#roadsidegothic

[hellsbellsmoteltales]

The Chattering Chute

The traveler jerked awake, heart hammering, convinced that the gaunt bony motel clerk was standing over his bed. The room was silent, but his throat felt like dry sand. Wanting a cold drink of ice water to settle his nerves and get the creepy out of his head, he grabbed the plastic bucket from the dresser and stepped out in the dim hallway, and walked to the machine alcove for ice.

He held the bucket under the chute and pressed the lever expecting the "clunk" of ice cubes-- but instead there was this rhythmic, high-pitched rat-tat-tat-rat like gravel hitting the bottom of his bucket. When he looked to see, it was a heap of gross, yellowed molars and coffee-stained bicuspids; some were rimmed with black decay, others with crumbling silver filings, and the machine wasn't stopping; it just kept pouring them out like a relentless mechanical vomit of human teeth!

Just as the bucket began to overflow, a shadow stretched across the machine. It was the bony skeletal-looking clerk with the hollow eyes from his dream, his skin the color of old parchment, leaning against the wall. He didn't look at the traveler; he just stared at the pile and muttered...

"Must be a clog in the hopper. They always get stuck when the roots are still attached."

[hellsbellsmoteltales]

Hells Bells mystery guest #2

Earl walked into the Sunrise Diner looking like he'd been dragged through a gravel pit and hadn't shaken off the dust. His hair was a stringy, dirty mess escaping from under a ball cap--but it was his hands Gladys noticed that stayed with her --thick, restless hands with grease ground so deep into the knuckles they looked like bruised iron.

He didn't order much, just sat there with a twitch in his jaw everytime the door creaked, looking less like a handyman and more like a man who'd just finished a job he didn't want to talk about.

That's why Gladys was still watching an hour later from the diner window as he crossed the street to the Hells Bells Motel and hauled a greasy tool bag into Room 4. He spent half the night "fixing" things that weren't broken. By 3:00 a.m. he was lurking behind the diner's dumpster, burying a heavy package in the dark with a frantic heavy step. When the sun finally crawled over the horizon, Earl was gone. He left nothing behind in Room 4 but a single rusted skeleton key sitting dead-center on the nightstand.

Gladys saw the patch of fresh dirt by the dumpster when she took the trash out at dawn. She looked at it for a long minute, then turned her back and walked away. Gladys had seen enough of Earl to know that some things are better left buried.