Noia in the Night in Nowhere (translated from Danish & edited)

Been travelling my whole life all over the place, but barring the occasional questionable airplane/pilot combo, it was nothing, literally *nothing* that scared me - the lack of people was what was scary, and it was in Virginia, USA of all the exotic places in the world. 

Was basically finishing up a solo road trip on the east coast, it was past midnight and I’d been on the road since leaving Florida early that morning. Somewhere around the Carolina borders, I was getting desperate for some sort of lodging, I was getting dangerously tired - my eyes were starting to see all sorts of weird things at the edges of my vision, seemed the road ahead of me was under a never-ending invasion of shadow-people darting in front of the car. In retrospect, I should’ve just pulled over somewhere, despite all the signs prohibiting overnight stops at rest areas.  

I got turned away from all the full, nice hotels along the main roads, ended up following a faded old motel billboard arrow off the highway and onto a pitted, cracked old road that wound its way up a hill, past a defunct gas station nestled in the trees, and into the noisy, sticky darkness that is the Appalachian summer wilderness.   

There was a car haphazardly parking in the middle of the otherwise-empty parking lot, an old rusted-out Cavalier with its engine running, radio and lights were on, the driver’s side door was open. No people to be seen or heard, just the broken bits of country coming from the car radio and the night animals in the woods. 

The place looked like a lodge from summer camp, if it had been abandoned to Appalachian meth-heads for a decade or so - dark triangular framework that loomed over you, its presence only evident by the way it blocked out the stars.  

I parked right next to the motel entrance, but on the door is a faded sign "USE NIGHT OFFICE" and an arrow that just pointed you off into the dark to the right. Without getting out of my vehicle, I slowly rolled the car in the arrow's direction, and came to a glorified shed at the far end of the building, under the lots only light source - an old aluminum street-lamp with its own shifting halo of Appalachian insectry. The light was yellow, and I realized this was the light source I'd believed to be the moon on my way up the hill.  

I reluctantly got out of the safety of my car, the only thing I wanted less than that was to keep driving. 

Behind nicotined bulletproof glass, like an old drive-thru window at the world’s most questionable fast food joint, was an aging, balding, overweight fellow in a mandatory ratty yellowish undershirt, watching porn on an old CRT tv and annoyed that I'd had the audacity to disturb his session for a room at such a late hour.

Which was fine and understandable, but he could at least have washed his hands before spending 20 minutes and a magnifying glass to study my various international IDs and eventually handing me the key.    

And where did the driver of that lonely car go? Is it just going to be running there all night? What happened?!     

I am usually never a scared or paranoid person. But my gut feeling was shrieking, no one anywhere but the airports ever put so much energy into verifying my identity, simultaneously bored and annoyed with me. It felt almost like he was keeping me around long enough to identify a reason to make me move on

Eventually I got the room key though. The key fob was a worn piece of plywood with a number written with Sharpie. The man in the nicotine porn cell let me know my room was around the corner and up the stairs.   

I went back to my trusty vehicle.  

The other car was gone. 

I had been no more than 50 feet away from it. There had been no sound, I'd seen no people, but somehow, the abandoned car was gone. I wondered if the owner came back, if the owner’s possible murderer had escaped in the car, or whether someone unseen already had stolen it for drug money. 

This is the first and only time I've ever heard from that wicked little voice in the back of my head: "you are a girl alone in the woods" it said, and it was true. A big, strong, not-conventionally-attractive girl, but still a lone girl in the wilderness, nonetheless. I've traveled alone through lots of places that had others questioning my judgment afterwards, places I get told women never should be alone in, but I've never become aware of myself in that way before or since. 

I tried to calm myself, the other car had gone now and hopefully whoever it belonged to as well, I had nothing to be creeped out about, everything was par for cheap nighttime motels.   

I rolled my car around the corner, and into the pitch blackness that lived behind the building, guided into a parking space by the soft blue glow of a solitary, half-bashed-in vending machine. Grabbed my bag, got out, located the rickety stairs and went up. I was struck by the silence, told myself it was because the lodge now was blocking the white noise of the highway down in the valley, told myself that I'd scared the forest animals into silence, told myself once again all was well.   

As I was looking for the right room number, crunching gravel broke the silence, and another car came rolling around the corner and right into the parking lot adjacent to mine.  

"99 empty parking spaces, not a single other soul here, but you gotta pick that one?" said the paranoid voice in the back of my head. 

And then I realized that the car was identical to mine.  

Same make, same model, same color, same year. 

Nothing suspicious, just an odd coincidence, and my ability to cope with weird coincidences was shrinking by the second in this weird, dark place.  

"maybe the rental companies get a good deal on the new corrollas?" - the paranoid voice whispers, while the rest of me spotted the right door, and rushed over to it.  

A part of my brain concluded (without involving the rest of me) that if I wasn't behind that room's door before the other driver exited their vehicle, I would die. 

I jammed the key into the lock and suddenly a more physical, more noisy kind of darkness came flying at my face – the black in the black screeched angrily as it flapped away - I might've screeched just a little bit too. Apparently a pair of birds had been nesting in the light fixture next to the door.  

The other car's engine stopped and its lights went out. 

