I have no idea what all this is about. It just sort of came to me. It's like an amalgam of lots of different bits of ideas and God only knows if it'll ever go anywhere. Still, here it is, for your viewing pleasure.
I woke with my feet in the surf and my head in the sand, unable to remember from where I had come. I did not know whether I had been washed up by the sea, or whether the incoming tide had woken me as I lay on that icy beach. I did not know the time of day, the day of the week, the month of the year. Not even the year was I sure of.
The cold crystal current that had woken me or thrown me ashore forced me to stand. I brushed away sand from my eyes and staggered to the high-tide mark, where I stood with the other flotsam and jetsam, looking around me. I was at the apex of a wide crescent of anaemic sand which framed an expanse of shallow slate-grey sea that was filled with diving white horses; the beach was framed by a range of low dunes that were covered in whispering rushing waves of coarse grass. Palm trees drooped in the cool air. Inland, bejungled mountains reared. Overhead, the almost purple vault of the cold sky appeared about to collapse, or blow away, or simply vanish: it was not safe for birds to traverse, so there were none, but huge white clumps of cloud scudded across the tenuous filament, oblivious to the risk, like elderly judges’ heads.
In this timeless emptiness, with only the echoing rumble of the far-off far-out breakers and the whistling of the wind in my own ear for company, I speculated on what I must do. Automatically, I began to climb the nearest dune, but when I was less than halfway up its shifting sandy face I looked around and saw a thing I had not noticed before. There, perhaps half a mile distant, was the block-shape of some man-made something sprawled across the beach like a shipwreck or a sunbather. I made for it. There was no alternative.
The sand was hard and the walking was easy, and my thoughts were occupied in the speculation as to what this thing could be, and yet, when I reached it – or drew near enough to tell what it was – I continued speculating, for I felt my eyes deceived me. I walked right up to it and touched its vast flank. It was real.
Canted over at fifteen degrees, her dining-room rammed into the dunes and her bar in the breakers, the Victorian mock-baronial mass of the Hotel Atlantis blotted the beach like a whale carcass or a storm-driven galleon. Where she had come from, I knew – the town of Whorlton – but how she had got here, to this cold beach on the edge of this jungled island, I could not say. More, she appeared to be here in-toto, her cellars incongruously above ground, resting on the sand like a slipper on a carpet – roughly-assembled arches and buttresses and poorly pointed walls, all normally underground, were here on show and under attack from the sea and the wind-blown sand. Above the cellars, the crumbling cream-painted facades of the hotel, with bank upon bank of shallow bay windows, stared blankly out at their unfamiliar surroundings. From the half-hearted turret that pierced the sagging mansard there flew a flag – three equal horizontal bands, the outermost blood red and the centre lime-green – and I knew then, on seeing that flag, where I and the hotel both were. Tierra Del Mar. My island.
Strange to say, I accepted that fact as though it were supremely normal. I felt peculiarly detached and floated around the outside of the hotel looking for a way in with no feeling of upset or urgency or any kind of agitation at all. I felt remote, as though I were watching the scene on a flickering monitor in the safety of some distant bunker. I found a ladder that had been let down from the main reception lobby doors – their aluminium and plate glass incongruous with the rest of the building as the rest of the building was with the landscape – and noticed that there were footprints on the beach other than my own. They led away from the hotel but not back. Whoever had left the hotel and gone into the dunes had not returned.
With a sudden terrifying impression of being watched, like a cold lead hand on my heart, I scurried up the ladder and into the hotel.
