The man in room eleven never comes to the lobby. He never leaves his room, which is on the top floor, facing the street. Reclusiveness, however, is not a crime. The only disturbance he’s ever caused has involved a handful of New Haven citizens who, over the years, have complained about a man staring down at them from the window of room eleven, his face obscured by wispy curtains. Unless the laws of New Haven change, however, staring from windows at people passing by on the street below is not cause for intervention by the police.
Still, several people have been sufficiently disconcerted by the man’s gaze that they have, in fact, called the police. Their complaints, though, not only fail to involve any actual assault, but those who call the police always find themselves unable to be specific about what, exactly, they believe the man to have done to them. They’re simply convinced that he shouldn’t be there; that he’s (as one Yale football player put it) “up to no good,” or (as reported by a woman who works as a cashier at the Rite-Aid) “he’s just sort of... creepy... I just feel like he’s doing something wrong in there.”
The police consistently inform these people that citizens are entitled to look as if they’re up to no good (as long as they merely look that way), and that if there were laws against creepiness, a considerable portion of the New Haven population would be in jail already.
The man in room eleven is respected by the management and staff, in large part because he pays faithfully, in cash, the money neatly inserted into an envelope he slips under his door at the beginning of every month, and because he requires virtually nothing of the hotel’s employees.
He plays the cello, quite well, but never after ten p.m. He apparently keeps a snake, which creates no disturbance of any kind. The snake’s existence is apparent only because the boy who delivers the man’s daily meals (there have been different boys over the years but all are respectable looking, well dressed, if unknown to any staff member who lives in or near New Haven) leaves, along with the man’s food on a tray (ordinary food, chops and roast chickens and the like), a live rodent — a white rat, a hamster, a guinea pig — in a little cage, placed carefully beside the tray.
The following mornings, the tray and the cage, both empty, always appear in the hallway just outside room eleven.
The Duncan has its history of incidents, like any hotel. Even the Connaught in London, even the Ritz in Paris, has seen mortality do its work — how could it be otherwise, when so many come and go?
At the Duncan, there was the sudden disappearance of the room service boy (many years ago, when the Duncan offered room service at all), with no notice; without so much as leaving his uniform behind.
There was the porter (back when the Duncan employed porters) who came down in the elevator (no one was ever sure from which upper floor), walked purposefully through the lobby to the front door, and did not appear for duty the next day, or ever again.
There was the expression on the face of the man found dead in his room of a coronary occlusion. There was the single woman who’d said a cheerful good night to her two women friends, gone up to her room, and been found hung from the shower rod, by a silk stocking, the next day. There was the young man, stopping over on his way to Albany, who seemed to have been bitten, over and over, by... some small animal, probably a dog, though dogs have never been allowed at the Duncan.
Such events are not unusual, not in any hotel.
The only genuinely strange occurrence is a recent one, and it took place not inside the Duncan but on Chapel Street, in front of the hotel.
A young woman, a junior at Yale, had been walking back to the campus rather late at night, having been at a party on Dwight Street. According to her friends, she’d been entirely herself when she left the party: cheerful, bantering, and only as intoxicated as it’s possible to become after imbibing two Miller Lites. It being Chapel Street, a mere few blocks from the campus, no one thought anything of her walking home alone.
She was found less than an hour later, standing on the sidewalk in front of the Duncan, staring up at the building, frozen in place. She was alive, and unharmed, but remains catatonic three weeks after the incident.
No one is able to speculate about why she’d stopped before the Duncan like that — it’s hardly a New Haven landmark — though a faculty couple who had just walked past the young woman on Chapel Street do claim to recall the sound of someone knocking on glass, from above. They did not look up at the source of the tapping sound (it seemed so clearly meant for the young woman), and in fact thought nothing of it at all until they read about the young woman’s hospitalization in a police bulletin on Yale’s website.
The girl did briefly regain consciousness, in her bed at Yale — New Haven Hospital, the day after she was found on Chapel. She opened her eyes, but did not seem to be aware of her surroundings. She merely stared up at the ceiling of her room and said, “All those little teeth,” after which she emitted a hissing sound that, according to the attending nurse, did not sound quite like a noise of which the human voice is capable.
She spoke so softly that the nurse, who was the only one present at the time, is not entirely certain that the girl said, “All those little teeth.” The nurse believes it might have been, “All those little teas,” which would probably have referred to the Master’s Teas held in Morse College.
The latter version, of course, makes more sense. The nurse, however, is certain about the inhuman sound that followed the phrase; she says it resembled the hiss of a snake but was deeper and more penetrating, more like (according to the nurse) the sound of gas escaping from a valve.
At any rate, by the time the girl’s parents arrived from Grand Rapids, the girl had lost consciousness again, and has not regained consciousness a second time.
The girl’s parents have had her moved from New Haven to Grand Rapids. The doctors there are, as they say, guardedly optimistic. CAT scans have revealed nothing amiss in the young woman’s brain. There are, have always been, unsolved medical mysteries, and people who, like the Yale undergraduate, fall abruptly into catatonic states and sometimes return from them, just as abruptly, wondering where they are, assuming themselves to be still on the bus or in the room or wherever they were when they passed out of consciousness, days or weeks or months earlier.
Still, if you find yourself walking past the Duncan on Chapel Street, it’s probably just as well to focus your gaze straight ahead, either toward the lights and joviality of the Study Hotel or the brutalist bulk of the architecture school, depending on which way you’re headed. There’s plenty to see on Chapel Street, at eye level.
There are, after all, people who, for unknowable reasons, want to see things they’d be better off not having seen at all. These people seem simply to want to know that mysterious forces are alive and well.
There are zealots of another sort too. You could probably think of them as religious, in their way, though the message they want to impart is different from that of street-corner Christians. This other body of evangelists wants us to know that hell and damnation are inevitable, that we do not go unwitnessed by the evil eye, that it’s only a matter of time until our final destination is revealed to us.
So why take chances? There are, after all, unsavory presences at large in the world, and they sometimes manifest themselves in the unlikeliest of places. So, really, there’s no particular reason to glance up as you pass the Hotel Duncan. The man in room eleven has only proven dangerous to those who hear him tap on the glass, look up, and see... whatever it is that they see. It’s best to stare straight ahead, and go on about your business, especially if someone overhead, in the Duncan, seems to want to attract your attention.