Angler's Ridge--Chapter two
Chapter one
Chapter two
The duffle sits beside the bed like a dead body. No matter where I go in the room, I know it’s there. I can feel it, like eyes burning into the back of my skull.
Eyes like headlights.
The water in the bathtub runs red with rust for a few seconds before the pipes groan and gurgle like someone drowning, and then it’s pleasantly warm enough. There are some bath salts and bombs and oils, so I take a well-deserved pampering, lying back against the cool porcelain and closing my eyes and trying to let it all fade away.
How did this happen? How did I get here?
Everything seems to have moved so fast. One minute my duffle and I were minding our own business, the next minute I’m in this failing motel and I don’t even know where I was going.
I can go anywhere. I can buy a house, change my name. I could buy a yacht and sail for the rest of my life. I have options now.
I’m almost asleep when I hear a low murmur, a voice. Panic surges through me and I sit up, sloshing water onto the floor. I definitely hear a man speaking.
My voice catches in my throat. It can’t be…one of the local hicks. They can’t know what’s in the bag, can they?
I’m helpless in here, so as quietly as I can I climb out of the tub and wrap myself in a threadbare towel, ear pressed against the door.
“…er earlier this morning. The storm is expected to bring strong winds, hail, and lightning. Stay indoors until the sirens blast the all-clear…
”
Confused, I pull open the door and look around the room. Sitting beside the bed is a small, hand-crank weather radio.
Relieved and feeling a little stupid, I unplug the tub and then turn the radio off before changing back into my clothes from earlier.
I need to go clothes shopping.
I wonder if this place has a gift shop? I’m not looking forward to the walk back to the office, but I am hungry and my clothes feel sharp and gritty against my freshly-washed skin.
I slide the duffle under the bed and arrange the blankets so it can’t be seen, check my wallet to make sure I have plenty of cash, and set off back up the trail.
I guess it’s a pretty little pond. There’s a small pier that leads out into it, where I suppose I imagine fathers used to fish while their children ran around on the ramshackle playground.
I bet it was nice, to have the sort of family who did stuff like this. Long summer road trips, staying in hotels, seeing kitchy tourist traps.
I imagine what it must have been like, to have been here when this place was in its prime. In my head, I run up the rusted slide, gleaming in the summer sun, and jump into the pond. A kind man is grilling while a pleasant woman takes pictures on an old Polaroid.
I trudge back up the trail back to the motel, back up to the parking lot. A few cars are parked in front of rooms. A woman beats a rug over an upper railing. The smell from the diner wafts through the air, making my stomach gnaw on itself. A group of teenagers linger in front of the diner, pausing to watch as I enter and head for the booth.
I take a seat as far as I can from other people, in the back right of the restaurant, facing a large mural depicting the untouched beauty of the wilderness. I’m picking out animals hidden in the trees when Irma comes by.
“What’s your pleasure, sugar?” she asks.
“Oh, I…um…” I mumble, noticing for the first time the menu pinned under a pane of plastic beneath my elbows. I order a basic breakfast, scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, and grits, with an orange juice and coffee, and go back to browsing the mural.
The picture spreads the whole back wall of the diner, untouched by booths or tables, fliers or notices. It looks like the only thing the motel keeps top shape, freshly painted and free of years of smoke and grease fumes. There’s some hidden surprises in it, too, a bigfoot hidden in the trees, a young man with the antlers of a deer, a plesiosaur in the river.
“So, hit a deer?” Irma asks when she comes back with my food. “Must have been scary.”
“It was fine,” I murmur, looking into my coffee cup, trying to forget. “It ran off. Not even any blood on the hood.”
Irma looks relieved. “Oh, that’s good.”
I frown a little into my eggs. My car might be totaled, I’m stuck here in the middle of nowhere, and she’s worried about the deer?
In between bites, I ask her where I can get a fresh change of clothes.
“Mel’s Stop and Shop up the ways a bit,” she replies, pointing toward the mural. “Got everything you’ll need. Now, don’t go askin’ for no uber or taxi, we don’t do that city stuff here. Oh, and town curfew is at ten pm sharp, and if the storm sirens go off, you’re to shelter in place until the all-clear.”
I don’t know which surprises me more: the curfew or the shelter in place. I guess it must be the curfew, because that’s what I ask about first.
“Local ordinance,” Irma explains firmly. “To curtail…troublesome behavior after dark. If the police around here catch you, a ticket. If something else…if you need anything else?” She stumbles over her words at the last bit.
