Wallspaces

(Trigger Warning: Sexually Disturbing Content)

Nicholas had told himself many times that he wasn’t a pervert. He was interested in the private side of his customers, that quiet and sultry peek behind the veil that no one else got. It wasn’t like he was standing there, dick in hand as he peeked through the small, carefully drilled holes in the walls of the rooms. These crawl spaces between the walls, the ‘Wallspaces’ as he had affectionately named them, were there when he had begun working at the motel, ten years ago. He had played no part in their creation or cultivation, simply making use of their facilities to watch, quiet and undisturbed.

People showed who they really were when they were behind closed doors, and it was something that Nicholas liked to experience. There was a perversity in it, a naughtiness that he couldn’t shake. Everyone interesting in the world had a dirty little secret, and it was better that his was harmless wasn’t it? He repeated in his mind that he had never acted, merely watched passively, one more ugly fixture tucked away in greasy yellow paper and splintered beams.

The Chalmers’ Motel was named after a person long dead, and stood as a single reservoir of light, amid twenty miles on either side of unending, black road. It stood on a slight hilltop, visible from the turnoff, and standing out in the endless night of the desert. The rooms were small, convenient apartments that had been set into the side of the building, connected but separated. In the walls, a passage ran from the front room, where Nicholas usually sat, and the interior of the last hotel.

The isolation had never bothered Nicholas. The manager of the place, he lived out back in a small trailer, and at times, took to sitting out beneath the stars and watching the highway, as cars flew past. Each one was a small, bloom of light, flickering in the chilly night air. Those were the nights where the urge to watch was irrepressible. Cold beer in hand, Nicholas’s flesh would ripple with goosebumps when he saw one of those lights pull into the turnoff that would lead them to his doorstep. It was an invitation into that metal carapace, a small microcosm of their life.

It was one of those nights, eleven on a Wednesday, and the motel had been fairly empty. Nicholas tried not to begin his show until the clock had passed midnight, when people would start showing up less frequently. Those tourists who would be out partying and drinking certainly wouldn’t be driving on the highway at night, and those who were had usually already committed to an all-night drive. It was a perfect time to go about his hobby undisturbed.

At this hour, however, Nicholas was stuck in the lobby, a very charitable name for the front room of the place. It gave the potential guests no illusions about the kind of establishment it was, with the same nauseatingly yellow, peeling strips of paper coating all the walls, a TV blaring indistinct programs from a ledge above the desk through a haze of electric snow. Nicholas had assumed his usual spot, hunched over the front desk so no guest would be tempted to summon him from the back room with the small bell. On the desk, he had opened a tabloid magazine that he had purchased from a nearby petrol station when he went to pick up some groceries. Nicholas liked his news the way he liked everything else in his life, as a passive observer of the drama from his quiet, orderly world. The only noise aside from the fuzzy, muffled sounds of the television were the sounds of the highway outside and the continuous, monotonous ticking of the clock. Bored and tired, he skimmed across the articles in the magazine. Another serial killer on the highway, possible sightings of UFOs, a Chupacabra feasting on cows and tourists in the middle of the rural countryside, things like that. It was a crazy world out there, Nicholas thought to himself. Always another story to watch unfold.

It was a quarter-hour to midnight when a man stepped into the front room. The door usually had a sensor on it to alert Nicholas when someone was about to step through, allowing him to clear the detritus of the night off the desk. That sensor did not go off this night as the tall, pale man suddenly stood before the front desk. Nicholas had been near dozing off, the small, grainy text of the magazine, the comforting blanket of white noise emitted from the TV and the clock’s ticking all forming a soothing, numbing soundscape of aural oblivion. The last time Nicholas had looked at the clock, it was thirty minutes past eleven, and as he fought to keep his eyes open, he became aware of the fact that fifteen minutes had passed and a man and woman were standing before him at the desk.

The man was tall and pale, with black hair and dark, inset eyes. He wore a leather biker jacket with all sorts of patches and symbols, some of whom even Nicholas wasn’t familiar with. Despite all this, his lips were the strangest shade of red, and something about his smile and his eyes made Nicholas feel oddly relaxed. At his side, a thin, blonde, lithe girl of maybe late teens to early twenties slumped against his shoulder, clearly half asleep. Nicholas unconsciously swept the magazine (and several others of a less savoury nature) into a half-opened drawer on the desk in one smooth, practiced motion and gave his best, most winning smile. ‘Out late tonight huh guys? What’ll it be?’