My heart was in my throat. I finally managed to fumble the door open, rushed through it and slammed it immediately behind me. First thing you do then is lock the door right? Except the chain lock had been ripped out, and all that was left was a small piece of chain dangling impotently from the backside of the door. The built-in lock on the doorknob didn't work either, as it obviously had knocked its way out of the doorframe on multiple occasions. The only lock that worked was the little extra sliding lock that you might recognize from cheap public bathrooms. I had no choice but to put my life in the hands of 2 inches of cheap metal, and slammed the lock  in pace, feeling more relieved than that piece of metal probably justified. 

So. Now I was supposedly safe. Just me, the holes in the wall, and the well-fed spiders for company. 

The room was just as questionable as you'd expect a 30-dollar room in the middle of nowhere to be. But at least I wasn't on the road. Tried to sleep, but now I was thirsty. Went to the sink for some water, after some gurgling and groaning, the faucet gave up something that was rust-colored and smelled like aquatic plants. There was that vending machine outside - could check if it still worked? Could also grab my snacks from the car... 

Since its now around 4AM and time has passed since that creepster car came up, they're probably long gone, I should be ok out there, I thought. I darted down the stairs, past the vending machine and over to the car, grabbed my crackers and some change out of the car, and when I turned around, there is someone else with his back to me, using the vending machine. Yeah, these coincidences stopped being fun a while ago. He wasn't there when I passed by 20 seconds earlier, surely I would've heard him walking on the gravel or the rickety wooden walkway?! 

I cleared my throat, shuffled my feet on the gravel, making sure he could hear me coming up behind him. I know what my reaction might be like if someone scared me at 4AM in the middle of nowhere, and who knows what startled men at 4AM in Virginia do. 

No reaction, he just kept loading change into the machine, hit the button for a soda, "SOLD OUT". 

I coughed slightly, made sure my flipflops smacked extra loudly. 

Still no reaction, he hit another button, still "SOLD OUT". 

I muttered a sympathetic 'wow' under my breath, now not more than 5 feet from him. 

He still didn't acknowledge my presence. I wasn't getting any closer than that. 

He worked his way through all the buttons, at the bottom he hit jackpot and a small bottle of water clunked to the ground and rolled away from him. 

Finally I could see his face, and was surprised to see a face my own age. Judging from his posture and clothing, I'd expected the face of a retired coal-miner or something. 

He quickly grabbed the bottle, stood up, flashed me a bunch of white teeth, turned and disappeared around the corner. His haste surprised me, it wasn't a quick walk, the man literally ran. I wondered whether he had been just as nervous about me as I had been of him? It seemed unlikely, why would a large man be afraid of some lady tourist in flipflops? 

I shrugged it off. At this point things were just too weird, and in the oddest, most anticlimactic way.  

I loaded the vending machine with change, and coaxed it into relinquishing another bottle of water, went up the rickety old stairs and back into my room. I said goodnight to the 5-inch arachnid legs sticking out of a hole in the wall, just above the headboard, and was about to pass out on the bed when the strangest noise sent shivers down my spine. 

From the fringes of sleep, the noise was the howl of a primordial Wendigo God. At that place between sleep and reality, part of me immediately capitulated to whichever mythological horror was coming for me.  

In reality though, it was just a train in the distance, blowing its horn for some or other reason, acoustics warped by the geography and terrain. As my thoughts returned to the world of logic, I realized the horn kept blowing. Here, in the middle of nowhere, there shouldn't be so many traffic intersections that the train should need to keep blowing a consistent warning. I also recognized that the sound was coming from the wilderness behind the lodge, the same general direction which I'd seen the man bolt into the darkness not long ago. The train's horn had also changed - it wasn't the typical long-drawn honk you usually heard, it had broken off into choppy sections, now the howl was erratic, almost panicked in its intervals, as if trying to warn someone. The train's noise was getting closer, through my pillow I could now not just hear, but even feel the 'clickety-clack' of the oncoming train, just as if I'd put my ear down on a train track, like in the old westerns. The entire room vibrated with the train and its howl, I could feel it in my bones, and the insistent screaming horn only got louder and louder, as if it were the voice of my own rapidly-growing paranoia. 

Just as I felt compelled to start tearing my own hair and teeth out of my own head just to shove them in my ears and stop the horrible reverberations, a flash of rational thought blew through my mind. The last thing I remember before passing out was a recollection of a scientific correlation between subsonic sound waves and an unexplainable sense of unease or foreboding. 

I came to the next morning, completely stiff since I apparently hadn't moved since passing out, but more than ready to be on my way. Bathed in golden morning ambiance, the lodge was now transformed into a cozy mountain retreat, complete with an aproned motherly figure sweeping the steps in front of the main entrance. My car was all alone in the parking lot, no sign of any other guests who'd stayed the night.

I handed the lady my key, and she flashed a bright smile. The smile was odd, and I finally realized what people meant when people spoke of “a smile with too many teeth, like a shark’s grin”.

“Enjoy the rest of your trip!”, she exclaimed cheerily, her broom didn’t miss a beat.

Thanks, I replied, and stopped to refuel at the full-service gas station at the bottom of the hill on my way back to the highway.