The Sun Down Motel

by Simone St. James

  Run.

  Viv made a strangled sound and jerked the key again. The engine didn’t turn. She twisted the key and stomped the pedal, tears streaming down her face as a frustrated scream came out of her mouth. When she dared to look up again the woman was gone, but the motel was still dark, the night around her even darker.

  The engine was flooded. The car wouldn’t start. She had nowhere to go.

  Viv pushed down the locks on her doors and crawled into the back seat, curling into as small a ball as she could, crouching behind the passenger seat so she couldn’t see through the windshield anymore. Like someone escaping the line of fire. She stayed there for a long time.

  When the lights went on again and the sign lit up, she was still weeping.

  Fell, New York

  November 2017

  CARLY

  After all of my research, I wasn’t sure what I expected at the Sun Down. I’d seen an image of it on Google Earth, and it looked like an everyday roadside place: a strip of rooms, a sign. I knew full well that my family history, and my odd fixation, gave it a halo of importance in my mind. But to anyone else, I figured the Sun Down would be mundane.

  The Sun Down was not mundane.

  I stepped out onto the gravel lot and looked around. The building was shaped like an L, with doors facing an open-air walkway. It was full dark now, and the blue and yellow sign blinked down on us with its shrill message about cable TV and vacancy. There was a single car in the lot, an old Tercel parked in the shadows of the far corner. There were no other cars parked in front of the motel’s doorways, no sign of anyone at all.

  Heather got out of the passenger side and we stood in a breath of silence. No traffic passed on the road behind us. Beyond the motel were only trees and darkness with a half-moon high in the sky. I zipped the collar of my coat up and stared at the building, transfixed, taking in the dim lights on the walkway, the uneven patterns they made, the blank reflections on the motel windows. For a place that was built for people to come to, it had an air so deserted and quiet I felt for a minute like I was somewhere unearthly, like a graveyard or an Icelandic landscape.

  Heather seemed to feel the same, because she stood next to me in silence. She had left the poncho behind and was now swathed in a black puffy coat, practically a parka. I had the idea that Heather was perpetually cold.

  “Not creepy,” my roommate finally said, her voice low in the night air. “Not creepy at all.”

  My gaze traveled to the OFFICE sign, which was lit up. In theory, someone must be inside, but I found I didn’t really want to know. “Let’s look around,” I said instead.

  We circled the building, looking at the walkways and the closed doors. The walkways were dated, and the doors still had knobs with keyholes; it was practically the same place my aunt had seen thirty-five years ago. Around the other side of the building we found an empty pool, surrounded by a dilapidated chain-link fence. It was darker here, but even without the extra light I could see that the pool hadn’t just been closed for the season. The edges of the concrete were chipped and cracked, and the entire pool was filled with dirt and old leaves. The pool had closed years, maybe decades, ago and was never going to open again.

  I made myself think past the creep factor, think past the clammy cold in my spine, and remember my aunt Viv. If you were going to disappear from this place, where would you go?

  The most obvious answer was the road. Viv had left her car behind, but someone could have shoved her into their car and driven away. But that opened up a new list of questions. How had the person done it? Had they knocked her unconscious? The newspaper reports didn’t mention any blood or sign of a struggle. Had the person lured Viv out of the front office somehow? Begged for emergency help, perhaps, or pretended to need her for something? Had the person planned to take Viv specifically, or was it done on the spur of the moment?

  I walked away from the pool and started to circle back around the front of the motel. I wished now I’d come in daylight, so I could see the landscape better. Maybe in daylight the motel wouldn’t loom quite so weird and sinister.

  I was lucky, actually, that the Sun Down was still almost exactly as it was in 1982. If it had been bulldozed and replaced with a strip of big-box stores, I wouldn’t be able to map out where Viv could have gone. What if she hadn’t left by car? Could she have run somewhere on foot?

  “Heather,” I said, “do you remember what’s around here? Say, if someone were walking?”

  “Oh, God, let me think,” Heather said, following my footsteps. “I think it’s just woods and maybe farmland over that way, behind the motel. You’d have to go miles before you hit anything.”

  “What about either way up the road?”

  “You’d hit a gas station that way,” Heather said, pointing along Number Six Road in the direction out of Fell, “but again it’s a mile. And I don’t know if it was there in 1982. That way”—she pointed in the direction of Fell, the road we’d just driven up to get here—“there’s a turnoff toward Coopersville two miles up, and past that are a few old houses and a Value Mart before you hit the edge of town.”

  “I wonder if I can find a 1982 map,” I said.

  “Probably in the city library,” Heather agreed. “Someone died in that pool, by the way.”

  I turned and looked at her. “What?”

  “Seriously, Carly.” Her pale cheeks were reddened by the cold breeze, her blond hair tousling around its bobby pin. “I mean, come on. I’d bet a thousand dollars. Someone died, and they emptied it and closed it off and no one ever went there again.”

  I pressed my lips together. “Maybe they closed it because they don’t have enough customers to keep opening it,” I said. “Like, none.”

  “Duh,” Heather said, “they have no customers because someone died in the pool.”

  I opened my mouth to answer her, but a voice called out, “Hey there! Can I help you?”

