I Work in a Hotel, and There's One Room No One Goes In
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I hated hotel rooms. I never slept well in them. But you had little choice when you were on a two-day cross-country road trip. It was either stay in a hotel or stay in an Airbnb. But you had to plan for the latter. You couldn't just show up at some Airbnb and check in without a reservation. Of course, I couldn't tell my wife about my hatred of hotel rooms. If I did that, I would have to explain the root of the hatred.

And that was a story I had long ago decided not to tell ever again. I had spent most of my life trying to forget that trauma. So far, I hadn't been successful. June had already showered and was tucked into bed, scrolling through social media like she did pretty much every night. It was my turn to get cleaned up. After grabbing some toiletries from one of my bags, I headed to the bathroom. I hated hotel bathrooms just as much as I hated hotel rooms.

It was a package deal, plenty of hate to go around. Although I needed a shower, I was too tired to go to the trouble. It had been a long day of driving. I told myself I would shower in the morning. I didn't want to be alone in this bathroom at night for any longer than necessary. So I decided I would just wash my face and brush my teeth before going to bed. I turned the water on, keeping one hand under the faucet while I waited for it to warm up. But as I glanced into the mirror,

I noticed that the shower curtain behind me was completely closed. Of course it was. June had closed it after her shower. "Just stop it," I told myself. "Don't do this. Just wash your face, brush your teeth, and get out of here." But another internal voice came to the fore. "If you're having this much trouble staying in a hotel room for one night, how are you going to work in a hotel?" This question, posed by a cynical voice in my head, was one I had to answer to.

"June, that's how I'm going to do it. I'll do it for June because I love her, and this is important for our future." Once the water was warm, I bent over to wash my face. When I was done, I grabbed a towel and started drying off. But I froze with the towel over my nose as something moved behind me. I stared into the mirror, looking over my shoulder at the white shower curtain. My heart rate shot up as the silhouette of a person came up behind the shower curtain.

as though they had been sitting in the tub and were now standing. Judging by the shape of the silhouette, it looked like a woman with long hair. "Oh," I thought. "It's not happening. It's not real." It didn't help, shaking with fear. I dropped the towel but didn't dare take my eyes off the mirror to turn around. A wet sawing sound came from the tub, a sound from my past. It was the thing of the blackest nightmares, a noise that I could never forget.

But it was here, loud as could be in the bathroom. Although the woman didn't move, she simply stood as if facing me, still as a corpse. My throat clicked as I swallowed. "This isn't real," I thought. The woman's head tilted to the right as that sawing sound continued. It looked like she was canting her head in curiosity, as though considering my thoughts. But her head kept going, tilting, coming off her neck with a wet, sucking sound.

It bounced off her shoulder and fell to the bottom of the tub with a thud, leaving only the silhouette of a headless woman standing behind the thin white curtain. I shouted in dismay and stepped to the door, yanking it open and rushing out into the hotel room. "What?" June said, sitting up in the bed. "What's wrong?" I shook my head, unable to say the words. "There's a dead woman in the bathroom." Instead, I just mumbled, "Big spider." June cracked a smile. "That's it?"

"I didn't know you were scared of spiders. This was a big one," I said. Still smiling, June asked, "Do you want me to kill it for you?" Finally getting my shit together, I said, "Oh, that's okay. I got it." "Okay. Let me know if you need backup." "Thanks," I said, stealing myself as I turned back and walked to the bathroom door. I took a deep breath before rushing inside and yanking the shower curtain open. There was no one in the tub. It was empty.

Of course it was. "You sure you want to do this?" I asked, as the car passed a sign letting us know that the speed limit was down to 45 miles an hour. June eased her foot off the gas, letting the old Camry cruise toward the small town of Preacher's Point. She looked over at me and smiled, teasingly. "Getting a little nervous? Well, after all the stories you told me about your family, shouldn't I be?" June took one slender hand off the wheel and grabbed my thigh.

"I have a tendency to exaggerate, babe," she said. "We've had our issues, like any other family. But they're really not that bad. And besides, this is a good opportunity for me. For us." "Yeah, but you'll be indebted to them," I said. "Won't they hold it over you? I mean, we could turn around. I'm sure I could find a decent job somewhere. It can't be that bad everywhere, right?" June replaced her hand on the wheel. "You're a high school dropout.

I barely passed my GED test. We're not going to find a better offer than this. Do you know how long it would take me to get through school if I had to work full-time? I'd be well into my 30s by the time I graduated, if I could even handle this strain. I know, I said. You're right. The next speed limit sign warned us to slow down to 35. We'd passed a few ramshackle homes half-obscured by trees, but now we were coming into the meat of Preacher's Point. Population 489.

I looked out the window, stomach aflutter, feeling uneasy about this arrangement. But deep down, I knew it was the time apart that I was really worried about. I had just found June, and now we were going to be spending more time apart than together. I didn't like that, not one bit. And then there were the stories about her parents and siblings. Stuff she'd told me about before this out-of-the-blue reconciliation. They sounded like master manipulators.

I just hoped June really had been exaggerating. A gas station came up on the right side of the road. It was the kind of place that had been new in the 70s, but now looked like the sagging relic from the last century that it was. I imagined that the awning over the four pumps would leak when it rained, and that the place would be far from brightly lit in the dark of night.

Right now, the sun managed to coat this part of the earth with a watery illumination thanks to the pregnant clouds that threatened to break water over the forest at any moment. A small market sat in a cramped parking lot between a barbecue place on one side and an outdoor equipment store on the other. Both the restaurant and the sporting goods store looked to be flourishing. The market looked like it was barely hanging on.

