by Marc Layton
Then, without a moment’s hesitation, he readjusted his grip on the knife, brought it up to his right forearm, and cut a long, vertical line, deep into his flesh. His gaze never wavered from my face.
“It’s your fault,” he said again, as blood began to stream down his arm.
Ignoring the pain, I pressed my hands deeper into the glass, pushing myself up from the ground. I ran from the room, heedless of the cuts that burrowed into my feet as I fled. Sobbing, I skidded down the hallway and out our front door. I left a trail of blood as my feet slapped against the concrete. I wasn’t sure how long I ran. All I remembered was saying the same words over and over in my head. Just get safe, just get safe, just get safe.
I let the memory play once, twice, three times in my head, before I slapped myself in the face, the only way I knew I could make the images stop. Sometimes, the memory repeated on a continuous loop in my head, like some deranged movie I couldn’t stop watching. Only that movie was my life.
I got shakily to my feet and tip-toed towards the shared wall of our two rooms. Cautiously, I leaned forward again, pressing my ear up against the dark wood paneling. I listened intently for any sign of human life. I couldn’t hear any blare of the television, no sound of footsteps. The room beside mine felt empty and still. I felt my body slowly start to relax.
And then a scream, shrill and terrified, radiated from the other side of the wall. As if someone had known precisely where I stood, and had placed their mouth, just so, on the other side.
I fell back from shock but recovered quickly, pointing the .38 at the wall where my face had been moments before. It took me four attempts to unlock the safety, my fingers were shaking so badly. I was absolutely certain that the scream I had just heard had not come from any television or radio.
I was also sure, just as I had been before, that it had been a female who screamed. Was it possible that Kyle had kidnapped someone, a random bystander, caught in the middle of our abhorrent game? He could use her to get me to comply. Kyle knew that I would willingly give myself up if it meant saving an innocent life. He was potentially capable of doing something like this.
Yet, why was it that I only heard her? He hadn’t yelled, hadn’t shouted any commands. I didn’t hear any struggling. It was nothing more than a disembodied voice in an otherwise empty room.
The thought should have terrified me. As it was, the only relief I could manage to feel was that whoever was deciding to torture me in this moment wasn’t Kyle. This was a new, unrelated problem.
Uncontrollable laugher began to bubble up from my gut as I sat down on the bed. What, exactly, was I saying? That I now had a ghost haunting me, in addition to a crazed former lover? I laughed even harder, feeling tears begin to form at the corners of my eyes. Somewhere along the course of my demented night, I had inadvertently become hysterical. There was no other reasonable explanation for my thoughts. My fears had begun to emerge as auditory manifestations, and I knew the only way to make them go away was to sleep. Both my body and my brain needed to recharge. To say my nerves were shot felt like an enormous understatement.
Inspiration struck me as I glanced around the room. With gritted teeth, I walked to the nearest dresser and began to push it along the sullied carpet. It protested slightly, but the empty drawers made it relatively easy to shift. With a loud grunt, I pushed it up against the door to my motel room.
Next, I went over to the remaining dresser, which was tall and skinny, and dragged it over to the window, lodging it against the glass. If someone tried to come in through the window, the dresser would block half of their passage. I felt much safer.
Standing there, I couldn’t help but hook a finger around the curtains, so I could peer into the parking lot. My car was still the only one in the lot, half hidden by the rolling fog. Looking out into the nearby bordering trees, I couldn’t see the ground at all. The moist air looked chilly, yet strangely enticing. All I had to do was lift the window, wedge myself through, and disappear into the trees, disappear altogether. It would be so easy…
I shivered, alarmed by my own thoughts. “Get out of my head, Kyle,” I snapped, but it was my own reflection that I glared at. I was the one who had let him in.
Some much-needed sleep was going to help me strip him back out again. Glancing at the blockades I had made with the furniture, I crawled back into bed. It didn’t take long for sleep to overtake me.
The light in the room had altered the next time I woke up, but only slightly. For a brief and horrible moment my body had seized up upon opening my eyes, bracing myself for something terrible. But all was quiet in my room, and the room next door. The bed and dressers were cast in a bluish light, and I guessed there were still a few more hours to go before daybreak. I had not been asleep for very long.
Just what woke me this time? I asked myself, cautiously. I shifted under the blankets and knew the answer. I needed to empty my bladder. The normalcy of the problem made me laugh a little. The air was cold as I emerged from the quilt and walked towards the bathroom. I hadn’t even bothered to look at it when I had first checked into the room. Not that it would have mattered, in my case. The entire motel could have been infested with roaches, and I still would have stayed.