“No, I’m fine,” I tell her, going back to eating and looking for animals in the mural.
***
The whole point was so that I wouldn’t have to worry like this ever again. I’m not supposed to sweat, to wonder, to fret. If I had known it was only going to lead me to a little Podunk town where I had to walk everywhere for little gain, I…I might have done things differently.
At least the Stop and Shop has air conditioning. I actually wondered if it would.
It’s cool and dark in here and smells like dry goods and mountain air. It’s a kind of feed and seed place, with stacked bags of animal food and potting soil, buckets of dry nuts and beans, and the most alarming collection of taxidermy I’ve ever seen.
It’s well-done, I suppose, and not that deeply unsettling stuff where they’re dressed up like people. They’re…mashups. Wolves with antlers, squirrels with horns, deer with wings, even a great, black bear with the wings of a hawk of some sort and the tail of a rattlesnake.
Revulsion twists my stomach at their glassy, sightless eyes, displayed in lifelike poses on high shelving or countertops. A few ducks, thankfully normal, are in perpetual flight over the poultry section.
I take a small shopping cart and try not to look directly at the dead animals punctuating the decorative farming and mining equipment, picking up a few things here and there to get me through the night.
The clothing isn’t much to go on, spartan and cheap, with the occasional logo for the Stop and Shop. I don’t need much, since I don’t plan on staying longer than the night, but I do need it.
I reach up to take a shirt in my size from the rack only to come face to face with a young man, staring blinklessly into my soul. He takes a shirt from the other side of the rack without checking the size or even looking away from me, as if mimicking my actions, and without a word walks purposely to a gaggle of similarly-aged people who look similar enough that they might be siblings.
The group has their back to me, gathered in a semicircle around the milk, talking quietly among themselves. I get a prickle along the back of my neck before I realize something is wrong, and another several seconds before I realize their mouths are moving but they aren’t speaking. They don’t even seem to be mouthing words at each other, just unfocused flaps of movement. The eyes on the nearest girl slide in my direction, her head turning slightly afterward, looking as though she’s about to say something to me.
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to stare?”
The voice actually comes from behind me, a young man about my age in a green grocer’s uniform with the logo of the store in white.
“Oh, um,” I blink, realizing the people are now gone. “Just…waiting to get some milk.”
Sheepishly, I stride over to the milk and get a small jug and place it into my buggy, glancing over my shoulder to check and see if he’s still judging me.
He has the brawny shoulders and compact frame of one whose ancestors dug coal for a living, probably a local boy. He’s tall with an easy smile and dark hair, reasonably nice to look at.
“Passing through?” he asks.
“Yeah, something like that,” I sigh. “Had some…car trouble.”
“Oh, you’re the one that hit the deer!” he blurts, blanching.
“I…didn’t realize that was newsworthy,” I blush.
“Small town, not much to do but gossip.”
“It was just a deer,” I reply, grabbing some orange juice while I’m at it.
“It wasn’t…” the man sighs, looking haggard. “They’re just…dangerous, you know? Big…uh…big animals.”
I don’t know if I would say that about a deer. They’re small, right? Like lithe, graceful horses? I look up at the nearest taxidermy specimen, a doe preening turkey wings. No, they’re bigger than I would have thought.
That thing’s eyes burn into my memory. It must be shock, or something like it that makes me picture it like that, standing upright on long, wolflike legs, humanlike hands clenched by its sides. A kind of daymare.
“Did they put you up with Irma?” the man asks kindly. “Storm’s blowing in. She usually keeps the rooms well-stocked, but you’ll want some emergency candles and some canned goods just in case.”
He motions me to follow him down the aisles, lightly filling my cart up with about a night’s worth of camping equipment.
“Wouldn’t a flashlight be better?” I ask, looking skeptically at the matches and plain, white candles.
“No, uh…when the storms get electrical they can really mess with…electronics.”
“Good thing I don’t have a pacemaker,” I reply dryly. “Never heard of a lightning storm that bad.”
“Angler County’s weather…is a whole other beast,” he grins, getting a six-pack of canned sausage. “That should do it. I can check you out whenever you’re ready.”
“Yeah,” I answer, looking into my shopping cart and moving toward the registers. “Yeah, that should about do it.”
As I’m laying my stuff on the conveyor, a sudden low moan fills the room, causing everyone around to suddenly drop what they’re doing, looks of worry crossing their faces, hands nervously gripping shopping carts and purses.
“Alright, people!” the cashier calls, looking up from my order. “Don’t act like you haven’t done this before! You know what to do!”