Streets branched off the main road down which we traveled, leading to small neighborhoods of one-story houses that seemed to sag under the weight of their own roofs. We passed a dollar store, which looked to be doing a hefty business, and a bank I'd never heard of before. There were several commercial buildings with no signs on them at all, aside from the occasional sun-faded "For Lease" sign.

June had already told me that the town of Preacher's Point made most of its money in the summer, when tourist season was in full effect. But apparently that wasn't enough to provide the denizens with year-round prosperity. Unless those denizens happened to own the sporting goods store or one of the few restaurants that lined the main drag. Or maybe the people in this struggling town were perfectly happy, and it was simply my perception souring the place for me.

Maybe they didn't mind living in sagging houses and working in depressing buildings. I wasn't one to talk, anyway. All I owned was inside the car with us, and it amounted to little more than a hill of beans. My most prized possession was the collection of notebooks I scrawled my silly stories in whenever the mood struck, along with a thumb drive containing a half-finished novel. I would be so lucky to have a sagging house and a steady job.

and I would certainly be happy to share that kind of life with June. She made it all worth it. She was the only reason I had agreed to this odd arrangement in the first place. "See this road?" June asked, pointing to the cross street we were approaching. I leaned forward and read the green sign. "Preacher's Point Road? If you take it down that way," she pointed out her window, "I'll take you to the point the town is named after."

You can't see it from here, but it sits on the top of a cliff and looks out over thousands of acres of national forest. We'll have to go there before I leave. It's a great make-out spot." "Hell, let's go there right now," I said. June laughed, a sound that always buoyed my spirits. "My parents are waiting on us," she said, but of course she knew I was joking.

Soon, the buildings and houses thinned out again, and the trees pressed in close to the two-lane road which climbed up out of the town. The old and overworked Camry struggled up the windy road. It was a miracle June's old car had brought us this far. The road leveled out, the Camry's engine earning a break as we rounded a bend and came onto a kind of plateau.

On the left side of the road, amid a clearing in the trees, stood a long, two-story building of brick and timber. June directed the car across the empty oncoming traffic lane and into the elongated U-shaped parking lot that flanked the hotel. There were only four cars in the lot, aside from the Camry. The lobby was in the middle of the building, as denoted by the steep awning and the sign that hung from it, "Preacher's Point Hotel."

There were no outdoor staircases or walkways. The front of the building was lined with windows, indicating that you had to go inside to get to the hotel room doors. June parked the Camry as near to the lobby as she could and shut off the engine. She looked over at me and smiled. "Ready?" "I guess so," I said. "They're going to love you. Just don't let them push you around, okay? Stand up for yourself."

I was just about to ask what that meant. Bajoon kissed me on the cheek and then got out of the car. I got out and followed her to the lobby door. We walked inside, greeted by the smell of wood polish, leather, and recently vacuumed carpet. The high-ceilinged lobby featured a fireplace in the middle, between two curving staircases that met on the second floor landing.

Antler chandeliers hung from the ceiling. Plush leather seats and couches sat warmly in a hue around the fireplace. Tasteful paintings of forest wildlife adorned the wood panel walls. To the right, a long wooden reception desk took up much of one wall, with a door marked "private" tucked in the back corner, to the side of one curved staircase. The desk was empty, and there was no sign of anyone in the lobby.

"Uh-oh," June said, turning to me. "Dad's gonna be pissed if he finds the reception desk abandoned." She said it with a smile, but there was an undercurrent of seriousness to it.

We approached the desk, and as we stepped up to it, two screams erupted from behind. I jumped back from the desk as two people sprang up, screaming with their arms held up, hands shaped into claws. One was a young man, the other a young woman, and I could immediately see the family resemblance to June. They both burst out laughing and pointing at me. June hadn't been fazed by the prank. Maybe she'd been expecting something like it.

"Dude, you should see the look on your face!" the young man said. He looked to be 17 or 18. I figured he was June's brother, Josh. The young woman was probably 22 or 23, although she had light brown hair, where June's was blonde. She otherwise could have been my wife's twin, just a few years younger. She was laughing too, faintly freckled cheeks red with excitement. This was the sister, Robin.

"What's with all the screaming?" a man shouted from nearby. I turned to see a middle-aged man at the top of the nearest curved staircase, looking down with his hands on his hips. His brown hair was buzzed on the sides and spiked on top. He had a graying goatee, and he wore black slacks and a tucked-in blue button-up shirt open at the collar. Robin and Josh immediately stopped laughing as everyone looked up at him. "Hey, Dad," June said. "Been a while.

June's father fixed his stare on his eldest daughter, paying me no mind at all. He walked slowly down the maroon-carpeted stairs, a stern look on his face. When he was a good ten feet away, he stopped and opened his arms wide. June moved mousily over and hugged her father. The man wrapped his arms around her and propped his chin on her head. Only then did he look at me, and the look he gave was anything but welcoming.

His green-eyed stare so intense, I found myself fidgeting and looking at my feet. The Breachers Point Hotel did a hearty business in the summer months as outdoor enthusiasts used the rustic and charming place as a home base of sorts for their various adventures. There was a bevy of hiking trails, fishing spots, lakes, mountain biking trails, and other attractions nearby. In the early spring and late fall, when the weather was right,

They also got some skiers and snowboarders staying with them. Usually those who didn't want to or couldn't snag a room in one of the several ski resorts in the area. But in the winter, the entire area shut down because of the weather. The hotel closed from mid-December through the end of February each year. When June and I arrived, it was mid-May, and the Braddock family was gearing up for a busy summer. They wasted no time in putting me to work. That was the deal after all.

I was to work for them while June took a full load of summer classes in Helena, three hours away. Her parents agreed to pay for her schooling and to pay me a decent salary while I worked at the hotel for them. Of course, they would also provide room and board. Before we'd even had a chance to unload our stuff, Mr. Braddock started barking orders, telling Josh to show me the ropes.