The girl met Nicholas with unfocused eyes and offered a smile. The man mirrored the smile, and placed a fifty dollar bill on the table. ‘I like to stop by when I pass down this way. It’s a nice, quiet place. One room, just three hours.’

Three hours huh? Nicholas processed the request mentally as he went beneath the desk to retrieve the guestbook. The guy wasn’t even going to stay the night, just spend three hours with his date. He felt the tingles in the pit of his stomach and the familiar goosebumps on his arm. Again, he felt the need to stress to himself, he wasn’t a pervert. It was simply an observation of human nature. Besides, anyone who would come to a place like this for a quick lay would have to expect something like this. Human nature and all that.

The man was still standing there, smile frozen on his face, as Nicholas returned with the guest book. ‘You got any requests, something you’d like to drink?’ he asked with a smile that he hoped wasn’t a leer. ‘Something to set the mood?’

The man gave a cheerful laugh. ‘I think she’s had enough,’ he said, giving his date a squeeze, and eliciting another vacant smile. ‘As for me, I don’t drink alcohol. Terrible for the complexion. Just one room, no disturbances for three hours. Nice and simple.’

‘It’s one-twenty a night,’ said Nicholas, looking at the man apologetically. ‘We go by nights and not hours.’ It was bogus of course, but it was a trick that Nicholas had learned from his predecessor. Sometimes people out late weren’t thinking straight, and that was the time for a little revenue enhancement.

The man didn’t miss a beat, and pulled an aging wallet from his jeans. It was dirty, worn and with dark stains at the edges. The man saw Nicholas looking at it, and chuckled slightly. ‘I know, I’ve had it for longer than I can remember. My friends tell me I need to catch up with the times, but there’s something nice about an old wallet, you know? So many memories.’

He pulled two hundred dollars in bills out and put them down on the table. ‘Keep the change,’ the man smiled, as Nicholas looked dumbfounded. He must’ve been pretty damn desperate, thought Nicholas but he understood when he looked at the drunk girl. She was beautiful, in a thin, waifish sort of way. Nicholas had never quite managed to conquer territory of that sort, but had always been curious. He pushed the guestbook toward the man and woman, and motioned to them to sign their names while he fetched their room keys.

The man signed in one fluid motion, before taking the keys to his room. The girl continued to slump against him as he walked her toward the door. Just before they exited into the night, the man looked back at Nicholas and winked. ‘See you soon, compadre,’ he said with a cheeky smile.

Nicholas didn’t stop looking at the door for at least a minute after the couple exited the building. There was something about the guy that he couldn’t quite put his finger on, but he had felt strangely light-headed in their presence. He looked into the open guest book, with the man’s signature in it. The calligraphy was beautiful, and in crisp, black lines, the man had signed his name as ‘Chalmers’. Cute, thought Nicholas to himself, flipping the book closed. He could probably tell that guy as he checked out that lying on the guest book was a fineable offence. If there was one thing that he knew, it was that people who threw around money seldom argued. Still, business was basically over for the night, and Nicholas felt the familiar stiffness in his muscles, the tension in his stomach.

He put the ‘Ring Bell for Assistance’ sign up on the desk and retreated from the public eye, closing the thick door behind the desk labeled ‘Staff Only’. He knew that it was a ludicrous thought, but the thrill of getting caught made him excited and scared. The feeling was exacerbated by the thought that the couple had come through the front door without triggering the sensor. He knew that most people would ring the bell, or at worst, stand around until he got back, at which point he would apologize profusely. It would take a special kind of person, a real wierdo to open the door and see for themselves where he was.

The way the building and the individual rooms were spaced was archaic and old fashioned, and the Wallspace between them was accessed via an old tunnel built directly into the wall behind the ‘Staff Only’ door. The interior of the Wallspace was pitch black and musty, the only source of light being small shafts that peeked through the small, eye level holes drilled in the walls. There was only one for each room, thirteen in total. The man had accepted the thirteenth room, which felt right for some reason Nicholas couldn’t put his finger on. Normally, the procedure for going through these corridors was something to be undertaken with great care, but tonight, Nicholas moved through them as quickly as he could while making as little sound as possible. He was aiming to get to the last room before anything interesting started. He could check the others later that night to see if he had missed out on anything. Squeezing through the labyrinth of beams and mysterious tubes in the darkness, Nicholas eventually reached the correct vantage point, body leaned against the thick wood of the wall, and eye pressed to the peep-hole.

