There’s something kind of creepy about hotels. Even if nothing particularly bad happens to you there, they’re kind of home but not home at the same time. Personally, I tend to have trouble falling asleep in hotel rooms.

But what if the hotel room you’re in tried to eat you?

On that note, let’s talk about Stephen King’s “1408,” from the anthology Everything’s Eventual.

We start off with our hero, Mike Enslin, coming to the Dolphin Hotel in New York City, intent on spending a night in the hotel’s most haunted room, the titular room 1408. See, Mike is a writer who writes books about staying in haunted places, with titles like 10 Nights in 10 Haunted Graveyards and stuff like that. Anyway, while Mike’s in the lobby, he’s approached by the manager Mr. Olin, who asks him to come with him to his office.

Once there, Olin pours Mike and himself a drink, then tries very, very hard to convince Mike to not go into the room. He notes that Mike doesn’t actually believe the things that he writes, which makes him more vulnerable to whatever’s in 1408, which isn’t actually a ghost but something far, far worse. It’s so bad, in fact, that Olin hasn’t let anyone take the room in over 20 years.

This is because room 1408 has detrimental effects on people, both physically and psychologically. One of the maids who went into the room went blind, and didn’t get her eyesight back until she’d been out of the room for some time. Another maid retired because she developed very early onset dementia, and eventually died of a heart attack. Also, at least 12 people died from suicide in that room, and at least 30 others died of apparently natural causes.

So, the room is really fucked up.

This isn’t enough to deter him, however, and Olin admits defeat and gives him the key. And it is a key, rather than a key card, because electronics don’t work in the room. Olin goes with him up to the 14th floor (which is actually the 13th, due to superstitions), then leaves him to it, again trying to warn Mike to not go inside. This, of course, doesn’t work.

Things seem very odd before Mike even enters the room, because he notices the door is crooked to the left. He bends down to grab his tape recorder to take down that observation, only to see that the door is now perfectly straight. Then he bends down to grab his bag, only to find when he looks back up that it’s now crooked to the right.

Mike is kind of freaked out by this, but thinks that it’s Olin’s story getting on his nerves and that the manager is currently having a good laugh at his expense. So he decides now that he’s going to go in out of spite.

He manages to stay in the room for all of 70 minutes, and dear God are those 70 minutes fucking freaky.

Mike turns on the light, and the room is cast in a kind of yellow-orange glow that he finds a little unsettling. Then he notices three pictures: a woman in an evening gown on a staircase,  a ship in a storm, and a still life of fruit where the colors are mostly a sickly yellow and orange. These are also crooked, so he goes to straighten them out. This manages to make him feel a little better.

Then he notices an ashtray with an old matchbook in it. He decides to take the matchbook with him as a souvenir. This matchbook becomes very important later.

Then he goes to the bedroom, which is where the really freaky shit starts up. First, when he goes to turn on the light, he notices that the wallpaper texture is all wrong, like “old dead skin.” Turning on the light reveals a bed with a duvet that’s similarly colored to the fruit in the creepy still life.

Then he picks up a menu, which is in French. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, it’s in Russian, then Italian. Then it’s not a menu but a horrifyingly grotesque image of a young boy with a wolf eating his leg, before finally turning back into a normal, English-language room service menu. There’s also a plum on a plate that’s there, then not there, and there again, all light with the same creepy yellow-orange light. The pictures on the wall also change: the still life becomes a severed human head, the woman now has her tits out and teeth filed to points, and the ship now contains all the people who ever died in this room.

So, it’s about this time that Mike decides that it’s time to get the fuck out of here. There’s just one small problem: the door won’t open, despite being unlocked.

Mike then realizes that he can use the phone in the room to try and call for help, except oops, no he can’t. Because when he tries to call Olin, instead he gets a horrible inhuman voice telling him that they’ve killed all his friends, to watch out for the siren, and that he can never leave the room, all while the horrible light intensifies.

Mike then starts to feel a presence, and that presence is extremely hungry, and Mike looks really tasty. He then remembers the matchbook that he took from the ashtray.

Which he uses to set his shirt on fire.

While all this is going on, the walls start to crack and bulge, and the room appears to be melting. However, Mike is now able to actually open the door, because the force in room 1408 apparently likes its food raw, and he runs out into the hallway.

Only problem now is that he’s still on fire, but this is remedied by a helpful bystander who puts him out with an ice bucket.

Mike’s experiences change him, and not really for the better. Other than the treatments he has to go through for his burns, he’s also developed high blood pressure, eye problems, and issues with his back and prostate. He also has a nice little case of PTSD, which means that he can no longer write, and the sight of sunsets send him into a panic because of how much they look like the light in 1408. So the voice on the phone was right: he escaped, but part of him is still stuck there.

So, that was “1408,” which is actually one of my favorite stories of King’s. I really like how it starts out slow, then slowly ramps up throughout the story into absolutely bugfuck territory. You can track Mike going from mocking, to uneasy, to dread, then to full-on pants shitting terror. There’s also the “13” motif: Olin mentions that the 14th floor is actually the 13th, since a lot of hotels and other places tend not to acknowledge the existence of a 13th floor because the number is considered unlucky by a number of cultures. Plus the fact that the numbers 1408 themselves add up to 13, making it a very unlucky room indeed.

Like a lot of King’s stories, “1408” was adapted into a film of the same name. It stars John Cusack as Mike and Samuel L Jackson as Olin, and actually adds quite a bit to the story. This makes sense, since they’d have to do that to make a 104 minute movie out of a 30 page story. I actually saw the movie before I read the story, and remember quite enjoying it, so I would recommend checking that out as well if you’re interested.

And remember: if someone tells you not to step inside the eldritch abomination, you should probably listen.