Josh came out from behind the desk and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. "You're gonna love this," he said, pulling me out of the lobby and into the hallway that led to the first floor rooms. As I went, I glanced over my shoulder to see June and her father in what looked like an argument.

June's eyes darted toward me, Ed tilted up toward her father, who was hunched over, grabbing one of her wrists. "Only about half the rooms are ready for guests," Josh said as we walked down the hall lined with numbered rooms. "We'll start getting the other ones ready, which means dusting and making beds and putting towels inside." The hall carpet had a psychedelic swirl pattern of muted colors that struck me as odd for the rest of the place.

but it was clean, thick, and unique. Josh released me, and I slowed, checking out the rustic door frames and the metal numbers on the doors. The locks were old-school key locks, not the new electronic ones most other hotels had. It added to the charm of the place. As he walked, Josh continued talking about all the things I'd be expected to do while working at the hotel.

Walking casually, I let him get ahead of me, in no real hurry to start working after the long car ride. Just as I came abreast of a room door, the knob turned and the door opened a crack. I stopped and looked at it, reading the room number, 111. I expected to see the door open more and a guest come out, but that didn't happen. The door simply stayed open about two inches, as if it had opened on its own.

Josh turned the corner ahead, his voice fading as he kept walking, oblivious. I turned to face the door to room 111. "Hello?" There was no answer, so I stepped forward and knocked. Two gentle raps, still nothing. I pushed the door open, glancing inside the dark room. It looked normal, as far as I could tell in the limited light. There was a short entryway that opened onto the room.

I could see a desk and a rolling chair next to a dresser with an ancient box television on it. Beyond the dresser, the corner of the room stood in a deep shadow, and as I stepped toward the threshold, drawn by something I couldn't pinpoint, that deep shadow moved, seeming to unfurl itself like a huge, thin-limbed man with arms that moved like tentacles.

Shadow dark, spider-like fingers crawled across the ceiling toward me, racing toward the doorway, seeming to get darker the closer they got to the light. Fingers gripped my upper arm and yanked, making me cry out. "What are you doing?" Josh asked. I turned to look into his face, seeing what he'd surely looked like as a small child in the throes of a vivid nightmare. He'd grabbed my arm, and now he pulled me away from the room.

I whipped my head back to the room, thinking about that strange, shadowy figure I was sure I'd seen. But it was gone. There was only the empty room, and the door slowly closing on itself. The shadows in the corner didn't move, didn't unfurl, and they didn't look anything like a spindly and too tall man. Although I'd experienced a number of vivid visions in hotels, this one was new. I'd never seen anything like it before.

I wondered if I was getting worse. Josh used his free hand to slam the door shut before turning to look at me. "How did you open the door?" he asked. "I didn't," I said. "It opened by itself." "Bullshit," Josh said, but he looked even more pale and frightened than when he'd first grabbed me. "Or it was already open," I said. "I don't know, but I didn't open it." Still gripping my arm, Josh looked at the door, Adam's apple bobbing as he gulped loudly.

"That room is off limits," he said, yanking me away from room 111. "Why?" I asked. "Because there's mold in there. We haven't gotten rid of it yet. You're not allowed to go in there, okay? I'm serious." "Fine," I said. "Just let go of me." Seeming to notice what he was doing, he let go of my arm and gathered himself. "Sorry. Let's just get this done. We only have an hour before dinner."

The hotel didn't have a kitchen, but there was a small cabin where Mr. and Mrs. Braddock stayed about a hundred yards back from the hotel. Mrs. Braddock made dinner in the cabin, and when it was time, Josh and I ventured up the dirt road that led from a side parking lot of the hotel to the house. We'd spent the last hour getting rooms ready, but Josh had barely talked while we worked. I caught him looking at me about half a dozen times, suspicion on his face each time.

His mood had changed since the incident at room 111, but the one time I tried to ask for more information about the room, inquiring about the kind of mold inside, he told me not to worry about it and to keep working. So that's what I did, making beds, dusting, and folding towels just right so they would look fancy as they hung from the towel racks in the bathrooms. It was boring work, and I could already tell it would get old fast.

i was more interested in the maintenance aspect josh had shown me where they kept the tools in one of the back rooms although he said that his dad usually handled most of the maintenance who's covering the front desk i asked as we walked up toward the house it's friday night so that means it's robin's turn josh said tomorrow it's my turn you guys take turns yep and as soon as we teach you how to man reception you'll be part of the rotation

The one-story cabin was nothing special, but it was far enough away from the hotel and curtained by enough trees that it felt secluded. We moved up the porch and through a screen door into a warmly lit open space that smelled of home cooking and had a cozy, lived-in feel to it. To the left was a living room area, and to the right, a dining room that was divided from the kitchen by a breakfast bar. Mr. Braddock sat stiff-backed at the head of the table, reading a book.

I glimpsed June and a middle-aged woman I recognized from pictures as Mrs. Braddock. "Come in!" Mrs. Braddock called cheerfully. June turned from her position at the stove and smiled at me. It seemed she was helping her mother cook. Mrs. Braddock washed her hands, dried them quickly, and hustled over to me with a welcoming smile on a face that was only just starting to show the telltale signs of middle age.

Her widely spaced brown eyes were kind and inquisitive as she shook my hand and welcomed me to her home. For the first time since my arrival at Preacher's Point, I felt welcome. It was a warmth that seemed to melt the coldness I'd received from Mr. Braddock, at least for the moment, and I reveled in it as we sat down to eat. Mrs. Braddock asked me all sorts of questions as we ate, despite June's occasional half-hearted pleas to leave me be.