I stepped into the bathroom, running my hands along the wall for the light switch. There wasn’t one. Frowning, I felt around in the air around me, until my pinky caught a long string, hanging down from the center of the ceiling. I yanked it down, and a harsh white light flooded the bathroom.
I turned to glance at the state of my hair in the mirror and saw four eyes staring back at me. Standing directly behind me was a woman, with grotesquely pale skin. She wore a long lavender cotton nightgown. My blue eyes met her brown ones in the glass, and her mouth stretched wide as she screamed in my ear.
Shrieking, I spun to the right, and flew back into the main room, wrenching the bathroom door closed behind me. Whimpering, I grabbed one end of the desk and dragged it forward, holding onto its legs. I didn’t stop until the desk was lodged in front of the bathroom door, locking it in place.
Shaking, I glanced down at my jeans. I didn’t need to pee anymore.
My heart was still pounding, a deafening noise in my chest when I heard a knock on my door a few minutes later. I swung around to stare at it, eyes wide. My hands shook violently at my sides. Once again, I felt the threads of my sanity unraveling.
“Rebecca? Rebecca, it’s Phil again. I heard a scream. Again. Everything still okay in there?”
I bounded forward. “One second!” I cried and jostled one corner of the dresser. Suddenly, I was desperate to be near Phil, desperate to be in the company of someone I was almost positive was human. I could feel the truth on the tip of my tongue, I was ready to spill all my secrets to the gentle, friendly man. Whatever it took me to finally feel safe.
I pushed the corner of the dresser back and retracted the chain lock. I had made a gap just big enough that I could wedge my skinny body through the doorway, into the hall.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” I cried out, squeezing myself between the door frame, and the dresser. “Listen, I know I keep screaming, and I’m sorry about that, but there’s a lot going on.”
I wiggled myself into the hallway and turned my gaze to Phil.
But he wasn’t there. Instead, I looked into the eyes of the woman I had seen in my bathroom a few minutes before. Her body heaved back, and forth with silent sobs. She reached out for me with pale, skinny fingers.
Screaming at the top of my lungs, I threw myself down the hallway as fast as my legs could carry me. Bile threatened to eject itself from the pit of my stomach, but I swallowed it back down and tried to run faster. I didn’t know if the woman chased after me or not. I didn’t take the time to look back.
My feet slammed against the ancient wood floors, but when I looked down all I saw was concrete, and tiny fractals of light, bouncing off of shards of glass in my toes. I blinked, and the image was gone. I was still in the Evergreen Motel.
&nb
sp; Panting, I ran into the lobby, bee lining for the front desk at the back of the room. “Phil!” I gasped out, slamming my hand over, and over again against its wooden top. “Phil!”
I heard faint rustling from behind the desk, around a corner that was hidden from view. I braced myself for the grisly pale woman to appear again, but it was Phil who emerged, blinking against the lobby’s bright overhead lights.
“Rebecca?” he said, voice thick from sleep. “What’s the matter?”
“There was a lady. In my bathroom,” I blurted out, trying to catch my breath.
The manager rubbed his eyes, and blinked at me. “What?”
“There was a woman, in my bathroom,” I said again. “She wore a light purple nightgown. Phil, I think she’s dead,” I added. Tears sprang to my eyes.
I watched as all the blood slowly drained from Phil’s face, his expression stricken. With one hand, he reached out and grappled for the desk, as if he needed something to hold him steady.
“I think...I think you may have just seen my deceased wife,” he said softly.
It was my turn to clutch at the desk for support. “What?”
He nodded, running a hand through his wispy hair. “She died last year. It was…,” he swallowed. “It was a terrible accident. I thought I was the only one who could see her.”
My blood turned to ice in my veins. I felt the urge to shake my body violently, as if I could shake off her ghoulish presence. I studied Phil’s ashen face and wondered how she had died. I didn’t have the nerve to ask.
“Well,” I hesitated. “I might need to switch rooms, then. Because she won’t leave me alone, and, frankly, she scares the shit out of me.”
Phil winced, staring down at his feet while he shook his head. “I’m afraid that won’t do you any good, Rebecca,” he said softly. “My wife didn’t die in your room, in any of the rooms, in fact. She just has a penchant for wandering. She’d probably find you no matter where you decide to sleep.”
I stared at him, feeling the incessant urge to tell him about Kyle, tell him everything. But his eyes were wet when he finally looked back at me. I bit the tip of my tongue. Phil had his own share of demons to bear. He didn’t need to suffer weight of mine as well.
A few minutes later I was back in the hallway, making my way towards Room 27, head pounding from overwhelm and exhaustion. I thought back to earlier that evening when I had dismissed the idea of pulling off the highway and sleeping in my car. The thought brought me back to the brink of hysterics again, so I dismissed it. I needed a bed, even if it was a haunted one.
