by Ray Cluley
By night the motel was nameless, the stuttering fluorescence of its neon sign only a rectangular outline of where words once were. The light made the shadows of the building darker and gave moths the false hope of somewhere to go, collecting the dust from their broken wings so that a once vibrant white was now mottled and sulphurous.
By day the place fared no more favourably. The title of its sign was visible, Travellers Stay, but so was the fact that it needed a fresh coat of paint twenty years ago; flakes peeled like scabrous sores. In sunlight, the building behind the sign was more than a dark shape but not much more, the drab monotony of its sun-bleached walls broken only by the repetition of plain numbered doors.
When Matt arrived, the motel was neither of these places but something in between. Dusk was a veil that disguised before and after and the motel looked as good as it ever could. Anyone who came to the Travellers Stay came at dusk.
“We’re here,” Matt said. He made a slow turn and bumped gently up-down an entrance ramp. A sheet of newspaper skittered across his path as an open v, became caught on a wheel, and was turned under it twice before tearing free. He pulled into a spot between a rusting truck and a Ford that sat flat on its tyres and noticed neither. “Wake up.”
Only when he cranked the handbrake did Ann stir beside him, sitting up from the pillow she’d made of her jacket against the passenger window. The denim had pressed button patterns into her forehead like tiny eyes. A sweep of her fringe and they were gone without her ever knowing they were there.
“Where are we?” Her breath was sour with sleep.
“Motel.”
Ann turned to the back seat. “John, honey.”
John, her teenage son, mumbled something that spilled a line of drool and woke. He wiped his chin and sat up. “What?” he said. “What?” He sniffed at the saliva drying on the back of his hand.
Matt released the steering wheel and flexed his fingers. He arched his back and shifted in his seat, eager to get out and stretch his legs.
Ann was looking around. “Here? Seriously?”
Matt ignored her.
There was a woman sitting on the porch enjoying a cigarette. She was leaning back on a chair with her feet up on the rail. She was wearing cowboy boots. Cowgirl boots, Matt supposed. Black jeans and a vest top the same, faded gray from too many washes. The door behind her was propped open by a pack of bottled beer.
“Want me to loan you fifty?” Ann said. “She can’t be any more than that.”
It could have been funny from someone else, but Ann had never mastered that type of humour.
“She’s not a hooker,” Matt said. He was tired. His words came out the same way.
“And how would you know?”
The woman was attractive. Matt found a lot of young women were, these days. But if he felt any lust it was for the cigarette she held and the beer she drank. Hell, it was for the ease with which she did both. As he watched she brought a hand up to her mouth and inhaled lazily. She chased it with a tip of her drink.
“I don’t know,” Matt said. He got out of the car before he had to say anything else.
The woman looked his way and raised her beer in silent greeting.
“Hi,” he called back. Mr Friendly.
The thump of a car door behind him. Ann.
“We’d like a room,” he said to the woman.
“You sure?”
Matt looked at Ann and wondered how much of their conversation the woman might have heard.
“We’re sure,” Ann said. “You got any?”
Matt sensed some sort of bristling, but only from his wife. The woman in the chair merely shrugged. “Twenty or so, judging by the numbers on the doors.”
“We just want one,” Matt said.
“Help yourself,” she said. She said it differently to most people. Got the inflections all wrong.
“Do we pay by the hour here or what?” John asked, slamming his door at the same time because he wasn’t brave enough with his insult. Matt heard him, though, and he’d told him before about slamming the door. Not for the first time he wished Ann’s ex had got the custody he’d apparently wanted.
Ann made a show of looking around the parking lot and beyond. It was a show Matt had seen before and it meant she was looking at how he might look at the woman.
“Just one night,” he said.
“Hope so,” the woman said, getting up and going inside.
That’s how you do it, Matt thought, looking at John. Chicken shit.
Ann was looking at Matt, eyebrows raised, waiting for him to react somehow to the woman’s attitude. He made a show of looking around the parking lot and beyond.
