The Sun Down Motel(23)
“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.
I read through the pages again, looking at the photos. There was a school picture of fourteen-year-old Nick, with the blue eyes and the cheekbones I recognized. The family’s only surviving son, the caption read. He’d lived with relatives in town for a few years, then had left at eighteen. What was Nick doing back in Fell, staying at the Sun Down Motel alone for weeks? Why was he here? What did he want?
The lights flickered, went out, then on again, the fluorescents overhead making a zapping buzz. I stood and walked to the door, peeking out the window at the motel sign. It was on—and then it flickered off, then on again.
Shit. A power problem? I grabbed my coat and put it back on, pulling the office door open and stepping out. Behind me, the lights flickered again as if we were in the middle of a thunderstorm, even though the air was cold and still. From down the hall came a rhythmic thumping, a metallic clunking sound that I couldn’t quite place. It sounded mechanical, accompanied by a high-pitched, motorized whirr. I stepped out and realized it came from behind a door labeled AMENITIES. It was probably an ice machine, malfunctioning with the power problem.
The wind slapped me in the face, and I pulled my coat closed. There was another whiff of cigarette smoke, and something brushed by me—actually touched me, knocked me back a step. In the yawning, empty darkness, a man’s voice said, “Goddamn bitch.”
I stumbled back another step. Goddamn bitch. I’d heard that—really heard it. A strangled sound came from my throat, and I turned to look back at the motel.
The lights were going out. Starting at the end of the L, the corridor lights were blinking out like a row of dominoes. The darkness sat heavier and heavier, gained more and more weight. A fuse problem, I tried to tell myself, though I’d never seen a fuse in my life. The darkness marched down one side of the L, then straight up the other, step by step, ending at the office. The light over the door blinked out, and then the sign. I was alone. There was no sound.
That was when I saw the boy.
He was around eight or nine, on the second level. He was sitting on the walkway floor, cross-legged in the dark, looking at me with a pale face through the latticed bars of the panel beneath the railing. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt with colors splashed brightly on it, as if he were heading for the beach. As I watched, he put his hand on the panel and leaned forward.
“Hey!” I shouted at him in surprise. There weren’t any kids staying here according to the guest book, certainly none who were underdressed for the cold. I took a step toward the staircase. “Hey! Hello?”
The boy stood, turned, and bolted, running lightly down the corridor away from me. I heard his small, even footsteps on the stairs. I forgot about the smoke and the disembodied swearing and the rest of it and jogged down the length of the motel, hoping to catch the boy as he descended.
The boy hit the bottom step and vanished around the corner, toward the nothingness of the dark woods. “Hey!” I shouted again, as if I could make him turn around. I had a shiver up my back, along the back of my neck. Was that real? It looked real. What if it was a real boy?
I was at the bottom of the stairs now, and from above me I heard a familiar click. The same click from last night when the doors opened. I stepped back, tilting my head back and looking up through the slats of the railing. It was a single click this time, followed by the other sound I’d heard that night—the rustle of fabric. There was a footstep, the double-click of a woman’s heeled shoe. Then another.
I took another step back, looking up. The light from above the door to room 216 was out, but I could vaguely see. The door was open, like it had been last night. As I watched, a woman walked out into the corridor.
She was bathed in shadows, but I could see enough. She wore a dark, knee-length, long-sleeved dress. It looked purple, or maybe blue, with a flower pattern. On her feet she wore low heels with modest closed toes. She was slender, her calves slim beneath the hem of the dress, her arms pale and graceful. Her hair was curly and spilled over her shoulders. She put her hands on the rail and looked down at me, and for a second I could see the dark liner around her almond-shaped eyes, the pale oval of her face. She looked like any one of a million women in family photographs a generation ago, except that she was looking at me, and she was not real.