by Castle, Jack
Gun still held discreetly behind her, and still at the ready, Becca stepped all the way out of her motel room. She eased the door almost all the way closed behind her, but was careful not to lock herself out. The cold concrete pulsated beneath the bare soles of her feet and she shivered involuntarily from the frigid winter air.
Scanning the interior parking lot, which was separated from the front of the motel by an old overhanging carport, she could see every single car and truck was now gone. Even the fat guy with the Buick (you remember him, right; the one wearing the cheap suit and dragging his big suitcase out of the trunk). Yep, he had moved on down the road, too.
That’s weird.
It was as though everyone had gotten the memo to vacate except her. At least she could still see her old and trusty Land Rover was still lying dormant in its parking stall and hadn’t taken off.
The motel’s exterior lights were still on, including the Christmas lights, hung with not-so-much care on the eaves and posts of the covered porch. More lights were strung out to the great oak at the parking lot’s center. So that was somewhat comforting. But still, nary a soul to be found.
Certainly not her dead fiancee’s. She had been foolish to believe in such nonsense.
The brisk air caused her to shiver a bit more and for a second she thought she might not ever stop shaking from the cold. So rather than go out on a hunting expedition for her mysterious Midnight Caller in bare feet and tank-top, she decided to go back inside her warm motel room.
As she eased the door to her motel room closed, she didn’t see the shadow wash up onto the patio like a gentle wave upon a sunset beach.
(Mike? Or is it something else? Who am I? I told you, don’t worry about that right now. That comes later. That is, assuming you are still around.)
(Oh, I’m sorry. That sounded dreadfully ominous. Tee-hee. I assure you, it certainly wasn’t intended.)
(Yes. I am speaking to you. Who else did you think I was talking to? Geeesh.)
Chapter 2
Becca Explores the Motel
When Becca re-entered the room Bart was dutifully sitting by the door looking up at her expectantly. “Relax,” she said reflexively. “It’s probably just some drunk.”
Bart tilted his head to the side, the way shepherds often do when they’re trying to understand, and she couldn’t help but give his head a quick rub as she passed him by.
Do not fall in love with that stupid… mutt. You’re just going to have to give him up in the morning anyway.
“Shut up, Donnie.”
Yes, she had decided the voice of her gun now had a name. She could almost imagine seeing his shadow on the far wall.
Becca dropped onto the edge of the motel bed and pulled on her combat boots. Not bothering with the laces she scooped up the thick fatigues shirt hanging haphazardly on the back of a chair and slipped it on. She purposely wore the shirt open and untucked so she could conceal her pistol in the sleek leather holster Mike had bought her and clipped it neatly to her belt.
Before going back outside she thought about bringing Bart. In the end she had decided to forgo bringing the dopey dog. Shepherds are instinctively connected to their handlers. And Bart was untested in the field. If he were to pick up on her current state of fear and loathing he might attack a passerby without being given the order to do so. And that meant she’d have a lot of explaining to do to the client in the morning.
Why do you care, lass? You said so yourself, he’s just a stupid mutt.
Ignoring Donnie, and after making doubly-sure she had locked the door to her room, Becca stepped back outside onto the motel’s cement patio; as soon as she did the icy winds flash-froze her face.
Geez, I should’ve put on my heavy coat.
The abandoned motel parking lot was so eerie she resisted the urge to carry her gun in hand instead of keeping it in its holster. It was that creepy.
“Might as well start with the lobby.”
She walked briskly across the interior parking lot, passed under the low-hanging carport and ventured around to the front of the motel’s main entrance. She found the double-doors decorated with holiday wreathes but also firmly locked. The lights were still on inside, so without even thinking about it she started slapping on the glass doors with her palms.
No answer.
She peered inside. Nope. Nobody home.
Checking the night clerk’s window she found a sign below a door buzzer that read…
If no one is here,
please ring bell.
Bzzzz…BZZZZ-BZZZZ… BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
Nope. Still nobody home. No wonder they didn’t have any business.