  We turned and saw a man standing in front of the office. He was watching us, though he had not come off the walkway to get any closer. With the light from the sign over his shoulder, we could only see that he was tall, beefy, and somewhat young.

  “Sorry!” I called out to him. “We’re just looking around.”

  The man shifted his weight uneasily. “That isn’t a good idea,” he said. “No one is supposed to go near the old pool area.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to sound agreeable. I started toward him, Heather following behind me.

  When we got closer, I could see he was about thirty, with dark hair cut close to his scalp. He was wearing a white shirt and a blue polyester uniform vest with dark dress pants. The vest had the words Sun Down Motel in yellow over the left breast. “Do you need a room?” he asked us.

  “No,” I said. “Sorry, we’re just curious.”

  That seemed to confuse him. “About what?”

  “I like old motels,” I said, inspired. “You know, these midcentury ones. I think they’re neat. It’s sort of a hobby of mine.”

  We stepped onto the walkway. The man’s gaze moved between me and Heather. “I’ve never heard of anyone with a hobby like that,” he said.

  I looked at his uniform vest and felt my fascination ramping up. This was the place where Viv had worked for months before she disappeared. She’d likely stood in this exact spot. Had the vests been the same in 1982? I had the feeling of Viv nearby, looking over my shoulder, like I’d had in apartment C. I was so close, with just the thin shimmer of time between me and her. In Fell, that shimmer seemed to barely exist. “Can I see the office?” I asked him.

  He looked even more confused, but Heather gave him a polite smile, and he shrugged. “I suppose.”

  The office was dated, the walls dull brown, the reception desk large and heavy. I stared in shocked awe at the big landline telephone with its plastic buttons for various lines, the leather book with handwritten g
uest entries, the worn office chair, the coat hook in the corner, even the space heater next to the desk that looked like a fire hazard with its yellowed cord. “Jesus. What is it with this place?” I asked myself in a murmur.

  “What was that?” the man said.

  “Nothing, sorry.” I tried giving him a smile. “Have you worked here long?”

  “A few months, I guess.” Now the man’s look had turned a little sullen and curiously blank, as if he was rapidly becoming uninterested in us.

  “Do you like it?” Heather asked.

  “Not really.” He looked around, like someone might hear. “It’s okay, I guess,” he amended. “We don’t get very many customers.”

  I tried to get more information from him, but it got harder and harder. His name was Oliver. Yes, it was very quiet out here. No, he had no idea how old the motel was. No, he didn’t think they’d ever renovated it, but he didn’t really know. Heather wandered to the office door, where she looked out the little window at the world outside while we talked.

  By the time I’d given up on Oliver and we were driving back to town, the fascination and excitement had drained out of me, leaving only frustration. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” I admitted to Heather. “I mean, what did I think I would learn, going there, standing in that office? How did I think that would help me?”

  “You wanted to feel closer to her,” Heather said, as if the answer were simple. “You wanted to see what her life was like.”

  “Well, I guess I accomplished that, since nothing at that motel has changed since 1982.”

  We were quiet for a minute, the dark road going by outside our window. Heather bit her lip.

  “What?” I said.

  “I’m not sure I should show you.”

  “Well, now you have to show me. What is it?”

  She hesitated, then took a piece of paper from her pocket and unfolded it.

  Help wanted. Night shift desk clerk. Start immediately. Please inquire. A phone number.

  “No way,” I said, staring at it in disbelief. “No freaking way. They’re hiring for my aunt’s actual shift?”

  “I know, it’s weird,” Heather said.

  “Weird doesn’t even describe it.” I sighed, running a hand over my ponytail. “Why am I actually tempted to apply? Am I insane?”

  “It would be creepy, right? But it would also be kind of cool.”

  It was exactly what I was thinking. Spend my nights at the Sun Down? I was the kind of girl who would spend the night in a supposedly haunted house, just to see what would happen. That sounded like my ideal vacation. “Maybe they won’t hire me.”

  “Um, I don’t think they’re exactly overrun with options.”

  My heart was beating faster. Excitement, or fear? “We could stay in touch through the night. Do regular check-ins.”

  “You can bring my Mace with you. I have extra.”

  “Heather, my aunt vanished from that same spot. On the night shift.”

  “Sure, but that was thirty-five years ago. Do you think whoever did it is still hanging around? He might not still be alive, and if he is, he’s old now.”

  “I’m not supposed to be here very long. Yet I think I want to do this. I want to stay. Why?”

  “Because you’re a Fell girl,” Heather said with a nod. “I called it when I met you.”

  “This place is dark.”

  “Some of us like the dark. It’s what we know.”

  I made a turn next to an old theater called the Royal, which had boarded-up windows. The marquee still advertised a showing of You’ve Got Mail. “I could work a few shifts, find what there is to find, and bail,” I said. “I can do it for a few nights, right? Do whatever Viv did. See things through her eyes.”

  “You’ve come this far,” she said. “Are you going to turn around now and go back to college? It doesn’t seem right, leaving your aunt in the lurch like that.”

