Part 3 – New Name Same Shift

Part 3 – New Name Same Shift Well I’m back again. Tonight has been a little bit calmer thankfully. We’ve only had a few guests actually check in or out since I got here. There’s the writer in room forty who said he wanted to check in “for inspiration” and booked up two weeks, a guy in room twenty-six who booked for two nights to go fishing, and then a young woman in fifty-five who is on her way to visit her parents. Other than that, I’ve spent most of the night just sitting behind my desk and watching the cameras. Which is actually how I noticed this guy. A couple of hours ago, I noticed this guy in his bathrobe standing in front of the vending machine. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. After about twenty minutes though, he was still standing there. Thirty minutes go by, same thing. Same guy, same spot, same position. I got distracted for a bit when the writer came to check in. That man stood in front of me and asked questions until I thought my ears were going to bleed. Eventually, he was satisfied with the results of his inquisition and went to his room. An hour had passed and bathrobe guy was STILL standing there. I figured, at this point, I should go check on him. Maybe he was sleepwalking or maybe he’s just weird. Either way, I felt like I should see if he needed anything. It took a minute or two for me to get to the vending machine. When I came around the corner, there it was but bathrobe guy was nowhere to be found. That is until I turned around and about shit my pants. He was standing right behind me just looking at me. “Jesus Christ, buddy. You almost scared me to death!” I exclaimed. “Sorry.” “Can I help you with anything?” “The machine took my dollar.” I walked over to it to check things out. I couldn’t remember the last time this machine had been stocked. I didn’t even know we still had it. I bent down and picked up the power cord that had just been lying on the ground. “It’s not plugged in. I don’t know if this works to be honest sir.” “It did before,” he said, holding up a soda can. I looked down at it and I swear it was like something straight out of an antique store. I recognized the brand but let me tell you, this thing was likely older than I was. “When did you get that, sir?” I asked. “A while ago.” “Okay…umm. I can give you a dollar if you come by the office.” “See you later then.” And with that, bathrobe guy turned and walked down the hallway. I didn’t see him the rest of the night.

A couple of hours had gone by and I was going down a YouTube rabbit hole about people restoring extremely old vending machines, when the phone rang. It was the lady in room fifty-five. Now, room fifty-five is on the end of the building and is on the second story. That’s important context for what I heard after I answered. She claimed there was a man looking through her window. At three in the morning, I just assumed this was some creep and I did what any reasonable person would do. I assured her that we would be right there and to just stay inside. I grabbed Gary and the bat and we walked to her room. When we got there, no one was standing outside the window or by the door so we knocked. She let us in and we began to get some more information. She said that she had just gotten out of the shower and noticed the curtain open slightly and all she could see was a sliver of the man’s face. The issue I had with what she said was that she wasn’t talking about the window by the door, where the walkway is. She was talking about the one that overlooks the parking lot. There isn’t a ledge or walkway there. Gary and I weren’t exactly sure what to say. Gary stood there talking to her and I walked over to the window and opened it up. There was no fire escape here, no ledge, no tree anywhere near close enough to climb up, and I highly doubted some random guy was toting around a ladder at this time of the night right off the highway. I closed the window and joined back up with Gary and the young lady. We both reassured her that no one was there and that she would be perfectly fine. I asked if she had the TV on or was on a laptop, thinking maybe she saw a reflection or something like that but she was adamant that she knew what she saw. While we were sitting there listening to her describe it again, her face went ghost white and she froze. She stood there pointing at the window when Gary and I turned around. Through the opening of the curtain, the three of us saw a man standing there. His face was pressed up against the window. We stood there for a second and with a wave of the curtain, the man was gone. Gary and I rushed over to the window and threw it open again to find nothing. There wasn’t a sign that a person had ever been there at all. “Well. That’s new,” Gary said, breaking the silence. Needless to say, she checked out and I doubt she will ever be back. I didn’t have the heart to charge her for the night.

