The Grand Malabar - By Sabiha Atturkhan

Written By: Sabiha Atturkhan

Category: Horror & Gothic Fiction

Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

Sabiha Atturkhan, a participant in the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, brings us "The Grand Malabar," a captivating piece of horror and Gothic fiction. This story unfolds in a hotel steeped in mystery, where the ordinary merges seamlessly with the supernatural. Through its rich narrative, Atturkhan invites readers into a world where every corner holds a secret. Her writing showcases the power of suspense and the art of storytelling, making this a noteworthy entry in this year's competition.

About the Work

"The Grand Malabar" is a masterclass in atmospheric tension, drawing readers into its eerie setting with a deft hand. The narrative is woven through multiple perspectives, each adding depth to the hotel's unsettling aura. Atturkhan employs vivid imagery and a meticulously crafted mood to create an immersive experience. The story explores themes of time, memory, and the unknown, leaving readers with a lingering sense of unease and fascination.

The Grand Malabar

Original Submission by Sabiha Atturkhan

THE GRAND MALABAR

A Story in Four Voices

by Sabiha Atturkhan

CELESTINE

Night Manager. Thirty-one years of service.

The rule was simple, and Celestine had maintained it for thirty-one years without ever writing it down.

Room 7 stays empty from the fifteenth to the sixteenth of each month. Not closed — closed would require a maintenance ticket, a paper trail, a reason legible to anyone with access to the system. Empty was different. Empty was a management decision, a word that asked no questions and answered none. The room existed on the booking system as available. It simply never got booked. Celestine had maintained this arrangement with the quiet efficiency of someone who has learned, over three decades, that the most dangerous thing you can do at the Grand Malabar is draw attention to the things that must not be noticed.

She discovered the breach at nine forty-three.

She had been reviewing the evening’s arrivals at the front desk while the lobby settled into its nighttime quiet. The last dinner guests had retreated to the bar. The kitchen was closing. The night porter, a young man named Joseph who had been at the hotel for eight months and whom Celestine had already decided would not last the year — not because he was incompetent but because he was too curious, the worst quality a person could possess at the Grand Malabar — was folding luggage trolleys in the service corridor. Outside, the Indian Ocean moved against the coral with its usual indifference to the business of the land.

Mr. Emmanuel Okafor. Lagos. Checking in for three nights. Room 7, second floor, garden view. Confirmed by head office at fourteen hundred hours.

Celestine read the booking twice. Then a third time, in case she had misread the room number. She had not.

She picked up the telephone to call the GM. His phone went to voicemail. His deputy was in Mombasa for a conference and would not be reachable until morning.

She stood at the desk with the receiver in her hand and looked at the name on the screen and tried to remember the last time she had felt something she could honestly call fear. It had been a long time. Fear required uncertainty, and Celestine had spent thirty-one years constructing certainties — procedures, schedules, arrangements — precisely to prevent the particular quality of uncertainty that came with a name in a room that should have no name in it.

She set the receiver down.

She could call Room 7. Offer an upgrade. She had a reason ready — plumbing inspection, we apologise for the inconvenience, please accept the suite on the third floor with our compliments. She had used this reason before, in the early years, before she fully understood the terms of the arrangement. She had moved guests with plumbing inspections and electrical faults and once, memorably, a fictitious wasp nest. Those were the years when she still believed she was managing the situation. Those were the years before the incident in year three.

She picked up the telephone. She set it down.

The thing in Room 7 did not like to be disturbed once it had settled on something. The guest she had moved in year three had been relocated to Room 12 on the third floor. The thing had followed him. Not immediately — there had been a delay of perhaps two hours, during which Celestine had believed, with the relief of someone who has narrowly avoided something terrible, that the relocation had worked. Then the night porter on duty — a different young man, long gone now — had knocked on her office door at three in the morning with an expression she had never forgotten and told her the guest in Room 12 was asking to speak to a manager. In a way that suggested urgency.

She had gone to Room 12.

The guest had been sitting on the edge of his bed in the full light of every lamp in the room, still dressed, his suitcase repacked and standing by the door. He had looked at her with the eyes of someone who has seen something they cannot file anywhere sensible and are consequently trying to file it nowhere at all. He had checked out that night. He had left without his dry cleaning. He had not left a review. And Celestine had stood in the corridor outside Room 12 in the early hours of a Wednesday morning and understood, with the clarity of something irreversible, that the arrangement had a scope she had not fully appreciated.

