Part 10 – The Overlap

Well, everyone I think this is going to be my last post for a while. It has been a damn day. I started my shift like normal. Gary and I talked for a while. He explained his latest idea to trap Richard and about the 15 work orders he has. It was about an hour before I realized I hadn’t seen Dan or Elliot yet. They hadn’t checked out and all of their gear was still set up throughout the lobby. I asked Gary if he had seen them today and he just shook his head no. “Maybe they finally got tired of this place,” he said. “But their car is still here and so is all their stuff,” I said, gesturing to all the equipment scattered across the table in the corner. “Maybe they walked.” “Where?” Gary shrugged. “Hell, if I know.” I looked up their reservation on the computer. They hadn’t checked out yet, so I went to their room. I knocked and no one answered. I knocked again and waited. Still no one. “Dan? Elliot?” I said, knocking a third time. “Guys, are you in there?” I unlocked the door and pushed it open. Their room was a disaster. The beds were flipped. A lamp lay shattered against the wall. Long gashes stretched along the wall, like deep claw marks. They ran the span of the wall, interrupted by unexplainable gaps, like a partially erased drawing. There were several on the ceiling. In the middle of the room, a camera lay on its side, smashed to pieces. I ran back outside and yelled for Gary, who was walking around the corner. “What’s wrong?” he asked, approaching the room. When he looked in the door, he took a step back and grabbed my arm. “Call the cops.” It didn’t take long before they arrived. They walked through the room taking pictures and marked the area off with tape. The officer didn’t seem to have any clue as to what happened. “I haven’t ever seen anything like this,” he said, rubbing his forehead. They questioned the two of us about Dan and Elliot. What were they doing here, if they had said anything specific to us, if they had mentioned that they had plans to go anywhere, etc. We answered their questions but didn’t have much to add. They hadn’t mentioned leaving to us and based on the room, if they did, they didn’t leave on their own terms. The police continued for the next couple of hours. They took endless photographs, collected statements, and went through any belongings they could find in the room. Eventually, they told us to keep the room closed off and they would get back to us. After they did, I went back to the lobby and started going through some of Elliot’s notes. There were pages and pages of ideas, theories, readings, and questions about things that they had seen during their time here. The notes were a mess. Elliot had pages and pages of EMF readings. There were tons of theories crossed out. There was one section that caught my eye. Four lines, circled in red ink. HAUNTING? TIME DISPLACEMENT? RESIDUAL EVENT? PARALLEL SPACE? Underneath that, “NOT SEPARATE EVENTS. OVERLAP?” was underlined. The two of them had gone through the entire motel. They had sketched out the layout and even included the physical measurements. The hallway that included room 14 had multiple, different measurements for the same hallway. None of them matched. 117 ft. 118 ft. 146 ft. 119 ft. 203 ft. 113 ft. It was like the motel itself shifted and changed. I started to read a section that had questions about the Bellweather Hospital and the Bluebird Bar when the phone rang. Every line was lit up. We currently only had 15 guests staying at the motel, but when I checked the phone’s screen, I could see that every room was calling at the same time. Every. Single. One. I picked up the phone and a cacophonous chorus erupted from the handset. There was the sound of children laughing, wails of torment, people casually talking, static, and horrific howls of otherworldly beasts. It was like a soundtrack of endless realities playing over each other. My ears ached with the booming sounds from the phone. I jerked the handset away from my head, but the sound continued. I could still hear it bellowing from the motel itself now. The lights started to flicker on and off as the ground bucked and started to shake. At one point when the lights flickered, I could see the lobby full of shadowy figures, standing there perfectly still. When the lights flickered again, they were gone. Gary came running from the back. “What the hell is going on?” The lights went out again. The lobby sat in darkness as I clumsily searched for a flashlight. I finally found one and flipped it on. The lobby had changed. The computer, the fake plants, everything was gone. They had been replaced by old lamps, and a solid oak desk had replaced the cheap one I had sat behind so many times. The door appeared to be 20 feet further away than it should. There were people there. Men in miner’s clothing walked across the open room casually, as if nothing were happening. They didn’t look up at either Gary or me. “What the fuck?” I asked. The lights came