by Ellen Datlow
The stifled beat of my own rage got me across town, into the Puppet Motel and halfway through unpacking my first suitcase before the place’s eerie quiet started to sink in. I looked around, throat suddenly gone tight. It still reeked of old beer, somehow, with even less pleasant things lurking beneath—a filthy alley stink, antithetical to the cleanser I’d personally coated every inch in. Probably seeping in from the garbage chute outside, I told myself, through the windows I left constantly open; this place wasn’t old enough to have accumulated its own funk of decay yet, and Toronto’s summer streets were nobody’s idea of perfume. But it was either deal with the smell or live in a sweatbox.
I paused in the middle of the living room, listening hard—straining, almost—but heard nothing aside from my own breath, the pulse and rush of blood in my ears. No tone, for once. That was a mercy.
That night, I did something I don’t usually do: slept naked atop the bed sheets with a fan on high at my feet, carefully calibrated brown noise playing through my phone’s earbuds, trying to tilt myself into what little breeze the windows let in. It was like I was deliberately breaking my own rules because I wasn’t used to being alone anymore, making everything strange, so the underlying weirdness wouldn’t stand out so much. And it even seemed to work, at first—I fell asleep quick and hard, then slept deeply, without dreaming.
Waking, however, was a different story.
• • •
“I don’t understand the question. Can you try again?”
It was my phone’s voice-activated AI—familiar even though I never used it, that skin-crawlingly pleasant uncanny valley monotone—speaking out of nowhere into my earbuds, jolting me awake. I groaned and rolled upright, the tone back and ringing in both my ears, and yanked the earbuds out. After a beat its voice went off again, probably repeating the question, words inaudible but the intonation unmistakable. I could see “her” readout twang across the screen, back and forth, an electrified rubber band.
I fumbled my way to the settings screen and turned the AI off, then checked the time: half an hour before my set alarm. I lay back, eyes rolling up, a palm clapped over each eyelid; maybe I could get at least a little more sleep, if that fucking amorphous, ever-present tone eased up. . . .
“I don’t understand,” the AI repeated so loud I actually yelped. “Please try again. Please—specify.”
Everything in me locked stiff for an instant, like tensing against a punch. I’d never heard that too-calm no-voice pause before, as if thinking; the very implication burnt my throat, froze me all over. I stared down at the inert plastic rectangle, muscles tensed for fight or flight, my whole scalp crawling—but fight what, flee where? What was—
“Okay,” the AI said. “When can we expect you?”
The Motel’s tone was almost inaudible now, but that didn’t help; I felt it in my jaw, my teeth, my tongue, realizing for the first time how it wavered up and down when it hit this particular pitch, arrhythmic yet random. A mouthful of ants, itching against my palate.
“Oh, I see. That’s very soon.”
Abruptly, the tone seemed to steady once more, pausing; waiting. For what? An—
(Answer?)
“Her name is Loren,” the AI told whatever it was responding to, helpfully—and that was it, motherfucker: enough, no more, gone, gone, gone. When the phone buzzed next I was already in motion, jackknifed to standing, thighs and stomach twisting painfully as I grabbed my shit and ran butt-naked out into the hall. Somebody (me, I guess) was making a noise like an injured dog, all terrified whimper. I slammed the door shut behind me, fumbled the key in and jerked it around, hearing the bolt squeal; had my shirt up over my head with no time for a bra, one arm already inside and the other sleeve dangling empty, hauling my leggings up like I was trying to lift myself high, crotch-first. Not quite fast enough, though, to prevent the AI’s voice from telling me I had a new message from unknown caller even as I scrabbled backwards, hit the stairwell door and wrenched it open, then half fell headlong downwards, towards the open air.
I erupted out onto Bathurst, shoeless and panting, only to spend the rest of the day riding streetcars from coffee shop to coffee shop, denuding myself of change in pursuit of company, Wi-Fi, noise. Didn’t even find the nerve to turn my phone back on till the end of the day, at which point I immediately retrieved five messages: three from the George Street renters, demanding help with various chores, plus two from Greg, urging me to call. Nothing else in the file, AI’s promises aside—not even a hang up.
