The manager of the Dolphin Hotel on Lexington Avenue does not want you to stay in room 1408. He will meet you in his office. He will offer you brandy. He will be very reasonable and very direct and he will tell you that the room has had fifty-six incidents since the hotel opened in 1910 — forty-two deaths, natural and otherwise, and fourteen people who checked in sane and checked out in conditions that required immediate hospitalization.
He will not say the room is haunted. He will specifically say it is not haunted.
"It's an evil room," he will tell you. "I don't use that word lightly. Not a haunted room — haunted implies a spirit, a history, a reason. This room has no reason. It's just evil in the way some places are. In the way that some things are."
The writer who stays there anyway — because writers always stay there anyway, that's the whole point, they think they are immune to things, they think observation protects them — will notice almost immediately that the room is wrong. Not in any describable way. In the way that you know, sometimes, that you are being watched, except the feeling does not come from any specific direction. It comes from the room itself. The walls. The carpet. The particular angle of the window.
The air conditioning comes on and does not shut off. The room gets cold. The paintings on the wall are of the ocean and they are fine paintings, technically accomplished, but there is something in them — in the color of the water, in the way the waves are caught at a particular moment of breaking — that is deeply unpleasant in a way you cannot immediately name.
Time moves strangely. This is the part that gets the writers. The men who debunk hauntings for a living. The skeptics. They look at their watch and it says 9 PM and then they look again and it says 9:01, but an hour has gone by. Or a minute, but it has somehow felt like three days. The room changes this. The room has its own time and it is not yours.
Things happen in the room. They are different for each person. That is also part of it — the room is not performing a set piece. It is responding. It finds what you have kept quiet and brings it into the room with you.
The writer wanted ghosts. The writer got something worse: himself, in the room, in the dark, with the air conditioning running and the clock that does not work correctly, and the understanding that the room knew he was coming before he knew he was coming, and had been waiting, with no particular urgency, because the room has all the time it needs.
Fifty-six incidents since 1910.
The manager sips his brandy and says: "I'm asking you not to stay in that room. I'm not ordering you. I'm asking."
The writer thanks him for his concern.
He takes the key.
He always takes the key.