back on and then it was back to the same old lobby that I had sat here and written these posts in. Dan and Elliot’s equipment was going insane. Gary and I dashed to the front door, throwing it open and running outside. We weren’t in the parking lot. Not the way it normally is anyway. The motel was back to the pictures I had seen from the articles and when I looked up, the sign didn’t say “The Wayfarer Inn.” It said The Fredmont Hotel. The sun was high in the sky, and the parking lot was filled with cars that were from decades ago. People in seersucker suits walked past the two of us, completely oblivious to our existence. The ground shook as thick black liquid rose up our legs, completely engulfing our bodies. We fought against it to no avail. When it receded, we were standing in a hallway. A tall man, whose arms dragged along the ground as he walked, stood there, his back turned to us. “What the hell is happening?” Gary asked. The man turned to face us. His face was hollow, his eye sockets deep pools of black. He started to walk towards us slowly. His arms were outstretched, scraping along the walls as he got closer and closer. The two of us tried to run but made no progress down the hallway. I looked over my shoulder to see the man had almost made it to us. His jaw opened and stretched into an endless pit, lined with rows and rows of teeth. The lights went out. When they came back on, we were back in the lobby. The phones weren’t ringing. None of the equipment was going off. It was silent. Gary rubbed his face, unable to say anything. The two of us stood there breathing heavily. “WHAT THE FUCK?” I yelled. “I think I’m going to be sick,” Gary said, his hands on his knees. “We’ve got 15 guests. We gotta check on them.” “Aw hell. Okay. Let’s get this over with,” he said, wiping vomit from his mouth with the back of his sleeve. I went back to the table where Elliot’s notebook had been. I looked back at the four questions Elliot had circled. I looked back at the words underneath them. NOT SEPARATE EVENTS. OVERLAP? I folded the page and put it in my pocket. Before we left the lobby, Gary spoke up. “The cameras.” Gary looked at me. “What?” “Dan and Elliot's cameras.” The two of us ran over to them, hoping to see some sort of evidence of what had happened. Nothing. It just showed Gary and me standing completely still for 47 minutes. I watched the footage again. Neither of us moved. We didn't look around. We didn't speak. We just stood there. “Forty-seven minutes?” Gary asked. “Yeah.” “It didn't feel like forty-seven minutes.” “No.” Gary stared at the screen for another few seconds. “I really am gonna be sick again.” The two of us ran outside the lobby and up to the second floor. We had to go check on everyone and get them out of the motel. When we finally made it to the second floor, it was wrong. It looked like St. Agnes’ again. The wood floors, the benches. They were all there. The kids weren’t running and laughing this time though. They just stood there staring in our direction, their faces completely emotionless. We both slowly took a step backwards. The lights went out again. When they came back on, the hallway was the Wayfarer again. Several doors were open as we ran down the hallway to the first guest’s room. As we passed, I looked into each one. One was completely black and empty. One opened into an endless sea of bodies, wiggling in one large mass. We passed by one halfway down the hallway that stopped me dead in my tracks. It was the hospital room I had seen at the Bellweather. The man covered in the sheet stood there in the middle of the room. “Why did you stop?” Gary asked, grabbing my arm. As we went to continue moving down the hall, my eyes were locked on that man’s room. We had made our way about 20 feet away from it when I saw his covered head peek around the doorway into the hall. The lights went out again. This time, when they came on everything was seemingly back to normal. We were standing outside of the first guest’s room. Gary knocked on the door rapidly. A small woman opened the door, shocked to see us there. “Yes?” “Ma’am, are you okay?” “Yes… Why?” “You haven’t seen or heard anything?” I asked, confused. “No. It’s been quiet. I was just watching a show before you knocked.” This happened with every guest we talked to. None of them heard or saw anything out of the ordinary. One guy was asleep when we knocked and chewed us out for waking him up this late at night. 15 guests and not a single one of them had anything to say. We made our way back to the lobby. Gary dropped into one of the chairs while I sat behind the desk. Neither of us said anything for a while. I just poured us each a coffee with the traditional whiskey backer. Gary didn’t even react when Richard walked by the front door with a sandwich in his mouth. After a few hours, Gary looked over at me. “You got any vacation time?” “Yeah.” “Me too.” I looked at him. “How much?” “Enough.” “When do you want to leave?” “Now.”