My name is Lin Mo. I’m twenty-two, and I spent four years studying hotel management, hoping to launch a glamorous career at a high-end hotel in a big city. Instead, by a twist of fate, I ended up at the Twilight Hotel, a remote place with hardly any guests. On my first day, the manager handed me a Front Desk Handbook filled with eerie rules:
“After midnight, if a guest in Room 1013 rings the bell, pretend you didn’t hear it.”
“Don’t look directly into the eyes of any female guest wearing red high heels.”
“If the elevator stops on the third floor for no reason, recite your employee number until the doors close.”
At first, I thought these were just unusual rules of the hotel business. Then, during a night shift, I saw the guest in Room 1013 pull something that shouldn’t exist out of a key card that wasn’t in the System. Then, at three in the morning, an extra door appeared out of nowhere in the hallway on the security cameras. Then, my coworker Xiao Zhang broke one of the rules, and the next day everyone insisted he had “never worked here”...
What is this hotel devouring? And how many more night shifts can I survive by following the rules?