It all seemed pretty innocent, and I was actually enjoying it, until she slipped in a strange question. "So, is there any past trauma we should know about?" She said the words lightly, as if they were a joke, but her eyes betrayed her. "Past trauma?" I asked. "What do you mean?" I glanced to my left at June, who was more than a little focused on her half-finished plate of food. "Oh, is that too personal of a question?" Mrs. Braddock asked.

"I'm sorry, I can be very blunt. It's okay," I said, willing to do pretty much anything to keep this woman on my side. "I'm just not sure what you mean. Well, I guess that's a good thing, isn't it? If nothing comes to mind, you must have had a pretty lucky life so far, huh?" "I guess, yeah," I said. The conversation fell away, and the sound of utensil scraping plates took over.

Then, curious about Josh's odd behavior after the Room 111 incident, I decided to inquire about it. "So what kind of mold is in Room 111?" I asked. "Is it black mold?" All the faces raised at once, eyes fixing on me before they darted toward Josh.

The moment didn't last long, but I felt its impact like a slap on the back. And I knew Josh had lied to me about the mold. "There's more than mold wrong with that room," Mr. Braddock said. "The air conditioner keeps breaking, the toilet leaks, the sink clogs. It's what we call a problem room. Every hotel has one, and that's ours. Rather than put guests in it, we just keep it closed."

We want our guests to have a great experience, and it's not worth the risk of putting someone in there." "Oh," I said. "I see. I was just curious because the door was open when I passed earlier. At first, I thought someone was in there." Again, the Braddocks exchanged glances. They were still lying to me. I just didn't know why. "It was open?" Mrs. Braddock asked. "Maybe I left it that way after I went in there earlier to make sure the water to the toilet was off."

I didn't say anything, but I had the feeling I'd broached a subject that made everyone uneasy. Even June looked slightly ill when I glanced at her. As we finished dinner, I decided to ask June about room 111 when it was just the two of us. By the time we got everything unloaded and into our room, 2:22. It was after nine o'clock and the hotel was silent. We had brought Robin a plate of food at the front desk,

and while we unloaded the car, June's sister ate and stared at her phone. There was tension between June and I that I couldn't break no matter what I tried. I thought it had something to do with Room 111, but I hadn't found the right moment to ask her about it yet. Then, as we were getting settled into our hotel room, June asked me an odd question that mirrored her mother's from dinner earlier. "You remember that night when you proposed?"

And we stayed up all night discussing all our bullshit? Laying it all out? Of course, I said. In the middle of putting some clothes in the rustic dresser, June sat on the bed inside. Did you tell me everything? Yes, I lied. It was an automatic response because I'd long ago promised myself I wouldn't tell another soul what I'd been through as a child. Not just because it changed the way people treated me, but because I had no urge to give it power by telling the story again.

I'd learned those lessons the hard way years earlier. "This is important, Oscar," she said. "If you haven't shared something with me, I need you to tell me about it now." "What is this about?" I asked. "First your mom asks me about trauma, and now you? What's the deal? Does this have something to do with Room 111?" June stood and came over, taking the stack of shirts out of my hands and putting them on top of the dresser. She grabbed my hands as she spoke.

"I just need you to promise that if you experience anything weird here, you'll tell me or one of my family members." "What does 'anything weird' mean?" I ask. "Why are you acting so strange? Just promise me, okay? Promise me that you're not hiding anything from me, and that you'll let someone know if you experience anything weird." I thought about the shadow that seemed to reach for me from the corner of room 111, and I consider telling June the truth about my past.

but the thought of that made me sick and seemed somehow wrong. Like something was telling me not to do it. Like I would lose June if I did. So I looked into her eyes, hoping she couldn't see the lie behind them, and I said, "I promise." Fifteen minutes later, we were both in bed with the lights off. Ten minutes after that, sleep took me. There was no cognizant awareness that I was no longer in reality. I'd never been a lucid dreamer.

so I had no idea what it was like to know you were dreaming without waking up immediately afterward. So as I found myself wandering the halls of a distorted version of the Preacher's Point Hotel, it all seemed perfectly natural to me. The psychedelic patterns on the 70s-style carpet swirled and morphed and climbed up the wood-paneled walls like living organisms. Dressed only in my boxers, I strode with heavy feet, walking in the air a foot above the floor,

Several of the rooms I passed had their doors open, allowing me to glimpse inside. The terrible things I saw in them seemed as natural as the fact that my feet weren't actually touching the carpet. In one room, a shirtless man crouched on the floor with his back to the open door. His left arm pinned something down while his right arm moved back and forth in a sawing motion. The sound of metal teeth cutting through meat and bone filled my skull like a macabre white noise machine.

As I continued walking, changing the angle slightly, I saw that the man was cutting into a woman's neck. She lay on her back on the floor, eyes open and staring at the ceiling. Her head rocked as the man cut and cut and cut.

But as I was just about to lose sight of her, she turned her head toward me and blinked, sending a blade of implacable terror through my heart. I carried that terror with me as I continued down the shifting, distorted hallway, peering into the other open rooms. I saw a man wearing a loose white t-shirt, attacking a woman with a hammer. The man and the woman looked just the same as they had in the other room, but also entirely different.

in that twisted dream logic that never survives the confines of reality. And I saw other things as I peered into the hotel rooms. I saw a young child being pulled out from under a bed, screaming. I saw a bathtub full of blood. I saw a wall splattered with brains and blood and pieces of skull. Taking all this in, I continued walking down the hall, knowing it was important that I get somewhere. But I didn't know where exactly.

Not until I followed a curve in the hallway and saw room 111 at the end of the hall. Of course, that wasn't how the room was positioned in reality, but it seemed right in the land of dreams. As I approached the room, the closed door opened, beckoning me in. The room was crowded with people whose faces I couldn't see, and they were all glad I was there. Although they didn't speak, I could hear their voices in my head, whispering for me to come inside.