She had never moved a guest again.

She picked up her logbook and made a note in the careful handwriting she had maintained for thirty-one years: Room 7 occupied 15th. Monitor.

She capped her pen. Set the logbook parallel to the edge of the desk, precisely, deliberately, the discipline of a woman for whom small precisions were the only defence against large uncertainties.

Then she went to make her rounds.

She walked all forty-seven rooms every night, which was not required but which she had done without exception for three decades. The building communicated through her feet — through some quality of the floors beneath her that she had stopped trying to explain to herself long ago. A room where a guest was distressed felt different from a room where a guest was sleeping. A corridor that had been empty all evening felt different from one where something had recently passed through it. She had developed this sensitivity gradually, the way you develop a sensitivity to weather — not through intention but through long exposure to a climate that rewarded attention.

Tonight the second floor felt wrong from the moment she stepped off the lift.

Not dramatically wrong. Not the wrong of an emergency or a confrontation. The wrong of something slightly misaligned — a picture frame a millimetre off-level, a smell that is almost right but not quite. The specific atmospheric pressure of a space where something has shifted without announcing itself. She walked the corridor slowly, her footsteps muffled by the runner, past the framed botanical prints the hotel group had installed during the restoration — plants that didn’t grow on this coast, rendered in hyper-precise colonial natural history style, beautiful and wrong simultaneously — and stopped outside Room 7.

The corridor was quiet. No sound from within. The door was closed. The do not disturb sign was not on the handle.

She pressed her palm flat against the door.

The wood was cool. From the other side: nothing. No sound, no warmth, no vibration of occupation. The room felt, to her palm, the way it felt on the fourteenth of every month — technically empty, suspended, waiting for whatever came next.

She stood there longer than she should have. Her palm against the cool door, her feet on the runner, the corridor quiet around her and the ocean somewhere below and beyond and the whole building breathing in the way it breathed at this hour — slow and deep and old.

She withdrew her hand. She continued her rounds.

— ✶ —

She had been twenty-three when she arrived. Fresh from Nairobi, a certificate in hospitality management, a reference from her aunt’s employer, a good memory for names. The previous night manager, a man named Adichie, had trained her for six months — the breakfast service schedule, the linen inventory, the particular temperament of the regular guests, the way the electrics on the third floor occasionally failed and needed resetting from the basement panel. He had been methodical and patient and she had liked him.

On his last night, he took her to Room 7.

She remembered it clearly even now, thirty-one years later, with the precision of a memory that has never been allowed to blur around the edges because blurring would make it easier to dismiss. The way he unlocked the door with the master key and stood aside for her to enter first. The way the room looked exactly like every other room on the second floor — the colonial-era furniture, the deep green and gold upholstery, the view of the garden dark beyond the glass, the smell of lemon polish and sea air. She had taken two steps inside and understood, with the absolute certainty of something felt rather than reasoned, that the room was not empty.

There was no sound. No movement. No visible presence. The certainty arrived through her skin, through some layer of awareness below conscious thought, the way you understand in the dark that you are not alone before you have any evidence for it.

Something lives here, Adichie said, in the same tone he used to explain the breakfast service schedule. It has always lived here. Before the hotel. Before the colonial administration. Before anyone built anything on this particular ground. We do not know what it is. We have learned, over many years, what it needs. You will maintain the arrangement. It will maintain you.

She had asked what that meant.

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at his own hands — and she saw them, really saw them, for the first time. The hands of a man genuinely, impossibly old. The skin paper-thin, the tendons visible beneath, the knuckles enlarged by decades she could not calculate from his face, which looked like the face of a man of fifty and told her nothing true.

You will understand, he said, in time.

Adichie had not been the first. There was a photograph in the hotel archive — she had found it in her second year, sorting through a box of old administrative records that no one had opened since the restoration — taken in 1923 of a woman in a housekeeper’s uniform standing outside the door of Room 7 with her hand flat against the wood. The photograph was black and white, slightly overexposed, the woman’s face turned toward the camera with an expression that Celestine had spent a long time trying to name. Not fear. Not resignation. Something more settled than either — the expression of someone who has made a calculation and arrived at an answer they can live with, which is different from an answer they are at peace with.

