The Sun Down Motel

by Simone St. James

I scratched my nose under my glasses and said, “Heather, are you tired?”

  On the floor, she sighed. “I’m never tired. I told you, I have insomnia.”

  “Don’t you have to study or something?”

  “I’ve read my textbook twice. One has to read something.”

  I smiled. “Well, since one doesn’t have to study, would one like to go to the Sun Down Motel with me?”

  Her head appeared above the rim of the vintage coffee table. “Really?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know what I’ll find, but I’ve come this far. I may as well go, and now is as good a time as ever.”

  She lit up, like I’d suspected she would. “One would be delighted.”

  I closed my laptop. “Let’s go.”

  Fell, New York

  September 1982

  VIV

  She didn’t want to stay in Fell, exactly, yet somehow she did. She worked another shift at the Sun Down, and another. Janice paid her some money, and Viv found an apartment on Greville Street that had cheap rent and a roommate named Jenny. Jenny was a night shift nurse at a local nursing home, working the same hours as Viv. She was tired, single after a bad breakup, and not in the least curious. The two girls came and went, slept all day and worked all night.

  “I don’t get it,” Jenny said one evening. She was preparing to iron a blouse, fiddling with the knobs on the iron as it heated up. “You were on your way to New York City. Why didn’t you go?”

  Viv turned the page of the People magazine she was reading, leaning against the kitchen counter. “That’s just something I told my mother,” she said. “I didn’t really want to go. I just wanted to leave home.”

  “I get that,” Jenny said. She had ash blond hair, cut in feathered layers like Heather Locklear. She licked the pad of her finger and lightly touched the face of the iron to see if it was hot enough yet. “But this is Fell. No one wants to be here. I mean, come on. People leave.”

  “You haven’t left,” Viv pointed out.

  “Only because this job is good. But trust me, I’m going.” She licked her finger again and touched the iron. This time there was a sizzling sound and she jerked her finger away. “I’m going to meet a rich, gorgeous guy and marry him the first chance I get. The women’s libbers say it’s wrong, but I still think it’s the best thing a girl can do.”

  “That’s it?” Viv asked her. “Get married?”

  “Why not?” Jenny shrugged and tugged the blouse onto the ironing board, started to work on it.

  Viv didn’t want to get married. She’d dated boys, made out with them. She’d even let Matthew Reardon put his hand down her pants. But she’d only done that because they were on their third date, and he expected it. His fingers smelled like cigarettes, and she hadn’t liked it much. Her entire life in Illinois had been about doing what other people expected, never what she actually wanted.

  “Don’t you want to do something with your life? Something big?” she asked Jenny.

  Jenny didn’t look impressed. “If you wanted to do something big, you should have gone to New York, don’t you think?”

  Maybe. It was stupid to think you had some kind of destiny in life. It was extra stupid to think that Fell, New York, was somewhere you wanted to be. But Grisham belonged to Viv’s family, and New York City belonged to everyone else. Fell, in its shadowy way, was hers.

  She bought a car, a used Cavalier, the first car she’d ever owned herself. She took two hundred dollars out of her bank account to buy it, and she didn’t feel the panic she thought she would.

  There was a movie theater downtown, a hole in the wall called the Royal that showed second-run movies for a dollar. Viv went to the early show before her shift sometimes, sitting in the half-empty theater. She watched E.T. and An Officer and a Gentleman and, on one memorable night, Poltergeist. She ate sandwiches from the Famous Fell Deli, down the street from the theater, and sometimes she got a milkshake from the Milkshake Palace, around the corner, for fifty cents. She cut her hair, which she’d worn long like all of the other girls in Grisham. Good girls don’t have short hair, her mother always said. Viv cut her light brown hair to shoulder length and teased the top and the sides with hair spray.

  She called her mother, who was furious even though Viv hadn’t ended up in the den of sin that was New York City. “I’m not sending you money,” her mother told her. “You’ll just spend it on drugs or something. I guess you’ll see what it’s like to be a grown-up now. Why can’t you be like Debby?”

