The Hostel From Below the Ground

I have stayed in cheap places before and been fine. I am not fussy. But the Backpackers Nest in Korovgrad broke something in me. I found it late, after a long day, when the two hostels I actually wanted were full, and the price was so good I ignored the way the booking page had exactly one photo and it was of the sign.

Reception was a man behind a cage of chicken wire in a hallway that went down. Everything went down. The dorm was in the basement, a converted cellar with no windows and no ventilation, just a single bare bulb and eight bunks jammed so close you could touch the person across from you. The air was wet. There is no other word. It sat on your skin. And there was a smell, sweetish and organic and old, that seemed to come from the walls themselves, and that I could taste at the back of my throat within a minute.

The door to the dorm had a lock, technically. A hasp and a padlock loop. But the screws holding the hasp to the frame were loose in soft, damp wood, and when I tugged the whole plate lifted away from the jamb with almost no force. Anyone in the building could have opened that door with one hand. I mentioned it to the cage man and he shrugged and said it was fine, this was a safe area, which is exactly what a person says right before it is not.

I lay on the top bunk fully dressed with my valuables inside my clothes and my backpack looped through my arm, and I listened to the pipes, and to a slow steady drip somewhere behind the wall, and to a scratching that I told myself was pipes too. I did not sleep. Around three a man I had never seen came down the stairs, stood in the doorway breathing for a while, decided he had the wrong room, and went back up. The door, of course, had opened for him without resistance.