God's Gone AWOL

[3] The Puzzle Begins

As the bellhop turned around, Atticus caught the flash of his golden nametag pinned to the side of his chest. It read "Leslie". Atticus felt a little better now that he didn't have to refer to the bellhop as "the bellhop".

"Did you just bribe him?" He asked Bentley,

"Actually," She said, "He was bribing us first. Sometimes you just gotta play dirty,"

"You're unbelievable,"

"You're still here. Who's REALLY the unbelievable one?"

Both of them stopped once they passed the elevators. There was a maintenance worker in black overalls poking at the electrical panel on the wall, and a red velvet rope had been hastily moved in front of each of the sets of metal doors. It looked like they were out of order.

"What's wrong with the elevators?" Bentley asked,

"Oh, they're old," Said Leslie the bellhop, "They broke just after Mr. Feral arrived, so we're gonna have to take the stairs,"

They nodded silently and continued to follow. Atticus leaned over and whispered quietly to Bentley.

"This doesn't seem like a coincidence," He said.

"No," She agreed, "Do you think he might have known we were coming?"

Leslie led them through a heavy metal door. He held it open politely, acting as though he hadn't already broken his illusion of professionalism by accepting bribes from people who weren't even staying at the hotel. As soon as they entered the stairwell, Atticus couldn't help but internally face-palm a thousand times.

The height of these stairs... was just too much.

Much of the climb was obscured by layers and layers of banisters and walls, so they weren't even able to see all the way up. The stairs spiraled upwards, around and around and around, so high that they were seemingly endless. Even the golden staircase in the Library of Heaven wasn't this excessive. He wasn't sure what he had expected from a building of this size, but the ground still spun under Atticus' feet as he looked up the endless flights.

"Don't worry! It's just a short climb," Said Leslie, "No elevator, no problem!"

"What floor is Mr. Feral on?" Atticus asked, his voice smaller than he meant it to be.

"The twenty-ninth!" Leslie enthusiastically began to climb those unending stairs.

"The WHICH NOW??" Bentley demanded, chasing after him.

Atticus had no choice but to follow.

The three twirled upwards, circling each set of stairs in a gradual incline. Leslie was energetically in the lead with Bentley valiantly attempting to keep up with him. Atticus brought up the rear. He had much less energy than either of the other two. And although theoretically he could go over thousands of steps with the power he had, climbing like this was still exhausting. This wasn't a hotel staircase, this was practically Jacob's Ladder.

Upwards, upwards, upwards. Each step pushing the ground further downwards. Each... agonizing step. Each sweat inducing, horrible, needless step. How did humans get by with so many stairs and no wings to back them up??

After what felt like an eternity, Bentley straight up collapsed on one of the landings. Leslie may have been made out of rubber, but she wasn't. She remained there on her hands and knees until Atticus caught up to her. Her red hair was drenched with sweat and her white face was flushed a light pink. Atticus on the other hand, showed no physical signs of weariness beyond the slight uneven breaths escaping his lips.

"Are you alright?" He asked her,

"If he wasn't a goddamn human, I'd just fly to the top floor in an instant. But NOOO, gotta say in character,"

Atticus smiled gently.

"I can carry you if you're too weak to continue," He said with the sweetest voice he could muster.

Of course, he had no intention of doing such a thing. It had just been more teasing, but that didn't stop Bentley from sending him the most menacing red glare possible. She quickly got back to her feet and continued up the stairs without a single word. Atticus followed after her, silently holding back an evil smile.

Not long after, they reached a landing with the number '29' printed on the wall. Leslie was waiting patiently beside the door, no trace of sweat or weariness was visible anywhere on his body. Once the other two caught up to him, he politely opened the door again, waving them through. Atticus couldn't tell whether or not this obnoxious excuse for a bellhop had seen the murderous red glow in Bentley's eyes or not. If he did, he must have been well trained in customer service because he didn't even flinch.

Once they were on the other side of the door, they were met by a long, stretching hallway adorned in white, gold and red. Rows of white doors lined either side, each equipped with card locks beneath the stainless-steel handles. The narrowness of the hall, accompanied by the red carpet below cast the room in a muffled silence. Something about the atmosphere reminded Atticus of those shining white and ghost-quiet halls of Heaven he used to wander all those years ago. It had been a while since he had visited a place like this.

"Huh, it seems I've forgotten which room it is..." Said Leslie, looking around.

"You've WHAT?"

Atticus had to hold out an arm to stop Bentley from advancing on the poor man.

"If only there was a way I could jog my memory..." Leslie cast a wink in her direction.

Bentley, who was clearly at her wit's end, slapped another magically-produced twenty dollar bill into Leslie's expecting hand.

"Ah! Now I remember. It's this way!" He said, pocketing the money.

