Then again, there was no such thing as little boys who vanished or the woman in 216.
I gulped breaths in the quiet of the truck, trying not to let panic overtake me. I could get out, go ask for help in the restaurant. But what kind of help did I want? The police? Did I just want to get out of here? To go home?
Where was home? In that moment, I couldn’t even picture Illinois. I had no idea what it looked like. The only thing I could picture was my apartment with Heather and the Sun Down Motel. Should I call Heather? Would it panic her if I did?
The driver’s door cracked open and I jumped. I hadn’t even seen Nick come back. He swung into the truck, but he didn’t touch the ignition. Instead he handed me a take-out cup and kept one for himself.
I inhaled. It was hot chocolate. I peeked through the gap in the lid and saw there was whipped cream on the top of the drink. I stared for a second, so surprised I didn’t even sip it.
“I didn’t know if you liked coffee,” Nick said. I turned to see him watching me stare at my drink. “I forgot to ask. I figured chocolate was a safe bet.”
“Thank you,” I said, my voice rusty.
He looked at me for another long minute. The harsh light from the restaurant was dimmed by distance and the shadows of the truck’s cab. It made his face look half lit, half sliced with darkness. It was hard to figure out how old he was in this light, even though I knew his age from the newspaper stories—he was twenty-nine. He looked handsome and jaded and a little bit crazy. I probably looked crazy myself, and I’d bet the light glinting off my glasses wasn’t very flattering.
“What’s your name?” he asked, his voice harsh.
I blinked, surprised. I realized I’d never told him. Well, if he was a serial-killer-slash-date-rapist who specialized in women who had just seen ghosts, it was too late now. I’d just throw my hot drink at him and run. “Carly,” I said, sipping my chocolate. It was heavenly, the whipped cream melting into the hot drink and making it teeth-achingly sweet.
“Carly,” Nick said, “tell me you just saw what I saw.”
“I saw it,” I said. “I saw that little boy. And I saw that . . . woman.” She was a woman, yet she wasn’t. She was something else.
“Jesus.” He rubbed a hand over his face, and I heard the rasp of his beard. He was wearing a dark blue plaid flannel shirt over a T-shirt, and once again no jacket. I realized he must have run straight out of his room when the commotion started.
“You’ve been staying at the motel for weeks,” I said. “Has anything like that happened before?”
“No.” He dropped his hand, stared ahead out the windshield. “There are noises. Always noises, even when the place is empty. There are strange smells, and the door thing. You saw what the doors do. That happens a lot. The lights go on and off. And one night, that woman was on my bed. Sitting on the foot of the bed. I woke up and she was just there, looking at me. The bed didn’t sag or anything—she had no weight. She was there, and then I blinked and she was gone. I could smell her perfume, and something bad. Coppery, like blood. That was about two weeks ago.”
My heart was thumping again just listening. I couldn’t imagine being so close to that woman, so close to whatever she was. “And you stayed?” I asked him, incredulous. “After you saw that, you still stayed?”
“I know. But I have my reasons.”
“Your reasons are crazy, whatever they are,” I said.
But he shook his head. “They’re not.” His voice had the slightest ragged edge to it—you could only hear it if you were listening closely. Whatever his reasons were, he believed in them. “You shouldn’t talk about crazy,” he said. “You know damn well we’re going back there as soon as we finish this drink.”
I opened my mouth, the words ready to go. No way. I’m never going back there again. Forget about my wallet and all my stuff, and forget about the job. Forget about Viv. No freaking way.
But I didn’t say any of it, because he was right. Whatever had gone on at the Sun Down, we’d run away in the middle of it. And damn it, I wanted to know how it had ended.
I wanted to know what the Sun Down looked like right now. Were the ghosts gone?
I tilted my cup and swallowed down some hot chocolate. The whipped cream was like soft, sweet comfort in my throat. I couldn’t reconcile the man next to me with whipped cream. I wiped my mouth and said, “I Googled you.”
He didn’t speak, but I felt him tense in the air between us.
“I had to,” I said. “You’re staying at the motel where I work. At night. You stay off the books. And you had a gun on your bedside table.”
“I keep that for protection.” He opened his free hand. “Some good it did. I didn’t even grab it when I left the room. I don’t have it right now.” He glanced at me. “I’ve been gone a long time. You don’t know what it’s like to have unresolved shit in your past, shit that weighs you down and draws you back to a certain place.”
Oh, he was wrong. So wrong.
“I do,” he continued. “I guess you know what happened to me. Some people can get past something like that, eventually move on. I never could. I’ve been an open wound all these years. Drugs, alcohol—nothing helped. So I thought I’d come back, see this place as a grown man. Face my past. I checked into the Sun Down for one night—one night. And do you know what happened?”
“What?”
“I slept.” He gave me half a smile, and for a second I could see the high school kid I’d seen in the newspaper stories, the kid who had been good-looking and decent and ready to take life on. “I mean, I really slept. It’s been years since that happened. I’m a night person. I’ve had insomnia for so long I don’t even remember when it started. And I checked into the Sun Down and slept for eleven straight hours. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers, the sound loud in the truck.
“In Fell, though?” I asked. “The place where it all happened? It’s the only place you can sleep?”
“I can’t explain it, either.” He looked out the window. “Eli is buried here. My mother is buried here. I sure as hell never made a home anywhere else. Maybe this fucked-up place is as close to home as I’m ever going to get.”
I was quiet, thinking about Heather saying, Some of us like the dark. It’s what we know.
“So I stayed,” Nick said. “I paid Chris a stack of money, and he left me alone once he saw I wasn’t dealing or doing any other shit. Just sleeping. Every time I lie down in that place, day or night, I fall asleep. You want to know what I’ve been doing for most of the past month? Catching up on a decade’s worth of sleep.”