The Fear Index

a small lobby with a counter, deserted, and a seating area with a black and red sofa with wooden legs and matching armchairs. In the gloom a small aquarium glowed brightly but it seemed devoid of fish.
    Hoffmann took a few steps over the threshold. He reasoned that if he was challenged, he could say he was looking for a room: he had money in his pocket, he could pay for it. They probably rented by the hour. The thick door closed behind him, cutting off the sounds of the street. Upstairs someone was moving around, music was playing; the thump of the bass line shook the thin partitions. He moved through the empty reception, across a floor of curling linoleum, and followed a narrow passage to a small elevator. He pressed the call button and the doors opened immediately as though it had been waiting for him.
    The elevator was tiny, lined with scratched grey metal like an old filing cabinet, with just about enough room for two people, and when the doors closed Hoffmann was almost overwhelmed by claustrophobia. The buttons offered him a choice of seven floors. He pressed number six. A distant motor whined, the elevator rattled and he began to rise very slowly. It was not so much a sense of danger he felt now as of unreality, as if he were back in a recurrent childhood dream he could not quite remember, from which the only way to wake was to keep on going until he found the exit.
    The elevator ride seemed to go on a long time. He wondered what might be waiting at the end of it. When at last it did halt, he put up his hands to protect himself. Jerkily the doors opened on to the sixth floor.
    The landing was deserted. He was reluctant to step out on to it at first, but then the doors began to close and he had to thrust his leg out to save himself from being reimprisoned. The doors juddered back and he moved out cautiously on to the landing. It was darker than in the lobby. His eyes had to readjust. The walls were bare. There was the same stale, almost fetid smell of air that had been breathed a thousand times and never refreshed by an open door or window. It was hot. Two doors were opposite him; more led off the passages to either side. An amateurish sign composed of movable coloured plastic letters, of the kind sold in toyshops, indicated that Room 68 was to the right. The clank of the elevator motor restarting behind him made him jump. He listened to the car descend all the way to the bottom. When it shut off, there was silence.
    He took a couple of paces to the right and peered slowly around the corner along the passage. Room 68 was at the far end, its door closed. From somewhere close by came a rhythmic noise of rasping metal, which at first he mistook for sawing but almost immediately realised was bedsprings. There was a thump. A man moaned as if in pain.
    Hoffmann pulled out his mobile, intending to call the police. But, curiously for the centre of Geneva, there was no signal. He put it back in his pocket and walked warily to the end of the passage. His eyes were at exactly the same level as the bulging opaque glass of the spyhole. He listened. He couldn’t hear anything. He tapped on the door, then put his ear to the wood and listened again. Nothing: even the neighbour’s bedsprings had ceased to creak.
    He tried the black plastic handle. The door wouldn’t open. But it was held by only a single Yale lock and he could see the door jamb was rotted: when he dug his fingernail into the spongy wood, he pulled away a wedge of crumbling orange flakes the size of matchsticks. He stepped back a pace, checked behind him, then barged against the door with his shoulder. It gave slightly. He moved back a couple of feet further and lunged at it again. This time there was a splintering sound and the door opened a couple of centimetres. He worked the fingers of both hands into the gap and pushed. There was a crack and the door opened.
    It was dark inside, with just a faint line of grey daylight showing where the bottom of the window shutter had failed to close properly. He edged across the carpet, groped around and through the net curtain for the switch, pressed it, and noisily the shutter began to rise. The window looked out through a fire escape on to the back of a row of buildings about fifty metres away, separated from the hotel by a brick wall and adjacent yards full of waste bins, weeds and rubbish. By the thin light Hoffmann could see the room, such as it was: a single unmade bed on wheels with a greyish sheet hanging down