  Debby, Viv’s little sister, the good daughter. At eighteen, Debby wanted to be a teacher; she wanted to stay in Grisham, work in Grisham, get married in Grisham, and most likely die in Grisham. She looked at Viv’s angry restlessness as something alien. “I’m working extra shifts at the ice cream shop and saving for college,” Debby said when she got on the phone. “I think you’re crazy.”

  “You can be as perfect as you want,” Viv told her. “Dad still isn’t coming back. And he still doesn’t care.”

  “That’s mean,” Debby said. “He’s going to call. He is.”

  “No, he isn’t,” Viv told her. “He has a new wife, and his new wife is going to have new kids. I’m not waiting around for life to go back to the way it was, and neither should you.”

  Debby said something else, but Viv didn’t hear it. She took the phone from her ear and made herself hang up, listening to the click it made in the cradle as it disconnected.

  * * *

  • • •

  The world was different at night. Not just dark, not just quiet, but different. Sounds and smells were different. Number Six Road had an eerie light, greenish under the empty expanse of sky. Viv’s body got cold, then damp with unpleasant sweat; she was hungry, then queasy. She wasn’t tired after the first few nights, but there were times she felt like there was sand under her eyelids, blurring her vision as her temples pounded. Three o’clock in the morning was the worst time, almost delirious, when she could half believe anything could happen—ghosts, elves, time travel, every Twilight Zone episode she’d ever seen.

  And she sort of liked it.

  Night people were not the same as day people. The good people of Fell, whoever they were, were sound asleep at three a.m. Those people never saw the people Viv saw: the cheating couples having affairs, the truckers strung out on whatever they took to stay awake, the women with blackened eyes who checked out at five a.m. to futilely go home again. These weren’t people suburban Viv Delaney would ever have seen in a hundred years. They weren’t people she would ever have talked to. There was an edge to them, a hard collision with life, that she hadn’t known was possible in her soft cocoon. It wasn’t romantic, but something about it drew her. It fascinated her. She didn’t want to look away.

  And it was in the depths of night that the Sun Down itself seemed alive. The candy machine made a deep whirring noise in the middle of the night, and the ice machine next to it clattered from time to time like someone was shaking it. The leaves swirled in the pool, which was empty of water and fenced in, even though it was the last month of summer. The pipes in the walls groaned, and when one of the buttons on the phone in front of her lit up—indicating someone in one of the rooms was making a call—it made a featherlight click sound, audible only in the perfect, silent hush of night.

  The smell of cigarette smoke came back again and again when she was in the front office. Always the sting of fresh smoke, never old. At first she thought it must be coming through the vents from one of the rooms, so she took a folding chair and moved it around the room, standing on it beneath each vent so she could close her eyes and inhale. Nothing.

  She stood next to the office door for an hour one night, staying still, nostrils flaring, waiting for the smoke to come. When it did she rotated, left then right, trying to figure out the direction it came from. She had gotten nowhere when the front desk phone rang and interrupted her, th
e sound shrill in the night air.

  She picked up the phone, her voice almost cracking with disuse. “Sun Down Motel, can I help you?”

  Nothing. Just the faint sound of breathing.

  She hung up and stared at the phone for a minute. She’d had a similar call before, and she wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. Who called a motel in the middle of the night and breathed into the phone?

  The next night found her standing in front of the office door again, waiting for the smoke. If someone had asked her in that moment, she could not have told them what she was looking for. A man? A malfunction in the duct system? An illusion in her own mind? It wasn’t clear, but the smoke bothered her. It was eerie, but it also made her feel less alone. If she had to put it into words, perhaps she’d say that she wanted to know who was keeping her company.