Inside the Atlantis all was not as I remembered it to have been. While the hotel had always been shabby, now it was as though it had been prepared for demolition, or for redevelopment: there was nothing inside except for what had already been broken when I had been there before – so in the reception lobby, that lofty panelled space with the electroliers – there was nothing but the gouged hulk of the reception desk and a crushed chaise-longue. The floorboards were bare, the wallpaper was peeled, and vast flakes of paint hung from the ceiling, which wept damp. To the left, towards the sea, the bare floor of the bar ramped away like a slipway towards the crashing sea, which had seeped in and flooded the lower reaches of the bar, while to the right the dining room pointed at the sky like the bow of an aircraft-carrier. Despite the dereliction, though, the air was fresh – the gaping glasslessness of the staircase windows saw to that, and in the breeze blew pieces of paper like autumn leaves. I plucked a sheet from the air and read it, and saw that it was typewritten by me – no letter F, the Imperial was practically useless – and was a page from the manuscript for my theories on decimal time. I plucked another sheet and found it to be a page from my novel, and another was a poem, also by me. These things I accepted, without argument, without upset, without comment. I filed away the facts and moved on.
Behind the reception desk hung a pock-marked pinboard, on which was pinned with a butter-knife, back to front, the title page from my book about decimal time. I read what I had written first, my title – International Decimal Time: A Concept For Temporal Rationalisation – and smiled. It seemed so silly here, in this tilting hotel on the shore. Then I read the note that had been written on the back of it. “Back in five minutes,” it said, and was signed “Stillings”; Stillings, I thought, allowing the name to fill my mouth and the room. It was a name I knew, but I could not salvage the memory from the depths so that I could understand its significance.
“Stillings,” I said to myself. “Stillings.”
A sound from upstairs stopped my Stillingsing. Something had moved – not a piece of debris falling or rolling and not the building settling on its sandy bower – a living something. The sound had been a footstep. Where the staircase had been was nought but a crazy fun-house void, with the ghost of the cantilevered marble marvel that had been there echoing across the walls and up to the floors above. A ladder stretched up to the next floor. I climbed it.
Upstairs was another large chamber. It was empty: even the plasterwork, which had been battered but delicate scrolled leaves and vines and cherubs and suns, had been removed – only brick remained, only bare boards. The ceiling remained, partially collapsed, too small for the room. The sound repeated. I moved toward it. It, whatever it was, it was in the ballroom. I pushed open the scuffed door, ignoring the disfigured caryatids that framed it (someone had smashed off their faces), and looked inside.
The ballroom was a long room that stretched down to the sea. Paper blew about here, too, and the long white curtains blew into the room from the glassless windows while the sheets that had been used to wrap the chandeliers had come loose and flailed in the eddying air like the tentacles of hunting deep sea creatures. The walls, which had been oppressive greens and browns and had borne decorative panels of rustic scenes of old England, had all been painted white, as had the ceiling, which had previously been blue and filled with cherubs and angels and clouds and ribbons. Their ghostly outlines – the rustics and the angels – stared out in silhouette from behind the white. The floor was covered in yet more white sheets, which formed valleys and hills of white like a relief map of Antarctica that ever changed in the wind. The footsteps belonged to a donkey, which was nervously hovering at the bottom of the hill of the room. It looked anxiously from the flailing sheets to the foaming sea and to the whirling paper. It was much like being in a snowstorm inside a wedding dress, and the situation did not appear to agree with the donkey.
I approached the donkey: it was the first living creature I had come across, and it seemed to me rude to do anything but introduce myself. It waited patiently for me to approach, and advanced its nose for tickling when I drew near. I did not tickle its nose, though, for I had seen it wore a collar with a name tag. I lifted the brass disc and saw that the creature had been named Muffin. Are you, then, a mule, I wondered, and stepped back to examine the creature. It seemed disappointed when its nose was not tickled, and moved away. I let it. I did not like animals equine: once I was bitten by a horse and a donkey – or a mule – is much too close to a horse for comfort.
I went on to the windows that overlooked the foaming bay and peered out. Angled to the sea as they were, and with the floor tilted with them, they were reminiscent of the captain’s cabin of an ancient pirate ship. I leaned out – surely, for the simile to continue, the name of the ship – hotel – should be across the stern in florid swirls. It was! An extinct neon proclaimed the name Atlantis to any who might care in a whirling glass worm of gas. Rigging trailed in the surf, broken. But it was not rigging – it was a disconnected telephone wire and suddenly, like a lightning strike on a sunny day, I knew why I was in this hotel, alone, confused.
I remembered: the telephone call had brought me here.
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