  Viv. Whatever I was afraid of, Viv had gone through worse. She’d gone through something awful, something terrifying, and in all this time, no one had ever solved it. No one had even found her body. I was the only one to do it. To do anything.

  Which meant I needed to work nights at the Sun Down Motel.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it. What could possibly go wrong?”

  Fell, New York

  September 1982

  VIV

  A week after the night the motel went dark, Viv had to call the police for the first time in her career at the Sun Down.

  She’d thought about quitting after that terrible night. She’d thought of packing her bags and going back to Illinois. But what would she say when she got there? I saw a ghost, so I ran home?

  She was twenty years old. What would you do if you ever saw real trouble? her mother had said. Going back to her old bedroom, to working at the popcorn stand at the drive-in, was out of the question.

  Besides, part of her wondered who the woman in the flowered dress was. Something about the woman’s anger, her obvious anguish, spoke to her.

  So she went back to work at the Sun Down.

  The night of the police, she brought a bologna sandwich with her to work—Wonder Bread, bologna, one Kraft single, a dab of mustard. The best meal you could have in the middle of the night when you made three dollars per hour. It usually sufficed just fine, but tonight the bologna didn’t cut it. She found herself thinking about the candy machine.

  The candy machine was behind a door marked AMENITIES, on the first level next to room 104, in a tiny room it shared with the ice machine. The candy machine worked, and it had candy in it; Viv figured it must be refilled during the daylight hours. It carried Snickers, and they were twenty cents, and Viv had two dimes in her pocket.

  She took her jacket from the hook and put it on over her uniform vest. Pulling the zipper up, she stepped outside the office and turned the corner. The Sun Down actually had a few guests tonight, so she wasn’t entirely alone. There was a couple on their way to visit family in North Carolina; there was a young guy who looked dead on his feet, as if he’d been driving for days. There was a man who had taken a room alone with no luggage.

  Still, she felt the low-level fear she always felt when she turned the corner and saw the long leg of the L stretching away from her, the rows of doors, the feeble beams from the overhead lightbulbs, some of them burned out like broken teeth. Her spine tightened and she remembered the feeling of the sign going out, the buzzing blinking into silence, the doors opening one by one. The footsteps, the voices, the smoke. And the woman.

  Run.

  She looked around the parking lot, at the building. She saw no sign of the woman now, but she imagined she could feel her. Maybe it was nothing; she didn’t know. I can’t leave her, she thought.

  Viv had bought a spiral notebook and a pen at a stationery store after that night. At first she just thought about it, glancing at the book every once in a while, but eventually she started writing. She wrote down what had happened that night, what the woman looked like, what the voices had said. It got the thoughts out of her own head, made them real. The notebook became her only company on the long nights—that and a used copy of The Hotel New Hampshire, which she doggedly kept reading though she didn’t fully understand it.

  She was thinking vaguely of the novel, of whether she’d take it out of her purse and try again, as she entered the AMENITIES room for her Snickers bar. Summer had turned into early fall, the heat falling away, the nights getting cooler and breezier. She sidled into the tiny room, which was big enough for only one person, and contemplated the candy machine.

  Outside, a new-looking Thunderbird pulled into the parking lot. A woman got out, putting her keys in her purse. Viv peeked around the door and watched her. The woman was in her late twenties, wearing pale blue jeans and a white blouse with small red polka dots on it. A silver belt and ankle boots complet
ed the outfit. Her dark hair was cut short and teased, sprayed back from her temples and away from her forehead. She had blue eyes under dark slashes of brows and a curl to her lip that was sensual and full of attitude. She looked like Pat Benatar’s not-so-cool sister—pretty and fashionable, rebellious but not quite rock-’n’-roll.

  She didn’t head for the motel office to check in but instead walked to the door to room 121, the room Viv had given the man with no luggage.

  Viv ducked behind the door and watched. The man in 121, she recalled, wasn’t bad-looking, but he was near forty. What was this girl doing meeting him at a motel? The hookers who came to the Sun Down were washed-out women with stringy hair and tight clothes, who spent a few hours in a room and paid in crumpled fives and tens. This woman looked nothing like that. She looked like she could have come from Viv’s suburb in Grisham. Viv watched as the woman knocked once on the door of room 121. The door was opened by the man Viv had checked in; he had taken off his coat and was wearing dress pants and a shirt unbuttoned at the throat, his shoes off. He smiled at the woman. “Helen,” he said.

  The woman cocked her hip, giving the man a pose, though her smile was warm. “Robert.”

  Robert held out his hand. “Come in.”

  Behind Viv, the ice machine made a whirring noise and kicked to life, making Viv jump. She ducked back into the AMENITIES room before they could see her looking. She scrambled for her two dimes and shoved them into the candy machine, and was just digging behind the machine’s flap for her Snickers bar when the door swung shut and she was suddenly in the dark.

  Viv froze. She could see absolutely nothing—she tried waving her hand in front of her face but saw only blackness. She waved her arms in front of her, touching the front of the candy machine, feeling her way along it. The ice machine continued to click and whirr behind her like it was speaking an ancient language, and ice cubes clicked into its plastic container with a chattering sound. Viv felt frantically for a light switch, her breath in her throat.