Postmortem Assessment

The inside of the hotel room measures twenty-seven by forty feet, roughly, including the bathroom. The balcony is an additional four by eight feet.

The room is surprisingly clean. The sheets are freshly starched, without any stains revealed by blacklight. The mattress is less than pristine, but not drenched in forensic evidence. Victor can't find traces of blood anywhere.

There are thirty-nine sheets of hotel stationery left, along with three ballpoint pens emblazoned with the hotel's logo. There are two room service menus, one on top of the desk, one in the bottom drawer on the left.

There are six towels: two large, two medium, two small. There are two washcloths, one folded into the shape of a fan, the other draped over the towel bar.

There is one television in the room.

There are precisely zero explanations for what happened in that cursed fucking house.

Victor has been a pragmatist his entire life, despite the superstitious protestations of his Orthodox grandparents, the stories about the evils in the old country, the gilded icons and myriad saints. When he was a child, he always looked askance at fairy tales, myths about men who achieved greatness, Santa Claus. None of it ever seemed realistic.

He took great comfort in mathematics, though. Victor has always been fond of counting things. Four molars knocked out of a woman's mouth with a mallet. Two minutes before the police arrive to assess the situation. One hundred eighty eight droplets of blood left behind over three hundred sixty four square feet of terrain after a crime, roped in with yellow tape, CAUTION DO NOT CROSS.

What happened in the house can't be quantified with numbers or explained with science and forensics, which is quickly unraveling Victor's view of the world.

Can his senses really be trusted? They seem to be in working order now: the hotel suite is precisely seventy-eight degrees, and he weighs one hundred fifty seven pounds, naked on the sleek white scale left in the hotel bathroom by a previous guest.

He's still been sleeping with the lights on; he doesn't want to have to relive the memory of the terrifying silhouette in the cellar, the panic that drove him to shoot the lock of the cellar door with a bullet that materialized out of nowhere.

There are sixty-seven-and-a-half ceramic tiles on the floor of the bathroom, and no way for Victor to explain the fear that drove him to break the house's window with a chair, shattering glass like a barbarian.

He needs bullets for his gun. He's not sure how to get them; he doesn't want to venture out in public for fear of being spotted by the wrong person. He's mostly sure he's safe, but without knowing how much of a trail he's left behind, Victor isn't willing to risk it.

The more he thinks, the more he counts, the more he attempts to reason, Victor becomes increasingly certain that he will never be able to explain what's happened, and that thought is fucking terrifying.