“I’ll be home…for Christmas…”
A voice… a disembodied singing voice, it was muffled, but definitely coming from somewhere nearby.
Damn my hearing.
Becca cocked her good ear upward and turned in a slow circle. As near as she could tell, the singing voice emanated from across the parking lot where she saw another set of glass doors, this time leading to a shoebox shaped building with a neon sign on it that read…
Paradise Lost Motel
LOUNGE
“Okay...”
Becca knew she should’ve gone back for her coat. It had to be less than ten degrees out. But it was only a short distance across the parking lot to the lounge, so she briskly rubbed her shoulders and made a quick dash for it.
The bells on the lounge’s glass entrance jangled as she swung the door open. As soon as she entered the foyer, the sultry voice singing I’ll be home for Christmas could be heard much clearer now.
Next to the entrance of the main room, Becca saw a small closet-looking room where you could check your coat. A quick glance inside the coat room revealed only empty hangers.
Two signs on cheap tripods stood at the entrance of the lounge area like stalwart sentinels. One read, Karaoke every Tuesday Night!, and another, Meet Santa Claus, cookies and milk on Dec 15.
Damn, I just missed Santa.
A third sign, one with worn edges and probably the most relevant, read, The Christmas Tones, Tonight! The poster had a picture of three attractive young women in Santa Claus costumes wearing short skirts, and flashing big ole’ smiles and plenty of ‘Jazz Hands’.
The singer inside, still crooning the same Christmas song as before, sounded like she was singing A cappella, in that same sultry voice, beckoning her within.
With no other apparent options, Becca tentatively ventured inside.
The lounge’s interior was little more than a brown leather-clad bar situated against the wall, and about two dozen circular tables covered in hideous orange tablecloths. Each table was encircled by metal-backed chairs with equally repugnant orange plastic seat cushions.
“Charming.”
A dump if ya ask me.
“No one asked you, Donnie.”
The joint was empty and looked like Wal-Mart’s Christmas decorating committee threw up all over it. For starters, an obviously fake Christmas tree sat sadly in the corner with several equally fake presents beneath it. Even the bar didn’t escape the holiday décor and was lined with a row of garland and tinsel. And somebody sure loved that classic Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer special because those little figurines were scattered all over the place. Okay. As much as she hated to admit it, Becca had always had a thang for that Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer special too. Oddly enough, Yukon Cornelius had always been her favorite. “Don’t ya know? Bumbles bounce,” she said softly to herself in a passable Yukon Cornelius accent.
“I’ll be home for Christmas…if only…in…my dreams.”
The attractive young woman on stage, and only occupant in the lounge, had her eyes closed as she finished singing a not-too-shabby version of Bing Crosby’s favorite Christmas ballad.
The girl, twenty-two at most, was pretty in a way that Becca was not. Tiny, adorable round face, perfect skin, insanely-white teeth, and raven hair cut in a cute bob. If a Christmas Kewpie doll sprang to life, thi
s girl would be it.
The music faded and Becca became very self-conscious; she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to clap or not. After all, there wasn’t anybody else here. Not even a bored bartender.
Before Christmas Kewpie Doll could start singing another round Becca asked, “Excuse me, Miss? Hey, do you work here? Hello?”
Kewpie Doll slowly opened her doe-like eyes. The girl seemed startled that there wasn’t anyone else in the room, but she recovered quickly enough.
Spotting her standing amongst the tables and chairs, Kewpie asked, “I’m sorry, what?”
Becca weaved in and out of the vomit-colored banquet tables and was forced to wonder, Seriously, who would even pick that color? As she approached the stage, she said, “I asked if you work here.”
Kewpie Doll wore a dazed, vacant expression on her face. She looked the way Becca felt in fact, and seemed troubled by the question. Becca figured the girl might’ve gotten all the looks in the family but may have gotten short-changed in the brains department. Alright, alright. Becca admitted to herself she wanted to think that because the girl was just so darn cute.
