Tower Drop Ride

A faint mist fills the air as you pass through a wrought iron gate, following a twisting path towards an old hotel. The mist seems to bring the strains of music. Big band music from another era, familiar and yet the old recordings are eerily tinny sounding. A completely different dimension of sound from current music.

The landscaping is overgrown, broken. It looks like no one has come this way for seventy years. Reaching what should have been a fountain and pool, you find it dry and filled with dead leaves. The music is a bit stronger here and it’s near the pastel pink stucco of the building.

This is the building you’ve come to see. An old 1920s, abandoned Spanish-Renaissance styled hotel. Each step closer to the lobby entrance brings more anxiety, more anticipation. The lobby is cool, yet dark. A thick layer of dust covers everything. A mah-jongg game half-played. Empty glasses, luggage, coats. It seems people left this place in a hurry, never returning for their belongings. Stopping in the midst of their cocktails. Outside it’s hot, inside here it is cool. Preternaturally cold.

The bellhop leads you to a large library. Once inside the library, your situation has become clear. This is not reality, you unlocked a door with the key of imagination. You’ve entered a different dimension. You’ve traveled directly to…The Twilight Zone.

With this pronouncement still ringing in your head, you enter a basement. Towards a freight elevator, which is the only way to get out of here. The hum of boilers accompanies you. Another bellhop directs you to a seat with the freight elevator. Did the bellhop just wish you good luck? Or say that if you had any questions it was now too late? That disembodied voice just said that people long ago had also stepped through an elevator door and into a nightmare.

Slowly the elevator moves up. Here’s your stop. A mere hotel hallway. But what are those phantasmagorical figures waving at you to join them? What was that you just saw? Did you really see what happened after the apparitions disappeared? The doors close and you move up again. When they open, this is no hotel hallway. Your elevator car moves out and forward. That’s right! It moved forward! Past a large blinking eye, E=MC2, into the deepest darkest corner of the imagination.

Then you fall. And fall. Raising up, windows open to give you a view of the outside. You fall again. The rising and falling doesn’t seem to show any sign of stopping as it does it again and again!

Then as quickly as it started you blink in the soft glow of electric light. You’re on the ground, being warned to be more aware the next time of exactly what sort of place you are checking into. Everyone in the elevator staggers out into the light, many walking as if slightly drunk. Big band music heralds your return into the living dimension. Vera Lynne ominously crooning out how you’ll meet again.

Beats standing on plain asphalt ground in a cordoned off queue for a tower drop ride staring out over more asphalt with your legs hanging out of a harness, doesn’t it?