  She was interrupted that night by someone actually coming through the office door—a real person, one not smoking a cigarette. He was a trucker getting a room to catch a few hours’ sleep before continuing south. Viv took his thirty dollars and he inked his name into the guest book. After him came another man, also solo, wearing a suit and trench coat, carrying a suitcase and a briefcase. He, too, paid thirty dollars and wrote his name in the guest book: Michael Ennis. He might stay an extra night, he explained, because he was waiting for a phone call to tell him where to travel next, and he might not get it tomorrow.

  “Sounds exciting,” Viv said absently as she opened the key drawer and took out the key to room 211. She was putting him several doors away from the trucker; she always gave people their space. Night people didn’t like to have neighbors too close.

  He didn’t reply, so she raised her gaze and saw him looking at her. His look was calm and polite, but it was fixed on her nonetheless. “Not really,” he said, in reply to her comment. “I’m a salesman. I go where my bosses tell me to go.”

  She nodded and gave him the key. She did not ask what he sold, because it was none of her business. When he left, she could not have said what he looked like.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next night, she tried a different tactic: She stood outside the office door, her back to the wall, and waited for the smell of smoke. She suspected it came from outside the door now, not through the vents, so she moved closer to the supposed source. It was a beautiful night, silent and warm, the breeze just enough to lift her hair from her neck and fan her sweaty cheeks.

  It took less than twenty minutes this time: The tang of fresh cigarette smoke came to her nostrils. Jackpot. She shuffled down the walkway, following it slowly away from the direction of the rooms and around the other side of the building, toward the empty pool. She lost the smell twice and stood still both times, waiting for it to come back. Silently tracking her prey.

  She edged out toward the drained and emptied pool, stopping next to the fence that had been around it all summer for reasons unknown. She looked around in the dark, seeing nothing and no one. Maddeningly, the smell came and went, as if whoever created it was moving. “Hello?” she said into the blackness, the concrete and the empty pool and the trees beyond, the deserted highway far to her left past the parking lot. “Hello?”

  There was no answer, but the hair prickled on the back of her neck. Her throat went tight, and she had a moment of panic, hard and nauseating. She hooked her fingers through the pool’s chain-link fence to hold on and closed her eyes until it passed.

  She smelled smoke, and someone walked past her, behind her back, in five evenly paced steps. A man’s heavy footsteps. And then there was silence again.

  Her breath was frozen, her hands cold. That had been someone, something. Something real, but not a real person. The steps had started and stopped, like a figure crossing an open doorway.

  Viv had heard ghost stories. Everyone has. But she had never thought she’d be standing holding a chain-link fence, trying not to vomit in fear as her knuckles went white and something other crossed behind her back. It was crazy. It was the kind of story you told years later while your listeners rolled their eyes, because they had no idea how the terror felt on the back of your neck.

  Behind Viv’s shoulder, the motel sign went dark.

  The garish light vanished, she heard a sad zap as the bulbs gave up, and she turned to see the sign dark, the words SUN DOWN no longer lit up, the words VACANCY. CABLE TV! flickering out beneath them. She walked toward the sign, unthinking, a hard beat of panic in her chest. She had no idea where the switch to the sign was, whether someone could turn it off. She had never had to turn the sign on or off in her weeks here—the evening clerk always turned it on, and the morning clerk always turned it off. The loss of its bright, ugly light was like an alarm going off up her spine.

  She turned the corner, opening up her view of the interior of the motel’s L. She stopped and cried out, because the lights were going out.

  At the end of the short leg of the L—room 130 and the one above it, room 230—the lights on the walkway in front blinked out. Then the lights in front of rooms 129 and 229, and on, and on. As if someone were flicking out a row of switches one by one, leaving the entire motel in darkness.

  Viv stood frozen, unable to do anything but watch as the Sun Down Motel went dark. The last lights to go out were the office, closest to her at the end of the long row of the L, followed by the neon sign that said OFFICE. And then she was standing in front of a black hole on the edge of the road, without a sound or a shuffle of feet, without another soul for miles.