Stepping through the door, I found myself in a brightly lit room. Everyone moved in close, but I still couldn't see their faces. Their heads were blurry, although I thought I could see little things moving in those blurs, like insects scurrying across their faces. They urged me to sit on the bed, so that's what I did. There were eight of them, including two children, and they were all dressed in clothes from another era, maybe the 1920s or 30s.

The men among them wore thick suits, the women elaborate dresses. The children, a boy and a girl, wore similar clothing, but obviously child-sized. However, there was one man who seemed to be the leader, and he wore different clothing. He struck me as some kind of religious figure, and his robes were of pure black and deep red. His voice seemed to be the loudest in my head as they talked to me.

And as the strange experience continued, his face became gradually clearer in my mind. He had dark hair, slicked back along his oddly shaped skull, a prominent brow shaded intense dark eyes, a hatchet nose jutted from the middle of his face over a gash of a mouth. They kept talking to me all at once. Then their whispers got lower and they told me their secrets. Soon, I knew exactly what I had to do. "Oscar! Oscar, wake up!"

I jerked my head and opened my eyes, immediately squinting against the bright bathroom light. As consciousness took hold, pain followed swiftly. My forehead hurt, and so did my mouth. Someone was touching me, grabbing my shoulder. I turned, seeing June standing behind me. I was in our bathroom, standing in the bathtub, and I'd been facing the tile wall. The room was so steamy I couldn't see my reflection in the mirror, and my whole body was dotted with water.

I was hot, even though I was only in a pair of soaking boxer shorts. "Are you okay?" June asked, looking more than a little terrified. "What happened?" I asked. As I spoke, I tasted blood. I tongued a new gap where one of my molars had been when I'd gone to bed. The pain of the empty socket made me wince. "I don't know. You were… sleepwalking, I guess." I turned back and looked at the tile wall, seeing a smudge of blood there.

I reached up and felt my forehead. My fingers came away bloody. "Was I banging my head against the wall?" June looked sick. "Let's just get you out of there. Did I have the water on?" I asked. "I turned it off just before I woke you up," June said. "Must have had it on hot," I said, the tingling sensation that I'd burned my skin fading only slightly. June gave me some toilet paper, which I used to wipe the blood from my forehead.

There was a small cut there, but it wasn't bleeding too badly. I tossed the bloody toilet paper in the trash can. June handed me a towel, which I used to dry myself off before stepping out of the tub. She watched me closely the whole time. I didn't know what to say, so I kept my mouth shut. My hands shook and my stomach shriveled as more of my logical mind came back from the fog of sleep. "You never sleepwalk," June said finally, when we were both out of the bathroom.

"No," I said, pulling on a pair of clean boxers. "Not that I know of. It's this place," she said from where she sat on the bed. "What do you mean?" She shook her head. "I don't know. I think we need to get you out of here." "Where would I go?" "We would go somewhere," she said. "Together. It doesn't matter. It just needs to be away from here." I sat down next to June and took her hand. "What the hell is going on?" I asked. "Please, talk to me."

June shook her head and then tucked a strand of hair behind one ear. "My family believes that room 111 is haunted," she said, staring down at her legs. "And that it's our job to keep the spirits in there." Ordinarily, I might have laughed, but not tonight. My head still hurt from where I'd been banging it into the wall. My skin still tingled from the hot water, and I was still missing a molar. How was it that I couldn't remember what had happened to me? It made no sense.

"Why would the room be haunted? What happened?" I asked. "We were never told. Our parents said it would only give the spirits power to talk about them. All I know is that it was something awful, back when the hotel was still new. Something that involved several people, including two children." I had a vague recollection of my strange dream, but it was fading away even as I sat next to June on the bed, trying to wrap my head around what she was saying. "So what?"

"You think the spirits want me for some reason?" I asked. Now June looked into my eyes. "They have this theory," she said, "that the room will latch onto someone with a dark past. Some unresolved trauma. But that couldn't be you, could it? You would have told me, wouldn't you?" Swallowing, I looked away from my wife. "People stay here all the time," I said. "Surely there's someone staying here now that has experienced some trauma. I bet lots of people with trauma have stayed here.

"Maybe," June said. "I don't know how it all works. Like I said, I thought it was all bullshit. My parents might know, so let's ask them." I interrupted. "No," June said, a little too loudly. "Why not?" She let go of my hand and stood from the bed. "Let's just go, okay? I'll call them in the morning and let them know it just wasn't going to work." "What about your schooling?" I asked. "It doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is getting you out of here before something awful happens."

Okay, I said. Okay, let's do it. Let me gather my stuff. Just get dressed, June said. I'll put some essentials in your backpack. I can always come back later for your other things. Let's just get out of here as soon as we can, okay? I feel like something terrible is going to happen. Five minutes later, we stepped out of the room and into the silent second floor hallway.

as we padded on the plush carpet toward the stairwell to the lobby. A feeling of impending dread scratched at my gut like a rat trying to claw its way out of my intestines. Apparently, June felt something too because she grabbed my hand and kept me moving. When we reached the top of the stairs, I saw that the lobby was empty. Even the desk was unoccupied. "What time is it?" I asked. June had grabbed my phone and stuffed it into my backpack, which she had over one shoulder.

About 1.30, she said as we descended the stairs. Is someone supposed to be at the front desk? I asked. Robin is probably sleeping in the back office. There's a bell in case someone comes in needing a room. That made me feel a little better about that empty desk and the suddenly cavernous and cold lobby until I saw the chains on the front doors. I stopped moving and June yanked our arms taut, turning to look at me.

