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coming through the office door—a real person, one not smoking a cigarette. He was a trucker getting a room to catch a few hours’ sleep before continuing south. Viv took his thirty dollars and he inked his name into the guest book. After him came another man, also solo, wearing a suit and trench coat, carrying a suitcase and a briefcase. He, too, paid thirty dollars and wrote his name in the guest book: Michael Ennis. He might stay an extra night, he explained, because he was waiting for a phone call to tell him where to travel next, and he might not get it tomorrow.
    “Sounds exciting,” Viv said absently as she opened the key drawer and took out the key to room 211. She was putting him several doors away from the trucker; she always gave people their space. Night people didn’t like to have neighbors too close.
    He didn’t reply, so she raised her gaze and saw him looking at her. His look was calm and polite, but it was fixed on her nonetheless. “Not really,” he said, in reply to her comment. “I’m a salesman. I go where my bosses tell me to go.”
    She nodded and gave him the key. She did not ask what he sold, because it was none of her business. When he left, she could not have said what he looked like.
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    •   •   •
    The next night, she tried a different tactic: She stood outside the office door, her back to the wall, and waited for the smell of smoke. Shesuspected it came from outside the door now, not through the vents, so she moved closer to the supposed source. It was a beautiful night, silent and warm, the breeze just enough to lift her hair from her neck and fan her sweaty cheeks.
    It took less than twenty minutes this time: The tang of fresh cigarette smoke came to her nostrils. Jackpot. She shuffled down the walkway, following it slowly away from the direction of the rooms and around the other side of the building, toward the empty pool. She lost the smell twice and stood still both times, waiting for it to come back. Silently tracking her prey.
    She edged out toward the drained and emptied pool, stopping next to the fence that had been around it all summer for reasons unknown. She looked around in the dark, seeing nothing and no one. Maddeningly, the smell came and went, as if whoever created it was moving. “Hello?” she said into the blackness, the concrete and the empty pool and the trees beyond, the deserted highway far to her left past the parking lot. “Hello?”
    There was no answer, but the hair prickled on the back of her neck. Her throat went tight, and she had a moment of panic, hard and nauseating. She hooked her fingers through the pool’s chain-link fence to hold on and closed her eyes until it passed.
    She smelled smoke, and someone walked past her, behind her back, in five evenly paced steps. A man’s heavy footsteps. And then there was silence again.
    Her breath was frozen, her hands cold. That had been someone, something . Something real, but not a real person. The steps had started and stopped, like a figure crossing an open doorway.
    Viv had heard ghost stories. Everyone has. But she had never thought she’d be standing holding a chain-link fence, trying not to vomit in fear as her knuckles went white and something other crossed behind her back. It was crazy. It was the kind of story you told years later while your listeners rolled their eyes, because they had no idea how the terror felt on the back of your neck.
    Behind Viv’s shoulder, the motel sign went dark.
    The garish light vanished, she heard a sad zap as the bulbs gave up, and she turned to see the sign dark, the words SUN DOWN no longer lit up, the words VACANCY. CABLE TV! flickering out beneath them. She walked toward the sign, unthinking, a hard beat of panic in her chest. She had no idea where the switch to the sign was, whether someone could turn it off. She had never had to turn the sign on or off in her weeks here—the evening clerk always turned it on, and the morning clerk always turned it