Peri

Chapter 16: The Red Room-Part Three

"Peri?" I said, choking back tears as I held my phone up to my ear.

"Yeah, what's up? Wait. Are you crying?" Her initially casual tone quickly shifted to one of concern as she processed the quavering in my voice. "Morgan? What's wrong? Do I need to come get you?"

"Mhm. Hurry please."

"Okay, sure. I'll be right there."

I was standing on the side of the road when she pulled up in Aunt Vicky's car.

"Hey, uh, what the fuck is that?" She said, clearly panicked, "I could see it from, like, a mile away! What happened?"

"I don-I don't know," I stammered, trying to stop crying.

"Did you kill somebody else?"

"No!" I shouted, sucking up a fat glob of snot before continuing, words tumbling out all at once, "I was just hanging out and then one of the lights went out and when Korina's mom replaced it it was red but no one else saw that it was red then the lights kept turning red one by one until that happened and I don't know why or what to do but I can't take this horrible noise anymore and I just wanna go home!"

"So, no one else saw this?"

"No! At least, I don't think so."

"Look, dude, I don't know what the hell you did to break reality again, but this is really, really bad."

"It's all really, really bad! It's been really, really bad for a while now!"

"I know, I know. Let's just—" she grunted in frustration. "Just get in the car. We need to go. Now."

Wiping my eyes, I pulled open the door to the passenger's seat.

"A little more urgency, please."

Picking up the pace, I climbed inside and buckled my seatbelt, barely able to get the door shut before Peri took off. My eyes were glued to the window as Korina's house rapidly faded into the distance. Peri sped all the way to the motel, but it was still very late by the time we arrived because she had originally picked the place under the assumption that we were leaving in the afternoon. Upon first impression, the motel was a dingy old lot with a C-shaped block of rooms that wrapped around a dirty, uncovered swimming pool. There were three stories, each with an open-air walkway wrapped in railing so brittle-looking that I was certain a toddler could have broken the bars. Cutting right through the middle of the C was a stairwell that looked to be more rust than metal. All-in-all, it looked extremely unwelcoming, with the worst part being the massive, neon eye-sore of a sign. It faced both the street and the rooms, blasting everything in a large radius with a grimy, red spotlight. As we pulled into the parking lot, I felt the heat again, and made my discomfort known to Peri, but all she did was apologized and tell me that it was our only option. She reasoned that it would be better than trying to sleep in the car in a Wal-Mart parking lot, though I wasn't completely convinced. As she got out to go check in and get our room key, I laid down on the floor of the car to get as far away from the heat as possible. Eventually, she came to get me, and we went up to our room on the third floor.

Each step creaked under our weight as we ascended, the light overhead occasionally flickering, its electrical buzz harmonizing with the drone of the flies that swarmed the place. Some unidentifiable liquid formed a shallow pool in the corner of the second landing, piss or vomit, it was hard to decide. As we climbed the last flight to the third floor, I could only hope that the dark red splotches on the steps were just rust.

It was upon looking out from the textured concrete walkway leading to our room that I realized that there were no other cars in the parking lot. I, finding that suspicious, pointed it out to Peri, but she reassured me by saying that the motel was shaped like an H, and that the other guests were probably just in the lot on the other side. She invited me to walk through the breezeway attached to the stairwell and see for myself, but I had walked through enough strange liquids for one night, so I declined.