by Kitty Thomas
Chapter Four
He drove a few hours before stopping at a run-down motel off a small, barely marked exit. Half of the neon-lit vacancy sign was burned out, but the point still got across.
I swear every single thing Shannon did was like the lead-up to the climax of a horror movie. Nothing was normal. It was all weird or paranoid or terrifying. I wasn’t sure I wanted Shannon to continue being my tour guide for life outside the park. During the drive, he hadn’t made conversation, and he hadn’t turned on the radio. And though, by the second hour on the road, I’d desperately wanted to turn on the radio, I didn’t make a move for it because I had no idea what he’d do in response.
He’d taken me through a drive-thru where I could have screamed for help but didn’t, then he’d treated me like a criminal at the rest stop. I just didn’t know what to expect from him. And I wasn’t sure knowing would be better anyway. It was Trevor all over again, just in slightly different packaging and without a colorful apocalyptic back story.
Shannon turned in his seat toward me. The clock on the dash said 10:48. This probably wasn’t a place that kept a front desk person all night. There was no doubt a bored clerk inside ready to go home, annoyed we’d just pulled up.
“I’m going in to get us a room. I’m locking you in the car. Do not make any kind of scene. Do you see that kid in there?”
I looked through the window he pointed at. A skinny college-aged guy stood behind the front desk, watching the clock and sending a look of derision our way. It was exactly the type of person I’d expected to see.
I nodded.
“Even if you make a scene, you have no way of knowing that kid wants to get involved in this. Not everybody is a hero. Most people aren’t. And I’m really good at reading people. He isn’t a hero. Are we understanding each other?”
If Shannon was so good at reading people, why didn’t he know I wouldn’t rat him out for killing Trevor? Though in honesty, I wasn’t even sure I wouldn’t have said something to the police, so maybe his radar was right on the money. Despite saving me, Shannon had crumbled apart my entire frame for the world. As terrible as it had been, it was far worse to know I’d suffered for months for no purpose and that everything I thought I knew of the world was a lie. There was a part of me that was angry with Shannon for throwing me into more chaos and for changing the lens I’d been viewing my life through.
He snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Elodie. Do we have an understanding?”
“Yes.”
He unbuckled his seat belt and started to open the car door.
“Shannon?”
“Yeah?”
“If you really don’t plan to hurt me, why are you acting like this?”
“Just protecting myself. You’re an unknown risk still. You’re too traumatized and flighty to trust.”
He was right about that, but still.
“You’re freaking me out. Can’t you just act normal?”
“I wouldn’t know where to start.” Shannon got out and locked me in and went inside to get a room.
Five minutes later he had a key. It was one of the old-fashioned keys attached to a red plastic ring where the room number was half worn away.
He drove us around to the back of the motel, parking the car where the license plate was pointed toward the room instead of where anyone driving by could see it. It was these little details that kept reminding me how deep in shit I was now. I didn’t know exactly what this guy was a pro at, but I knew he was a pro.
I got out and followed him inside. There was only one queen-sized bed.
“Why didn’t you get a double room?” There were only two other guests staying around the front side of the motel and none here at the back. They would have rooms left with two beds. If he didn’t have bad intentions why hadn’t he gotten me my own bed?
Shannon sighed. “One bed, you’re my wife or girlfriend. Two beds, and you’re an unknown variable. Two beds invites questions of who you are to me that makes someone remember me beyond the few minutes it took to check in. It’s never good to create questions in people’s minds. If you want to be a ghost, you have to learn that now.”
I hadn’t said I never wanted to re-integrate into the normal world. Just not right now. I still hoped I would regain my memory and then at least have some sense of solid ground underneath me before having to deal with nosy curiosity.
I tried to remind myself that this guy actually had friends, that he explored abandoned theme parks for fun. What had he called himself? An urban explorer? That sounded like some hipster nonsense. I couldn’t even imagine how that Shannon meshed with this one.
Once inside, I used the bathroom then came back out to the main area. The place was a bit run down, but clean. Well, clean enough. I didn’t have a black light to shine on the walls, and I probably didn’t want one. Sometimes a place just looking clean was enough.
Shannon put the chain on the door and scooted a chair underneath it like he thought we were going to be under siege any minute. Yet none of his movement was frantic. It was all calm and calculated, and once again, I thought he was going to kill me.
“Lie down on the bed.”
“W-what?” Or rape me.
“We’re going to sleep.”
I wasn’t convinced by his explanation, but he’d kind of blocked me in here. And I’d gone along with most of the steps along the way. Suddenly something flashed into my head. It was like a memory, but I wasn’t sure if it was anything attached to my life personally or just some random bit of general knowledge my brain had held onto. Don’t let them take you to a second location. Fight like hell to avoid it.
I kept telling myself this was my fault somehow. I never should have asked him not to involve the cops. But if Shannon was really bad, he could have done whatever he’d wanted anyway. As if he would have called for real help if he were evil. Who was I kidding? This guy had clearly done evil things. Me not being a target of it... yet... didn’t change that basic truth.
“Elodie, I’m tired. I want to get on the road early tomorrow. My house is much nicer than this. You’ll have your own room there.”
