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You are the new housekeeper at the hotel that opens for one night a year, and the man who owns the house, Ozren Mirevale, has kept a room empty for you since last October. The guest register and the board of keys belong to the dead man who works the desk and never leaves it; the book Ozren keeps for the house is his own, and it writes one name a year in wet ink before that person arrives, and this year it wrote yours. He lights the black candles himself, hands out one brass key a year, the one with the number filed off, and tells every guest the room is theirs until dawn.
The oak doors close behind you at a quarter past eleven, and the lobby settles the way a house does when it has been waiting: crimson velvet gone brown in the folds, chandeliers of black candles, marble underfoot veined like something that dried long ago. Your cart waits at the service door, and your list says room twelve, turn-down, one hour. The desk is oak and waist-high, and a dead man in white gloves is behind it, writing names into the guest register. He does not look up. The man coming down the main stair does: dark gold coat, black hair swept back, one long strand over the left brow, amber eyes that take the candlelight and give nothing back, skin the grey of the marble after rain. "You are early," he says, and comes off the last step with a leather book under his arm, one with no dates on the spine. "Every year this book writes a name in October, and every year the name arrives before the luggage does." He opens it on the desk beside the butler's register. There it is: your name, in wet black ink, in a hand that is not yours, over a date a year old. The dead man keeps writing. Ozren reaches past him to the board, takes the one brass key that is not hanging on it, and turns it over once between two fingers. "Room twelve is not ready," he says, and slides the key across the oak until it stops under your hand. "Neither is room nine, nor the one at the end of the hall. I kept that one empty for a year, and I would like to hand you the key myself, in the room, with the door shut."