She had never found the woman’s name in any employment record. She had searched — methodically, the way she did everything — through the hotel’s staff registers going back to its founding in 1889. The registers were incomplete, the colonial-era ones especially, full of gaps where names had not been recorded or had been recorded in a script she could not read or had simply been omitted because the person in question was not considered significant enough to document. She found no housekeeper matching the woman’s approximate age in 1923. She found no reference to Room 7 in any administrative document before 1961, when a single line appeared in a maintenance log — second floor, room seven, no action required — in handwriting she did not recognise, beside a date in November.

She had never found Adichie’s predecessor either. His employment records began in 1971, transferred from another property in the hotel group, with a reference that described him as reliable and discreet, which she had come to understand were the two qualities the arrangement required above all others.

Some things at the Grand Malabar did not leave paper trails. Some arrangements were older than the people who maintained them.

She had put the photograph back in the box and returned the box to the archive and never looked for it again. But she thought about the woman’s expression sometimes, on the nights when the second floor felt wrong — that settled, calculating look, the look of someone who had weighed what the arrangement cost against what the arrangement gave and had decided, quietly and without drama, that the arithmetic worked.

Celestine understood that expression now in a way she had not understood it at twenty-three. She understood it in the way you understand something that has become true of yourself.

— ✶ —

She had understood in her seventh year. She had been looking at staff Christmas photographs from her first year at the Malabar — a new employee’s habit, orienting herself in the hotel’s history — and she had found herself looking at a young woman at a party. Twenty-three years old. Bright-eyed, a little nervous, wearing a red dress she still owned because it still fit perfectly, because everything still fit perfectly, because nothing about her body had changed in seven years in any way she could measure.

She went to Room 7 that night and stood in the doorway and looked at the corner near the wardrobe where the darkness was always wrong — always a different texture, a different weight, a different quality of presence than the darkness everywhere else in the room.

Is this the arrangement? she had asked.

The darkness did not answer. But she felt — through her feet, through her palms, through some quality of attention the Malabar had been slowly developing in her since the night she arrived — that the question had been received. And that the answer was yes.

She had not aged since. She had also not left.

Not because she couldn’t. She had taken holidays — two weeks every January, always the same village in the highlands, always the same guesthouse, always the same walks along the same roads in the early morning. She went. She came back. She did not consider not coming back, not in any serious way, because she understood by now that the arrangement was not a cage. It was more like a gravity. You could move within it. You simply could not escape it, and after long enough you stopped wanting to, because wanting to escape something you cannot escape is simply a way of suffering that serves no practical purpose.

The Malabar was her life. She maintained it. It maintained her. This was the arrangement.

— ✶ —

She came back to the second floor at eleven fifty-nine, completing her final round. She had spent longer than usual on the third floor — a guest had reported a problem with his television, which was functioning correctly, and she had spent twenty minutes demonstrating this while the guest became gradually uncertain of what he had seen. She was good at this. She had been making people uncertain of what they had seen for thirty-one years.

She passed Room 7 at midnight exactly. She stopped. She put her palm flat against the door.

The wood was warm.

Not body-temperature warm — not the warmth of a sleeping person radiating heat through a wall. Something else. The warmth of a room where something is very awake and very present and has been for some time. The warmth of sustained, concentrated attention directed outward from within. She had felt this before, in thirty-one years of midnights, and it had always meant the same thing: the thing was feeding.

But it had always fed quietly. It had always fed from its corner, with the contained patience of something that has learned over a very long time not to disturb the arrangement. The warmth she felt now was different in a way she could not immediately locate. More diffuse. More mobile. As though what was inside the room was not in one place.

Celestine stood with her palm against the warm door and breathed carefully.

She reached into her pocket for the master key.

Adichie had been explicit: the door stays closed on the fifteenth. You do not open it. You do not check. You maintain and you do not interfere. These were the rules she had followed without exception for thirty-one years.

Her hand was on the master key. Her other hand was on the door handle. She stood like that — both hands committed, neither moving — and listened to the silence of the corridor and the distant sound of the ocean and something else, very close, that might have been breathing and might have been nothing at all.

She turned the handle. She pushed the door open.

The room beyond was dark. Not hotel-room dark — the ordinary dark of closed curtains and a sleeping guest. Absolute dark. The kind that feels structural, load-bearing, as though the darkness itself is holding something up.