But the tone stayed with me, all day, with no respite. It rang through me tip to toe under any music I put on, no matter what the volume. And always deep enough to hurt.
• • •
“What in the hell’s wrong with King Street, exactly, Loren?” Greg demanded when I finally FaceTimed him back; the barista who was the only other person left in the Second Cup had already told me they were closing in fifteen minutes, which I figured gave an excuse to bail if things got too acrimonious.
How long you got? I felt like asking, but chose to play it dumb/diplomatic. “ ’Scuse me?”
“Check out the listing, on Airbnb.com. No, I’m serious, do it now. I’ll wait.”
Once I did, I could see why he was pissed. All but two of the votes were down, and not a single posted review was positive. A few were just the normal stupid shit—they told me there was a crib but there wasn’t (there was, in the guest bedroom closet, the person just hadn’t looked hard enough) or kitchen electrical plug doesn’t work (which was why there was a label over the wall switch saying DO NOT TOUCH, which people routinely ignored). The rest, however, were . . . odder.
Most’ve the weekend went okay, but the bathroom light doesn’t work and the door kept blowing shut when I was showering, so I’m standing there naked in the dark. I complained and they said they’d fix it (I’d said I’d pass it on to the owner, and had), which was total B.S., they never did.
I always felt like somebody was watching me.
My alarm clock stopped working, so I missed half the stuff I had scheduled.
It was really hard to get to sleep, and REALLY hard waking up.
All we wanted was to just get drunk and watch some sports, but the TV kept crapping out and my dad and my brother wouldn’t stop arguing.
I heard somebody crying, it sounded like it was inside the wall. It went on all night.
I had a big fight with my girlfriend, left to cool down, and when I came back she was gone. I thought maybe she just went home, but I’ve been back for three weeks and nobody knows where she is.
It smells funny and looking at the walls gave me a headache. Second night it got so bad I got a nosebleed and had to go to Emergency.
Went to bed and woke up with my best friend having sex with me, and neither of us can explain why it happened. It was like he was sleepwalking. Now he won’t talk to me.
My ears haven’t stopped ringing since I stayed there. My doctor can’t figure out what’s wrong with me. DO NOT book this place.
“See what I mean?” Greg demanded, soon as I picked my phone back up.
I was still staring at the laptop screen, surprised by how much it disturbed rather than validated me to be finally confronted with proof I wasn’t nuts—that I definitely hadn’t been the only one who found the Motel’s atmosphere toxic. Up till then, the only real mystery I’d encountered directly (aside from my own reactions) had been the Case of the Missing Barrie-ite—and there she was, right in the middle, six complaints down. Yet much as I hated the Puppet Motel itself, the idea that so many customers had apparently left the place I was “responsible” for feeling equally unsatisfied and creeped out was strangely insulting.
“Yeah,” I finally said, “that’s all pretty weird. Not really sure how they can blame us for stuff like the accidental gay experimentation, though—”
“Well, sure, obviously. But what about the rest? If I didn’t know any better, I’d think they were talking about sick building syndrome, or whatever—ba
d wiring, transformers, gas leaks. Some kind of contamination.” As I hesitated: “I mean, you haven’t felt any of this, have you?”
Only every fucking time I’ve been there, I thought, but didn’t say. “It . . . can be a little off-putting, yes,” I agreed, at last. “Might be the colour scheme.”
Greg hissed. “Well, that’s not my fault. The place came like that.”
“Uh-huh, that’s what I assumed. Could be an idea to repaint, though, at least.”
That seemed to calm him, or at least make him think twice about whatever rant he had brewing. “Okay, all right, I’m sorry. I just—this place is supposed to pay for itself, you know? At the bare minimum. Optimally, it’s supposed to provide a second stream of income for Kim and me, a nest egg to build on for when we come home . . . but it isn’t, and I guess now we know why. I mean, I get that that’s not your problem—but it means I can’t redecorate right now, because I don’t have the funds.”
