My skin is sticky with rain when the cool lobby air, with its smell of must and hair, squeezes in under my clothes. That smell tells me everything I need to know about the room I’ll be staying in. The floor will be carpeted and up close it will smell like detergent but in a general, distant way it will smell like cigarette smoke. The top drawer of the end table next to the bed but nearest the door will have nothing but a bible in it and the bottom drawer will stick and it’ll have saw dust in the back corners. The lights will be dim and there will be a leak somewhere, the bathroom sink, most likely, but I’d place bets on the roof in this place.

I’ve stayed in a lot of places like this, is what I’m saying, and I start thinking about taking off before the guy behind the counter meets my eye.

“Checking in?”

“You’ve got a vacancy?” I ask, hoping he’ll say no.

“Sign’s lit up outside isn’t it?”

“No.”

“Sign’s broken,” he says, “We’ve got all the rooms you need.”

“Just one then.”

There’s an ash tray in the room and a ‘no-smoking’ sign glares out from the back of the door before I cover it with my jacket and take off my shoes. The room is yellow in a lot of subtle ways but better than I expected from the look of the manager. Maybe he’s got a wife or a son that looks after the customers with more care than he does. I take off my pants too, unbutton my shirt. I lift a slat of the shades and give the wet, dejected silhouette of my truck a sympathetic stare. There’s a suitcase in the cab with most of my worldly possessions but nothing in there is worth the walk back across the parking lot.

I dump the contents of the little bag I brought with me onto the bed: a book, a flashlight, three pens, and a comb case that I’d rather not talk about. The book on the other hand, the book is why I’m telling you any of this at all. This shitty-looking paperback travel guide was handed to me by a man trying to prove he had the power of foresight and it turns out the thing was written by me at some later date, a me that lives with his wife in a small apartment in Brooklyn some years from now.

“So fuck you,” I told the guy, “If I wrote the thing then I’m the one doing all the work here,” and he told me to hang on to it because he didn’t think I was taking the situation seriously. Since looking the thing over I’ve taken the seriousness of the situation at a rate of about two and half times.

‘Autumn by the Wayside: A Guide to America’s Shitholes’

The dog-eared page about a third of the way through the book has a photo of this motel and an interview with the guy in the lobby. ‘Phil’ is the only answer he gives that isn’t ‘no’ so the rest of the entry refers to him as Phillip the Naysayer which is exactly the sort of thing I would write about someone if left to my own devices. Now that I’m being told I’ve written it already the epithet seems bitter and tacky and not at all like me.

The rain peters out around ten and so I pull my pants back on and stomp to the roadside with my copy of Autumn by the Wayside and compare really carefully the pictures and descriptions to verify everything. I notice, not without a little despair, that the lit room in the book’s illustration is the very same that I’ll be passing my night in. The caption, ‘Doors are self-locking,’ seems out of place until I check my pockets and remember my keys on the table inside.

“No,” Phil says when I ask him if he’s got a spare.

“You don’t keep a master key or something?”

“Lost it.”

“You lost your master key?”

“You lost my regular keys.”

“Seems short-sighted, Phil,” I tell him and he keeps quiet in quasi-agreement.

“Handyman’ll be in tomorrow,” he says, “Take the place next door and don’t lose my keys.”

I become my own neighbor in a room that seems a little more yellow than the last but otherwise bears a remarkable resemblance down to the placement of stains. The book says it’s worth spending the night awake to avoid being woken by the noises in the walls that perk up around one and wake you up anyway so I open the bible to the first page and wait.

I’m just getting past the ‘begats’ when I hear a noise. A minute passes and I turn a page and the noise comes round again, this time clearly in the wall behind my head, a muffled noise like a jacket sliding off a chair.

That’s my room back there, my first, theoretically empty, room. Or else, and this is truly the coldest of comforts, the noise is just coming from inside the wall. It happens again while I consider, this time not waiting for something to cover it, this time nearer the door but still firmly in or against the wall. I open the book again to see if I have anything else to say about the matter.

‘The advertised breakfast manifests in much the same way as the thing in the walls: potentially harmless if left alone but tempting and ultimately a cause for distress.”

The noise again, a fabricky sliding across the wall. I’ve got myself into a pickle with this one because it’s either actually a thing in the wall or it’s a thing in the other room with things I love like my phone and my keychains. Sitting up between heartbeats, I stretch and look over the wallpaper for cracks or likely seams but don’t see anything noteworthy. I step forward and the thing inside reacts all at once with a noise like a jacket being thrown against the wall, sends me skittering back. It shuffles back toward my bed frame and the noise disappears into the corner.

Outside I see that it’s started to rain again, big sloppy dribbles from the celestial St. Bernard. I peer through the shades of my old room, trying to align the pin-prick holes into a clear image. My glasses are in there somewhere. The shade moves a little behind the window and I try to remember if I left the bathroom window cracked or the fan on or if there had been a particularly gusty A/C unit or something but none of that sounds familiar. Ominous.