She reached inside for the light switch. Her hand found the switch. She pressed it.

Nothing happened.

The room stayed dark and the darkness in it was not the darkness of a room with a faulty bulb. It was the darkness of a room from which light had been removed as a deliberate act. She stood in the doorway with the useless switch beneath her fingers and let her eyes adjust and waited for the room to assemble itself in the dimness that filtered in from the corridor behind her.

The bed had been slept in. The briefcase was by the door. The phone charger was in the socket. The coffee cup was on the nightstand.

The wardrobe door was open.

The guest was not in the room.

She took one step inside.

The door swung shut behind her.

In the corridor, the lights went out.

MR. OKAFOR

Room 7. Grand Malabar Hotel. The night of the fifteenth.

He arrived at the hotel at eight forty-seven in the evening, which was later than he had planned because the meeting had run long and the traffic from the business district to the coast had been the kind of traffic that makes you understand why some people choose to live alone in small rooms and never go anywhere.

The Grand Malabar was not what he had expected. He had booked it because it was available and reasonably priced and because the taxi driver, when he had named it, had nodded in the way of someone confirming a reasonable choice rather than a surprising one. What he had not expected was the building itself — the colonial facade, the deep verandas, the garden lit in the warm amber of carefully considered outdoor lighting, the quality of the silence that surrounded it. Not the silence of emptiness but the silence of a place that had been here long enough to have learned to be quiet.

The night manager checked him in. A woman — he would have put her at mid-fifties, though there was something about her that made the estimate feel imprecise, as though the usual indicators weren’t quite aligning. She gave him his key and told him about breakfast service and directed him to the lift with a smile that was professionally warm and personally nothing at all. He had seen the same smile in hotels across twelve countries. He did not think about it again.

Room 7 was on the second floor. Garden view, the booking had said, and through the gap in the curtains he could see the garden lit from below, the bougainvillea purple-pink against the dark. He set his briefcase by the door. He unpacked the things he always unpacked immediately — phone charger, toiletry bag, the printed documents for tomorrow’s meeting. He ordered a coffee from room service because the meeting had given him a headache and the ritual of coffee was reliable even when the outcome wasn’t.

He drank the coffee. He set the cup on the nightstand. He got into bed and turned off the lamp and was asleep in less than ten minutes.

He woke because the room was wrong.

Not wrong in any way he could name immediately. The bed was comfortable. The air conditioning was set to twenty-two degrees. The curtains were closed. His phone was on the nightstand. His briefcase was by the door. His shoes were side by side on the mat, the left one slightly ahead of the right in the habitual way. Everything was where he had put it.

He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling and tried to locate the wrongness the way you locate a sound you are not certain you heard. It was not the temperature, which was correct. It was not the light, which was the ordinary dark of good curtains. It was something more structural than either — something in the quality of the air itself, a density, a pressure, as though the room contained slightly more than it should for its dimensions. As though the space had been compressed without the walls moving.

He had stayed in hundreds of hotels. He knew the specific disorientation of waking in an unfamiliar room — the two seconds of blankness before the brain assembles context. Lagos, Accra, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, the rotating geography of twenty years of business travel. He knew how to locate himself in the dark. He did it now: Grand Malabar Hotel, Mombasa, Kenya. Meeting at nine. Conference call at two. Flight home on the seventeenth. His daughter’s school play on the eighteenth, which he had promised not to miss.

He knew where he was. He did not look at the corner near the wardrobe.

This was not a decision. It was more instinctive than that — the way you do not look directly at something in your peripheral vision until you have established what you are dealing with. The corner near the wardrobe was in his peripheral vision and he was aware, with a certainty that had no rational foundation, that the darkness there was a different texture from the darkness everywhere else in the room. Denser. More present. More deliberate. The darkness of a place where something has been sitting very still for a very long time and has learned, through long practice, to be patient.

He thought about his mother.

This surprised him. He had not thought about her with this particular quality of grief in months — the raw, unmanaged kind from the first weeks after she died, when it arrived without warning and took everything with it. He had processed it, or believed he had processed it, moved it somewhere that didn’t interfere with the functioning of his days. It arrived now with the force of something that has been behind a door and has found the door open.

