The Sun Down Motel

by Simone St. James

  For a crazy minute it seemed like time had folded in on itself, like there was no gap between 1982 and this moment. This was the desk Viv Delaney had sat at; this was the exact phone she had used. The blue polyester vest may have been the one she wore. She had sat in this chair, looked at this pinboard with the police phone number pinned to it. What year is it? a voice in the back of my mind asked. Is it 1982 or 2017? Do you really know?

  I picked up the guest book and opened it. There were four rooms occupied tonight: two men, a couple, and a woman. I didn’t recognize any of the names. I found an old notepad and a pen, scribbled them down, and pulled out my phone. I already knew there was no signal in here, but I put on my coat, slipped out the office door, and roamed the walkway, then the parking lot, looking at the screen to see if a signal would appear.

  When I stood almost next to the sign (VACANCY. CABLE TV!) the signal icon popped up. I quickly tried to Google the names on my paper, but not even the first search would load. The signal was too weak.

  I stuffed the paper into my pocket. I texted Heather, knowing she would be awake. We’d stayed awake the past two nights, watching movies and getting me prepared to take the night shift once I knew I had the job.

  No files, no computer, no Internet, and my boss says not to ask him about Viv. I’m striking out so far, I texted her.

  Her reply was immediate. Carly, it’s eleven thirty.

  Right. I was just here to work a few shifts and find what I could find before quitting. I had plenty of time left in the night. Carrying on, I texted, and put the phone back in my pocket as the signal went dead again.

  The wind sliced down my neck, and the sign made a weird electric buzzing sound overhead. I moved away from it and walked to the parking lot, looking up at the motel. The rooms were dark except for two that had lamps on, the curtains drawn. The motel itself looked asleep in the darkness, yet it had that eerie vibe I’d felt when I first came here. I rubbed my hands together and wondered how I would spend the next seven and a half hours here. I wondered what the heck I thought I was doing.

  On the second level, the door to one of the unoccupied rooms swung open, showing the darkness within.

  I squinted. There was definitely no one staying in the room, no one in the doorway. Yet the door hung open now, banging gently in the wind.

  The lock must be broken, or the knob. I crossed the parking lot and climbed the stairs, huddling deeper into my coat because it seemed colder up here. Late fall in upstate New York is no joke. My ears were stinging and my nose was starting to run.

  I grabbed the knob to the room door—it was room 218—and pulled it closed. I tried turning the knob and found it was unlocked, and I had no key. I opened the door again and found it had a disc on the inside of the knob that locked it. I turned the disc and closed the door again.

  Two doors down, room 216 opened.

  That was it—just the soft squeak of the door opening, then nothing. The wind blew and the door creaked, waving.

  Something inside my mind said, This is not right.

  Still, I walked to the doorway and grabbed the knob, this time taking a second to sweep a glance through the dark room. Bed, dresser, TV, door to the bathroom. Nothing else there.

  I turned the disc and shut the door, making sure to pull it all the way closed. It swung back open again, even though the knob didn’t turn. I grabbed it and banged it closed again, harder this time. It stayed shut for a stretch of maybe ten seconds, then creaked open again.

  There was a faint sound from behind the door, as if someone were standing there. A rustle of cloth. The soft tap of a footstep. I caught a whiff of flowery perfume.

  “Hey,” I said, and reached my hand out. Before I could touch the door it slammed shut, so hard the door frame nearly rattled.

  My breath had stopped. My arm was still out, my hand up, my fingers cold. A wash of freezing air brushed into my face, down my neck. I couldn’t think.

  While I stood frozen, the door to 210 opened.

  My chest squeezed inside my coat. I made my feet move, bumped back against the railing. Dull pain thudded up my spine. My hands were like ice as I tried clumsily to turn my body, to back away. There were heavy footsteps.

  A man stepped out of room 210 and into the corridor. He was a few years older than me, maybe. Brown hair, cropped short. Worn jeans and an old dark gray T-shirt. Stubble on his jaw. Laser blue eyes. His hair was sticking up, like he’d been sleeping.