The sky had darkened to something like the colour of the woman’s clothes. An occasional breeze tossed litter in small circles and swept grains of sandy dirt across the ground. From far away came the quiet noise of a passing car, a long hush of sound as if the coming night had sighed.
“We’re not staying here,” Ann said.
“I’m tired,” he replied. It meant yes we are and I don’t want to fight.
“I’ll drive,” said John.
“Not my car.”
The woman returned with a large disk of white plastic declaring 8 in big bold black. It looked like a giant eye with twin pupils, the key dangling like a metal tear.
“Thanks,” Matt said, stepping up to take it.
“Clean sheets, towels, TV.” She pointed across the lot. “Vending machines are over there.”
“Thanks,” Matt said again. He gave the key to Ann and grabbed the bags from the trunk. John kicked at a crushed can and sent it clattering. The woman sat back in her chair and retrieved her bottle. She brought it to her mouth slowly. Swapped it for the cigarette.
“Quit staring.” Ann took one of her bags from him, more for the impact of snatching it than from any desire to help. She gave the room key back to him so whatever it opened up would be his fault.
“Good night,” the woman said quietly as they walked away. And in a dry tone, addressed to the floor, “Don’t let the bed bugs bite.”
“It’s gonna be a shit hole,” John said.
Matt smacked him across the back of the head with his free hand. Thought, fuck it.
“Hey!” John and Ann said together, John rubbing at where he’d been struck.
“Language,” was all Matt said, but mostly he’d struck out because he was fed up with the boy. And there was no need to state the obvious—of course it would be a shit hole.
“You can’t hit me,” John said. “You’re not my dad.”
“Thank God.”
“Matt—” Ann started.
“Sorry. I’m just tired, okay? Sorry.”
He wasn’t tired, though, not really. Tired of driving, and tired of taking John’s crap, but not tired like he wanted sleep. In fact, what he wanted was a beer and a smoke and a few minutes on his own to enjoy both.
Ann gestured at the door. A brass 8 that was probably plastic, a peephole beneath like a dropping.
Matt fumbled with the key. The overlarge fob made it a handful. It was the old-fashioned type of key, one you turned in a lock. It turned easily enough; he could have opened the door with a toothpick. He pushed the door open.
There were whispers in there, whispers in the darkness. He reached around the frame for the light switch.
The first thing he saw when the light came on was the usual motel scenery. A large bed, nearly-white sheets tight across it with a tatty blanket on top, and a bedside table with one drawer. The drawer would have contained a bible in the old days but now probably held dried balls of gum and cigarette burns. A TV angled down from the wall so it could be seen from the twin room as well, though the door to that was closed. Somewhere there’d be a tiny bathroom that didn’t have a bath.
The second thing he saw was movement as a number of cockroaches scurried for cover. Their shiny bodies glistened in the light they tried to run from. One sped for the shadows under the bed while another moved as if lost. One made straight for the open door.
John brought his foot down hard but missed. The insect dropped down between two boards of the porch.
“Beautiful room, dear,” said Ann. But she went in, slinging her bag onto the bed. Fearless city girl that once was.
John went in ahead of Matt, knocking him as he passed. He said sorry as if it was an accident and Matt had to fight the urge to kick the back of his feet into a tangle that would send him sprawling to all fours.
John put the TV on and sat on the bed, looking up at a commercial.
Ann opened and closed the drawer.
“Picture’s shit,” John told them. He glanced at Matt and added, “Shot,” as an alternative.
Matt dumped the bags and went to find the bathroom. He expected to find it between the two bedrooms.
He found it between the two bedrooms.
There was nothing there to scare away with the light. Just a sink and a toilet and a mirror. The mirror was spotted with neglect that would never wipe away. It distorted Matt’s reflection, darkened his face with blotches. Someone had smeared a fingernail of snot on it.
“Nice.”
He unzipped, lifted the toilet lid, and pissed, tearing a sheet of tissue to wipe the mirror with. It wasn’t until he was shaking dry that he saw the cockroach turning in the bowl. Its body span in a current Matt had just made and its legs kicked at the air. It would never get out.