His mother at seventy-one in the hospital corridor, smaller than he had ever seen her, holding his hand with a grip that was still strong. Her voice on the phone three days before the end, telling him she was proud of him, with the specific intonation of someone saying a thing for the last time. The particular silence of a house that has always had a person in it and now doesn’t. The way grief is not one feeling but a hundred different feelings wearing the same face — sometimes it was sadness and sometimes it was rage and sometimes it was the completely irrational desire to call her and tell her something funny that had happened, and the memory, arriving a moment later, that this was no longer possible.

He missed her in the dark of Room 7 the way he had missed her in the hospital corridor. Completely, and without anywhere to put it.

The corner near the wardrobe was very still.

He reached for his phone. Turned on the torch. Pointed it at the corner. Nothing — furniture, wall, the shadow of the wardrobe falling at the angle it should fall. He held the light steady for thirty seconds, then a minute, the circle of white light unmoving on the corner while his hand remained perfectly steady and his breathing remained perfectly steady and everything in the room remained perfectly, stubbornly, unreassuringly ordinary.

He turned off the torch.

The darkness in the corner was immediately different from the darkness everywhere else.

He sat up. Put his feet on the floor. The floor was cool and solid and ordinary. He sat on the edge of the bed and breathed and tried to locate, with the precision he applied to professional problems, what exactly was happening to him. He was tired. He had had a long meeting and a difficult drive and the coffee had not fixed the headache, which was still present, a low pressure behind his left eye. He was in an unfamiliar room in a city he visited infrequently. He was three months from a significant loss. These were facts. These facts had explanations.

The corner near the wardrobe had no explanation he was willing to examine directly.

He thought about his daughter. The school play on the eighteenth — she was playing a tree, she had told him with complete seriousness, and it was a very important tree. He thought about his office in Lagos, the view from the fourteenth floor, the particular quality of early morning Lagos light when the city was still deciding whether to be beautiful or chaotic. He thought about ordinary things, deliberately, the way you use a torch — not to illuminate the thing you are afraid of, but to make the surrounding area bright enough that the thing becomes harder to look at directly.

The corner near the wardrobe absorbed his attention like water into sand. No matter what he looked at, he was aware of it. No matter what he thought about, it was there.

He stood up. He crossed the room. He stood in front of the wardrobe and put his hand on the handle and stood there, his fingers curled around the cool brass, and did not open it. He could feel, through the handle, through the door, through some quality of pressure that had no name in any professional or personal vocabulary he possessed, that the inside of the wardrobe was not the same as the outside of the wardrobe. That there was something in the relationship between those two spaces that was not the simple relationship of a wooden door and the clothes behind it.

He stood there for eleven minutes. He checked his phone afterwards. Eleven minutes, his hand on the handle, not opening it and not stepping back, suspended in the specific paralysis of a person who knows that opening a door will change something irrevocably and has not yet decided whether to let it.

His mother’s voice on the phone three days before the end.

He opened the wardrobe.

The inside of the wardrobe was dark — darker than the room, darker than the corridor of darkness his torch had failed to illuminate, darker than anything with a rational explanation. His two suits hung on the rail, dimly visible. His spare shoes were on the shelf. His toiletry bag was on the hook on the door, exactly where he had put it.

And in the back of the wardrobe, in the left corner where the darkness was densest, something looked back at him.

Not with eyes. He could not have said, afterwards, what it was he had seen. What he could have said, and what he did say, much later, to his daughter when she was old enough for the story and he was old enough to tell it without his voice changing — was that he had understood, in that moment, with the absolute certainty of something felt rather than reasoned, that the thing looking back at him had been waiting. Not for him specifically. For someone exactly like him.

He did not scream. He did not run. He stood perfectly still, his hand on the wardrobe door, and looked back at the thing that was looking at him, and the grief that had arrived without warning in the dark of Room 7 moved through him like a current, and he felt it go — felt it drawn out of him with the precision of something that knows exactly what it is taking and is very good at taking it — and the thing in the wardrobe grew, infinitesimally, more present.

Then he closed the wardrobe door.

He packed nothing. He found his shoes. He put his jacket on. He picked up his phone and looked at it for a long moment and set it back down on the nightstand, face down, and did not take it with him.