Chapter three
Chapter two
The duffle sits beside the bed like a dead body. No matter where I go in the room, I know it’s there. I can feel it, like eyes burning into the back of my skull.
Eyes like headlights.
The water in the bathtub runs red with rust for a few seconds before the pipes groan and gurgle like someone drowning, and then it’s pleasantly warm enough. There are some bath salts and bombs and oils, so I take a well-deserved pampering, lying back against the cool porcelain and closing my eyes and trying to let it all fade away.
How did this happen? How did I get here?
Everything seems to have moved so fast. One minute my duffle and I were minding our own business, the next minute I’m in this failing motel and I don’t even know where I was going.
I can go anywhere. I can buy a house, change my name. I could buy a yacht and sail for the rest of my life. I have options now.
I’m almost asleep when I hear a low murmur, a voice. Panic surges through me and I sit up, sloshing water onto the floor. I definitely hear a man speaking.
My voice catches in my throat. It can’t be…one of the local hicks. They can’t know what’s in the bag, can they?
I’m helpless in here, so as quietly as I can I climb out of the tub and wrap myself in a threadbare towel, ear pressed against the door.
“…er earlier this morning. The storm is expected to bring strong winds, hail, and lightning. Stay indoors until the sirens blast the all-clear…
”
Confused, I pull open the door and look around the room. Sitting beside the bed is a small, hand-crank weather radio.
Relieved and feeling a little stupid, I unplug the tub and then turn the radio off before changing back into my clothes from earlier.
I need to go clothes shopping.
I wonder if this place has a gift shop? I’m not looking forward to the walk back to the office, but I am hungry and my clothes feel sharp and gritty against my freshly-washed skin.
I slide the duffle under the bed and arrange the blankets so it can’t be seen, check my wallet to make sure I have plenty of cash, and set off back up the trail.
I guess it’s a pretty little pond. There’s a small pier that leads out into it, where I suppose I imagine fathers used to fish while their children ran around on the ramshackle playground.
I bet it was nice, to have the sort of family who did stuff like this. Long summer road trips, staying in hotels, seeing kitchy tourist traps.
I imagine what it must have been like, to have been here when this place was in its prime. In my head, I run up the rusted slide, gleaming in the summer sun, and jump into the pond. A kind man is grilling while a pleasant woman takes pictures on an old Polaroid.
I trudge back up the trail back to the motel, back up to the parking lot. A few cars are parked in front of rooms. A woman beats a rug over an upper railing. The smell from the diner wafts through the air, making my stomach gnaw on itself. A group of teenagers linger in front of the diner, pausing to watch as I enter and head for the booth.
I take a seat as far as I can from other people, in the back right of the restaurant, facing a large mural depicting the untouched beauty of the wilderness. I’m picking out animals hidden in the trees when Irma comes by.
“What’s your pleasure, sugar?” she asks.
“Oh, I…um…” I mumble, noticing for the first time the menu pinned under a pane of plastic beneath my elbows. I order a basic breakfast, scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, and grits, with an orange juice and coffee, and go back to browsing the mural.
The picture spreads the whole back wall of the diner, untouched by booths or tables, fliers or notices. It looks like the only thing the motel keeps top shape, freshly painted and free of years of smoke and grease fumes. There’s some hidden surprises in it, too, a bigfoot hidden in the trees, a young man with the antlers of a deer, a plesiosaur in the river.
“So, hit a deer?” Irma asks when she comes back with my food. “Must have been scary.”
“It was fine,” I murmur, looking into my coffee cup, trying to forget. “It ran off. Not even any blood on the hood.”
Irma looks relieved. “Oh, that’s good.”
I frown a little into my eggs. My car might be totaled, I’m stuck here in the middle of nowhere, and she’s worried about the deer?
In between bites, I ask her where I can get a fresh change of clothes.
“Mel’s Stop and Shop up the ways a bit,” she replies, pointing toward the mural. “Got everything you’ll need. Now, don’t go askin’ for no uber or taxi, we don’t do that city stuff here. Oh, and town curfew is at ten pm sharp, and if the storm sirens go off, you’re to shelter in place until the all-clear.”
I don’t know which surprises me more: the curfew or the shelter in place. I guess it must be the curfew, because that’s what I ask about first.
“Local ordinance,” Irma explains firmly. “To curtail…troublesome behavior after dark. If the police around here catch you, a ticket. If something else…if you need anything else?” She stumbles over her words at the last bit.
“No, I’m fine,” I tell her, going back to eating and looking for animals in the mural.
