The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    Run.
    Viv made a strangled sound and jerked the key again. The engine didn’t turn. She twisted the key and stomped the pedal, tears streaming down her face as a frustrated scream came out of her mouth. When shedared to look up again the woman was gone, but the motel was still dark, the night around her even darker.
    The engine was flooded. The car wouldn’t start. She had nowhere to go.
    Viv pushed down the locks on her doors and crawled into the back seat, curling into as small a ball as she could, crouching behind the passenger seat so she couldn’t see through the windshield anymore. Like someone escaping the line of fire. She stayed there for a long time.
    When the lights went on again and the sign lit up, she was still weeping.

Fell, New York
    November 2017
CARLY
    After all of my research, I wasn’t sure what I expected at the Sun Down. I’d seen an image of it on Google Earth, and it looked like an everyday roadside place: a strip of rooms, a sign. I knew full well that my family history, and my odd fixation, gave it a halo of importance in my mind. But to anyone else, I figured the Sun Down would be mundane.
    The Sun Down was not mundane.
    I stepped out onto the gravel lot and looked around. The building was shaped like an L, with doors facing an open-air walkway. It was full dark now, and the blue and yellow sign blinked down on us with its shrill message about cable TV and vacancy. There was a single car in the lot, an old Tercel parked in the shadows of the far corner. There were no other cars parked in front of the motel’s doorways, no sign of anyone at all.
    Heather got out of the passenger side and we stood in a breath of silence. No traffic passed on the road behind us. Beyond the motel were only trees and darkness with a half-moon high in the sky. I zipped the collar of my coat up and stared at the building, transfixed, taking in the dim lights on the walkway, the uneven patterns they made, the blank reflections on the motel windows. For a place that was built for people to come to, ithad an air so deserted and quiet I felt for a minute like I was somewhere unearthly, like a graveyard or an Icelandic landscape.
    Heather seemed to feel the same, because she stood next to me in silence. She had left the poncho behind and was now swathed in a black puffy coat, practically a parka. I had the idea that Heather was perpetually cold.
    “Not creepy,” my roommate finally said, her voice low in the night air. “Not creepy at all.”
    My