Barf. If she’s so cute, why don’t ya marry the wee-thing?
“No, I’m with the talent,” Kewpie answered, with the slightest sense of pride. And then she sort of scratched behind her ear, in a really odd and slow way, almost gingerly, as though checking to see if her scalp was still attached.
Now that Becca was staring at her more closely she noticed one of the girl’s fake eyelashes was hanging off one eyelid. It looked like a black fuzzy caterpillar was trying to do a swan dive off her face. How did she not feel that? You’d have to when you blinked, right?
Not knowing what else to say, Becca asked, “Where is everybody?”
“I don’t know,” Kewpie Doll said, sounding a little dazed and confused. Was she high or something? “We have to sing whether people are in here or not,” she said, obviously a little embarrassed by the lack of audience. “It’s part of the contract.”
Becca nodded. “Yeah, uh-uh.” She was about to ask Kewpie Doll where her fellow singers were when she noticed a single stream of syrup streaming down the side of Kewpie Doll’s flawless, perfectly made-up face. “Uhmm… I think you’re bleeding.”
“What?” Kewpie asked, in that same slow and dazed response time.
“I said, I think you’re bleeding,” Becca said, pointing her finger for emphasis. What was wrong with this girl? Was she in an accident?
“Oh that? That’s nothing.”
More blood dripped down the side of Kewpie’s face. The white fluff on her Santa hat was now drenched with crimson.
How did I miss that before? Becca wondered.
“It’s nothing?” Becca repeated, with a tone of shock in her voice. “You’d better sit down while I go grab a first aid kit.”
Becca turned away, scanning the room for anything that might resemble a first aid kit on a wall, or anything she might use to clot the blood. Heck, at this point, she was even contemplating using one of the puke-orange tablecloths. As she had turned around she thought she had heard the Kewpie Doll say something to her. What was it? “I don’t think any of that matters now. I’m pretty sure I’m dead.”
Becca began to say something like, ‘Maybe I should call nine-one-one, or at the very least try the front desk again…’
Wait, what?
“What did you just say?” Becca asked and spun back around, but Kewpie Doll was gone.
There was no place to go. No backstage, no nearby doors, nothing. The girl had simply vanished.
Jesus, Mary-Joseph…Saints preserve us. That was a ghost you’ve seen there, lass. I say get our arses out of here right now.
For once, she and Donnie were in full agreement.
Becca wasn’t even aware she was backing up until she tripped, tripped, and tripped some more over the metal framed conference chairs behind her. She flailed her arms about to keep her balance, not exactly falling, but she did just about break her neck doing the dosey-doe with the metal-backed chairs.
Her eyes darted about, searching for where Kewpie Doll might have gone. Her body shivered involuntarily for a moment. A phenomenon she had never quite experienced without being cold--until now.
This is a trick. This is one of those videos you see on the internet where they trick you into seeing a ghost in an elevator or a dinosaur in a subway and it turns out to be an elaborate ruse.
But no one came out from behind a curtain and yelled, “Gotcha.” No slump-shouldered intern entered the room with a release form attached to a clipboard for her to sign.
So, what’s the alternative, you saw a ghost?
Becca’s fingers curled around the back of a nearby chair. She’d thought about picking up the chairs she’d knocked over during her brief stumble fest but instead decided to just leave. If a video of her fleeing the karaoke bar like a terror-stricken teenager showed up on the internet she’d count that among the least of her problems.
She had seen this horror movie before. And she wasn’t about to wait around to see how it turned out.
(Don’t worry. She’ll be back. They always come back. Even when they shouldn’t.)
Chapter 3
Becca Leaves Motel
Becca pulled out of the parking lot and checked the rearview mirror one last time. She resisted the urge to stomp the gas pedal all the way to the floor.