Now that they were in the bright light of the hallway, Atticus could get a better look at Leslie's appearance. Beneath the tacky uniform, it was apparent that this person had quite a good build. With lean arms and a well-structured chest. His body was attractive to say the least, and his face was even more so. His jawline was sharp, his cheekbones were well-defined, his eyes were so perfectly shaped he might as well be a walking anime character. Atticus vaguely wondered why this man was working in a hotel instead of on a runway or film set.

The angel unconsciously positioned himself in front of Bentley.

They followed the world's scummiest, most annoying tour guide down the length of the narrow hallway right to the very end. When they rounded the corner, they were met with a dead end and a dazzling gold light, so majestic that it almost made both of them topple over backwards in surprise. That light was the physical embodiment of the word "HALLELUJAH!!".

It was coming from a set of double doors. Except these doors were much taller than any of the others they had passed on their way. They had no lock and were very different in shape, style. And they were painted a dazzling gold color which seemed to be sparkling with an endless glow. A large symbol was carved elegantly into the wood. It vaguely resembled an inverted triangle with diagonal lines crisscrossing downwards, then curving across the letter V.

It was the sigil of an angel. A very specific angel...

At the same time, Bentley and Atticus rushed forward and pulled the golden doors open. Neither was prepared for what was waiting on the other side.

It was another hallway. Identical to the one they had just left. Only this one seemed to go on forever, with no connecting hallways, walls, or windows in sight. It was an endless, overwhelming stretch of doors, doors, doors, and nothing else. Blank white doors as far as the eye could see. Without any markings or locks on the knobs. Just doors.

"Hang on... I don't remember this being-" Leslie started.

Bentley immediately whipped around.

"I am not giving you any more money,"

"No, no! I'm not asking for that. I'm being serious. I swear I've never been here before,"

"He's telling the truth," Said Atticus, "I don't think we're in the hotel anymore,"

The honesty in Leslie's voice wasn't the first thing to set off the alarm bells in the angel's head. Back when they were in the hotel, the atmosphere had been muffled and dense, while the air had a vague chemical smell to it. Ever since they had opened the golden doors, the room felt lighter, more fragile. As though the walls were made of porcelain instead of wood and drywall. If anything, the feeling of this place was more like a dream than it was reality.

"You think this is an enchantment?" Bentley glanced at the hallway around them.

"It must be to discourage us,"

An enchantment was a type of spell designed to trap a person or group in a pocket-reality designed by the caster. With the exception of whoever was controlling the spell, nothing from the outside world could affect what happened inside, and nothing in the inside could affect anything outside. If Atticus and Bentley had accidentally wandered into such a trap, who knew what kinds of weird illusions they would face.

"Well it's not achieving it's goal." She started forward down the line of unending doors, "It's just making me more impatient than anything."

Atticus quickly reached towards her and grabbed her arm lightly.

"Please remember that the bellhop is mortal," He said quietly, "If anything goes wrong, we need to protect him by any means necessary."

They both turned to look at Leslie. This poor man had followed them into an enchantment, most likely set by Lucifer himself and he clearly had no idea what was going on. Sure, he was quite annoying, but Atticus felt a bit of an obligation to keep him safe. Even if he was always playing dumb for money, or trying to eavesdrop on their conversations. He wasn't immortal and he didn't have any magical abilities or weapons on him in case something went wrong. Likeable or not, he needed protection.

Bentley seemed to notice the bellhop straining his ears to catch what the two of them were saying to each other. She narrowed her eyes and switched languages.

"Adgt ol lrasd a prdzar?" She asked in Enochian.

Atticus shook his head.

"Don't use the Enochian language for such meaningless things. You're disrespecting it," He told her.

Enochian. Despite being the indigenous language of the angels, it was never used. This was for a variety of reasons, but mostly out of respect. There were millions of other languages in the world designed for every day usage, many were more complex and beautiful than the guttural speak of the old angels. And since it was a strict tongue designed specifically for magic, using it for casual conversation had always been a big no-no. Of course, Bentley reveled in disregarding rules, but that didn't stop Atticus from enforcing them.

"Fine then," She said, "Fine then. ¿Por qué él sigue aquí?"

"Wait," Said Leslie, "What language is she speaking,"

Atticus secretly wanted to smack him over the head and say: 'You work in an American hotel and you can't even recognize Spanish when you hear it? What has the world come to?' But he didn't.

At least Spanish was a decent language, so Atticus responded.

"Limpiaré su memoria. No te preocupes."

"You can speak it too??"

They both ignored Leslie.

"Are you saying I can drop the formalities then?" Bentley asked, switching back to English.

"The way you act is your decision," Said Atticus, "I'm not in charge of you,"

"Good." She smiled.

And then with a violent red glow in her eye, the door immediately to their right was blasted open in a horrific burst of light. Pieces of wood and metal were sent flying in every direction, and a cloud of dust sparkled in the air around them. Seeing the horrific sight, Leslie shrieked loudly in terror and clung to the back of Atticus' jacket.