"What?" she asked. Following my gaze to the chains locked around the two lobby doors with a fat padlock, she didn't say anything else. At least, nothing coherent. A dismayed sound came from deep in her chest, and she pulled me toward the office door. There was a back door through there. Josh and I had used it earlier when we headed up to the cabin for dinner. June barged through the office door and stopped dead when she saw that the couch in the office was empty. No Robin.

She shook her head and then pulled me across the room to another door which led to a hallway through which you could access the storage rooms and laundry facilities. We stepped into the normally brightly lit hall to find that it was almost completely dark. June let go of my hand and retrieved her phone, waking it up to shine the pale blue light toward the back door. We both jumped when the light picked out Robin, on her knees, facing the closed back door.

"Robin?" June asked, easing toward her sister some ten yards away. "Are you okay?" Robin didn't answer, but she was doing something with her hands up around her face. Since she was turned away from us, we couldn't see, but the jerk of her head backwards and the accompanying sound of liquid splattering on the floor were unmistakable. "Robin?" June said, voice high with terror. "What are you doing?" June's phone went dark again.

I blinked against the blackness in the moment it took for June to light the hallway up again. As the faint blue light spilled from the device, I saw that Robin now just stood a few feet away, facing us. Her mouth was open in a grin, blood dribbling out, many of her teeth missing. Her left eye dangled from its optic nerve, rolling gently back and forth on her cheek. She clutched a pair of pliers in her hands, a blood-smeared tooth held in the tool's jaws.

June screamed, but I couldn't manage such a reaction because I knew with implacable certainty that this was my fault. My sleepwalking excursion came back to me with all the clarity of a cherished and oft-visited memory. I had been in Room 111, and I had done what they asked of me. I had performed the strange ritual and, in doing so, had let them use me as a conduit to reality. The darkness inside me had given them power, and now they were using that power.

June dropped my backpack and stumbled away from her sister. Acting on instinct, I reached out to grab the pliers in Robin's hands. But she saw it coming. Or whatever was inside her saw it coming. And immediately jerked the tool away, jamming it tooth and all into her already damaged eye socket. She convulsed for a moment, floating in the air, feet no longer touching the tile. Then she dropped to the floor, head hitting the tile with a crunch.

Now, I saw that the back door had been chained shut, just like the front door. Panic mounting, I turned to June, who was taking a gasping breath between screams as she stared down at her sister. "Another exit!" I shouted. "Where?" My shout brought her back to me. Without a word, she turned and rushed down the hall. I followed, but some instinct caused me to look over my shoulder, and when I did, I saw that the hallway was crowded with people, the same ones from my dream.

the people from room 111, including the two children in the dark preacher. They stared at me, dressed in their early 20th century suits. This time, I could see all their features clearly. Their pale faces seemed to glow in the darkness. June and I hurried through the door that led out of the employees' area and into the corridor with the first floor guest rooms. She stopped at room 101 and banged on the door. Josh, wake up!

I peered down the hall toward room 111, the newly surfaced memory clear in my mind. I had done what they wanted. "Josh isn't in there," I said, throat clicking as I spoke. I had done what they wanted, but now I had to stop them. "What do you mean?" June asked. "He's dead," I said. "We need to get out of here. Is there another exit?"

"Oscar, how do you know Josh is dead?" "Where's the fucking exit?" I shouted, grabbing her arm. "At the other end of the hall!" she said, pointing. Of course, I'd seen the emergency exit earlier. But to get to it, we'd have to go past room 111.

I tugged June along by the arm as I started down the hall. "What happened to Josh?" June asked as we went. I said nothing, my gaze fixed on the open door to the haunted room. As we approached, June fell silent, and even though I knew what I would see, I still eased cautiously toward the open doorway, keeping myself and June against the opposite wall.

Peering inside, I saw Josh's body just as I'd left it. Spread-eagled on the floor at the foot of the bed, two burning candles still shoved into his bloody eye sockets. Only now the candles were much shorter than they had been when I lit them. Although his mouth was nothing but a dark hole from where I stood, I knew that his teeth were all gone. There was something about teeth. They were important to the ritual. Imperative, actually. That was what had started the whole thing.

teeth, and blood. When I had pulled out my tooth and used blood from my mouth to write the odd symbols on the wall, I had eased open the gate between the living and the dead. That was when they had really taken me over. But at that point, the ritual still hadn't been completed. So I went and got Josh, sucker punching him when he opened his bedroom door, groggy and grumpy. He hadn't gotten a word out before I hit him in the face.

Now, it was all so clear. I could see myself pulling his teeth out and then tapping them into the wall with a hammer, gently, gently putting them into their places amid the symbols drawn in blood. "What is it?" June asked, near sobbing now. "Close your eyes," I said. "You don't want to see this." I still had hold of her arm and tried to keep her back, but she wrenched free of my grip and peered into the room, seeing her dead brother on the floor.

A sorrow-filled shriek fell from her lips before I reasserted my grip and pulled her down the hall. We turned the corner and reached the emergency exit door. There was no chain on this one, which I found odd, but I wasn't about to reject our good fortune. I opened the door, shoved June outside and said, "Get your parents and get out of here!" Before she could answer or move toward me, I pulled the door closed between us. "Wait!" She cried, banging on the door. "Oscar, don't do this! Please!"

but I had to do this. I had started this whole thing. I was the one who had to end it. I had no idea how I would do it, but I knew I had to try. I was just 8 years old when it happened. 8 years old when my father caught up to my mother and I in a seedy motel. My father paid a woman to knock on the motel room door so my mother wouldn't know it was him.