  She could hear her breath sawing in and out of her throat. What the hell is going on? Her mind didn’t go to mundane explanations, like an electrical malfunction or even a blackout; it was three o’clock in the morning, the sodium lights on Number Six Road were still lit, and she’d just heard the smoking man’s footsteps behind her. No, this was no malfunction, and something told her it was just starting.

  And now a muted clicking sound came from the motel. Click, click. Viv peered through the dark to see one of the motel doors drift open, then another. The doors were opening on their own, each revealing a strip of deeper darkness of the room inside, as if inviting her. Come in to this one. This one. This one . . .

  Her panicked gaze went to her car. She could get in, go to the nearest pay phone. Call—who? The police, maybe. Or go to an all-night diner and sit there until whatever this was went away. The problem was that her purse, with her keys in it, was in the office.

  The wind was soft and cool in her hair, making her shiver. The doors had finished clicking open and were quiet. There was not a single sound from Number Six Road behind her.

  Do it. She could. Go to the office door, push it open. Her purse was next to the chair behind the reception desk. Four steps into the office, swoop down and grab the purse, then turn and leave.

  She made her feet move. Her sneakers shuffled against the gravel again, and she found herself lifting her feet to move more quietly. As if whatever it was could be fooled into thinking she wasn’t coming. As if whatever it was couldn’t see her already.

  Still, she found herself running toward the door, trying to keep her steps light. In and out. Just in and out. I can do it quick and—

  Her foot hit the step to the walkway, and something banged overhead. One of the room doors, banging open. Viv jumped and made a sound in her throat as footsteps pounded the walk above her, short and staccato, a full stomping run. The steps pounded down to the bottom of the L, then turned the corner. A voice rang out into the night air—a child’s. I want to go in the pool!

  Viv twisted the knob to the office door and ducked into the darkness. She stumbled through the office, her breath in whooping gasps, her hands flailing for her purse, her keys. Her eyes stung, and she realized it was because the smell of smoke was so strong, as if someone had been smoking in here for hours.

  She had just found her purse in the dark, her hands clutching the bulge of dark purple fake leathe
r, when she heard the voice. A man’s voice, crying out from the other side of the desk.

  For God’s sake, call an ambulance! the voice said, as close as if the man was standing there. Someone call an ambulance!

  Viv dropped her purse, the keys flying out and landing on the floor in a tinkle of metal. She gasped another breath, snatching them up and rising to run to the door. She ran to her Cavalier and wrenched open the driver’s door, launching herself inside. She threw her purse onto the passenger seat, got behind the wheel, and slammed the door.

  The motel in front of her windshield was still dark as she turned the key and pumped the gas, her foot hitting the floorboard. Nothing happened; the car didn’t start. She pumped the gas and cranked the key again, a sound of panic in her throat, tears tracking down her cheeks, but still nothing.

  She raised her gaze as a figure stepped in front of the car. It was a woman. She was young, thirty maybe, and had dark blond curly hair pulled back from her face and falling down her collarbones, dark eyes, a face of perfect oval. In the shock of the moment, Viv saw everything clearly: the woman’s slim shoulders, her long-sleeved dress in a pattern of large, dark purple flowers, the belt tied in a bow at her waist. She was staring through the windshield at Viv, and her eyes . . . her eyes . . .

  Viv opened her mouth to scream, then froze. No sound came out. She inhaled a breath, fixed for a long moment in the woman’s gaze.

  The woman wasn’t real, and yet—Viv saw her. Looked at her. And the woman looked back, her eyes blazing with some kind of ungodly emotion that made Viv want to scream and weep and throw up all at once.

  She gripped the steering wheel, feeling her gorge rise.

  There was a bang as the woman’s palms slammed the hood of the car—a real sound, hard and violent. The woman stood with her arms braced, staring through the windshield at Viv. Her mouth moved. Viv could hear no sound, or perhaps there was none. But it wasn’t hard to translate the single word.