  I stared at him, dumbfounded. He was real, but I’d looked at the guest book, and he wasn’t supposed to be here. Room 210 was unoccupied. Which meant I had no idea who he was.

  “Hey,” the man said to me as if he belonged here. “Who the fuck are you?”

  * * *

  • • •

  I exhaled a breath that steamed in the cold. I took a step back. “Um,” I said, “I’m—”

  “Banging doors in the middle of the night,” he finished. “I’m trying to sleep in here.”

  That wasn’t me. At least, I don’t think so. “You’re not supposed to be here,” I said to the man. I pointed to the doorway behind him. “In that room.”

  He scowled at me. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m calling the cops,” I said. I was impressed with how I sounded, considering I was terrified out of my mind. Too late, I remembered that the pepper spray Heather had given me was in my purse, back in the office. I moved my feet back again and turned to leave.

  “Wait,” the man said after me. “I’m staying here. It’s legit. I have a key and everything.” There was a clinking sound, and I turned to see him hold up a familiar leather tab with a key dangling from it.

  I paused. “What’s your name?”

  “Nick Harkness.”

  “You’re not in the guest book.”

  “I never signed the guest book. It’s legit.” He put the key away and reached into his back pocket. “You want to check me out? Here.” He pulled out his wallet and tossed it to the ground between us, where it made a heavy sound against the concrete floor. “My ID, everything,” he said. “I didn’t mean to freak you out.”

  I paused. Was it a mistake to bend down and pick up the wallet? Everyone knows a serial killer can get you in an unguarded moment. I toed the wallet toward me and grabbed it as fast as I could. His ID was in there, as advertised. He had sixty dollars, too.

  “Okay,” I said, mostly to myself. I closed my eyes and massaged the bridge of my nose beneath my glasses. “Right, okay, fine. This is under control.”

  Nick Harkness watched me, but he didn’t make a move. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Sure, I’m great,” I said. “I’m just great. I’m the night clerk.”

  Nick blinked his ice blue eyes in disbelief. I remembered that I was wearing my coat and I hadn’t put on the blue polyester vest. “You’re the night clerk,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yeah, I am. Sorry about the noise. I didn’t realize you were sleeping.”

  “You didn’t think you’d wake people up by banging doors in the middle of the night.”

  His tone dripped with sarcasm, and I wanted to fling his stupid wallet at his head. Something was opening and slamming the doors, you idiot, and I’ve had a shitty night. But I couldn’t quite get mad as I looked at him again, standing there in the November cold in his T-shirt. Something about his face. It was a good-looking face. It was also edged with exhaustion, as if he slept as little as I did. “You could try not to be a jerk,” I told him. “I was just doing my job.”

  A muscle ticked in his jaw, and he looked away.

  “The doors,” I said. “Have, um, have you noticed any problem with them?” When he still didn’t say anything, I said, “They were opening and closing, and I think . . . It was really strange.”

  Now I sounded ditzy and lame at the same time, but he didn’t seem to notice.
He still looked away and absently scratched his stomach. The motion made his shirt lift. Under the T-shirt, his stomach was very flat. “Christ,” he said, almost to himself.

  “Right,” I said. “You were sleeping. Here’s your wallet back. I’ll go.”

  “You new here?” he asked. He didn’t reach to take the wallet I held out.

  “Sort of.” Yes.

  “You’re new,” Nick Harkness said. He dropped his hand from his stomach, which made his shirt drop, unfortunately. “Jesus, I didn’t think they’d actually hire someone. The last guy left weeks ago, and Chris never even comes out here. I thought he’d given up.”

  “It’s temporary. At least, I think so. Do you . . . You’ve been here for weeks?”

  “Chris and I have an arrangement.”

  “What arrangement?”