“I understand.”
“I mean, it’s not like they built the place over a damn cemetery and only moved the headstones, or anything; the company walked me through full disclosure, right before we signed. Nothing’s ever happened there, Loren. Not in that unit, not in the building.”
“Not till I started moving people in, huh?” I ventured.
He snorted. “I’m not blaming you, if that’s what you think. This is nobody’s fault.”
I nodded, not sure how to answer. “So,” I said, at last. “What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing to do, I guess.” The early morning sunlight behind him made it hard to read his expression. “Ride it out. I’m back in two weeks and you’re back at school, so I’ll take over then—Kim’ll be joining me once her contract’s up. And then . . . we’ll just have to see, I guess.”
“Okay,” was all I said, and hung up on him.
I knew at the time I was being passive, if not passive-aggressive. And in hindsight maybe I should have told him everything, begged him to let me go back to the House of Flowered Sheets, pressured him into putting me up in a hotel: Yes, I have all these exact same symptoms; yes, your awful condo gave them to me; yes, it damn well is somebody’s fault, and you’ll do for lack of anybody else. I’ve lost time too, felt the dislocation, heard the same ringing. I’m hearing it right now. But—
I think the whole thing with Gavin had kind of slapped that particular impulse out of me, at least for the moment. Like Greg said, however bad things got, there was a set time limit to all this, a clock ticking down: I could deal with that. I was an adult. I could take it.
These are the sort of stories we tell ourselves when things get bad, of course, hoping they’ll stop them from getting worse. Even though, as we all well know, they so very seldom do. Still, I did the socially acceptable thing, for whatever the fuck that’s worth: kept it to myself, all of it—then, and for years afterwards. Not anymore, though.
Obviously.
• • •
Greg was right about the building’s history, or complete lack thereof. So far as I could find out, there’d never even been a medical emergency here—like most downtown condos, it was full of young singles and couples, some with babies, more with pets. I couldn’t tell if any of the babies or pets started crying outside the Motel’s door, because I simply didn’t get any traffic. It occurred to me that since I must have personally met every single person who’d ever slept under this roof, I knew damn well none of them had died here, mysteriously or otherwise.
Although one had disappeared, at least according to her friend. Or “friend.” Or . . . whatever.
It wasn’t until I’d finished my cleaning chores over at Flowered Sheets, hours after hanging up on Greg, that I realized the Motel’s lingering tone was finally gone—as if the automatic, repetitious, thoughtless movements from appliance to appliance, vacuum and kitchen and washer and dryer, had ritually cleansed me as well. And it stayed gone, didn’t reappear even when I went back into the Motel itself after midnight, turning the key the weird way you always had to: widdershins, then opposite, reversing your own natural instincts every time.
The light in the place was still bad, but the air was quiet, and the smell was mostly gone. I swept the floors, had a cool bath, changed into a sleep shirt, and lay down, only to realize that despite my exhaustion, I was still buzzing far too much to doze off. So I booted up my laptop instead, and surfed around. On a whim, I googled environmental tinnitus causes, vaguely hoping to find a nice, simple explanation. Made an interesting sidebar into the realm of low-frequency or infrasound—the kind that’s lower in frequency than 20 hertz or cycles per second, placing it beyond the perceptible/“normal” limit of human hearing, found to produce sleep disorders and vestibular stimulation even in people who couldn’t consciously perceive it. In various experiments, listeners exposed to infrasound complained of feeling seasick and emotionally disturbed, prone to nervous bursts of revulsion and fear—they even experienced optical illusions, brought on because 18.5 hertz is the eye’s basic resonating frequency. Because these symptoms presented themselves without any apparent cause, scientists believed that infrasound might be present at allegedly haunted sites, giving rise to odd sensations people might attribute to supernatural interference.
See, Loren? Gavin’s voice chimed in, smugly, inside my head. No ghosts, no goblins—there’s your “something wrong,” probably. Just something resonating around 20 hertz or less, creeping you out, making you think you hear things, feel things, see things. Making you afraid you might see things, at the very least.
