AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Recognize that voice?” she asked. “Or those words?”
The man’s body language shifted fiercely. He leaned away from his new friend, the sudden change punctuated by a furrowed brow.
“Is this some kind of joke?” he asked.
Ella glanced around, wondering if he wasn’t referencing something different. There was no one else around, nothing else to seize his attention. “Huh? A joke?”
“Yes. Who sent you this? Who put you up to this?” he scowled.
“Nobody, sir. This is a voice sample from a recent crime scene.”
The man steadily rose from his chair, now shaking with a sudden course of rage. He hobbled away towards the nearby stairwell, turned around and said, “I’ll get you for this. I’ll get all of you.”
Ella looked down at her hands, making sure she wasn’t stuck in some violent state of hallucination, or if she hadn’t accidentally shown the man a picture of a middle finger.
No. This stranger had become enraged at the sound of a rough, barely audible voice.
Ella leaped from her seat and made for the fleeing stranger as he vanished into a corridor, but then her partner’s voice drove a wrench into her pursuit.
“The hell is wrong with that guy?” Ripley asked.
Ella’s mind raced with questions, but no answers seemed forthcoming.Theman’s sudden reaction was a complete mystery. “I have no idea,” she confessed. “Did you see where he went? Upstairs?”
“I didn’t see him. I just heard shouting. Some lunatic?”
Ella joined Ripley at the stairwell, glancing for any sign of the incensed stranger. She should go and apologize to him, she thought, although for what she had no clue. “He said he was a local so I played that voice sample for him. Then he just… went crazy.”
“You’re the angel of death, Dark,” Ripley said. “Can’t leave you alone with anyone.”
Footsteps from behind announced a new arrival. A motel worker came from the back room and eyed the agents up. “Can I help you both?” she asked.
Ripley said, “Yes, we’ve got two rooms booked, but…”
“But there’s another guest here,” Ella jumped in. She’d created this problem and she needed to fix it. “Older man, was sat here reading a newspaper. Would it be possible to speak to him? Or get his room number?”
The motel worker,a middle-aged woman with curly brown hair, checked a notebook on the desk. “Miss Dark and Miss Ripley, that’s you?”
“Yes,” Ella said.
“Well, um, we can’t give out room numbers of other guests, but as far as I can tell, you’re the only people staying here.”
Ella dug her fingernails into her palm to make sure she wasn’t locked in some weird dream. What the hell was going on here?
“No, there was a man. He said he’d been staying here for weeks.”
The clerk flipped through the notebook again then shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, “But there’s no record of anyone else checked in.”
Ella didn’t have time to think. She bounded up the stairwell, heart pounding, hot on the heels of this apparent ghost. Did this man know something she didn’t?
***
Ella dropped onto the bed, letting the mattress consume her and soothe the aches from the fifteen-hour workday. Her ghost hunt had ended as abruptly as it started, with no sign of the mysterious stranger anywhere on either floor of the motel.
It was possible she’d misremembered and that he’d left the motel entirely, or perhaps found another way out of the building via the stairwell. However, more concerning was his reaction to thenameless and unrightvoice recording. Had it set off some troubled memory? Did he recognize the voice as someone close to him? She had a cacophony of questions, angry wasps stinging her temples, buzzing from one uncomfortable query to the next. She tried to focus on one question at a time, but as soon as she thought she had an answer, morequestionswould take their place. Combined with everything else going on, thecycle of bewilderment felt like a never-ending maze she was doomed to wander forever.
Ripley had seen him too, and that offered a little comfort. He wasn’t just a manifestation of her daydreams, he was a real human being made of flesh and blood and clothes. He said his name had been Gary, so if she needed to, she could perhaps find him through the police database. How many Garys could there be in one town? If this stranger recognized the speaker in the audio file, or if he recognized the bizarre words, she needed to track him down immediately.
The time on the digital clock beside her said it was just after one in the morning. That meant around seven hours of sleep at most. She battled with the idea of staying up all night and putting in a few more hours of work, but that just meant collapse would be inevitable around midday. Lack of sleep always came with a sacrifice, and in the end it just wasn’t worth it.
