The Yellow Silhouette

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room.

It was a rare luxury to lounge at the sill. She had heard that there were once hundreds of windows in what was formerly a towering hotel. Within every room, a portal to the endless world just beyond the thin veil of glass.

That veil disappeared from all but this one room. Blocked by layers of rock and rough concrete to seal the denizens within their home. Their sanctuary. In time, their tomb. As it was for their parents and parents before them. Living and dying and being consumed by the beast that was the once-hotel.

That wasn’t to say she believed the hotel haunted - as some had claimed. Entertaining as it was to imagine the concrete beast consuming them all in a more literal fashion, there was no truth to it. Bodies disappeared by human hands. Food appeared by soil and light in levels designated for such tasks. Their monster ran, quite disappointingly, by unbearably practical means.

She stretched her feet along the sill, toes extending and taking in the warmth from just beyond the glass.

It’d taken years to get to such a place of luxury, and she regretted not a second of it.

Her last home was in the lower levels, just above food and animal care. It didn’t matter how the fans blew, the rooms there stank of dirt, old water, and even older manure. Years of stench that clung to the skin, which no amount of rationed water could wash away.

Moving up the levels to the immaculate rooms above was a fool’s dream. A tale as much as the monstrousness of the hotel. The wealthy above wouldn’t surrender the space they curated, not just because a rat below worked hard or long. Wasn’t that to be expected? Why reward a norm?

Only the unique rose through the levels. And she was unique in her beauty. Unique in how she presented it. Immediately, that connected her to the Window. As with most things unique and beautiful, the Window didn’t belong to just anyone. Nor was it shared freely.

Now, nor was she.

The man who owned the room was, by tradition, the Concierge. An old term, he informed her, with a flare of irony considering the isolated nature of the not-Hotel. The Concierge was once a man who welcomed guests. There were no more guests. No one came from the outside, and no one ever left. If there ever was --

Thoughts cut short.

A flit of yellow across the white expanse seized her attention. From dozens of levels off the ground below, a figure appeared and vanished as soon as it came. She craned her neck, hands pressed hard against the smooth glass to find her again. Maddeningly, the figure was gone.

She was away from the window almost as fast, feet barely touching the worn carpeting of the presidential suite as she ran to find her Concierge. A person! She was sure of it. It was a person from just beyond the glass.

Kindly, warmly, almost lovingly he pulled her from the room. There was no person in the expanse, he reminded her with the same tone one might take with a particularly hard to tutor child. She must be, she supposed, with impossible fantasies about people on the outside.

It was nearly two weeks before she could see her Window again. A layer of frost had formed on the other side of the glass, as if the world itself wanted to keep her from seeing what it was hiding.

The Concierge swore there was no person beyond the walls. There couldn’t be - though no one quite agreed why. Her parents used to say the world was poisoned by men before them. Just like that. She stared out the window, trying to imagine how much poison it would take to flood everything in sight.

Other families believed society crumbled under the weight of its own vastness. Governments not of a few thousand survivors, but millions upon millions of people.

One man she knew, Jerral, said the issue was people weren’t where they were supposed to be. That there were invisible lines that kept people within the empty lands, and only evil crossed those lines.

It sounded silly, but she supposed the hotel wasn’t much different. People kept to their levels. Travel between was closely guarded by black-dressed men like him, keeping the wealthier above from mingling with the poor below.

Jerral was very concerned with ensuring people were where they belonged. He could tell a stranger by their faces alone, or so he claimed. As though he knew every face in the hotel, and exactly where each belonged.

She supposed she passed his scrutiny; he rarely protested her being ushered back to the ‘penthouse suite’ for the hours she and the Concierge spent together. When he was gone, she was finally alone with the Window again.

The Concierge didn’t appreciate the Window like she did. He finished their exchange, dressed, and left without so much as standing before its light, taking in the glow of the sun as it disappeared beyond the horizon, as it did twice each day. The final rays of golden sun turned a velvety, fresh shade of scarlet.

Nothing in the hotel looked fresh or new. They didn’t have the space to grow much cotton or raise many sheep - as useful as that animal was in the fourth and fifth levels - making fresh cloth a rare luxury. Dyed cloth, though? Only the highest members of staff could afford fresh clothes in anything but natural beige and whites.

The Concierge alone had the wealth for dull red cotton sheets on his bed. An ashy, almost brown color that couldn’t stand against the glow of the sky.

Colorful, ruined buildings stood against a backdrop of scarlett, and the flicker of yellow shone brighter than ever. The figure moved between dilapidated streets, disappearing and reappearing. She danced and practically floated, an ethereal sprite.

The yellow lady called to her, mocking the colorless confines of her hotel prison. An arm waving, beckoning. Summoning.

She pressed her palms to the glass, eyes desperately following the temptress. But, again, she was gone just as soon as she appeared.

How unfair! She appeared in an instant, to flicker and flit across the lifeless world below, only to vanish? There was a cruelty to knowing life still existed, but that a thin layer of glass separated her from that freedom. To be seen but not experienced, a tempting aroma that denied teeth and tongue.

She cried the length of the night, and didn’t return to the penthouse for days. Was it crueler to see what you couldn’t have, or to deny it entirely? Was a single, short breath of air torture to one who was drowning?