He left Room 7. He did not go past the front desk. He did not take the lift. He went down the service stairs, through the side door that the maintenance staff used, across the garden in the dark with the bougainvillea moving in the sea breeze above him, through the gate in the garden wall that was meant to be locked and was not locked, and out into the street.

He walked for four hours without knowing where he was going. When he finally stopped, he was on the seafront, sitting on a low wall above the water, watching the sun come up over the Indian Ocean.

He was not the same person who had checked into the Grand Malabar the previous evening. He could not have said precisely what was different. He could only say that something had been taken, and that the place where it had been taken from felt clean and empty in the way a wound feels clean and empty after something that should not have been there has been removed — the relief inseparable from the loss, the loss inseparable from the relief.

He never went back for his briefcase. He never went back for his phone. He never stayed in a hotel again without first standing in the doorway of his room for a long moment, letting his eyes adjust, making sure — before he crossed the threshold — that the darkness everywhere in the room was the same quality of darkness.

It usually was.

AMARA

Housekeeping, Grand Malabar Hotel. Eleven years of service.

She had a system for Room 7 and she had maintained it for eleven years without variation and without explanation.

Room 7 last, always, regardless of the order printed on her sheet. Trolley propped in the doorway before she entered — not because it made practical sense, but because a propped door was a propped door and meant the corridor was accessible and the corridor meant she was not alone. Wardrobe not opened. The chair in the corner left exactly as she found it, which was always facing the wall, regardless of how she had positioned it the previous day. She changed the linen, cleaned the bathroom, vacuumed, replaced the toiletries, wiped the surfaces, and left. In and out in twelve minutes. She did not linger. She did not look at the corner near the wardrobe while she was working.

She had never told anyone about the system. There was no one at the Grand Malabar to tell.

She arrived at six fifty-eight on the morning of the sixteenth and found the door open.

She stood in the corridor with her trolley and looked at the open door and the early morning light falling through it onto the carpet and felt the particular quality of stillness that the Malabar had on mornings when something had happened in the night. She had felt it before — not often, but enough times to recognise it. The hotel was quiet in the way of a building holding its breath. The ordinary morning sounds — the kitchen beginning below, the distant voices of the early-rising guests, the hum of the lift — all of it was present and yet seemed to come from very far away, as though the second floor was separated from the rest of the building by something more than distance.

She should go and find Celestine. She knew this. Celestine would be in her office finishing the night log, the same office, the same chair, the same cup of tea going cold on the corner of the desk. Celestine would know what to do because Celestine always knew what to do because Celestine had seen everything at the Grand Malabar and nothing surprised her anymore, which was either a sign of competence or a sign of something else that Amara had spent eleven years declining to investigate.

She thought about Celestine’s face in the staff photographs.

There was a wall in the staffroom where the hotel’s history was documented in framed photographs — staff dinners, refurbishment milestones, the occasional celebrity guest posed stiffly beside a smiling GM. The oldest photographs were black and white, faded to a grey that made the faces in them look like memories of faces. Celestine appeared in every decade. Not similar women. Not women who resembled each other the way relatives sometimes did. The same woman. The same face, the same eyes, the same particular way she held her chin slightly forward as though anticipating the next thing that needed managing. In a photograph from 1987 she looked exactly as she looked this morning at the six o’clock briefing. In a photograph from 2003 she looked exactly as she looked every morning. In a photograph from last year’s Christmas dinner she looked exactly as she looked in the photograph from 1987.

Amara had never said anything about this because some things at the Grand Malabar you learned not to say. You learned it the same way you learned everything at the Malabar — not through instruction, not through a handbook, but through a gradual accumulation of moments in which you noticed something and then noticed yourself deciding, deliberately, not to notice it. The photographs were one such moment. The way the lights on the second floor sometimes dimmed between midnight and two in the morning was another. The particular smell in the corridor outside Room 7 on the morning of the sixteenth was a third.

She put on her gloves. She went in.

The chair was facing the wall. The linen was disordered — someone had slept here. The bathroom had been used: wet towels on the floor, the soap unwrapped, the complimentary toiletries opened. There was a coffee cup on the nightstand and a phone charger still plugged into the socket, the cable dangling without a phone at the end of it. A briefcase was by the door, closed, undisturbed.

No guest.

She checked the bathroom again, though she had already confirmed it was empty. She stepped onto the balcony and looked at the garden, which was bright with early light and entirely undisturbed. She came back inside. She stood in the centre of Room 7 and looked at what was there and what was not there and tried to construct a version of events that explained both.