As soon as she opened the door, my father rushed in from the side and shoved his way inside, closing the door behind him as the woman who'd knocked protested and threatened to call the cops. My father had tricked the woman, telling her that it was a birthday surprise for his young son. It was a surprise, all right, but it wasn't my birthday. It was the worst day of my life. I had been sitting on the bed, and when my father barged into the room, I scrambled off the mattress and under the bed.

I remember my mother pleading with him, asking him to put the hammer down. He hadn't had a hammer in hand when he'd barged into the room, so I later determined that he added sticking out of one pocket, or more likely, hanging from the hammer loop on the carpenter pants he always wore. After all, he was a carpenter by trade. My mother screamed, and I heard a sickening thud.

A moment later, as I peered out from under the bed, I saw my mother fall to the discolored and sticky carpet, unconscious. I watched my father's boot-clad feet as he walked to the metal room door, opened it, and strode outside. The woman who'd knocked on the door started screaming at him, but she went silent with another one of those sickening thuds. Each and every time I relived that night, I told myself I should've bolted out that open door and kept running until I couldn't run anymore.

At least I wouldn't have witnessed what came next. But at eight years old, I didn't think of it. I had always been with my mom, and I was determined to stay with her until she woke up. The blood on her forehead and the way her eyelids flickered filled me with fear, but my child's mind couldn't comprehend what was truly happening. Moments later, my father came back into the room, slammed the door, and dropped a duffel bag to the floor.

I watched his feet come toward the bed, and I scrambled back toward the wall as his knees touched the carpet. Soon, his face came into view as he leaned down to look under the bed. The gaunt and wild look on my dad's face scared me so badly I wet my pants right then. The look in his eyes was one I could only describe as vacuous evil. My father had always been a little crazy, a little violent, a little prone to insane outbursts and threats. But this was different.

There was none of the manic eye rolling or face twitching. He was preternaturally calm, like whatever frayed barrier that had previously kept him from snapping completely had finally torn in half. He reached under the bed and pulled me out. I screamed and clawed at the carpet, but he was no use. He stood me up at the foot of the bed and told me I had to watch. He said if I didn't watch, then Mommy wouldn't go to heaven. And didn't I want Mommy to go to heaven? With the hammer, he hit her in the face once again.

Then he retrieved a saw from the duffel bag and started to work the blade through the flesh of her neck. Pretty soon, he had worked up a sweat. He took his shirt off and continued until he had decapitated her. I watched the whole time, believing that she wouldn't go to heaven if I looked away. The police showed up just as dear old dad was dragging my mother's headless corpse to the bathroom. They called the room, but dad just let the phone ring.

He grabbed my mother's head and brought it into the bathroom, putting it into the tub along with her body. Then he grabbed a pistol out of his duffel bag and pulled me into the bathroom to make me look at her body. "I always told her I would cut her head off," he said. "I told her if she ever left me I'd cut her head off, didn't I?" I just stared at her, wondering when she would go to heaven. "Hey!" Dad said, slapping me. "Didn't I say that? Didn't you hear me say that?" I looked up at him, all cried out, and nodded.

"It's important to be a man of your word, son," Dad said as he turned to look at his dead wife in the motel room tub. Then he brought the pistol up, put the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. I stood in the bathroom for what seemed like a long time, but was probably only a few moments. My mother lay in two pieces in the bathtub. My father lay collapsed against the toilet with the contents of his brain on the wall and the mirror and some of it on me. The motel room door smashed open, and the place was filled with police.

One of the officers grabbed me up and took me out of the bathroom. As he did, I looked at the mess of blood and brains and skull fragments dripping down the bathroom wall, and I wondered when my mother would go to heaven. As I got older, I tried my best to move past that trauma. And one way I did it was by imagining that I had jumped up to fight my father as soon as he burst into the room. In those fantasies, I was a grown man instead of an eight-year-old boy.

and I was able to wrestle the hammer away from my dad and beat him to death with it, ending his miserable life and saving my mother. His evil deeds had poisoned my life until I found June. She was the light that kept my darkness away, even if I could never tell her about that darkness. I could never risk her looking into my eyes and seeing the same DNA that had been inside my father. I could never risk her looking at me with pity because of what my father had done all those years ago.

And just like I could never tell her about my deep-seated trauma, I could never let the evil I'd released get to her. So I had to find a way to stop it for long enough so she could get away. I trudged away from the emergency exit door, ignoring June's shouts from inside. But as soon as I turned the corner, I saw the people in their thick wool suits and their puffy dresses, and the leader in his sleek red and black robe. He stood with one hand on each child's shoulder.

They were at the end of the hall near the door June and I had come through earlier, about the same distance from room 111 as I was. Although their mouths didn't move, I heard their whispers in my head. Shutting my eyes and clutching my skull, I fought to keep them out, to fight them. I couldn't let them take control of me again, but I was awake now. They'd managed to wriggle into my skull when I was asleep because I hadn't been alert, and because I wasn't aware of their tricks.

But now I was. I forced my eyes open and bolted toward room 111. The leader, some kind of dark preacher, gestured with his head and the door flew closed. But I managed to get my arm into it before it shut completely. I fought against the door, forcing it open and stumbling inside toward Josh's body.

I yanked the candles out of his eye sockets and tossed them aside before rushing over to the symbols I'd drawn on the wall, complete with Josh's teeth, which I had tapped into the plaster amid the symbols. First, I dragged my hands down the wall, pulling out many of the teeth. Then I spit on the dried blood and swiped my hands across it to smear the symbols. A knock came at the door, making me freeze. It was a familiar knock.

the exact same knock that had been echoing in my head since I was a child of eight. I turned to find myself no longer in room 111 at Preacher's Point Hotel. Instead, I was in a room at the Budget Inn off I-40. My mother got up from the bed and walked over to the door, saying nothing. She looked through the peephole and then, seeing it was a woman outside, said, "What do you want?" I looked to the bed, expecting to see eight-year-old me sitting there, but what I saw was a hammer.