Like a dying woman, she fled the suffocating halls of the hotel to return to the window again.

Every visit brought the woman in yellow closer and closer still. Bright as the sunshine itself, she cascaded through the streets almost too fast to follow. Her body twisted inhuman. A monster. An angel. A siren, calling her out to sea.

The figure was so close, she could almost feel her warmth through the glass. As if they were touching, even so far apart. She longed for the moment that the woman met the base of their hotel. Waited for it. lived for it.

The Concierge must have noticed her love for the figure. He was, she learned, a jealous man.

In a soft, deceptive voice he suggested meeting on her floor, seven levels down from his. He promised new sheets and a bed stuffed with cotton.

Luxury, he promised.

Lies, she heard.

He wanted her away from the Window. He must have seen the figure himself, he must have! A part of her wondered if the alien woman would come and get her, and that he feared being left behind. And she would. She’d flee from him like she did the hotel, finding freedom beyond their walls.

She didn’t need to say it, he knew.

The penthouse became off limits. They met in the room he gifted her when she was a few years younger, and not yet wise to the mediocrity of the hotel and its identical rooms. Varied only in its unique degradation, which was quick enough to memorize. Every crack and stain was known to her. The endless swirls on the ceiling had been traced by her eyes a thousand times.

The length of the room was exactly twenty-three steps heel-to-toe in either direction. The ceiling high enough to press her palms against it when stretching as tall as she could go.

Suffocating.

Every breath of air was the same that she had just taken, mixing with the sleeping Concierge’s until everything smelled like musk and mold. Fans that drew and purified the air ran slower at night, saving on their energy. They all but stopped now, leaving her laying in a miasma of sweat and stench.

Suffocating.

The nightmare of the lower levels chased her to the upper rooms. Heavy air filled her lungs, pressed against every inch of her skin to stain her with the filth of the hotel. She couldn’t be clean. It wasn’t even time for daily showers. Water would be shut off after just a few seconds of flow - no more than a quick sip.

She couldn’t be clean.

The woman in yellow was unsullied by the hotel. So brilliant she all but shined.

Silently, she slipped from the narrow bed, careful to not disturb the Concierge. Let him dream of a time when he kept her caged in this hotel. Where the concrete walls weren’t bars of a cell.

A gray woolen smock would be her wedding dress. She pulled it on with shaking hands, lips pulled tightly back in a desperate smile. She’d be with the yellow angel. All that separated them was a pane of glass, and glass was very yieldingly fragile.

She pinned back her straight black hair, hiding it under a veil fashioned from a worn shawl. A shabby bride she’d make, but she couldn’t imagine the sprite of a woman caring. The way she beckoned, surely she’d be glad for any gown she could muster.

Marching up the stairs to yet unheard music would have made the moment, but she hadn't lost her mind. No, not yet. The stairs would be watched by Jerral and other black-garbed members of security. The Concierge wouldn’t let them allow her past. Not when he’d grown so jealous of her affair with the golden silhouette beyond his glass.

In the center of the building there was an empty shaft, an old shuttle of sorts that would carry denizens up and down the levels. So she heard. It broke, decades back.

Through the heavy doors, though, were steel rungs welded to the metal walls. The rotting hotel tainted even its metal, which had grown brittle and brown with age. Rungs were missing and more were loose. The Concierge told her he intended to have them replaced, in time. One of his many lofty goals he bragged about. And his words would be her path to freedom.

The doors she pried open, her shaking hand finding the first of the stable rungs. Her heart raced faster than her lover through the streets outside.

Falling wasn’t a fear of hers, but to die in the heart of the hotel? That turned her blood cold.

Rung by rung, step by step she made it to the very top of the shaft. Old grease and rust stained her hands and turned her gown muddy as she climbed, veil tearing as she slithered between the final doors that separated her from the familiar penthouse.

Her heart still raced, filling her with a nervous energy as she began her wedding march. All that mattered now was the window, and the deathly freedom that waited just beyond.

She was halfway to the glass when a commotion broke around her. The wedding party interrupted by shouts, burly men spilling into the room dressed in security black.

No.

No, no!

The yellow figure in the window was so close, she consumed nearly everything in sight. Waving, crying out for her as the men surged forward, driven by the familiar voice of the Concierge.

She ran. The dress hiked up her rust-stained thighs, tearing away from desperate hands that tried to stop her.

For a glorious second she was sure what would happen. The glass would yield to her body, shattering like old mirrors and trinkets and raining down with her to the world below. She’d be with her figure, wound together like mortal and angel combined before the Earth took them. Together. Free of the Hotel.

She smashed into the glass.

It held. She didn’t.

With a surprised cry, she rebounded; gasping, shocked and pained. Ahead of her, the window had splintered, the picture of the world outside flickering and darkening between shards of broken glass.

Why did the men freeze and faint? It was her who wanted to scream and cry!

With the shattered screen before her, its cruelty was made starkly clear. There was no outside. No colorful buildings lined in tight streets. No pure white clouds above. No gentle fall of snow. No sunsets. There was just an old digital monitor hung on a concrete wall, a facsimile of everything that the Hotel denied.

Perhaps, a cruel thought pressed, not even that.

She hunched forward, rocking between heavy sobs and howls. Grieving, for what had never been.

All that was left of her world, her love, and the yellow silhouette was a broken window.