I giggled maniacally to myself as I opened the door to my room and squeezed through. In some twisted way, it was a relief to know the woman in my bathroom, the woman who had screamed from the adjoining room, had been a ghost all along. Up to that point, I hadn’t been entirely able to dismiss the idea that Kyle really had kidnapped some poor innocent woman off the street. No, his only victim was going to be me.
Grunting, I pushed the dresser back into place against the door. Even if Phil’s wife appeared again, there’d be no running. As terrifying as her screams and sobs had been, I found comfort in the fact that she was dead. I knew she couldn’t really hurt me. Meanwhile, Kyle was still out in the world, hunting me down. A much more viable threat.
The exertion left me feeling weak and light-headed. My jeans were soaked with urine, and I still hadn’t eaten anything. “Today can go straight to hell,” I muttered to myself, walking over to my white plastic garbage bag. I would change into my spare pair of jeans before I tried to sleep again. It took every ounce of willpower to complete the task, toss my soiled pants aside, and sink into the bed. I was in such dire need for sleep, my forehead broke out into a mild fever. The culmination of all the day’s various stresses washed over me, like a massive weight. This needed to be over.
I eased myself back, wrapping the quilt around me like a tight cocoon. Off in the distance, I could hear birds singing, coaxing the sun to rise. The cheerful noise was a comfort-- a complete juxtaposition to all the screams and cries I had both witnessed, and emitted over the course of the wretched night. I listened for a few more minutes, and closed my eyes.
I was just beginning to sink into unconsciousness when I heard a familiar buzzing noise. My eyes flung open and looked angrily at my cell phone, vibrating against the nightstand. It had been going off so constantly throughout the day, I had become numb to the sound. Once I had started ignoring it, I hadn’t noticed when the text messages had suddenly just...stopped. How long had Kyle gone without texting?
The question gnawed at me. Groaning in frustration, I grabbed the phone, squinting against the harsh blue light of the screen. His message was comprised of only two words.
Found you.
I blinked, but the words were still there when I opened my eyes again. Sucking in air, I lunged for my purse, yanking the strap up to place the purse on the bed in front of me. The room began to spin again, as I reached into its interior, and felt nothing but air. The .38 was gone.
Kyle had found me, and the only way I knew to protect myself was gone.
Fear and disbelief clouding my vision, I stumbled out of the bed, trembling. I ran to the door, crashing it against the dresser as I pried it open. I pressed myself between the dresser and the door frame, and lurched into the hallway. I glanced in both directions, relieved to see the hall was still empty.
A glowing red sign that read EXIT hung from the ceiling in the opposite direction of the lobby. All I had to do was make to my car, and I could escape. I had purposefully kept my car keys in my jeans pocket in case I needed to make a quick getaway. Remembering them when I had gone to change my pants likely saved my life.
I ran towards the emergency exit, ignoring the dull ache growing my lungs. You’re going to be okay, Aly, I told myself, willing my body forward, faster and faster. You’re going to be alright.
I flung my entire body against the solid silver bar of the exit door, clicking it forward as I threw the door open. The air outside was cold and damp, and it hurt to breathe. Rolls of fog, like liquid tumbleweeds, still drifted in the parking lot.
I ran forward, eyes on my car. I could hear the slap, slap, slap of my feet against the parking lot. Little rocks and pebbles jabbed into my feet, but I ignored them. I was halfway to my car, halfway to safety.
Suddenly, I heard heavy breathing behind me. The noise was ragged and sharp, and getting closer. I cried out, having realized that Kyle was close, much too close. I wouldn’t have enough time to jab the key into my car and unlock it before he’d be able to catch me.
Tears sprang to my eyes as I reached my car, and continued running. My one method of escape now behind me. I ran forward into the sea of looming trees, hoping that between the maze of tree trunks and fog, I could potentially lose him. I could loop back to my car, crank the engine, and never look back.
But his panting and footsteps sounded closer the deeper I went into the woods. I thought back to how I had felt earlier, as I drove in my car, and how I had felt looking into the foggy wilderness from the motel window. I had thought of my death so casually, then. Now, as it loomed behind me, I felt every muscle, every tendon, every ligament in my body willing myself to live. I was not ready to die. I was not ready to let Kyle win.
I felt the touch of his fingers against my hair. Shrieking, I quickly shifted course, but could not see the new terrain under my feet. I stumbled over a tree root and pitched forward, helpless. I flung my hands up, bracing for impact with the cold, damp earth, but I could not see the gnarled tree branch jutting out right in front of me. Blinding pain erupted as I struck my head against the bark, and the world went dark.
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