I know exactly how you feel.
He flushed it away, wondering how it had gotten in there in the first place.
“Matt,” Ann called, “can you fix the TV?”
He glanced again at the mirror on his way out, wondering what had happened to the man he saw there.
Back when Matt smoked and drank, when he was single, when he was playing and the band was doing pretty good and could maybe one day do better, he got into a fight with a guy because the man was yelling at a woman. He did it because it was often a sure way to get laid and the woman looked good for that. Red hair, straight and long, good breasts and striking eyes. She wore a top that pushed her tits up and her eyes she showed off with subtle make up.
“The picture won’t stay like it’s supposed to,” she said as he emerged from the bathroom. She tossed the remote onto the bed and continued pulling things from her bag. Instead of makeup, these days her eyes were lined with tiny wrinkles. She rarely looked at Matt now as she had back then. The way she looked at him now was like he was exactly the way she supposed. Her eyes still lit up when she smiled but that was less frequent, and usually because of some TV show. The first time she came her eyes had been wide and her mouth was a pretty O, as if the orgasm had startled her. He hadn’t seen that for years.
Matt reached up and turned the TV off by the main switch. ‘Fixed,’ he said.
John muttered something Matt ignored and Ann ignored the both of them.
“I’ll get some dinner,” Matt said.
John threw himself onto his own bed and stretched out. “Pizza.”
“He’s not driving tonight,” Ann told her son. She didn’t use the most supportive tone.
Matt left, closing the door on both of them and resting his hands on the porch rails. He looked at the sky and saw nothing he hadn’t seen a hundred times before. The words of the motel sign were invisible now, hidden in the glare of a surrounding neon rectangle. The yellow tubes looked like they’d been white once and then pissed on.
Across the lot, on the shorter length of an L shaped porch, the woman continued to smoke and drink. Occasionally she’d look at the end of what she smoked but mostly she looked at the ground.
Matt took a deep breath. He hadn’t had a cigarette in six years (Ann had urged him to quit) and so he hoped for some second-hand smoke. What he smelt instead, carried to him on the dusty air, was the welcome tang of marijuana. He filled his lungs with it, slight as it was. He watched as the woman released another mouthful of smoke, wishing he was near enough to breath it in.
He went to the vending machines instead.
A couple of cockroaches, alarmed by his approach, hurried out from beneath the machine and raced past his foot, slipping under the door of room 12. Others congregated around a nearby garbage sack, bumping into each other and adjusting their course.
The vending machine offered the usual candy and chips as well as some microwave snacks, though he hadn’t seen a microwave in the room. He rummaged in his pocket for money and found only a couple of folded bills. The readout told him NO CHANGE.
He’d see if the woman could help him.
She heard him coming and puffed a final time on her joint. She was stubbing it out and chasing the last toke with beer when he offered his money and said he needed change.
“Of course,” she said. “Change.” But she made no move to give him any. He leant closer with the cash and she took it with a sigh. She stood up and stretched, pushing out her chest in a way that was all the more alluring for being unintentional, her hands at the small of her back until it clicked. He wondered how long she’d been sitting out here. Before he could ask, or make any kind of conversation, she was stepping into the office behind her.
“For the machine?” she asked, calling it slowly. Lazily. The same way she drank her beer.
“Yeah.”
She returned with a handful. “It’s kinda picky with what it likes,” she said, explaining all the coins.
“Great. Thanks.”
She puffed her hair out of her face, brushed it aside when that didn’t work. “Anything else?”
“Yes, actually. Do you have a microwave back there? Only I saw-”
“Yeah, we got one,” she said, sitting again. “Just bring whatever you get and I’ll nuke it.” The gulp she took of her beer was an obvious goodbye.
Matt went back to the machine. He fed it coins until it served him his choices and took them back to the woman.
“Can I help you?” she asked. It wasn’t like she’d forgotten seeing him already. And it was disconcertingly earnest.
“Sure,” he said. “You can nuke these.” He tried a smile.
“That’s it?”
He wondered if she was a hooker after all.