"Did she just--"

"Relax, she can't hurt you," Atticus told him.

...She can't hurt anyone. She likes to threaten people, but she's too strong to ever actually follow up.

Through the mess of debris and dust, Bentley looked through the gaping hole that had once been a perfectly functional door. Atticus had been anticipating something sinister lurking on the other side. Like a horrible flaming monster or a room filled with trapped and tortured souls. But judging by the look in Bentley's eye, that was not the case.

With Leslie still clinging to his shoulder like a parrot, Atticus leaned over to have a look. What was on the other side of the door was neither a flaming monster, nor a bunch of tortured souls. In fact, there was nothing there at all. Just a solid, unmoving and unforgiving brick wall.

"Yep, this is an enchantment alright," Said Bentley.

"We should go back to the hotel if that's the case,"

"Agreed,"

They didn't have the patience to get lured into some complicated trap. If Lucifer wasn't there, he wasn't there. No point wasting time in some illusion designed to ward them off. The three turned around and tried to go back the way they came. But as soon as they looked back, those magnificent glittering doors were gone without a trace. They had been replaced by the endless hallway of white doors, stretching ever backwards without an exit in sight.

"Where did the doors go???" Leslie looked as though his brain was about to melt.

"Don't worry, they're still there," Said Bentley, "They're just hidden somewhere,"

She was right. Even though they seemed to have vanished, there was no kind of spell that could make them disappear completely. It was impossible to permanently trap someone in an enchantment like this without an exit. The best that anyone could ever do was move the door around constantly so it was too hard to find. But that was the rule of enchantment: there had to be a way in, and there had to be a way out. There had to be a door.

A door... In an endless hallway of infinite doors.

Finding a door in a place like this wasn't like finding a needle in a haystack- it was finding a needle in a needle-stack, except only one needle was the right size.

"One of these doors has to lead somewhere. Should we just open them each individually until we figure out which is the correct one?" Atticus suggested,

"Ain't much else we can do," Said Bentley, "I'll take the right side, you take the left?"

But before they could really go about obliterating too many perfectly operational doors, Leslie's voice rang down the hallway. Atticus wasn't sure when the bellhop had stopped clinging to his jacket, but he was now about a hundred meters down the hall, waving and pointing excitedly at something.

"Wait you guys, over here, there's a thing!"

Etched into the golden doorknob of one of the millions of inconspicuous doors, was that same angelic sigil they had seen before. Before they could think too much on it, Atticus quickly turned the handle and wrenched the door open. Revealing...

ANOTHER STUPID DOOR!!!

However, thankfully, this one was different. It wasn't one of the same little single-paneled white ones that went on forever in the hall outside. This one was gold and sparkly like the double doors that had first brought them into the enchantment —the ones that had disappeared just a moment ago. Atticus took this as a good sign and quickly stepped in to open it.

But it didn't take them out of the enchantment. Nor did it take them anywhere obviously dangerous. On the other side of the golden door was just... darkness.

It wasn't a hazy fog-at-night darkness or a pitch black bottom-of-the-sea darkness. It was a lights-out-in-a-windowless-room sort of darkness. The kind of darkness where a person can at least feel things, like walls, floors and ceilings. A claustrophobic, boxy, studio darkness.

Sensing no danger, Atticus took a step inside, followed closely by Bentley. They both glanced at whatever this area was around them, but neither could determine any characteristics. Was this a room? A box? A void? Judging by the clarity and lack of motion in the air, along side the lack of any echoes when his feet touched the ground, Atticus decided that this dark place couldn't be much bigger than a child's bedroom. It was some kind of enclosed space. But without sufficient lighting, he couldn't say for certain. Just as he was considering casting an illuminating spell, he heard Leslie yelp and stagger over the threshold behind them.

"What are you making noises for?" Atticus asked.

"Sorry! I didn't mean to! For a second there, it felt as though something pushed me-"

Before he could finish his sentence, the door leading to the faux-tel hallway abruptly slammed itself shut. Sealing them in the suffocating darkness.

Nobody moved. And then--

Without any warning, a golden light suddenly flashed on, blinding all three of them. Along what appeared to be a wall, three more dazzling doors flickered as though they had just been turned on by a light switch, beaming light into the room like three horrible glittering show lights on the Las Vegas strip. The change was so abrupt, Atticus was glad he was in his human form and not his true angel form. Blinking light spots out was easier when one had less than six-hundred eyeballs on their body.

"For Heaven's sake, what now?" Bentley asked, shielding her eyes.

Once the group had collectively cleared their vision, they all stepped forward to examine the three golden doors. Each had a different word written playfully across the wood, like something out of a funhouse. But none of the words made any sense whatsoever.

The first door said: HERE!

The second door said: THERE!

And the third door said: BACK AGAIN!

Atticus let out a sigh.