  Nick gave me another glare—he was good at it—and said, “An arrangement where I stay here and call the cops if there’s trouble, and he leaves me the fuck alone. Is that enough detail for you?”

  Jesus. Now I really did toss the wallet, dropping it to the floor the way he had done with me. “Well, someone could have told me instead of scaring the shit out of me,” I said. “It would have been nice. I can see why you’re staying here alone. Have a nice night.”

  I turned, but he called after me. “Let me give you a word of advice, New Night Clerk. If you think you hear the doors up here, don’t come up and fix it. Stay in the office and don’t come out. In fact, don’t come out of the office for anything. Just close the door and sit there until your time’s up. Okay?”

  I turned back to tell him he was rude, that it was uncalled-for, that he shouldn’t treat people that way. But for a second I could see past him into his room. The words stopped in my throat. I just stared.

  He didn’t notice. “Okay, go,” he said to me. “Go.”

  I turned and walked back to the stairs, my numb hands gripping the rail so I wouldn’t stumble on the way down. My eyes were watering with cold, my blood racing in my veins.

  Two things kept moving through my brain as I walked back toward the office.

  One, he knew about the doors. He knew.

  And two, when I’d seen past him into his room, I’d seen a bed, a TV, a lit lamp. The bed was made, but the pillow had an indent, as if he’d been lying there.

  And on the nightstand next to the bed was a gun, gleaming in the lamplight. As if someone had just put it down. As if he’d been holding it before he opened the door.

  Fell, New York

  November 2017

  CARLY

  Wait a minute. Back up,” Heather said. “Tell me that last part again.”

  I took another bite of my peanut butter toast. It was the next day, after I’d come home from my first shift at the Sun Down and fallen into bed, dead asleep for nine straight hours. Now I was in pajama pants and my favorite T-shirt, a baby blue one that read EAT CAKE FOR BREAKFAST on the front. I would have liked to eat cake for breakfast, except that I only had toast and it was five o’clock in the afternoon. “I know,” I said. “Maybe he was a cop or something.”

  “Carly.” Heather glared at me, a little like Nick had. She was wearing her black poncho, and we were sitting across from each other at the apartment’s small kitchen table, Heather with her laptop in front of her where she was listlessly working on an essay that wasn’t due for another six days. “No cop is staying at the Sun Down Motel for weeks on end. Dead girls, remember? The goal is that you are not one. Men with guns are the first thing to steer clear of. You should have Maced him.”

  “I don’t think he would have hurt me,” I said. “I didn’t need the Mace. I went back to the office and I sat there, like he told me to.”

  “All night?”

  I dropped my toast crust onto my plate. I didn’t quite want to admit that I’d been too scared to venture out of the office after that encounter. The doors, that rustle of fabric and whiff of perfume, Nick Harkness—it had been too much. I’d been in a fog of fear, vague and unfocused, like I knew something was going to happen and I didn’t know what. It was a piercing, lonely feeling, one I’d never had before. “I found an old computer in a cabinet in the office,” I told Heather. “I spent a few hours trying to boot it up and make it work. I answered the phone three times. One was a wrong number, and two others were heavy breathing.” I looked up at her. “Who makes heavy-breathing phone calls in 2017?”

  Heather winced. “No one good. Did you get the computer to work?”

  I shook my head and took a sip of my coffee. It had felt strange at first to eat breakfast when everyone else ate dinner, but I almost liked it. “Chris, the owner, said they tried a computer booking system, but the motel has an electronics problem. I got it hooked up to a monitor, but it wouldn’t actually turn on. Then I found an old copy of Firestarter under a shelf, so I read that for a while until it was time to go home.”

  “Hmm,” Heather said, clicking away at her laptop. “Maybe tonight will be more eventful.”

  I stared at her across the table. “Did you miss the part where the doors opened on their own? Several of them?”

  “I told you the motel was haunted,” she said matter-of-factly. “I guess the rumors are true. How many people do you think have died in a place like that? There must be plenty. Like the person who died in the pool.”