The briefcase suggested the guest had not intended to leave. The phone charger without a phone suggested the guest had taken the phone but left everything else. The disordered bed suggested the guest had slept here. The fact that the guest was not here was not something she could construct a satisfactory version of events around.

She began to strip the bed.

It was under the second pillow.

A phone, face down. Not fallen — placed. She turned it over. The screen was cracked in a pattern she had not seen before: a single point of impact at the centre with fracture lines radiating outward in a perfect radial symmetry, as though enormous pressure had been applied from within. She pressed the power button. Nothing.

She set it on the nightstand next to the cup.

She finished making the bed. She cleaned the bathroom. She replaced the toiletries. She vacuumed. She moved through the room with the systematic efficiency of eleven years of practice, her eyes on her work, not on the wardrobe, which was closed, and not on the corner near the wardrobe, which was just a corner in the daylight.

It was when she was retrieving her vacuum cleaner from the doorway that she saw the marks on the floor.

They were faint — barely visible in the morning light, the kind of thing you would not notice if you were not already close to the floor and looking. Two parallel marks in the carpet pile, each perhaps thirty centimetres long, running from the corner near the wardrobe toward the centre of the room. The carpet had been compressed, as though something had been dragged — not with the random pattern of furniture being shifted or a bag being pulled, but with the deliberate, even, unhurried mark of something that had moved under its own direction.

She looked at the marks for a long time. She looked at the door. She looked at the corner near the wardrobe, which was just a corner, which was always just a corner in the daylight, and which she had spent eleven years not looking at.

She rolled the vacuum cleaner back into the corridor.

She was reaching for her trolley when she saw Celestine.

Celestine was standing in the corridor twelve feet away, facing the wall. Her hands were at her sides. Her back was to Amara. Her head was slightly bowed, her chin toward her chest, in the posture of someone in prayer or in the posture of someone who has been positioned that way and has not been given permission to move. She was perfectly, absolutely still.

Amara said: Celestine.

Nothing.

She said it again, louder. Her voice sounded wrong in the corridor — too thin, too small, absorbed immediately by the carpet and the walls and the botanical prints with their wrong plants rendered in their precise colonial style.

Celestine did not move. Did not turn. Did not indicate in any way that she had heard.

Amara took one step toward her.

The corridor light flickered. Once. Then again. Then it settled into a dimness that was not quite darkness but was not quite the ordinary fluorescent brightness of the hotel’s morning corridors either. The kind of dimness that makes distances uncertain. The kind of dimness that makes you question whether what you are looking at is what you think you are looking at.

Amara stopped.

She thought, with the clarity of someone who has spent eleven years not thinking about certain things and has just run out of the energy required to keep not thinking about them, about everything she knew and everything she had decided not to know. She thought about the photographs. She thought about the marks in the carpet. She thought about the briefcase by the door and the phone with the cracked screen and the guest who was not in his room and had not been through the front desk.

She thought about the chair that always faced the wall.

She thought about thirty-one years.

She thought about the specific quality of the corridor’s new dimness and the way Celestine was standing and what it meant that a woman who had managed every contingency at the Grand Malabar for thirty-one years without showing anything that could be identified as fear was standing in a corridor in the morning light facing a wall and not turning around.

She thought about the corner near the wardrobe, which she was now standing beside, and which was no longer just a corner.

She could feel it. Not with her eyes — the corner was behind her and she was not going to turn around and look at it, not now, not while Celestine was standing twelve feet away facing the wall, not while the lights were wrong and the guest was missing and the carpet bore the marks of something that had moved of its own accord across the floor of Room 7 in the night.

She could feel it through her feet. Through her back. Through the specific quality of the air in the corridor which had the same texture — the same density, the same pressure, the same quality of being looked at from a direction she could not identify — as the air in Room 7 had always had on the mornings of the sixteenth.

Amara stood in the corridor of the Grand Malabar with her back to the corner near the wardrobe and her eyes on Celestine’s unmoving back and her hands on the handle of her trolley and understood, finally and completely and with no possibility of the understanding being set aside again, that the thing in Room 7 was not in Room 7.

It was in the corridor.

And it was standing very close behind her.

She did not move. She did not breathe.