“Er . . .”
She took the food from him and carried it back in, side stepping over a cockroach that sped across the floor. It turned a circle and went back the other way.
“Where you heading?” she asked, tossing the packets into the microwave. For a ridiculous moment he thought she was talking to the roach.
“Nowhere.”
She looked at him, started the microwave. “You got two minutes,” she said over its hum.
Matt laughed politely. “Home,” he said, “Picked the boy up from his dad’s, saw the in-laws. They want to give me a job.”
“Not good?”
“No.”
“What do you do?”
He said it for the first time in years. “I’m a musician.” Words that used to impress every girl he ever said them to. Some pretended otherwise, but it always worked.
“Not any more,” she said.
“What?”
“Not if ma and pa get their way.”
“Oh. Yeah. Exactly.”
“They just want what’s best,” she said. It was what Ann had told him, several times, until the drive lulled her to sleep. He’d probably end up taking the damn job.
They were quiet until the microwave dinged.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I want them to leave me the fuck alone.”
Matt’s surprise registered only when he saw hers. She offered food that looked as plastic as its wrapping. “I meant which of these is yours?”
He took it all without specifying, muttered, “Thanks,” and hurried back to his room.
He expected Ann to give him shit about how long he’d been. Wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d spied on him from behind the blinds. He braced himself for it. He opened the door and went in, dropped the lukewarm food on the bed, shut the door, said, “Dinner,” and then saw John.
The boy was stood in the middle of the room and at first Matt thought he was attempting some kind of prank. He wore a black cloak draped over his shoulders and had wound dark tape around his chest and waist. He flailed his arms around in cardboard tubes that he’d stretched black socks over. This was how Matt rationalised it. John’s curved back was a shiny black that glistened in the room’s light. Matt could see Ann’s reflection in it, saw how she cowered in the corner of the room.
“Ann? What’s going on?”
Ann shook her head and made wordless noise. She was rocking from side to side, looking at the thing in the middle of the room.
“John?”
He had wires sticking up from some sort of black hat. He was screeching, rubbing his extended arms up and down his legs as he crouched and then knelt. He leant forward on his elbows and brought his feet up behind where they seemed to disappear into the cape that draped him. The head wires flicked back and forth like fishing rods casting line, or like antennae. Yeah, antennae, that was it. The boy’s knees opened and sprouted bristled limbs. His calves separated, spitting split shins into new feet. And still he was screeching.
Ann screeched with him. Her rocking had become easier thanks to something like a large curved shield she had on her back. Her clothes were disappearing as if melting into her skin, only to be replaced by an oil spreading from her pores. Matt watched as her breasts distended and spread into a single band of blackened flesh. He heard things cracking in her chest. Her stomach swelled then flattened and split into sections and her newly segmented body fell forward, face down to the floor. The glossy shield she wore on her back separated for a moment and shook thin wings before settling back into place. Her hair fell away as two protrusions sprouted from her head, dancing back and forth erratically as they grew. Claws burst from her palms as she reached for John. For Matt.
Matt retreated until he felt the door handle press against his back.
John was now a huddled shape the size of a suitcase. He bumped his way around the room, striking furniture and hissing. Ann was tuning tight circles on the spot.
Matt opened the door behind him and rolled around it out of the room, slamming it shut. When a cockroach fled from beneath he brought his boot down quick and hard without thinking. There was a satisfying crunch. He slid his foot back, wiping the mess into a streak. The creatures in the room were hissing and fluttering and banging into things.
Matt stepped back from the door, waiting for it to bump with an impact. The porch rail stopped him stumbling into the parking lot. He leant against it and waited.
Eventually the sounds inside subsided.
He wiped his mouth, his stubbled chin, and glanced around to see who’d been alerted by the noise.
Across from him, in a chair pushed back against the doorframe, the woman sat drinking beer. She lowered the bottle and wiped her mouth as he had done. He stared at her for a long moment before she beckoned him over.
Matt went with a quick walk that wasn’t quite running, glancing back only once.