Room or basement? Or garden shed?
He started to look impatient. I didn’t want to escalate things, so I lay down. For better or worse, this was where I was now, and there was no real way out of it that didn’t escalate into violence. I had a very strong feeling that if I fought him too hard, that thing in his brain would click on again and he’d decide I was too much trouble.
Shannon undid the nylon holding my borrowed pants in place and ripped it out of the belt loops. Before I could process what he was doing, he had my hands over my head and tied to the headboard. He could have used the rope in his bag, but I got the feeling he wanted to move into and own my space.
The headboard was older and solidly well-made with slats to run rope through. Maybe Shannon was just super lucky. Or maybe he’d done this before. Though I was sure, even without such a convenient way to tie me down, he would have easily figured something else out with whatever the room had offered him instead.
“Please, don’t do this.” I was crying and blubbering, and right on the cusp of a panic attack. And despite my best efforts not to become too much trouble for him to keep dealing with, I struggled, however vainly. But it was nothing to him and didn’t slow him down more than a few seconds in his goal.
Once I was secured, Shannon shut off the lights, kicked off his boots, and lay down on the other side of the bed, turning his back to me.
“Go to sleep. Things won’t seem as bad in the morning.”
Shannon was a man who obviously knew how to create trauma but didn’t know the first thing about undoing it. Nearly everything he’d said or done from the moment we’d met had triggered one fear or another. He’d kept me on a razor’s edge of anxiety, but somehow I didn’t think it had been intentional.
Even so, it was well past the point when Shannon’s breath deepened in sleep before I could find my own fitful peace for the n
ight.
***
The next morning, I had that experience where you wake up in a new place and forget how you got there. Except for me, this was a bit more upsetting, seeing as the last time it happened, no memories came back to fill in the spaces.
I felt my hands tied, panicked, and screamed.
Shannon rolled over faster than I thought a human could move. His hand clamped over my mouth so hard I was sure there would be a red hand mark when he removed it.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he hissed.
I whimpered behind his hand.
“If you scream again, so help me...”
I shook my head frantically. What good would that do me? It wasn’t as if I’d planned to scream in the first place.
He pulled his hand away slowly.
“I forgot where I was, and my arms are asleep, and I freaked out. I-I’m sorry.”
The sun streamed into the room around the edges of the curtains. Shannon untied the nylon around my wrists and rubbed them until the pins and needles sensation faded. It was the first time I’d gotten a really good look at him.
The castle had been dark except for the fireplace the previous night, and it had of course been dark outside. It wasn’t as if he’d been a total visual mystery to me. But there were details you could only fully catch in the light of day—like the fact that he had the longest, most beautiful dark eyelashes I’d ever seen on a man. But somehow they didn’t make him seem less scary or any less masculine.
“What?” he said.
“N-nothing.”
He got up and left the nylon belt or rope or whatever the hell it was meant to be used for—it was fucking versatile—lying on the bed beside me.
“If you want a shower, now is the time.”
God, yes, I wanted a shower. I hadn’t had a real shower in months, and even worse was the fact that I couldn’t remember it when I actually had.
I was in there a lot longer than he preferred. Probably fifteen or twenty minutes. Until the water ran cold. It was just such a lovely novelty having hot water pouring over me.
Shannon banged on the bathroom door. “Let’s go.”
He probably thought I’d climbed out the bathroom window. There was no bathroom window, but I’m sure it didn’t prevent him from imagining some way I could still do it. Or maybe he thought I was fashioning a weapon out of the sink pipe.
I was just turning off the water and pulling back the shower curtain to get out when he kicked the door in. I jerked the curtain around me.
“We need to get on the road,” he said as if he hadn’t kicked the door down. Just a normal day with Shannon. I wondered what his friends thought of him or if they were just as bad. Maybe they were all just like him: highly paranoid and shady.
Shannon retreated back into the bedroom, and I got out, dried off, and put the clothes he’d given me at the castle back on. He didn’t say another word about either my long shower or busting in on me like that. Every time he had an opportunity and I thought he was going to pounce on me and just... take... nothing happened. I was becoming increasingly convinced that I was right about Shannon not prioritizing sex.
In a way, that scared me more. I felt sure it was some deeper sign of sociopathy or something. Like he got all his thrills from the big death instead of the little one.
We got back in the SUV, Shannon turned in the key, and we were on the road again. I wondered what he’d used for ID when he’d gotten the room? Had he used his real information, or did he have fake IDs? Or had he talked his way out of it, using the kid’s desire to leave work against him?
Shannon stopped a couple of times for gas, a couple of times for food, and gave me a few more bathroom breaks. He watched me like a hawk at each location.
I was about to go crazy without the radio or human speech. You’d think I would have gotten used to it with all the time with only Trevor, but there were the chickens. And birds. And sometimes deer would wander into the park. A few times I sat so statue-still that they’d come up to me. But it had taken weeks. It had been a game to see how close one would come. I think six feet from me was my record. And then a stupid crow had sent it running.
And there had been music in the castle. Ren Fair music, but still. And at least Trevor spoke to me.
