Ghost Stories
Ghost Stories
Sherlyn Colgrove
This is a work of fiction meant solely to entertain the reader. Some places have been created for creative purposes and all persons, business establishments, locales (either haunted or not) are a product of the author’s imagination.
Any similarities to anyone either living or dead, incidents and/or events are purely coincidental.
Copyright © by Sherlyn Colgrove 2011
Cover Image and Design by Sherlyn Colgrove
Deserted
~One~
When Adam and Renee left the motel that morning they knew that it was going to be hot, and when they hit the open desert that sat between themselves and Renee’s parents’ house it only got worse. Since they headed off the main interstate and started out on the dusty highway, signs of civilization had been few and far between. About the only company they’d had since hitting the old highway were the occasional tumble weeds blowing across the road and a couple of vultures circling above a prospective meal off in the distance. But Renee wanted to go back through the small town she used to pass through when she was a kid. She remembered a small souvenir store that had some of the most attractive and beautiful, handmade crafts, and it had been so long since she had been there that she couldn’t wait to see it again. This was the first time she had been given the opportunity to head this way since she moved from Arizona and out to California and she jumped at the chance.
Of course more than an hour on the highway without even a single, overpriced gas station in sight had Renee rethinking her side trip. She knew that the town was never in the heart of tourist country, though very little in southern Arizona that didn’t contain a ghost town with a wild or embellished history and a sideshow attached could forget about tourist dollars altogether. And if it was in the middle of the desert and didn’t even have the mountains to rely on for the nature lovers it fared even worse. She knew that where she was heading had very little to offer, and as they approached the edge of town she could see that now there was even less.
“Talk about an honest to god ghost town,” Adam said as they slowly cruised down the main street, which was still the old highway and sat eerily empty. “When was the last time anyone was here?”
Renee couldn’t say, so instead all she did was shake her head. “I wish I knew. I mean I’ve never looked it up since moving to Los Angeles ten years ago,” she admitted.
“It would have been nice to know that it was more than a ruined shell before we made the hundred mile side trip,” Adam grumbled.
Renee rolled her eyes and shook her head. “I don’t recall you suggesting that we look it up and make sure that it was still here,” she reminded evenly. “In fact I seem to recall you jumping at the idea at an extra couple of hours added onto the trip…I wonder why that is.”
Renee knew that Adam was in no hurry to get to Renee’s parents’ house, simply because the last time he was there her brothers kicked his ass in a family football game that had him icing his ribs for a couple of days and on a desk for a couple of weeks instead of being out on the streets investigating crimes as the newest detective in narcotics. And then there was the fact that he lost two hundred dollars to her father in the Saturday night poker game. When Renee suggested that they take the small side trip, he practically agreed before the words were out of her mouth, and she wasn’t about to let him make her feel guilty for it.
“You’re right,” he said to her surprise, and her expression had to display as much when she looked at him. The moment he glanced back at her his smile grew. “What?”
Adam was never so accommodating or willing to capitulate in an argument, especially when it called for him to admit that he was wrong, and she took a moment to give him a close onceover. “You have to want something,” she said finally.
“Why’s that?” he questioned with growing amusement in his tone.
“Because you’ve never ceded to me in an argument that quickly since we met,” she said honestly.
He continued to smile as he shook his head. “I don’t want anything, and you’re right. I didn’t argue when you said you wanted to come here and to be honest I didn’t think of looking it up either,” he admitted then made a “U turn” in the middle of the street and eventually pulled over.
“What are you doing?” she questioned as she looked through the window and recognized the motel at the west end of the main road – it was the first building they passed on their way into town.
“We’re here now. We might as well take some pictures. Who knows, we might be the first to post them online.”
Renee could only shake her head. “I just want to get out of here. We’re only a couple of hours from Tucson and right now all I want is a cool shower.”
Adam grabbed her hand and gave it a light squeeze. “I know. But I’ve never seen a ghost town before and I want to take a look around. Besides, the car’s been acting up and I want to put some coolant in the radiator anyway…before we have a problem.”
“I thought you took care of all of that before we left,” she said, though she did her best to keep any accusations out of her tone.
She wasn’t entirely successful and Adam gave her an irritated glance. “I did, and the mechanic told me that it was fine.”
“Mechanic my ass, you took the car to your brother,” she said.
Adam took in a breath and appeared ready to argue but Renee held her hands up, though not exactly in surrender. “I know he’s a damned good mechanic, but you know that he’s also a busy one. He probably had one of his people take care of the car, and you know that things get missed…that’s all I’m saying.”
“Matthew assured me that everything was fine,” Adam said evenly.
Renee knew that he was growing irritated and she threw her hands up again, this time in definite surrender. The last thing she wanted to do was get into an argument with Adam while they were on vacation. “Fine,” she said. “I believe you. That’s why we’re going to pull over and put coolant in the radiator and take pictures of a ghost town while the engine cools,” she said evenly, though she kept her gaze out the window and focused on the boarded up “truck stop” across the highway.