  “We have no evidence anyone died in the pool.”

  “I’m right. You’ll see.”

  I took my glasses off and set them on the table. Then I rubbed my eyes slowly, pressing my fingertips into my eye sockets. The world went pleasantly blurry, and I didn’t have to see the details anymore.

  I had to go back there tonight. I couldn’t let a few opening doors defeat me. I had to think of Viv, maybe lying in a grave somewhere for thirty-five years, with no gravestone and no one to care. I could find some of the answers at the Sun Down—I felt it.

  No, the creepiness and the boredom were not going to keep me away. I’d had some sleep. I was going to win.

  “If that guy is a cop, maybe he’ll help me,” I said, unable to quite stop thinking about Nick Harkness. Ice blue eyes. I’d never met a guy with ice blue eyes.

  “He definitely isn’t a cop,” Heather said.

  I dropped my hands and looked at her. She was a blond blur until I put my glasses back on. “How do you know that?”

  “I Googled him,” she said, turning her laptop so I could see the screen. “He’s from Fell. Except he doesn’t live here anymore, because fifteen years ago his father shot Nick’s brother to death, and after his father went to prison, he left town.”

  * * *

  • • •

  There was no one in the motel office when I got there at eleven. The lights were on, the door unlocked, but there was no one behind the desk. It looked like whoever was working had just stepped out the door, but there was no coat on the hook in the corner and I already knew there was no car parked in front of the office door. There was no car in the lot at all except for mine and a truck I recognized from the night before. Nick Harkness’s truck, I now guessed.

  I pulled off my messenger bag and shrugged off my jacket. “Hello?” I said into the quiet.

  No answer. I caught a whiff of cigarette smoke—maybe whoever I was relieving was having a smoke somewhere. But I hadn’t seen anyone outside.

  I poked my head back out of the office door and looked left and right. “Hello?”

  A whiff of smoke again, and then nothing.

  I pulled back into the office and walked back to the desk. I checked the guest registry—someone named James March had checked in. He was the only new guest since last night. It was written next to his name that he was in room 103. So, just down the corridor. Maybe it was James March who was having a cigarette, even though we had a yellowed sign over the office door that said NO SMOKING IN MOTEL.

  I sat at the desk and pull
ed out a sheaf of printouts from my messenger bag. Before coming to work, I’d spent a few hours on the Internet, using up the precious toner on Heather’s small printer. I’d added to my collection of articles about Fell—the few I’d been able to find before coming here. And I’d added articles about Nick Harkness. There were plenty of those.

  According to the articles, Nick was twenty-nine. His mother had died in a swimming accident when he was young, and he’d lived with his father and older brother, Eli. His father was a lawyer, well known in Fell.

  “He’d become erratic,” Martin Harkness’s partner at the firm said afterward. “He was angry, sometimes forgetful. We didn’t know what was wrong with him, but he wasn’t himself. I don’t know how we could have stopped it.”

  One day, Martin came home from work carrying a handgun. Eli was in the living room, and Nick—who was fourteen—was upstairs in his room, playing video games. From what the police could piece together, Martin shot Eli twice point-blank in the chest. Upstairs, Nick opened the door to the Juliet balcony, swung down to the ground, and ran to a neighbor’s to get help.

  When asked why he’d run, Nick had replied, “I heard the gunshots, and then I heard Eli screaming and Dad coming up the stairs.”

  When the cops came to the Harkness house, they found seventeen-year-old Eli dead on the living room floor and Martin in the kitchen, drinking a glass of water, the gun on the counter next to him. “Where’s Nick?” he said.

  Since Martin was well known in town, there was a frenzy in the local media. PROMINENT LAWYER SNAPS, headlines read. WHY DID HE KILL HIS OWN SON? No one had any answers. “It needed to be over,” was the only comment Martin ever made about the murder. “All of it needed to be over.” He pleaded guilty, leaving no new revelations to report. After a few weeks, the papers moved on to other things.