After that, I sat in the office for a while and obviously I locked the front door. After about forty-five minutes, Gary came out of the back triumphantly. “It’s done,” he said, with a smile on his face. “What’s done, Gary?” Like a proud father, he wheeled out what I can only describe as a trash can that had been turned into a machine. It looked like a Rube Goldberg machine made out of spare parts, trash, and hope. He had one of those big metal trash cans lying on its side with the lid propped open. There were springs attached to both sides, a couple of gears bolted near the bottom, and what looked like half a mile of wire running between everything. There was even some kind of homemade pressure plate sitting inside of it. “And what the hell is that for?” I asked. He gave me a look like I had just asked the dumbest question imaginable. “Richard.” Gary had tried using standard traps to catch Richard for a while now, and none of them had ever worked. He decided the only way to fix the problem now was to build one himself. “That’s a trash can, Gary.” “It’s a trap,” he stated defiantly. Gary proceeded to explain the intricacies of his grand design, with every ounce of his knowledge from Fuck This Possum University. Richard would have to walk in, step on the pressure plate, the gears would turn and the springs would pull the lid closed. His personal stroke of genius? He had made a sandwich specifically for bait. I pointed out that this was nothing more than an oversized, homemade version of the traps that hadn’t worked yet but I was just met with a grumble about “not seeing the vision” or something as Gary hauled it outside. Gary had been gone about twenty-five minutes before I got curious. I started to walk outside and go around the outside of the building, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. I eventually made my way back to where the dumpster was. I rounded the corner to find none other than Gary… Halfway stuck in his own trap. Richard was watching from on top of the dumpster. Richard saw me, shoved the last bite of sandwich into his mouth, and disappeared into the darkness. “Not. A. Damn. Word.” Gary said. I, meanwhile, could not stop laughing. I have seen Gary deal with things in this motel that I still can’t explain. However, it seems like another round goes to the 12-pound marsupial.

Gary wanted to leave early after the debacle with the trash can trap and I wasn’t about to ask a man who’d been bested by a creature whose natural defense response is to play dead, so I finished the rest of my shift by myself. I sat in the front office still laughing about seeing Gary’s legs kicking from that damn trap when the emergency exit alarm went off. The computer showed it as the bottom floor door on the east wing, so naturally I went that way. When I got there I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, just a door slightly propped open. That’s annoying but believe it or not, an emergency exit door propped open isn’t near as uncommon as you’d think. I walked outside the door, made sure I didn’t see anything blatantly obvious, then went back inside. I pulled the door closed and checked to make sure it closed completely. It did. All the latches seemed secured and the door didn’t appear to have anything wrong with it. After that I went back to the office. I kicked my feet up and relaxed for about five minutes before the second alarm went off. This one was not the same door. It was second floor, west wing. The complete opposite end of the building. Swearing under my breath, I walked my way up to check that door. Same thing. No one around, nothing wrong. The door latched fine and it didn’t appear to have any issues. At this point, I felt like either Gary was trying to pay me back for laughing, or some asshole kid was messing with the doors. I didn’t figure out something was wrong until about twenty minutes after the second door. See after the second door, I went back to the office and started going through the security camera feeds. I figured I would see Gary or some random kid running throughout the floors of the motel opening the emergency doors. I didn’t. What I did see though, was the one in the middle of the bottom floor wide ass open, only the alarm wasn’t going off. Now I know I said it’s an old motel, but I can say the one thing that works is the emergency exit doors. This one being wide open was a huge problem. Mr. Freedman may not pay great, but he doesn’t play with OSHA. I knew something was wrong so I walked to the exit to go check it out. When I got there, the door was just as I saw it on the camera. Wide ass open. There still wasn’t any alarm though. When I started to inspect the door I noticed a mark right on the center of it. It was a bloody handprint. And right below the handprint, written in blood… The number 14. I sat there and stared at it for a few seconds until the hairs stood up on the back of my neck and I heard “Fredmont” whispered in my ear. I ran to my car and just left. I texted the morning guy that I wasn’t feeling well and had to leave early.