A Motel Called Desire

On an old country road, on a cold dark night, a song called Loneliness ringing in my ear, the warm smell of tobacco rising up through the air, I was somewhere near a place called Ningun Sitio, or Nowhere, in plain English.

I found myself looking for a place to rest my weary old bones. It had been a long tiring day on the road, on the run from a troubled past. Up ahead I saw a crossroads with little more than a leafless tree and a boulder to one side.

As I slowly approached the junction I suddenly saw a battered old sign for a resting place called Desire. When I got closer to the sign I could see that it had some age to it. The beige wooden rectangle was heavily splintered and covered from top to bottom with the grime of eons of time.

I drove a little up a two-track path until I could see in the distance a place that looked decidedly off the grid. That was just what I wanted. The place was so off-grid, it felt like I had wandered into a post-apocalyptic war zone.

I stopped the car and walked tentatively up the bracken pathway to the front door. I knocked on the battered old door, but nobody came to open it. I put my right hand on the old squeaky brass handle, pushed it down, and eased my way past the door into a warm, welcoming world of hospitable normality.

***

A middle-aged, slightly plump woman with blond hair was standing at the reception desk. She smiled warmly as she greeted me.

"Good evening, Sir. We've been expecting you, your room is ready. Here's the key, it's number seven, second floor, halfway down the corridor."

I took the key and made my way into the lounge. There was a live fire roaring its warmth in the old chimney. On the mantle above were what appeared to be some old family photographs. To the left was a photograph of a man who I presumed to be a brother, uncle, or family friend.

I sat back in an old leather armchair and closed my eyes as I let the warmth of the fire waft over me. I was wondering what the woman meant when she said "We've been expecting you." At that point, I had not even given her my name. I wondered about who she thought I was. Before I knew it I was fast asleep.

I woke up after what seemed thirty minutes or so, only to see the fire was now nothing more than burning embers. When I looked at the old grandfather clock in a corner of the room, it indicated that I had in fact slept for three or four hours. It was midnight and time to go up to my room and get some shuteye.

At about three in the morning, I got up to go to the bathroom. When I went back into the bedroom I stopped to grab a bar of chocolate from my backpack. I got in bed and sat up to eat the chocolate. As I took off the wrapper, suddenly a mist appeared beside the bed. Out of the mist appeared a group of about three people. The first one was some middle-aged female, and she leaned right into my face and said "You know the rules here, no chocolate allowed in school, put it away."

The next morning when I told Jane about the ghostly visit that took place in my room, she said...

"Well, now that is a little strange, but then again...It used to be a school house and my daughter Emma has told me a few times about a girl in a white dress she's seen skipping along the corridor singing Ringa Ringa Roses. I believe her."

Then, whilst I was leafing through my wallet for some dollar bills to pay for my stay, the woman somehow disappeared into thin air. I left the money on the reception counterpane and turned to leave. As I did so I caught sight of some dusty photographs on a wall, one with a family in it, including the woman, a man who appeared to be her husband and a little girl in a white dress. There was another photograph of a young man who looked like he was the gardner, leaning on an upright pitch fork. In the dust on the surface of this photograph was what looked like some writing. As I narrowed my eyes to a squint, it looked like a childishly written message saying "Piggedy did it."

***

I headed back down the bracken track to the country road and turned left. Up ahead I saw a police patrol car, parked on the side. The officer was pointing a speed gun at me, which I was cool about since I was well within the speed limit. However, the patrolman stepped into the middle of the road anyway and put his arm up to wave me down.

"So, where are you coming from?" he asked as he leaned down so speak to me through the half open car window.

"Motel Desire, Sir. An old school house, I was told by the lady who runs it."

"That's impossible," he said as his eyes narrowed.

"That place has been abandoned for twenty years now. The last time I went up there it was still all shuttered up. Been that way ever since..." he stopped mid-sentence as if he had touched upon something very disturbing from the distant past.

"Ever since what?" I asked.

"The happening," he said, almost with a nervous, hoarse whisper.

"What happening, man?" I asked tremulously.

"That old school house was turned into a bed and breakfast place by a woman from outside the area, called Jane Coolidge. I used to call her Cool for short. One hot summer night, about twenty years ago, Jane lost her mind and slaughtered her husband Dane, and her seven-year-old kid, Emma. Jane disappeared and hasn't been seen since. Some say she's still around these parts somewhere and comes and goes like a ghost in the night.

"Jeez....can we go back up there together, just check the place out? Because I was there man, I swear to God. I spent the night there and it was all tickety boo, like nothing untoward had ever happened...

Ok, there was one thing..."

I told him about the ghosts appearing in my room and that seemed to convince him that I was maybe telling the truth. We jumped in his patrol car and made our way back to the old school house.

When we arrived and parked the car about twenty yards from the schoolhouse. From that distance, it looked just the same. We made our way to the front door and pushed it open. It was the same, but different.

There was a covering of what looked like many years of dust on every surface. I saw no sign of my having been there, except.....

On top of the reception desk, I saw the dollar bills I had left to pay for the room the night before but they too were covered in dust, as if they had been there for years, just like everything else.

Then I remembered the photographs, including the one with the message written in dust. I turned to look at the wall with the photographs and the policeman followed my gaze. Now the message on the glass front of the photograph of the gardner was even more pronounced. When I turned to look back at him he had turned as white as a ghost.

"Okay, we need to get out of here," he said. "I'm going to need your details."

"What for?" I asked.

You could be a material witness to what happened here all those years ago. In fact, now I think about it, you could be the murderer. You killed the whole family and buried Jane Coolidge somewhere. Turn around." As the policeman placed his handcuffs on me he read me my Miranda rights.

The last thing I remember seeing was the policeman grabbing the photograph of the gardner off the wall.

***

That was all fifteen years ago. They found me guilty on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence, the dollar bills I had left at reception. Under the dust they found my finger prints. I was incriminated by the bills and my own claim to have been there and seen ghosts. They said that I was probably ably abetted by somebody else, like the gardner who had mysteriously disappeared all of a sudden.

I did mention the photograph on the wall with the message saying "Piggedy did it," and they just mocked me. "Do you know what you are saying young man? The only Piggedy in these parts ever is the policeman who arrested you. So now, to add insult to murder you are trying to frame a decent upstanding member of our small community and officer of the law?"

***

I struck out lucky because they put me in a mental institute. My claim to have spent the night with the long-deceased ghost of Jane Coolidge and long dead school teachers was more than enough to convince them that I was insane. So I got away with a sentence of twenty years due to my diminished responsibility.

They say I could be out sometime this year, five years early due to my good behavior. Where I go from here, Lord only knows. One place I most certainly will not be going is back to some crummy, ramshackle motel called Desire, somewhere in the middle of Nowhere.

As for Sergeant Piggedy, they say one night in the dark he swerved his patrol car into a tree at high speed and died instantly. All they could find in the road were what looked like tiny child like footsteps in a strange pattern, like the child had been skipping in the middle of the road.