Psychological · Thriller · Drama

The Quiet Hour

Elenora Vance

Every night at three, the city forgets one person.

A night auditor at a failing hotel begins keeping a ledger of the guests nobody remembers checking in. The entries are in her handwriting. The dates have not happened yet.

Reading time: 6 h 52 min read
Pages: 386
Language: English
Recommended: 16+

4.8 · 1,284 readers

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Story world

Vellmar, a rain-soaked harbour city where the streets were rebuilt three times over the same foundations. The old avenues still exist beneath the new ones, and so do the people who walked them.

MemoryGuiltIdentityInsomniaUneaseMelancholyDread

Characters

Isolde Marek
Night auditor
Has not slept a full night in four years.
Ambrose Tate
Permanent guest
Room 411. No record of arrival.
Dr. Halvard
Sleep physician
Believes the ledger is a symptom.

Timeline

Winter, year one
The Amaranth Hotel loses its licence and stays open anyway.
Night 118
Isolde writes an entry she has no memory of writing.
Night 214
A guest arrives to match it.
The quiet hour
The ledger runs out of pages.

Preview

A fifteen-second trailer, then the opening pages as they were first printed.

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The reading preview is below

Opening pages

The lobby clock was wrong by four minutes and had been wrong for eleven years, which meant the quiet hour arrived a little early and left a little late.

Isolde had learned to trust the wrongness. It gave her time to prepare.

At 2:56 she opened the ledger to a clean page and found her own handwriting waiting there, patient as a held breath: Tate, Ambrose. Room 411. One night. No luggage.

End of preview