The same hammer I'd used earlier to tap Josh's teeth into the wall. Only there were no teeth in the wall. There were no bloody symbols. Only a scuffed wall with paint stained yellow by years of tobacco smoke. "Don't open the door, Mom," I said, staring at that hammer. But the exchange had already happened. The woman outside saying that someone had broken into my mother's car. Stressed and strung out and not thinking, my mother was opening the door. And it was too late to stop her.

As my father barged into the room, I grabbed the hammer off the bed. But as I went to lunge for the man who'd killed my mother, I found that I was frozen to the spot, shaking with fear, warm urine soaking my pants. I was an eight-year-old trapped in a man's body, scared to death but not really understanding what was happening, only that it wasn't good. My father slammed the door and locked it as my mother screamed at him to get out.

He turned around and said, "I told you what I would do if you left me. I told you!" Even as he spoke, he reached down and grabbed the hammer from the loop in his carpenter's pants. "Everything told me to move. To do what I'd done so many times in my imagination. This was happening again. But of course it wasn't. Not really. It was all a trick. The Dark Preacher was tricking me. Using my trauma against me much like he'd used it to gain access to my mind.

My father wasn't really here. He was long dead. So was my mother. This was all a ploy. The Dark Preacher was the one there. He was the one wearing my father's appearance like a skin to paralyze me until he could either kill me or gather enough power to escape the hotel he'd been confined to for nearly a century. I couldn't let him win. I couldn't let my father win again.

As he raised the hammer in one hand, reaching out and gripping my mother's neck with his other, I broke my paralysis. Launching myself over the corner of the bed, I raised the hammer and smashed it into my father's face before he could do the same to my mother. He stumbled back and fell to the floor.

Pure rage filled me as I fell upon him, reversing the hammer and smashing the claw into his face repeatedly until his features collapsed or were obscured by torn flesh and blood splatters. Chest heaving, I finally stopped and looked down at my dead father, confused about what I was seeing. The air was filled with the sound of a blaring alarm. A sudden coughing fit took over, and I realized I was sweating. My back was burning up.

I looked over my shoulder to see that I was no longer in that motel room from so many years ago. I was back in the Preacher's Point Hotel, and the curtains were on fire. Flames licked the ceiling and were busy engulfing the wall. Smoke billowed along the ceiling, growing thicker with each passing moment. Somewhere nearby, the sound of a window shattering fought with the fire alarm. It barely registered. I was thinking about my father.

I spun around and looked down at the man I still straddled. He didn't have my father's curly black hair, and he was much older than my dad had ever been. His brown hair was buzzed on the sides and spiked on top. He had a graying goatee that surrounded a bloodied mouth full of smashed teeth. "Mr. Braddock!" I realized with sickening shock. Movement from the still-open door to the hotel room prompted me to look up. My gaze landed on June, who stood in the doorway, staring down at her father.

I dropped the hammer to the carpet and stood up, coughing as I breathed in more smoke. June's eyes crawled up to my face, and in the light from the growing fire behind me, I saw something far worse than pity in her eyes. I saw hate. She turned around without a word and ran down the hall in the direction of the emergency exit. "June!" I yelled, stumbling after her. I chased her outside and around the building to the front, coughing and calling her name to no effect.

There were several guests standing outside in the parking lot, talking excitedly to one another. June went directly to her car, and I followed along, trying to talk to her, to explain. When we reached the car, I noticed that June's mother was inside, sitting blank-faced in the front passenger seat. June got inside and started the engine up. I stood outside her door, knocking on the window. After a moment, she looked up at me and cracked the window.

"Get in the car. We need to leave. Now." Unable to do anything else, I got into the car, scooting into the middle of the backseat as June reversed and then tore out of the parking lot, heading toward the town of Preacher's Point. The first mile passed in utter silence. I attempted to say something about her father several times, but none of the words seemed right. Saying I was tricked just seemed so pathetic, and saying sorry seemed so trite.

Halfway into the second mile, I said, "Is she okay?" "No, she's not fucking okay," June said. "Look at her. What happened?" "I don't know. Shortly after you locked me out of the hotel, I saw her standing in the woods like that, just staring at the place. Once I got her into the car, I went back and broke a room window so I could get inside and get you and-" She trailed off. "And what?" I asked. "Find my dad," she said.

"Jesus, I'm so sorry, June. I thought he was someone else. Something else." "I was right." The words sounded pathetic and trite and ridiculous. "Just don't," June said. "Don't fucking talk about it." I sat back, wringing my hands, glancing up at June in the mirror every so often. She remained silent. We all did. When we reached Preacher's Point, the town was shut up tight. So when June took a ride off the highway, I couldn't imagine why.

"Where are we going?" I asked. June didn't answer, but I had my answer soon enough. We passed a sign that read, "Preacher's Point Scenic Area, Half Mile." "June?" I asked. "Are we going to Preacher's Point?" Still, she didn't answer. As we rounded a curve in the road, June smashed the gas pedal to the floor.

The old Camry lurched, pressing me weakly against the back seat. A street light up ahead cast illumination over Preacher's Point, which was essentially a small oval parking lot bordered by a metal railing, overlooking what I assumed was a sheer drop into the valley below. June steered the car right for it. "June!" I screamed, lurching between the two front seats and trying to grab the steering wheel. June elbowed me in the mouth with more power than I thought she had.

I fell back against the seat and looked into the mirror, but it wasn't June's face I saw. It was the face of the Dark Preacher. He smiled. A second later, the Camry broke through the metal railing and sailed out from Preacher's Point.