Which did make sense, of a sort. And yet.
So further down the Google click hole I plunged, until forty minutes later I was wide awake and hunched over my keyboard, speed-reading my way through a website belonging to some guy named Ross Puget who specialized in “esoteric networking,” jam-packed with hosted articles about shit like “psychic reconfiguration” and “bioenergetic pollution.” The latter, all filed under “Hauntings Without a Ghost?” were about locations featuring the usual array of paranormal crap—orbs, cold spots, time fugues, visual and auditory hallucinations—but lacking one key ingredient for a classic paranormal experience: an actual human story, death, or what-have-you, to set it all off.
Three months ago, it would have been good for a few laughs or an enthusiastic discussion with Gavin, before falling into bed together. Now, all I could think was god, oh, god, because almost everything I’d experienced at the Puppet Motel, everything the guests had implied they might have experienced—it was all right there, in front of me. In cursor-blinking, eyestrain-saving black on white.
The site linked to Puget’s Facebook page as well, and the guy had a startling number of friends—maybe “esoteric networking” was bigger business than I’d thought. Since he was online right now, I opened the site’s Messenger app, typing: re hauntings w/out ghosts—questions ok?
Sure, go ahead. I should tell you up front, though, I don’t provide services myself. I just put you in touch with people who do.
Fine, I typed back, just need info, rn. I gave him my name, then described the Motel situation, as quickly as I could. Finishing up, I typed: wwyd?
What?
What. Would. You. Do.
Define “do.” What’s your goal here?
Make place ok 2 live in.
Situations like this are difficult to resolve cleanly, or safely. My advice would be to leave and not go back, but I’m assuming that’s not an option.
N. Nt really.
All right. In that case, what I’d try to do is get a recording of any phenomena you can, audio or visual, and send it to me. I can review it, and maybe put you in touch with someone.
Omg, thank you. Thank you sm. Can send smthng rn.
Great, go ahead. Hope it all works out.
Me 2, I typed, and signed off.
• • •
I sent him the mp3, waited, got no reply. And then . . . I must’ve fallen asleep somehow, because the next time I surfaced I was out of bed e
ntirely, standing and staring at the primary guest bedroom wall, swaying slightly back and forth with my hand—the left, even though I’m very much right-handed—uplifted, raised halfway, like I’d caught myself in the act of deciding whether or not to touch that dim, dark grey surface. To find out exactly what it’d feel like under my naked fingers, dry and cool and only slightly rough, paint over plaster over baseboard over steel, concrete, the naked dollhouse pillars from which this hell-box of a condo’d been conjured. . . .
Without thinking, I snatched my hand back as if from an open burner, stomach roiling. Then, for the second time in two days, I hauled my shaky ass out of there—more slowly than my first retreat, managing to finish dressing this time, but heart hammering and my throat dust-dry all the same, eyes skittering around like I expected the walls themselves to start clutching at me. And with a lot more dignity, though that deserted me pretty much the second the stairwell door almost hit me in the ass.
Halfway down, my phone’s AI shook awake and spoke, voice echoing in the concrete stairwell, loud enough I almost screamed. “Someone wants to talk to you, Loren. Don’t be rude.”
Another bitter lesson learned that very second: Doesn’t matter how hip, self-aware or trope-conscious you think you are—when shit gets weird, your instincts take over, fight or flight and nothing but, all pure shivering prey reflex. They can’t not.
“Who?” I shrieked at the phone in my hand, as if the really upsetting thing here was having been called rude by a hunk of sleek plastic for not being willing to speak with a ghost. “Who fucking wants to talk? Who?!”
Must’ve come out far louder than I’d thought it would, because my throat hurt by the time I was done. The text message alert chimed. Hands shaking, I swiped the messaging app, saw UNKNOWN at the top and had just enough time to think of fucking course before the message itself appeared, halfway down a blank white screen:
help me
I stared at it, panting. After a few seconds, the three rippling dots of an incoming message followed, and then the same two words again, stark and bleak: help me