Could be I’m to blame but if something’s called ‘the thing in the walls’ you’d expect that it spends at least half its time in the wall, right? That’s the sort of parameter I feel like could grant me a little leeway in antagonizing the situation.

Back in my old room I see that the thing has taken the liberty of punching a hole in the wall or, I should say, from within the wall. An exit hole. The thing that’s not in the walls flutters under my bed when I step forward and I jump on back to the door frame, just a little annoyed that my second room may very well be unviable after this. From a distance it looks like the thing left a variety of flaky, fibrous strips on the jagged edges of plywood upon exiting, dusty like moth wings. A piece breaks off as I watch and lands close to the bed, close enough that the thing under the bed, now more aptly named, reveals about six inches of itself as it scurries briefly my direction.

This is a thing about the size and shape of a flattened shih-tzu, dry and papery, no real face to speak of. The body’s made up of something like a fan mold, emitting from the center and layered over several times. When it moves, it moves in frantic, scurrying spider walks and sounds like old newspaper being shuffled around. The thing smells like mold too, it might just be a mold of some sort. If it looks like mold and smells like mold…

It moves back under the bed, little dried bits of it breaking off the edges when they brush against the frame’s leg. I flip through the book in my hand to see if there’s anything helpful. Sometimes I miss things and sometimes I feel like the book changes in between readings.

‘The advertised breakfast…’

There’s a noise, the thing moving around again. I look up and can’t tell whether it’s still under the bed. There’s nothing nearby to throw so I take off my shoe and lob it at the bed. It lands about two feet in front and the thing scurries out over it, halting eerily on top and draping its curling, fleshy slabs over the slides. It turns once, after a second, and I wonder if it isn’t looking at me.

“Boo!” I shout and it comes closer so I run outside into the rain.

The thing from the walls sits very still, framed by the open door, looking like an angry, moldy doormat. I stand in the rain, looking back. Several minutes pass and my clothes get wet and heavy. I wipe rain from my eyes, think the thing maybe moved and second guess myself. I blink and it’s gone. Definitely gone.

My shoe looks dusty and rotten where the thing sat on it and the room’s got a smell like mushrooms but maybe I’m just making that up. The coast looks clear from the doorway but I throw in my other shoe just to make sure. The thing scurries out from under the dresser and up and into the wall again. I stuff a pillow inside and head back to the lobby.

“Phil?” I ask, because I can’t tell whether he’s sleeping in that chair, “Phil I’m afraid you’ve got something in the walls of this place.”

“Saw a rat?”

“What I saw was not a rat.”

“Something like a mop head come out of the wall?”

“Phil, if we’re talking about the same thing I think you need to budget for new mops.”

Phil grunts.

“That thing in the walls is pretty freaky, man,” I continue, “Any chance you’ll be doing something about that?”

“You find that sort of thing in old places like this,” he says, “We’re renovating next year.”

“In the short-term? It punched a hole in the wall, Phil.”

“How big of a hole?”

I think for a moment before I answer.

“Big enough for a person to crawl through. Goes into the room I was in before.”

He doesn’t seem particularly disturbed by this.

“Do you have any fondness for the thing? If you hear some banging around later will you come running or is it cool that I use an amount of lethal force?”

“Thing’s got no love from me.”

“Got anything around here with some heft?”

Phil looks tired and annoyed.

“I’m the sort of guy that writes reviews, Phil, and you lending me something to defend myself with is the difference between two and three stars.”

Phil sighs and opens a drawer. Eventually he hands me a hammer that doesn’t look like it’s ever seen use.

“Thanks, Phil.”

The pillow’s gone out of the hole when I return, not on the floor so probably in the wall. I brush off my shoes and put them on. The hole itself is as it was, hardly large enough for me to crawl through and definitely not connecting the two rooms. Inside I see a lot of dust and a few more scraps that the thing left behind. I’m calling it mold, now, for sure. Some sort of roving, mean, wall-infesting mold.

There’s no answer when I tap on the wall with my hammer so I start peeling chunks back, confirming my suspicion that there’s little more than a couple of cardboard pieces dividing this place up. When the hole’s big enough I break through into my previous room.

There’s a lot of things from the wall in that old room. A few on the walls, several on the floor, and one on the side of the TV. They remain motionless, like startled spiders. I, too, am still until I hear the rustling sound of old newspaper from the other side of the wall and the jagged drapings of a thing peer over the edge of the hole.

Phil doesn’t get his hammer or his key back and he gets to keep the things I left in my room. I pull out of the motel parking lot in the rain and find a comfortable place on the side of the road to park and sleep. If I’m the one writing this book, I need to go into a little more detail as to why I call the places shitholes. If you visit this place, let Phil know I still gave him the extra star. A deal’s a deal, after all.

-traveler