Down the hall, the elevator dinged. No one came out.
I told myself not to move. Then, of course, I did.
The elevator doors opened before I reached them, polite as ever. The brass key in my hand vibrated once, like a small heartbeat, and the elevator accepted it.
The panel had no numbers now — only a single glowing word:
Beneath.
I pressed it before thinking.
The doors closed. The air turned syrup-thick. Somewhere in the walls, a voice whispered names that sounded almost like mine.
When the elevator stopped, the doors opened into... a basement? A sub-lobby? The lights flickered in perfect rhythm, exactly four times each. Between flickers, things moved. I couldn't catch them looking.
The floor here wasn't carpet but something dark and reflective — not water, but not solid either. Each step I took left a faint ring of sound, like glass struck gently.
There was a desk. Someone stood behind it — not the same clerk as before. This one was shorter, or taller, depending on where I blinked. Its uniform fit perfectly but seemed to change color with each breath.
"Welcome back," it said. The voice was almost kind. "We've prepared your feedback form."
It slid a single sheet toward me. Blank, except for one line:
How long have you been falling?
I didn't answer. I didn't have to. The pen wrote something by itself.
When I looked again, the page said:
Long enough to forget the direction.
The clerk smiled. "Excellent. Management appreciates clarity."
I turned to leave, but the elevator was gone. The hall behind me had been replaced by an expanse of doors — all black, all marked with symbols that looked like constellations collapsing.
"Where does this go?" I asked.
"Down," said the clerk. "Everything important eventually goes down."
The floor pulsed once. The air grew heavier. Somewhere nearby, water — or gravity — was leaking.
I walked.
Each door I passed opened just slightly, whispering a memory.
One showed my childhood bedroom, half-lit, empty except for the bed I never made.
Another showed me sitting in this same hotel, watching myself write this same moment down.
A third was completely dark, except for breathing.
When I reached the last door, it opened by itself.
Inside was an observation deck overlooking nothing. The nothing shimmered faintly, like heat over sand, but deeper — a black so complete it made sound go quiet.
And floating in it were hundreds of objects — teacups, typewriters, chandeliers, and people. Some were whole. Some weren't.
A low hum filled the air. The same note I'd heard from the elevator, stretched into infinity.
Then a voice behind me:
"Room service."
I turned.
The clerk — or maybe another one — stood in the doorway holding a silver tray. On it: a glass dome covering a small, rotating sphere. Inside the sphere, cities folded and unfolded like origami lungs.
"Your order," said the clerk.
"I didn't order anything."
"You remembered it," they corrected. "That's close enough."
The dome clicked open. A faint breeze swept out — cold, sweet, and wrong. The sphere pulsed once, then spoke in a whispering chorus:
"Return to your floor."
The clerk bowed and backed away, fading as if distance itself forgot how to measure.
I looked back at the void beyond the window. The floating figures had shifted closer. Some wore hotel uniforms. Others wore my face.
The hum grew louder. I realized it wasn't the elevator anymore. It was the hotel's heartbeat. Slow. Deep. Patient.
I took one step forward and the gravity changed. The floor tilted — not enough to fall, just enough to suggest the idea. The figures outside twitched in unison, like puppets catching the same thought.
Something inside the walls began to move.
I could hear it dragging itself upward through the floors, scraping metal against time. Each impact sent a tremor through the room. Dust fell upward, not down.
Then the intercom crackled.
"Attention, guest," said a voice I didn't recognize. "We hope your stay has been memorable. We remind you: memory is payment."
A pause. Then, softly:
"Balance overdue."
The lights died.
Darkness, thick as gravity itself, pressed against me. I reached for the key in my pocket — but it wasn't there. Instead, something cold and smooth. A tag.
Room 0 — Staff Access.
I wanted to scream, but the air wouldn't let me.
When the lights flickered back, I was standing in the lobby again. Empty. Perfect. Restored.
Only now, there was no clerk behind the desk.
I stepped closer. A mirror hung where the guestbook used to be. My reflection was smiling. It blinked slower than me.
The bell on the counter rang once. My reflection tilted its head. "You're late," it said.
"For what?"
"Shift change."
I felt the tag in my pocket pulse. Somewhere upstairs, a door opened — and another version of me stepped out to check in.
The reflection smiled wider. "Gravity's back," it said. "Someone has to keep it in place."
The chandeliers began to hum again. The piano resumed its broken song.
The elevator doors slid open. Inside, the cat's bellhop cap sat on the floor, still warm.
The display read: Lobby → Beneath → Repeat.
I walked toward it, because that's what guests do.
When the doors closed, the voice returned, gentle as always:
"Thank you for choosing The Hotel at the End of Gravity. We hope you enjoyed your stay.
If you experienced any permanent existential distortions, please contact management."
The elevator began to rise — or fall. I can't tell anymore.
All I know is that the hum follows me now, even when I'm awake.
Sometimes, when the world feels light for no reason, I hear the bell.
One ring.
Always polite.
Always patient.
And I realize I'm not leaving —
just checking in again.
End of The Hotel at the End of Gravity