She had decided to leave the seedy motel far behind and push onward to Sioux Falls, and from there, on to her client in New York. It was not like she was going to go back to sleep; not after Mr. Midnight Knocker and the vanishing Christmas Kewpie Doll. Nope. No sir. Good-bye. As fast as she could grab Bart, (the not-so-bright German shepherd), and her gear, (an overnight bag in the form of a vintage backpack) and stow both in her Land Rover, she was outta there.
As she sped down the highway she remembered those cheap magazines you always see at the checkouts in grocery stores, I married Bigfoot, Son of Santa Claus, and her personal favorite, Batboy had my baby. She was probably going to ignore those stories with a lot less frivolousness in the future.
And so what if you saw a ghost? And I’m not saying that you did. So what? It’s not like Kewpie doll of Christmas past was trying to hurt you or anything--scared the crap out of you, sure. But if anything, Kewpie Doll seemed more like a confused victim than an evil poltergeist.
Okay, Becca-Bear, time to focus on driving. You only got a couple hours of sleep back at the motel. And, according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, South Dakota’s Interstate 90 is considered one of the nation’s most dangerous and remote roads in America. This was easy to believe, especially when the highway twisted and turned around steep gorges, sometimes without the added safety of guard rails. But it wasn’t like she had a whole hell of a lot of choices; I-90 was a direct line from Seattle all the way to her client at an Air Force Base in Buffalo, New York.
The good news, however, was once you crossed the Wyoming border and got down out of the mountains and into the straightaways the journey was pretty darn enjoyable. Before arriving at the creepy motel she had passed South Dakota’s more popular tourist attractions like Mt. Rushmore and the gambling town of Deadwood. From there, the highway had followed wide valleys dotted with densely timbered stands of black spruce and a variety of other evergreens. This wasn’t her first time traveling through the Dakota Badlands; it was her fourth, her last trip during the summer months being her absolute favorite. Back then she had been able to absorb the scenic beauty of the rolling grass prairies, steep canyons and spectacular alternating colors in the striations in the cliff walls that looked undisturbed for millennia.
(Yay… South Dakota!)
But now it was winter, and that meant everything was closed and locked up tight for the next three-hundred-and-fifty three miles between Rapid City and Sioux Falls. And after nightfall, the rugged landscape of the Badlands seemed to take on a more tortured appearance, as though some evil calamity had befallen the
land. Even now the moonlight stretched eerily over the towering needle-like spires and harshly-eroded buttes of billion-year old granite. And the gorges, although plenty deep during the day, took on a more menacing drop, as if they went straight down to the center of the Earth, and somehow, impossibly, a little beyond it. Last summer the drive had been a real scorcher but now the winter temperatures had plummeted to ten degrees, and those sprawling seas of mixed prairie grasses were now buried under thick blankets of frozen and inhospitable snow. Becca knew if you broke down out here at night, and some long-haul trucker didn’t pick you up, there was a pretty good chance they’d find a corpsicle in the morning.
No, this wasn’t the same happy sight-seeing trip like she had taken previously; this felt more like… survival.
Despite the icy road conditions she was able to safely motor down the two-lanes of rural highway-intermountain corridor at a steady speed of sixty mph in her recently restored Land Rover.
To ease her mind, and maybe return to some sense of normalcy, she turned on the radio. At this point, anything, even rap or some aging boy band would be preferable to the sounds of the winds battering her Rover’s windows.
But of course the radio didn’t work. Why would it? Every station--nothing but static. Not surprising for these parts, but disappointing nonetheless.
For the next half hour or so, she hadn’t seen a single other vehicle. Not uncommon for this time of night, especially during the winter, but a random traveler would’ve been welcome.
She spied her cell phone on the center console. It was nearly midnight. Everyone she knew in the entire world would be asleep in their beds right now. Except maybe her brother back in New Hampshire. They were three hours ahead back east. If it’s almost midnight here, that meant, she did some quick math in her head, it’s almost three a.m. there. And if memory served, Robert worked a crazy-ass early shift, and before leaving the house he liked to exercise on that ridiculous elliptical thingy in his basement in front of the television, so little bro might actually be awake.
