The Way Inn

The Way Inn
Will Wiles

THE WAY INN is played out in the anonymous and bizarre lobbies, corridors and concourses in which modern business life takes place. The ‘Way Inn’ of the title is a global chain of identikit mid-budget hotels, and Neil Double, the novel’s protagonist, is a valued member of its loyalty scheme. Neil is a professional conference-goer, a man who will attend trade fairs, expos and conventions so you don't have to. It's a life of budget travel, inexpensive suits and out-of-town exhibition centres. This would be hell for most people, but it’s a kind of paradise for Neil, who has turned his incognito professional life into a toxic and selfish personal philosophy.But Neil is about to change – not least because he finds himself, for the first time in his adult life, willing himself to engage with somebody of the opposite sex as a human being rather than as a one-night sexual fling. In a brand new Way Inn in an airport hinterland, he meets a woman – a woman he has seen before in bizarre and unsettling circumstances. She hints at being in possession of an astonishing truth about this mundane world. And then she disappears. Fascinated, and with his professional and personal life unravelling, Neil tries to find the woman again. In doing so he is drawn into the appalling secret that lurks behind the fake smiles and muzak of the hotel…

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COPYRIGHT (#u8382a0b4-6900-51ba-8b55-9b5e80a4354d)

Fourth Estate

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First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate 2014

Text © Will Wiles 2014

Will Wiles asserts his moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

‘The House of Asterion’ by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by James E. Irby, from Labyrinths, copyright © 1962, 1964 by New Directions Publishing Corp., reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.; and by permission of Pollinger Ltd.

A catalogue record of this book is

available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007545551

Ebook Edition © June 2014 ISBN: 9780007545568

Version: 2015-01-28

DEDICATION (#u8382a0b4-6900-51ba-8b55-9b5e80a4354d)

For Hazel and Guy,

with my love

EPIGRAPH (#u8382a0b4-6900-51ba-8b55-9b5e80a4354d)

The house is the same size as the world; or rather, it is the world.

‘THE HOUSE OF ASTERION’,

JORGE LUIS BORGES

CONTENTS

COVER (#u9c8c5cc7-810c-502a-ae08-8fd210f6d516)

TITLE PAGE (#u90775851-c67d-5c30-856e-b55c54c1a58a)

COPYRIGHT (#u6769e315-2775-5488-a907-a12a0dfc1579)

DEDICATION (#u163c7c77-20f8-56a5-b768-e24b84b8fc48)

EPIGRAPH (#uc9423a82-947f-5fc5-8a34-e885031ba221)

PART ONE: THE CONFERENCE

PART TWO: THE HOTEL

PART THREE: THE INNER HOTEL

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)

ALSO BY WILL WILES (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)

PART ONE

The bright red numbers on the radio-alarm clock beside my bed arranged themselves into the unfortunate shape of 6:12. Barely four hours since I went to sleep, I was abruptly awake. I remembered that I had been in the bar, and that I had seen the woman again.

Apart from the red digital display – 6:13 – the room was dark. And the preceding day was clear: I had seen her again, and I had spoken to her. Over the years I had come to believe that my memory was steadily enhancing this woman. Our first encounter was so out of the ordinary that it took on a completely unreal complexion in retrospect, and I suspected that I might be elaborating on it, on her, to make the whole bizarre incident more exotic. But there she was again, matching perfectly what I had assumed was an idealised vision. Her Amazonian height, and her pale skin and red hair – even in the flesh, there was something about her that didn’t quite match up to reality, as if she was too high definition. Just hours later our reunion had already taken on the qualities of a dream. One that had been interrupted before it was complete. Maurice. Maurice had ruined it.

A return to sleep seemed unlikely and unwise. It was less than an hour until the alarm would go off and I had no intention of oversleeping and being forced to head to the fair without a shower and breakfast.

The hotel room was well heated, the carpet soft and warm under my feet. It was quiet, almost silent, but the air conditioner hummed its low hum, and there was something else in the air – a kind of electromagnetic potential, a distorted echo beyond the audible range. Or nothing, just the membranes of the ear settling after being startled from sleep. Outside it would be cold. I opened the curtains but could see little. The sullen orange glow of the motorway to one side, an occluded sky untouched by dawn, and on the level of the horizon a shivering cluster of red lights that suggested, somehow, an oil refinery. Maybe the airport – radar towers, UHF antennae.

I switched on the room lights. Latte-coloured carpet, a cuboid black armchair, a desk with steel and wicker chair, a flat-screen TV on the wall and of course an insipid abstract painting. It was like every other hotel room I’ve stayed in: bland, familiar, noncommittal, unaligned to any style or culture. I once read that the colour schemes in large chain hotels were selected for how they looked under artificial light, on the understanding that the business people staying in the rooms would mostly be there outside daylight hours. And that principle must also apply to the art on the walls – and again I remembered the woman in the bar, what she had said about the paintings. The indistinct background hum seemed a little louder – it had to be the air-con, or the minibar under the desk. It was a benign sound, almost soothing, a suggestion that I was surrounded by advanced systems dedicated to keeping me comfortable.

Showering took the edge off my tiredness, and allowed me to ignore it. I put on a Way Inn bathrobe and returned to the bedroom, drying my hair with a Way Inn towel. The TV was on, but only showed the hotel screen that had greeted me on my arrival in the room last night.