“Everything alright?” she said as he turned the corner into her section of the porch.
“My wife . . .”
He didn’t know how to finish.
“John. He . . .”
She nodded, got up and went inside. By the time Matt was at her chair she had returned with another for him. She put it down beside hers and sat. “Yeah,” she said. “That happens sometimes.”
She gestured for him to sit. He did. When she picked up her beer, she hooked another bottle with it and passed it over.
Matt looked briefly at the bottle and took his first mouthful of real beer in five years. Ann had made him quit, or rather she bought near-beer which was the same thing. He gulped until his mouth was awash with it. It was delicious.
“How did you find this place?” said the woman.
“I just turned off the freeway. I was tired. What’s happening?”
“It doesn’t matter.” She raised a leg and pushed against the rail to tip her chair back. She kept her foot on the rail and took another swallow of beer, leaning back in a comfortable balance. “Even if I could tell you.”
“They’re fucking cockroaches,” Matt said. He’d finally pushed the words from his mouth.
“I don’t think they’re at the fucking stage yet,” the woman said. “Gotta get used to it first.”
Matt shook his head. He was calmer than he should’ve been, but he wasn’t ready for jokes. “They are cockroaches?”
“Mm. Tough little critters. But then so are we, right?” She drained the last of her beer and set the bottle down with the row of other empties. From her angled position on the chair she couldn’t quite set it down properly and it fell, spinning. Matt watched as it slowed to a stop, the neck pointing his way, and thought of games he’d played as a teenager.
“So the kid’s not yours?” she said.
“No. God, no. He’s a—”
“Cockroach.” She sniggered the abrupt laugh of someone drunk. She had been looking out into the dark but faced him to say, “Sorry.”
He shrugged. “I was going to say asshole.”
“Like his father?”
She asked the questions without seeming to care for answers. Like they were rehearsed, or lines she knew well from a familiar movie. Matt answered her anyway with another shrug, adding, “You know, she didn’t even tell me she had a kid until we’d been together a year? Can you believe that?”
The woman handed him another beer and he slapped the top off against the railing. He brought it up to his mouth so quick for the foam he hit his teeth. The woman winced for him as he gulped it down. She looked back into the darkness.
“You wanna be a rock star, huh?” she said. She smiled when she said it, looked his way so he could see it before it went. “The bright lights of fame and fortune.”
“Sounds stupid now,” he admitted.
They watched the moths beating themselves against the motel sign. Closer, Matt could see the words within the neon. He noticed the lack of apostrophe, Travellers Stay, and wondered if it was true for everyone.
“What are you doing here?” he asked her.
“Nice girl like me in a place like this?” She spat an arcing stream of beer into the parking lot. “Hiding. Deciding what I want to be. I’m allowed to do that, you know.”
He held his hands up in surrender, though her tone hadn’t been entirely aggressive.
The woman set her chair down and rummaged in the front pocket of her jeans for a crumpled packet of cigarettes. Matt hoped she’d offer him one and she did. When he looked inside he saw a row of ready-made joints.
“You’re a musician, right?” she said, seeing his hesitation as reluctance.
He took one and gave the packet back. “It’s been a long time.”
She returned the pack to her jeans without taking another. “If it’s your first in a while, we’ll share.” She pointed to where the lighter lay next to scattered cigarette butts. A couple were joints smoked down to fingertip length. Roaches, they were called, Matt remembered. This was a roach motel. He snorted a laugh.
“You gotta smoke it first,” the woman said.
He glanced over at room 8 and wiped his lips dry. He sparked a flame from the lighter. The paper pinched between his fingers crackled and glowed as he sucked the flame down. He shook the lighter out, a habit he’d had long ago, and exhaled smoke in one, two, three little puffs.
“Good man,” the woman said.
“Used to be.” He felt light headed. It had been a long time. He passed the joint over.
“Thanks.”
“My name’s Matt.”
“Amber.”
A cockroach ran a straight line across the edge of the porch then turned and made for them on the chairs. Amber toed it aside gently and it hurried back the way it had come.
