Dirk took the key and turned to go. “Pleasant dreams,” the old man said.
Out the door, Dirk returned to his truck to retrieve his overnight bag and keys. Four, five hours sleep, he’d worry about starting his beast in the morning.
For a full motel, there didn’t seem to be many other cars out there. Dirk saw only two, in fact, one a pickup in worse condition than his, the other a station wagon with Quebec plates.
The hall was short, four rooms on either side, rather bland and barren. The usual accoutrements afforded to even the sleaziest motels, like payphones and plastic trees, had been excluded. With some effort, Dirk keyed into his room and dropped his bag on the floor next to the bed with a thud.
The clock said 1:49. The room was cold, almost as if the heater hadn’t been on at all. But it chugged away, blowing out all the hot air it could manage. Against the windows, the wind sounded like a wailing banshee. The road was too far to the side to be visible, even when the snow eased. Dirk yanked the drapes shut and sat, disappointed, on the side of the bed.
Another hour and a half, or less, and he would have been in Montreal. Saint Catherine Street. A stripper on either side and whiskey to warm his gut. He’d still do the job tomorrow night, and be back home in Centerport by dawn.
Maybe he was better off without the distractions. But he sure could’ve used at least a beer.
He heard the first scream about ten minutes after closing his eyes. The second followed immediately, and he heard a woman’s voice through the wall saying, “It’ll be alright, hon, don’t worry. We’ll find him.”
Something heavy shifted in the next room, someone opened a door onto the hallway, and a little girl called out for Fluffy.
Ten seconds later she called out again, and Dirk knew he wasn’t about to get any sleep until the damned dog was found.
He shrugged his clothes back on and stepped out into the hall. The lights, though dim, were bright compared to the darkness of his room. He shielded his eyes as he glanced in both directions.
“Have you seen Fluffy?” the girl asked.
“Not yet, kid.”
She came into view only gradually: three foot tall, cute in a little girl way but without the pigtails, tears welling up in her eyes but refusing to fall.
Behind her, the mother was pretty cute, herself, even partially concealed in the shadow of her doorway. Killer body under that nightgown, maybe more visible than it should be because Dirk only saw her in silhouette. He couldn’t even tell what color her long hair was.
“I hope we didn’t wake you,” she said.
“Just got in,” Dirk said truthfully. He didn’t move closer. “Haven’t had time to fall asleep.” He bent at the knees so that he was on the kid’s level. “So, where was Fluffy?”
“In bed,” the girl said.
Dirk nodded. A glance at the mother gave him no help. He figured the little dog—he imagined it was one of those white, powdery dogs a person might have taken to a show if it had been better groomed—hadn’t gone outside. Too cold. And he’d never find a white dog in the snow.
The girl and her mom were in the last room of the hall, which ended at a bare wall and a tightly shut window. No escape that way.
No one else seemed to have been roused. Dirk swept his eyes down the hall, meaning to check the remaining six doors—four across the hall and two on his left—but there was no need. Directly in front of him, the door was ajar.
He undid his lock to make sure he could get back and then knocked on the open door. “Hello?” No answer. “Fluffy?”
He knocked again, hard enough to push the door slightly open. It was dark. No one answered. The old man up front had said Dirk filled the motel; he half expected to find a groggy-eyed traveler—on her way to Montreal, like him—petting the straggly dog that had somehow gotten in. She’d look up at Dirk, shrug, and say, “Yours?”
That didn’t happen.
The room was a shell. The door looked fine on the outside, but inside it hadn’t even been sanded down. There were beams supporting the outside wall and the one to the hall, but no other walls, no furniture, no light switch, only bare wood and wires hanging haphazardly from the ceiling.
Where there should have been a wall to the next room, Dirk walked straight through. It encompassed all four rooms on this side of the motel, one long Hollywood behind-the-scenes facade. Outside, everything looked fine. Inside, Dirk left a second set of footsteps in the sawdust.
Five steps in the room, he wished he’d taken his guns.
“Fluffy?”
He jumped, the girl’s voice startled him so badly. Not good to get jumpy like that, even in the middle of the Twilight Zone. No wonder the motel had filled up so quickly; it was only half a motel. Or less.
The footprints Dirk had been following ended abruptly, with neither a turn to one side nor a reversal of direction. Someone, not too long ago, had stopped here. Every muscle in Dirk’s body tensed. A small pool of blood, thick and congealed, had spread to about half a foot in diameter just a few steps beyond where he stood now. A splattering of fresh stains surrounded it.
Slowly, Dirk raised his head to see, in the highest rafters, a man’s naked, ravaged body The arms and legs were pinned, crookedly, between the beams and the ceiling. Bones must have been cracked to force the arms in those directions. The chest cavity had been savagely opened, the organs removed without delicacy, leaving a gaping hole with the sharp edges of ribs protruding randomly.
From the door, he hadn’t seen the body; he hoped the girl with the lost dog didn’t, either.
He didn’t want to stay long to look at it, but a few peculiarities struck him. The eyes had been popped out. He hadn’t been stripped, but his clothes had been shredded to nearly nothing.
Dirk never had time to consider what might have done this before the girl and her mother let out a pair of high-pitched screams. There were words underneath, totally lost beneath terror, but Dirk didn’t need to discern the words to understand the meaning.
He crouched, turned, and stepped aside in a single motion. The creature, stooped even lower, snarled. It separated Dirk from the open door, from which the women had fled.
Its snout was wolf-like, its fur silvery gray, but its eyes were human. Angry, maybe, but human. Its front legs were actually arms hanging, knuckles scraping, to the floor. Saliva dripped from its jaw. Canines glistened, catching every ounce of available light from the hallway.
To Dirk’s left, another creature growled. There was probably another behind him; like a pack of wolves, they’d surrounded and trapped him.
He knew what had killed the man in the ceiling.
Fluffy emerged from wherever she hid, teeth bared, barking, tail tucked tight behind her. She was not white at all but sandy, medium-sized, half the weight of the creature blocking the door. She’d come from behind it.
When the creature turned, Dirk knew he’d never get another chance. He dashed for the door, passing too close to the thing. He heard the other behind him.
The girl appeared at the doorway with Dirk. He ran straight into her, and they toppled to the ground. Behind him, the dog yelped and then was silent. Dirk scrambled to pull the door shut, untangling himself from the screaming girl whose Fluffy had led him into this room in the first place.
In that brief moment, he saw that two of the creatures had ripped the dog in half. One scooped internal organs out of its torso; the other crouched on its legs, staring at Dirk.
Dirk managed to pull the door shut before two other creatures, bounding toward him from opposite corners of the room, slammed into it. The whole motel shuddered with their momentum.
The girl was incoherent, calling for Fluffy and reaching for the door. “No,” Dirk said, dragging her bodily away.
“Jessie, no!” the mother cried, rushing toward them.