Snowbird Gothic Stories 4 - "Minus One"

“Minus One” is one of the stories you can blame on work.

I do a great deal of traveling for Ubisoft, and depending on where the game I’m attached to is based, that can mean a lot of time in Paris, or Lyon, or Toronto, or wherever.  Every habit has to start somewhere, though, and for me it started with an extended stay in Paris in 2004 to work on a survival horror game called Cold Fear.

Ubi put me up in a little extended stay hotel in a neighborhood called Bercy, which had a ritzy shopping district and a large park in it and otherwise not much else to recommend it to the confused and timid traveler except easy access to a metro station. (also, a crepe stand strategically positioned at the entry to said metro station. But I digress). This wasn’t my first time out of the country, but it was my first extended stay out of the country, and the hotel staff - used to dealing with business travelers who were considerably more together than newbie game writer guy - didn’t necessarily have a whole hell of a lot of patience for either my questions or my absolutely terrible French. And so finding the laundry (and getting my money back when the ancient machines ate it) became an adventure, and figuring out what to do with trash became a negotiation, and so on and so forth until I finally had it all figured out just in time to go home. And each of these mysteries had to be teased out of the women who worked the front desk, occasionally looking up from their magazines to tell me that it was my imagination that my keycard didn’t work.

But one of the first stumbling blocks I ran into was the elevator. Any tourist guide to Paris will tell you about the Louvre and Notre Dame; it will not tell you that the damn elevator buttons are numbered differently. The floor labeled “1” would be “2” in the US, and then you have all the basement levels numbered in the negatives. Making matters worse was the fact that one of the two elevators in the lobby didn’t have the negative numbers on it, so for a week I was fairly certain I was hallucinating one way or another when I stepped into a lift.

That’s where this story came from, that feeling of uncertainly and dislocation when you step into a place that’s almost, but not quite, like home. So all the humiliations and missteps and fears of getting it wrong - like standing for half an hour in front of a restaurant waiting to get seated when local custom is to seat yourself, or elevators that don’t make sense, or, well, any of a million little things that added up to an unreasoning terror that I was Doing It Wrong. That’s what got distilled into this particular tale, which is one of the new ones in the collection. It’s never been published before, though it nearly made an appearance in an audio anthology that didn’t quite make it off the ground.

So enjoy. And be careful if you go to Bercy. I’m sure that elevator’s still there.