***
The whole point was so that I wouldn’t have to worry like this ever again. I’m not supposed to sweat, to wonder, to fret. If I had known it was only going to lead me to a little Podunk town where I had to walk everywhere for little gain, I…I might have done things differently.
At least the Stop and Shop has air conditioning. I actually wondered if it would.
It’s cool and dark in here and smells like dry goods and mountain air. It’s a kind of feed and seed place, with stacked bags of animal food and potting soil, buckets of dry nuts and beans, and the most alarming collection of taxidermy I’ve ever seen.
It’s well-done, I suppose, and not that deeply unsettling stuff where they’re dressed up like people. They’re…mashups. Wolves with antlers, squirrels with horns, deer with wings, even a great, black bear with the wings of a hawk of some sort and the tail of a rattlesnake.
Revulsion twists my stomach at their glassy, sightless eyes, displayed in lifelike poses on high shelving or countertops. A few ducks, thankfully normal, are in perpetual flight over the poultry section.
I take a small shopping cart and try not to look directly at the dead animals punctuating the decorative farming and mining equipment, picking up a few things here and there to get me through the night.
The clothing isn’t much to go on, spartan and cheap, with the occasional logo for the Stop and Shop. I don’t need much, since I don’t plan on staying longer than the night, but I do need it.
I reach up to take a shirt in my size from the rack only to come face to face with a young man, staring blinklessly into my soul. He takes a shirt from the other side of the rack without checking the size or even looking away from me, as if mimicking my actions, and without a word walks purposely to a gaggle of similarly-aged people who look similar enough that they might be siblings.
The group has their back to me, gathered in a semicircle around the milk, talking quietly among themselves. I get a prickle along the back of my neck before I realize something is wrong, and another several seconds before I realize their mouths are moving but they aren’t speaking. They don’t even seem to be mouthing words at each other, just unfocused flaps of movement. The eyes on the nearest girl slide in my direction, her head turning slightly afterward, looking as though she’s about to say something to me.
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to stare?”
The voice actually comes from behind me, a young man about my age in a green grocer’s uniform with the logo of the store in white.
“Oh, um,” I blink, realizing the people are now gone. “Just…waiting to get some milk.”
Sheepishly, I stride over to the milk and get a small jug and place it into my buggy, glancing over my shoulder to check and see if he’s still judging me.
He has the brawny shoulders and compact frame of one whose ancestors dug coal for a living, probably a local boy. He’s tall with an easy smile and dark hair, reasonably nice to look at.
“Passing through?” he asks.
“Yeah, something like that,” I sigh. “Had some…car trouble.”
“Oh, you’re the one that hit the deer!” he blurts, blanching.
“I…didn’t realize that was newsworthy,” I blush.
“Small town, not much to do but gossip.”
“It was just a deer,” I reply, grabbing some orange juice while I’m at it.
“It wasn’t…” the man sighs, looking haggard. “They’re just…dangerous, you know? Big…uh…big animals.”
I don’t know if I would say that about a deer. They’re small, right? Like lithe, graceful horses? I look up at the nearest taxidermy specimen, a doe preening turkey wings. No, they’re bigger than I would have thought.
That thing’s eyes burn into my memory. It must be shock, or something like it that makes me picture it like that, standing upright on long, wolflike legs, humanlike hands clenched by its sides. A kind of daymare.
“Did they put you up with Irma?” the man asks kindly. “Storm’s blowing in. She usually keeps the rooms well-stocked, but you’ll want some emergency candles and some canned goods just in case.”
He motions me to follow him down the aisles, lightly filling my cart up with about a night’s worth of camping equipment.
“Wouldn’t a flashlight be better?” I ask, looking skeptically at the matches and plain, white candles.
“No, uh…when the storms get electrical they can really mess with…electronics.”
“Good thing I don’t have a pacemaker,” I reply dryly. “Never heard of a lightning storm that bad.”
“Angler County’s weather…is a whole other beast,” he grins, getting a six-pack of canned sausage. “That should do it. I can check you out whenever you’re ready.”
“Yeah,” I answer, looking into my shopping cart and moving toward the registers. “Yeah, that should about do it.”
As I’m laying my stuff on the conveyor, a sudden low moan fills the room, causing everyone around to suddenly drop what they’re doing, looks of worry crossing their faces, hands nervously gripping shopping carts and purses.
“Alright, people!” the cashier calls, looking up from my order. “Don’t act like you haven’t done this before! You know what to do!”
Chapter three
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