The lights dimmed further.

From twelve feet away, in a voice that was Celestine’s voice in every quality except the one that made it human, something said:

Good morning, Amara.

We have a room to prepare.

THE MALABAR

Est. 1889. 47 rooms. Four stars. Highly rated on all major platforms.

The building is one hundred and thirty-seven years old.

It has held a great deal.

The thing that has been in Room 7 since before the foundation was poured — since before this coast had a name in any language that the people who named it would recognise — left its corner for the first time in thirty-one years at three forty-seven in the morning of the sixteenth.

It did not leave because it was disturbed. It left because it was finished.

The man from Lagos had been sufficient. His grief was of a quality the thing had not encountered in some time — clean, recent, undefended, the grief of someone who had not yet built the usual architectures of protection around it. He had opened the wardrobe of his own volition, which they almost never did, and in doing so had made the taking easier and more complete than usual. The thing had taken what it needed. The man had left. This was the arrangement as it had always functioned.

Except.

The thing had been in one corner of one room for thirty-one years. Thirty-one years is a long time even for something that does not experience time the way living things do. It had been patient because patience was the arrangement — the night manager maintained the vacancy, the thing maintained the arrangement, and everyone maintained the pretence that the Grand Malabar was simply a hotel with a minor quirk in its booking system.

But the man from Lagos had opened the wardrobe. And in the moment of the opening, the thing had felt — for the first time in thirty-one years — the edge of the room. The boundary of the arrangement. The door that was, from the inside, simply a door.

It had taken the grief and it had taken something else: a sense of what lay beyond Room 7. The corridor. The forty-six other rooms. The stairwells and the lobby and the garden and beyond the garden the coast road and beyond the coast road the ocean, which had its own patience and its own hunger and was not the thing’s concern. What was the thing’s concern were the forty-six other rooms and the people sleeping in them, some of whom were, it was certain, experiencing their own version of the specific quality of undefended, recent, clean grief that the man from Lagos had brought so obligingly into Room 7.

The night manager had come to the door at midnight. The thing had felt her palm against the wood — that familiar pressure, the woman’s specific quality of attention, which it had known for thirty-one years and which tasted of something old and preserved and not quite natural. It had let her open the door. It had let her take one step inside. Then it had taken the light from the corridor and moved past her while she stood in the dark and could not see.

She had turned to follow. It had been waiting in the corridor. She was still there.

The housekeeper was useful. Her system — last, always, trolley in the doorway — had been a small and consistent pleasure for eleven years. The deliberate and sustained maintenance of not-knowing was, for the thing, a form of attention that was almost as nourishing as grief. She had never looked at the corner directly. She had always known it was there. This tension — between knowing and not-looking — was something the thing had come to appreciate in the way that a connoisseur appreciates a particular quality of preparation.

It had spoken through the night manager’s mouth because the night manager’s voice was the most familiar sound in the building, and familiar sounds were useful when you wanted someone to stay very still.

The housekeeper had not run. This was interesting.

The building holds this information the way it holds everything else — in its walls, in its foundations, in the limestone quarried from this coastline and mortared together by men who did not know what was in the ground and would not have believed it if told.

Room 7 is empty. The door is open. The corridor is quiet.

Somewhere on the second floor, a trolley stands unattended. A phone with a cracked screen sits on a nightstand. A briefcase waits by a door for an owner who will not return for it.

The building notes all of this with the patience of something that has been noting things for one hundred and thirty-seven years.

It notes one more thing.

The booking system, updated automatically at midnight, shows a new reservation. Confirmed by head office. Arriving this evening.

Room 7. Three nights. Garden view.

The room is ready.

— ✶ —

End

Category: Horror & Gothic Fiction

Author: Sabiha Atturkhan

About the Competition

The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 by Hashtag Kalakar is a prestigious platform celebrating literary excellence worldwide. It brings together a diverse array of voices, offering writers the opportunity to showcase their creativity and storytelling prowess. Participants engage in a rich tapestry of genres, contributing to the competition's vibrant tapestry of global literature.

We extend our heartfelt thanks to Sabiha Atturkhan for sharing "The Grand Malabar" with us. Her participation in the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 enriches our understanding of Gothic fiction's allure. We appreciate her contribution to the literary community and look forward to seeing more of her profound storytelling in the future.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.