The man and the woman were having a conversation, sitting on the bed, or so he thought. They hadn’t turned any of the lights on in the room, but the closed curtains did nothing to restrain the moonlight that flooded the room in a ghostly, pale glow. The man and his partner were sitting on the bed, hands clasped and faces pressed closed together. The man whispered something into the girl’s ear, and she giggled.

The man finally ran his hand through her long, blonde hair and kissed her deeply. The two of them broke apart, before kissing again, hands exploring the curves of each others’ bodies. Nicholas was watching in rapt attention, feeling a familiar tightness in his pants.

The girl stood up and the man began undressing her, first peeling her clothes off and revealing her black, lacy underwear, kissing her all over her upper body before he undid her bra, and allowed her breasts to fall forth. In the moonlight, the girl looked like an angel, every part of her body angular, petite and ripe with the freshness of youth. The underwear went away quickly before the girl was laid down gently on the bed and the man went to work, undressing as he went.

The two bodies writhed against each other in the darkness of the moonlight, Nicholas the quiet audience to this, as they changed positions and the girl ended up on the bottom, her head hanging over the side of the bed. Above her, the man was grunting, and in moonlight, the shadows accentuated the contours of his rippling muscles. Nicholas was not interested in men, but even he had to admit that the guy looked beautiful. He was considering breaking the former taboo, and pleasuring himself alone in the darkness, when he stopped, and stared.

The muscles in the man’s neck rippled, even as the girl’s eyes were closed and she was too lost in rapture to notice. They coiled, like enormous worms just beneath the skin and suddenly, something shifted in his demeanor. Nicholas couldn’t place it, but somehow, the man didn’t look like a man any more, resembling nothing less than an extremely lifelike puppet as he continued his ministrations. His hungry eyes were focused on his conquest, staring like two black orbs, unblinking in the darkness. His limbs hung stiffly from his body, like a propped-up corpse.

The man opened his mouth, and his jaw split open, the corners peeling away like soft rubber as the mouth stretched much wider than a human’s. It was like watching a snake before it bit its victim, but the mouth just kept distending, like a grotesque puppet made of lifelike flesh and rubber. Along the edges of the mouth, where the lips had pulled back and the gums were still blood-red and pulsing, sprung rows of small, sharp fangs, like the interior of a shark’s mouth. The man arched his back, before pushing his head into the woman’s breasts, wrapping his mouth around one, and visibly biting down.

Nicholas couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe as he watched it happen. The girl, head still rolling around drunkenly, gave only a short gasp to indicate that she had been bitten, and her veins pulsed in her neck and arms. They stood out, like overfed maggots as she writhed in the man’s embrace, gasping with pleasure the whole time. The pulsing in her veins became weaker and weaker before she finally gave out a soft sigh, which turned into the rattle of empty lungs as her veins visibly collapsed and her head and arms fell limp. Her mouth was hanging open, as if she had just realised something was wrong, and her sightless eyes, red with burst blood vessels, hung directly in line with Nicholas’s. He felt his legs and muscles, aching from their rigidity, go lax, and a warmth go down his leg. It took him a few seconds to realize he was staring at a dead woman.

The man didn’t seem to mind his partner’s inactivity, as he continued to press against the dead body, running his hands through her hair, and pulling at the flesh of her breast with the sound of someone chewing on soft meat. Each thrust made the woman’s head shake limply and he pulled his blood-soaked face, dark in the moonlight, out of her chest with a deep, satisfied sigh. Nicholas couldn’t take his eyes off the woman’s eyes as he silently apologized to her for his cowardice. She was dead now, and he hoped to god the man wouldn’t smell the urine soaking his pants.