Truck stop would have been a generous term; all that stood there was a small, dingy-white, block building and a tall canopy, under which trucks could park and pump their gas. Of course the pumps were gone, but a single island that once held the two pumps still remained full with yellow desert grass and weeds pushing up through the concrete and the two craters left by the removal of the pumps. One of the craters even had a cactus sprouting up through it and it reached for the canopy; it was already ten feet high, which told them that, at least the truck stop, had been abandoned for quite some time.
Once they were parked, Renee slid out and stretched while Adam headed around to the back and pulled out a gallon jug of coolant. While he took care of the engine, she pulled her digital camera out of her bag and started taking pictures of the old motel. It was entirely stucco and was once brick red in color, though now little of the paint color could be recognized, if it could be seen at all. Much of it had chipped away and gotten lost in the rocks and jungle of weeds that choked the property from the main, “U” shaped motel and smaller souvenir shop in front, to the empty concrete pit that was once the pool. The gravel-covered drive that traced along the edge of the motel and arched in between the motel and the small island where the souvenir shop and the pool sat was heavily inundated with weeds and debris, including a fallen tree. It looked as though it might have been an oak tree, but it had long since died and any leaves that may have been on it vanished long ago. Still, Renee couldn’t be certain; an arborist she was not.
As for the motel itself, it was barely standing. None of the windows were boar
ded up and Renee could see through the empty frames well enough to make out that much of the roof had collapsed and the sky was visible on the other side.
Renee snapped pictures through the broken windows of some of the rooms, along with the pool and souvenir shop, which was boarded up. The last pictures she snapped were of the dilapidated sign, of which only a couple of letters could be seen, the “E” and the “L” that labeled it a “motel”, and sadly she couldn’t even remember the name.
“Well I think that we should let the car sit for about an hour,” Adam said as he walked up to Renee and handed her a bottle of water. “Feel like taking a little walk?”
She didn’t really, but the light breeze that started to gently roll down the length of the highway felt good on her back so she nodded. “Sure,” she eventually agreed, and with her camera slung over her shoulder and her water in one hand, and Adam’s hand in the other, they headed down the old highway.
As they headed through town, Renee allowed memories of her childhood to return to her in waves, and all the while she snapped pictures. And while she found herself engrossed in the town and what had become of it, she couldn’t deny the fact that the breeze had grown icy and a sense of dread started to creep in. She had a feeling that, if they stayed long enough, they would find out what happened to the town and she was suddenly not so sure that it was something she wanted to know.
For an hour they walked up and down the dusty, ill-maintained highway while Renee snapped pictures and Adam glanced around and identified points of interest here and there. Fortunately the town was small and it didn’t take long to reach the east end of town and walk back to the west, where their vehicle remained right where they left it. Of course it wasn’t as though it was going to go anywhere. It didn’t take long to figure out that no one was left in the town and if they were, they were likely in no position to steal their car in the first place.
“So are you ready to get going?” Adam asked as he headed to the driver’s side of the vehicle and got in.
“I’ve been ready,” she said with a smile, which grew as she looked at him. “The question is, are you ready?”
Adam looked back over at her with the same smile that won her heart a year ago when they first met. She was then, and continued to be, a chef at an Italian restaurant that had been robbed, and Adam was the first officer on the scene. It wasn’t exactly love at first sight, but they were drawn together then and were inseparable now.
Renee loved that smile, but more than that, she loved to see Adam squirm…playfully of course. “I hear that my brothers have organized a football game. Even Brandon is flying in from San Francisco for the reunion,” she said with a wide smile in reference to her younger brother, who rarely made it back home now that he was in college. He had just finished up his junior year and she couldn’t wait to see him. “All the guys in the neighborhood will be there and they are all looking forward to their favorite quarterback returning to play.”
Adam’s smile remained though it grew stressed and forced. “Great. Can’t wait.”
Renee resisted the urge to laugh and instead she looked back out the window and took a deep breath, though she found it difficult to keep the tremors of laughter from rolling through her body.
Her amusement didn’t last. The moment she heard the key turn in the ignition with nothing but a click as a response, dread filled her entire body and she looked back at him. “Please do not tell me that we are stuck here,” she said evenly.
Adam turned the key again, and once again nothing happened. “Afraid so,” he said with a heavy sigh as he slumped back in his seat. “At least for now.”
Renee shook her head and slumped back herself.
Only a second later she heard Adam remove the key from the ignition and open the door. “What are you doing?” she asked as she opened her eyes and looked over at him.
“No cell service,” he said as he held up his phone and waved it at her. “As impossible as it seems, we’re going to have to head back through town and look for a living person and hope that they have a phone we can use to call a tow-truck, or at least find an area of town where we can pick up a signal and make the call from there. If we can’t then we’re up shit creek without a boat, much less a paddle.”