Matt seems to dream the sex and when he wakes he pulls her over onto him so he can watch this girl with long un-red hair fuck him again, and she does, and this time slowly, but then he’s kneeling at the bedside pulling her jeans down and her panties and he realises maybe he’s still drunk or still dreaming or remembering or something. He kneels at the bedside and she opens her legs to him and he stares at her sex, but this time before he can stand, plunge, enter her, before he can feel that welcoming wet warmth of a new woman, a torrent of cockroaches spills from inside, a swarm that flows from between her legs to flood the room, dropping from the bed to the floor in inky waves, scurrying over his thighs and groin and tangling themselves in the hair there. When he tries to scream, something scampers up across his neck and chin and into his mouth, bristled legs tickling his lips and tongue, wings fluttering against his teeth, and when the squat weight of it slips down his throat he wakes up gagging.
She was at the window, looking out through the blinds. The light coming in was early morning and neon. It made her look hazy.
“You can go now,” she said.
She had dressed back into her jeans and vest, her arms folded over her chest and a cigarette between her fingers. He had seen that chest, kissed it, squeezed each breast. Even remembering Ann, what she had become, he felt little regret. He wanted to do it all again. He hardened under the covers thinking about it.
“I want to stay here for a while.”
Outside, the motel sign flickered and blinked out.
Amber brought the cigarette to her lips and blew smoke into the weak sunlight coming in between the blinds. It curled and spread there, gray and slow. “Maybe this is my fault,” she said to it.
He tried to sit up, to say something.
“No,” she said. “You should go. Be a rock star or something.”
He brought his arm out from under the covers to reach for her but knocked a lamp down and it smashed. He felt clumsy, like his arm was too long.
She merely glanced sidelong at him and smoked some more. “Too late,” she said quietly, and pulled the cord at the window.
The blinds gathered up in a rush and bright sunlight streamed into the room, blinding him. He cried out and crossed his arms over his eyes, thinking this was the worst hangover he’d ever had until he felt how horribly bristly his flailing arms were, how slender. Maybe it wasn’t a hangover, maybe he was still drunk or still dreaming or remembering or something, but oh that fucking light hurt!
He rolled from the bed, marvelling at how easy it was; there was a strange new curve to his back and, oh God, he’d seen something like it before, hadn’t he? He slid into the darkness beneath the bed, the shade like cool water on his thickening skin.
She was saying something about how he’d had a chance, but it was hard to hear the words over the high noise he was making, and when she said something about his chance or choice or whatever he had no idea what she was talking about because all he could do was hiss and turn on the spot as his back split and opened and new spiny limbs burst from old ones.
I’m a moth, I’m a moth, I’m a fucking moth!
But of course he wasn’t, he never had been. It was easier to hide from the light than to seek it out, easier to blame others for his lack of happiness than to risk being burned in the pursuit of it. The bed above shifted and bumped with him as he changed, but it grew more distant as he diminished and decided and became what he’d always been.
“I guess you’ll stay a while,” someone said. Someone who knew the way, once, but lost herself on purpose to avoid choices. She’d never be anyone or anything.
He didn’t care. There were things with him beneath the bed, nudging the dust and scavenging waste. They had faces, these things. Human faces, looking down at the ground as they bumbled around. He’d never noticed them before.
He remembered, then, the one he’d crushed from room 8. Did it have a face like these? And whose face had it been?
He flexed the wings he’d never use and scurried back to his room to find out, hoping whoever he found there would accept him for what he was.
Behind him came the call of tiny voices he pretended not to understand.
Ray Cluley is a British Fantasy Award winner with stories published in various magazines and anthologies. Some of these have been reprinted in Best of the Year volumes, Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror, as well as Steve Berman’s Wilde Stories: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, and Benoît Domis’s Ténèbres. He has been translated into French, Polish, Hungarian, and Chinese. His short fiction is collected in Probably Monsters while a second collection will soon be looking for a home. He is currently writing for Black Library’s horror imprint, as well as working on his own novel. You can find out more at probablymonsters.wordpress.com