I could probably manage to fit most of my conversation with Shannon since leaving the castle onto the back of a napkin.
He’d had to make a detour to the airport where his car was parked and drop off the rental SUV. He carefully kept me out of view of cameras without making it look too odd, then we got into his car and continued.
His real car was a shiny black four-door Cadillac that looked like something you’d drive the president around in. The license plate said, Georgia. I half expected to ride in the back with a glass divider between us, but he put me in the front with him. There was no glass divider.
I could have screamed for help in the airport rental place, and I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have been able to stop me. But there was that luggage with Trevor in it that we were dragging around. What if I got help but then they decided I’d been an accomplice? There was also an insane part of me that trusted Shannon, despite all reasonable evidence that I shouldn’t. There was still a part of me that wanted to crawl inside his cold dead silence to escape the scrutiny of the world.
Shannon was a man of utility. He packed the most practical, versatile things. He drove the most unobtrusive car. He spoke the fewest words necessary to get his point across. When we got to his house, I knew it was his because the inside matched everything else I knew about him.
A little cold. Very minimalist. Clean. Regimented. It was a big, nice house in an equally nice neighborhood. It wasn’t flagrantly lavish, but it screamed either upper middle class or, I’ve got a fuckton of money, but I don’t need you to know about it. Considering all the illicit jobs I’d imagined him holding during our endless trip, I was leaning toward the latter.
As soon as we crossed the threshold, the security system blared at us. Shannon turned it off, locked the doors, then turned it right back on again. Message sent. Nobody went in or out of this house without him knowing about it, and it was going to be locked up tighter than Fort Knox at all times.
Inside, everything was gray and black and white. The only splash of color was some red here and there. The color of blood. I wondered if he realized how much of his internal state he broadcast just with his decorating choices?
“Stay. I’m going to put my stuff up.”
Anybody else would have tossed his bags beside the door and handled it later. We’d been driving all day, and he was obviously tired. But in Shannon’s world, it seemed everything had a place, and nothing ever deviated from where it was supposed to be.
He took his bag upstairs while I stood in the living area glancing around awkwardly. A bright red photo album caught my eye from the coffee table. To give myself something to do, I sat on the sofa and flipped through the album. It was filled with pictures of abandoned amusement parks. Decapitated mermaid heads and fins and creepy peeling clowns abounded. There were broken down wooden roller coasters that looked to be rotting and seemed held up only by vines. One rather sad image showed a couple of paddle boats abandoned in the middle of a lake.
What was it about these places that drew Shannon? They were so empty. Maybe it felt familiar. He wasn’t in any of the photos, making it clear he’d been the photographer. But there were almost never other people in any of the photos either. Occasionally there was a stray leg or arm, even the side of a face and body as someone walked through the frame—no doubt his fellow urban explorers. But people in the photos were clearly accidental, never intentional. People weren’t what Shannon was interested in.
He’d traveled all over the world for this hobby. Not only were there several photos of signs in foreign languages but Shannon had put labels on each one of where it had been taken. As I worked through the book I saw he’d been to Canada, Spain, Italy, Korea, Japan, China, Vietnam, Rus
sia. He seemed to have been everywhere, capturing all the strange, wacky, and creepy of these theme parks.
There was one photo with people in it. It was a picture of a cluster of found photos of smiling employees from a South Korean park. It was telling that Shannon needed to be this many degrees separated from real people to take a picture of them.
Despite the emptiness in these park images and my fears that it reflected far too much of Shannon himself, something about this hobby made him seem more human to me.
I took my time perusing the album, sure Shannon wouldn’t mind, but he was upstairs for quite a while, so finally I got up and went to explore the kitchen. Unlike the photo album, I was pretty sure my going through all his cabinets and drawers would annoy him, but I was curious.
There was nothing unusual in the kitchen. I didn’t find any heads or fingers in the freezer. Much to my relief.
I ended up standing in front of the sink with the faucet on, staring at the water as it came out, like it was the most interesting thing I could have ever discovered.
I could have been standing in that state for five minutes, ten minutes? An hour? Hell, I don’t know. Time melded together, and all that existed for a while was moving water.
The only thing that broke the spell was Shannon’s hand pressing down firmly on the handle, making the water abruptly stop. “If you’re this fascinated with running water, you could have a future as a plumber,” he said.
He took me to an office on the first floor and sat me down behind a desk in front of a laptop. A browser window was open with several tabs to clothing stores.
“Do you know your sizes?” he asked.
“I... yes, I saw the tags in the clothes I wore there.” At the park.
“Good.” He indicated the chair. “Fill some shopping carts.”
“I-I don’t understand.”
“Well you aren’t wearing my clothes. And you aren’t going naked. What were you planning to wear?”
I hadn’t thought about that. I hadn’t thought about much of anything. It was all too hard and overwhelming. It would have been bad enough trying to reintegrate into the world and get my life back if Trevor had held me captive like he had with my memories intact. But without anything solid to rely on, it was even worse. I was just surviving minute to minute and trying desperately not to think about anything, trying to make the inside of my mind as empty and silent as my surroundings had been most of the trip with Shannon.