Renee practically growled as she got back out of the vehicle and stepped out into the dry heat of the Arizona desert. For a day that started so promising, in the arms of her fiancé and only a couple hundred miles from her parents, whom she hadn’t seen in six months, the day had turned to crap and she almost dreaded what else might happen.
***
~Two~
After gathering up a bottle of water and a couple of energy bars each, Adam and Renee headed out away from the motel in search of a phone. Adam had no confidence that they would find one, but with cell service coming and going – mostly going – they didn’t have a choice. With any luck the town wasn’t as deserted as it appeared to be and they would find a phone, or at the very least they would get a signal that would stay long enough to put the call into the roadside service department of their auto insurance company. In any case, Adam’s biggest concern was getting them out of the dusty little ghost town unscathed.
“I thought that this was a major highway. I find it strange that we haven’t seen a single car pass by,” Adam said as they crossed the highway. “There are even weeds popping up through the asphalt in the road,” he added as he nearly tripped over a wad of yellow, matted foliage bunched up in a crack in the middle of the highway.
“I guess that’s why the town died,” Renee said matter-of-factly. “I remember them putting in the interstate when I was a kid…in fact when it was finished my parents preferred to use it than head through here, though I figured that it was because they didn’t want to dump fifty to a hundred dollars on us kids at the souvenir shop every time we passed through town. At the time it didn’t dawn on me that it was just a shorter route to take, and I suppose that’s what everyone else thought too. There just isn’t any incentive to drop down this way anymore.”
“Still, this was a town once. I can’t imagine how it could simply die away as though it never existed,” Adam said, and it was true. Of course he grew up in Los Angeles and the thought that his hometown would become a ghost town was laughable and something out of a bad science fiction movie. He was ignorant to small town struggles and he admitted it openly, but still…
“Let’s try that lodge over there. It looks like they have a payphone in front of the manager’s office…maybe it’s still working,” Renee said with a hint of hope in her voice.
Adam turned his head slightly and took a moment to get a good look at her, and it dawned on him then that she was feeling ill at ease. “Are you okay?” he asked as he put his arm around her shoulders.
She looked up at him with a smile and he knew immediately that it was a smile meant only for his benefit and certainly wasn’t heartfelt. “Fine. Why do you ask?”
Adam looked at her a moment longer before he shook his head. “I don’t know. You seem a bit out of sorts.”
She stopped for a moment and shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just being here and seeing everything I remember as a kid in ruins.” She looked around and he could see her shiver. “I guess that it’s all just a bit overwhelming. It definitely puts things into perspective.”
“How so?” Adam asked as he urged her to start walking towards the lodge once again.
She shrugged. “Just how fragile some things really are and how quickly they die.”
He didn’t like the way that she sounded and he grabbed her hand.
She gave a small laugh and squeezed his hand. “I didn’t mean us,” she said.
It scared him sometimes, just how she seemed to know what he was thinking. And it wasn’t that he was insecure where Renee was concerned, because he knew that she loved him as much as he loved her. However, the look in her eyes had him worried and he wasn’t sure why.
Adam didn’t have time to think about what was
going through Renee’s head; the town wasn’t exactly big and in no time they were at the lodge. Like the red motel where their SUV was parked, it was set in the shape of a “U”, but that’s where the similarities ended. There had been no pool or souvenir shop for guests, and instead of a solid building, the lodge was broken up into two-room segments, and the manager’s office seemed to be the biggest building on the premises.
Something else that was different was the fact that the lodge was surrounded by an eight-foot high, chain-link fence with barbed wire at the top and “NO TRESSPASSING” signs every ten feet or so.
“Well this could complicate things,” Renee said.
“Not necessarily,” Adam said and started to search around the fence. He had yet to meet a chain-link fence that didn’t have at least one hole cut into it and it wasn’t long before the fence in front of him revealed its makeshift door. In the back of the lodge, where the fence was the closest to the buildings, there was a hole cut into it next to one of the posts, and it was big enough for him to fit his six-two frame through. When Renee headed through, she barely touched the links of the fence.
Like the graveled parking lot of the motel where they’d left their vehicle, the ground of the lodge was filled with rock and sporadic sprays of weeds, and the weeds carried over to the walks in front of the rooms as well as the manager’s office. Patches of gray spotted the walls where the pale yellow paint had chipped away and dusted the ground, though much of it was long gone.
As they walked through the parking lot, Adam took the time to look at the cabins and their surroundings. Where the dilapidated sign stood, which read only “Lodge” where it wasn’t busted out, stood a couple of Saguaro cacti, one of which had to be about seventeen feet high whereas the second was well over twenty feet, while a handful of yucca and aloe shrubs shrouded their bases. Of course they were not immune to the tide of tumbleweeds and yellow grass that seemed to take over the entire town, and the ground beneath the plants could no longer be seen, but no doubt the broken glass and plastic from the sign was littered throughout, along with at least a decade’s worth of debris.