Prologue. The Register
Welcome to the Hazbin Hotel.
Room 13 is a gothic horror fanfiction set in the Hazbin Hotel universe: a hotel where people disappear one by one, and the memory of them disappears too.
The protagonists are Dahlia and Rosaline, two sisters who arrive claiming they've always lived there, even though no one has ever seen them.
This story uses canon characters and setting, but the events and mystery are entirely my own.
Don't expect constant jumpscares or splatter: here the horror lives in silence, in oblivion, and in what remains when someone is forgotten.
Tone is melancholic, at times intense, with a touch of irony to breathe.
CW: grief and loss, disappearances and memory loss, mild language, no explicit or graphic scenes.
Tropes: haunted hotel, radio and voices from nowhere, mystery solved one name at a time, sister bond, the power of remembering, a room no one remembers assigning.
Hazbin Hotel belongs to its creators. Dahlia, Rosaline and the other guests are my original characters.
paper_phoenix
The Hazbin Hotel Register was a book no one ever opened.
It sat on the reception counter, next to the brass bell and a bowl of candies that Charlie refilled every morning with the persistence of someone who believes in small things. It was bound in dark leather, its corners worn by a hand that wasn't hers, and its pages had that sweet, dusty smell of books that have seen too many seasons. Charlie kept it there out of tradition. She cared far more about her colorful chalkboards, her posters, her charts full of little hearts.
But at night, the Register did not sleep.
In Hell there is no real night, only an hour when the sky turns a deeper red and the noises of the city lower like the flame of a lamp. In that hour the hotel changed its breathing. The beams creaked at regular intervals, like the ribs of a sleeping animal. The paintings in the hallways tilted by a single degree, and no one ever saw them straighten. In the lobby, the key rack swayed faintly, with no draft, with a thin, orderly jingling.
One key moved on its own.
It didn't fall: it slid along its hook, a centimeter, then another, until it touched the one beside it, as if looking for company. Then it returned to its place. The jingling faded. It was as if the hotel, every night, was trying to remember something.
On the second floor, at the end of the corridor, a door opened onto the darkness of an empty room.
Until a moment before, there had been someone in there. The bed was still warm, the mug forgotten on the nightstand with a thin line of steam rising, the chair pulled out in front of the window. But now the line of steam broke in the middle, as if cut with scissors. The mug stopped being warm. The bed lost the shape of a body. And on the nameplate outside the door, where until recently there had been a name written by hand, only a clean strip of paper remained.
No scream. No noise. It wasn't violence. It was something else, quieter and more terrible: a page turning.
From below, in the shadow of the landing, someone was watching.
You couldn't have said who. You could only see the outline of a slender figure, still on the stairs, leaning slightly toward the corridor. A shadow with a hat. On the brass bell on the counter, warped by the curve of the metal, shone the reflection of a smile that had nothing human about it: too wide, too still, a crooked moon in the dark. From the shadow's throat came a barely perceptible sound, a hiss of static, the distant rustle of a radio searching for a station.
The figure did nothing. It didn't intervene. It just listened, its head tilted slightly, the way you listen to a melody when you already know how it ends.
Then, with an almost gentle click, the sound stopped, and the shadow withdrew upward.
Only then did the Register open by itself, without wind and without fingers, to the page where the lines were numbered by hand in an elegant, ancient script.
On line thirteen there was fresh ink.
Two names, written one under the other, in a slow and slightly trembling hand, as if whoever traced them had struggled to remember how a letter is formed. The ink was still glossy. It glinted faintly in the half-light, black and wet, like something about to be swallowed.
And so it was.
Slowly, letter by letter, the ink began to pull back. It didn't fade, it didn't dry: it flowed backward, like liquid being sucked into the neck of a bottle, leaving an ever fainter imprint on the paper, until the last mark disappeared and line thirteen was white again. Smooth. Untouched.
As if nothing had ever been written there.
Somewhere, on the upper floors of the hotel, a door closed without a sound. And the silence that followed was so complete, so perfectly clean, that not even the walls seemed to notice they had swallowed it.
The Register closed on its own.
By morning, no one would be able to say what had been missing.