Except, with a sharp rattle of breath moving, the woman wasn’t dead, at least in the traditional sense. Her eyes focused on him for one breathless second before her mouth opened wide, revealing the same serpentine fangs as her mate, and she hissed loudly. The man took this as encouragement and redoubled his efforts, as the corpses rubbed against each other, pale, bloodless hands grasping and clawing at each other’s bodies. She looked feral, with eyes wild and crimson and she bit into his shoulder, sinking her new fangs into his skin. He responded in kind, and as they fucked each other, Nicholas could see the rivulets of blood under their skin passing through their mouths and re-entering their veins before exiting through their partner’s. The man gave a snarl and pulled the woman’s legs back, snapping bone and tearing skin and muscle. She responded by pulling her inch-long claws down his back, slicing open the pale flesh like paper. A horrid cacophony filled the room of breaking limbs, snapping bone and wet splatters of tearing flesh as the undead fornicated, bending into new, horrible shapes the human body was never meant to express.

Nicholas was reminded in an awful fashion of a car crash he had seen once. The victim had gone straight through the windshield, landing on the hard asphalt as he had tried to stop. Before he had even finished rolling, a truck had plowed into his body, filling the air with a sharp crack and a spray of blood that Nicholas remembered hearing even on the hilltop. It took the police and the paramedics hours to pry the remains of the victim out of the wheels of the truck, and when they did, he had been a twisted mass of flesh, arms and legs filled with crushed bones wrapped like snakes around his body, a kind of macabre human knot.

This was not unlike the scene he saw before him now, as he stared, alone in the darkness inside a wall as the two vampires made love in the room. A twisting mass of limbs, torn and bending in different directions, the sound of bone grinding unnaturally against bone, and the glint of the moonlight reflecting off glistening flaps of skin and muscle. The man’s back was flayed completely, the skin laid to the side in neat sheets and the musculature tensing visibly in its nest of veins and nerves as it reflected his actions. The girl’s head had been turned a full 180 degrees, and her gasps of pleasure were marred slightly by the gruesome motion and rattling of the broken spinal cord in her neck.

It could have been hours or minutes that Nicholas had stood there watching, open mouthed, the revolting coupling of broken corpses, before finally, the two collapsed on top of each other, clearly spent. Whereas humans usually found themselves trying to catch their breath after moments of passion, the two undead lay there, nervelessly cold and still, a grotesque, a misshapen mound of twisted limbs, meat and blood. Nicholas had watched them the whole way through, shaking slightly, as he stood ramrod still in the quiet passage where he had hidden. There was difficulty in tearing his eyes away from the sight, and removing the sights he had already endured from his memory. The sounds of bones breaking, and gurgling, rattled gasps of feral pleasure haunted his mind as finally, he managed to drag himself back to the front desk.

Nicholas had spent the night in the shower of his trailer, the door locked, staying far from the other patrons. He had kept the lights in his house on until he saw the first glowing rays of the sun peek over the reddened horizon. The desert was cold, pale and blue in the early dawn, but Nicholas did not emerge from the trailer nor turn the lights off until the sun was high in the sky. Even then he had brought his double-barreled shotgun with him when he went to investigate the thirteenth room at the end of the motel parking lot. He didn’t know exactly what to expect, but when he opened the door, preparing for the smell of meat and spilled blood, he was shocked to find the room pristine.

The man and woman were gone. The windows were open and the bed was made, sheets clean and without a drop of blood anywhere. On the bed lay a small, folded up note. Nicholas walked over, ignoring the note before he checked every nook and cranny in the place. Finally, he walked over to the bed, put the gun down, and opened the note.

‘Your predecessor enjoyed watching as well.

There comes a point in every person’s life where they can either sit and observe forever, or decide to take action. Passivity does not absolve you of responsibility.

No one will believe you if you tell them what you saw, and even moreso, I doubt you want to explain your ‘night hobbies’ any more than you want to explain mine. So I offer you a chance.

I’ll return in about a decade. It’s so hard to keep track of time when you get to my age. By that time I will expect you to have found yourself a replacement. Train him however you like, teach him or don’t, I don’t care terribly, just make sure he keeps the motel running. This place is a convenience I’ve come to enjoy. When I do, I will make sure you are well compensated.

You’ll enjoy the life we have, if last night was any indication. You’ve seen the least of what we can do, and what we enjoy doing. No sense in ruining the surprise yet though, as I’ve seen, you like to think about things. You’ll have plenty of time for that.

Don’t worry too much, just do the job you were paid to do.

Before long, you’ll be inducted into the family business

Best Regards

Mr. Chalmers.’