The Night Shift

Kayla took the job at the Restwell Motel because it paid eleven dollars an hour and because nobody else in town wanted it, and she did not think too hard about the second part until later. The Restwell sat out on the old highway, the one nobody used anymore since they built the new road. It was a long low building with twelve rooms in a row and a flickering sign and a parking lot with weeds coming up through the cracks. Kayla had driven past it her whole life. She had never once seen a car parked there. She figured that was just because of the new road. The manager was an old man named Mr. Doyle. He had her come in at nine at night for the training, which was weird, but the job was the night shift so she guessed it made sense. He showed her the front desk and the key board and the little coffee machine and the register. It took about ten minutes. There wasn't much to it. "You'll mostly be alone," Mr. Doyle said. "We don't get many guests. You sit, you watch the desk, you wake me if there's trouble. My room is the one at the end. Number twelve." "Okay," Kayla said. "There's one more thing." Mr. Doyle looked at her then, really looked at her, and his face was different than it had been the whole rest of the training. Kayla didn't like it. "It's the only rule that matters. Everything else you can mess up and it's fine. This one you can't." Kayla waited. "Room Four," Mr. Doyle said. "You see that key? On the board?" She looked. There were twelve hooks on the key board and eleven of them had keys. The hook for Room Four was empty. "There's no key," Kayla said. "There's a key. It's not on the board. I keep it. The point is you'll never have a reason to go in there, and that's good, because you're not going to." He leaned on the desk. "Here is the rule, and I need you to say it back to me. No matter what you hear coming from Room Four, you do not open Room Four. You do not knock on the door. You do not call out to it. You do not go and stand outside it. If it gets loud, you put on the radio and you turn it up and you stay at this desk until morning. Say it back." Kayla almost laughed. She thought it was a joke, or one of those things old people did to test if you were paying attention. But Mr. Doyle wasn't smiling, and the front office was very quiet, and out past the window the eleven empty rooms sat in a row in the dark, and Kayla found that she did not actually want to laugh anymore. "No matter what I hear," she said slowly, "I don't open Room Four." "Good." Mr. Doyle straightened up. He looked tired, suddenly, and old, older than he had ten minutes ago. "You're a smart girl. The last clerk wasn't smart. I don't want to have to hire again." He picked up his coat. "I'll be in twelve. Wake me for guests. Don't wake me for anything else, because there isn't going to be anything else, as long as you keep the rule." And then he left, and the door swung shut behind him, and Kayla was alone in the front office of the Restwell Motel with eleven keys, eleven empty rooms, and one locked door whose key was not on the board. It was twenty past nine. Her shift ended at seven in the morning. She sat down behind the desk and got out her phone and told herself the whole thing was just a weird old man being weird, and for almost two hours she actually believed that. Then, a little before midnight, from somewhere out along the row of empty rooms, something in Room Four began, very softly and very politely, to knock.