I had to drive from Wellington to Auckland.
I’d left it till pretty late in the day to start, for various reasons: a meeting that didn’t come off … quite a frustrating set of encounters, actually.
Anyway, the net result was that I was pleased to be back on the road, but wanted something more interesting than just the usual grind up the Kapiti coast, then across the volcanic plateau to Taupo.
Instead, I thought I’d drive through the Hutt valley, over the Rimutaka ranges to that line of small towns on the other side, and up the east side of the island. I’d never gone that way before, and it looked quite attractive on the map.
I knew that there was no way I’d be getting home that day. I know people talk about pulling all-nighters and driving up from Wellington in one go, but I know myself that I simply lose concentration after a few hours behind the wheel, and no amount of ten minute breaks or quick cups of coffee will revive me enough to keep on going after that.
Once or twice I’ve actually nodded off behind the wheel, but that’s another story – the fact that I’m telling you this one shows that I survived it. Just barely, though.
So there I was, driving along that road north of the Rimutakas, as the sky gradually began to go dark, starting to think about where I might find to stay for the night.
On previous drives I’d once or twice set up my tent in a rest area. There was a bit too much noise and hooning around for me to get much sleep, though. Nobody actually broke into the tent, but next morning I found the side-mirror missing from my car. I suspect I must have had quite a narrow escape. So it was a motel or a campground I was looking for – or perhaps a B & B.
After a while the signs started to say ‘Eketahuna,’ and I got to thinking about that name. I remembered that years ago some would-be humorous columnist had started a campaign to deny the existence of Eketahuna, had claimed that he’d travelled to where it was marked on the map and found nothing whatsoever there ...
It was a laborious jest, and nobody really fell for it, but I do recall a number of indignant Ekethunans writing in to assert the objective existence of their hamlet (and to denounce snooty Aucklanders who dared to poke fun at solid heartland citizens, no doubt).
Anyway, part of my cult of never planning things in advance – a reaction to my childhood, when every trip and expedition was plotted and prepared for to the nth degree months before it happened? – was being at the mercy of just such passing whims.
Why not stop in Eketahuna? I thought. It would have a certain cachet to sleep in a bona-fide ghost town, one whose very being had been called into question. It seemed like a funny idea, and I could already hear myself telling the story at dinner-parties in the future. Even if the place was completely boring, that too could form part of the joke.
So on I drove, closer and closer to that elusive Eketahuna.
I must have reached there around 6 or 6.30 p.m. It was kind of late in the year, and the lights were already on up and down the main street. It was not yet completely dark, but certainly shading off into night.
There was no-one there. I know that sounds odd. I’ve already mentioned the lights being on. Those things were there, yes: shops, petrol stations, lamp-posts. All the trappings of yet another ‘blink and you’ve missed it’, ‘road-goes-through-to-somewhere-else’ transit towns. Just no people. Anywhere.
I drove down the main street fairly slowly, looking around. Not a soul in sight. I guess they must all have been inside, watching the 6 o’clock news. Or worshipping the great god Dagon, for all I know ... In any case, the lights were all on but no-one was home. It was a kind of Mary Celeste town – spooky and atmospheric, yes, but a little disconcerting to someone hoping to find shelter for the night.
But there it was! A sign. A sign that said ‘motorcamp,’ pointing off down a sidestreet. Just what the doctor ordered, I thought. I’ll go down and find the motorcamp, and see if they’ve got any cabins to rent (somehow the idea of pitching a tent in the darkness that was coming on so rapidly just didn’t appeal).
After a couple of hundred yards, the sealed road turned into a gravel one. A couple of hundred yards more, and it became a dirt road. Literally. There was a little cardboard sign pointing through a fence into a field, saying something like ‘Murchison’s campground.’
There didn’t seem much alternative, so I started bumping the car through the potholes and hummocks of an old farmtrack.
I was just about to give up, and write the whole thing off as a will o’ the wisp, when the car came up over the brow of a hill and I saw – down a steep slope – the Eketahuna campground.
There was an old concrete utility shed in the middle of a muddy field. The ground was strewn with pineneedles and pinecones, as there were trees scattered through it. There was not a soul there (unsurprisingly), but I could see that – in season – a hardy wilderness camper could probably pitch a pup-tent somewhere down there. As long as they had a four-wheel drive to get down the slope and were reasonably confident about being able to drive up it again.
Turning my car around was no easy task. Finally I had to back up to about halfway through the field and then reverse very gingerly onto some tussock in order to get back onto the track. That field was muddy, I can tell you, and my confidence in finding a friendly farmer to tow out my car had sunk to an all-time low.
Now, why on earth would you leave up a sign saying ‘campground’ on the main street of your town, when all that sign led to was a muddy field in a pine forest (with, admittedly, a toilet block sitting there proud and tall for all to see)?
And even if that was a mere oversight, why would you open the gate to the field, and leave up the tattered sign which constituted the next turn in the maze? I have no answer to these questions. I didn’t feel disposed to ask any locals just at that moment (full dark had declared itself by now), though it intrigues me to this day.
The most urgent priority at that moment seemed to be shaking the dust of Eketahuna off my feet. So that’s what I did. I drove back into town, took a sharp left, and hooned off out of there – being careful to observe the exact speed-limit, mind you – I’ve seen too many road-movies with scenes of unspeakable things being inflicted on passing motorists by bored highway patrolmen.
I felt no desire to encounter any of their Eketahunan kinsmen. For all I knew they might eat human flesh ... certainly the evidence of the motorcamp sign showed that they had a lively sense of humour – and possibly a bit of a grudge against city slickers to work off.
So there I was, back in my car, zooming along the highway, full headlights on, wondering where the hell I was going to stay for the night. Somewhere a long way from Eketahuna seemed the best bet. I even toyed with the idea of keeping on until I got back to Auckland. It was only a few hundred miles, after all. I knew, though, that I simply wouldn’t be up to it. Sooner or later I’d end up drifting off the road, either deliberately or involuntarily, and I really didn’t fancy another night stretched out across the back seat in some out-of-the-way rest area.
It still wasn’t all that late, though; and by now I’d put a good few miles between me and the shadow over Eketahuna, so when I saw that lit-up ‘motel’ sign I thought that all my Christmases had come at once.
It was in the middle of the most blah, nothing place you can imagine. A road, a flat horizon (not that I could see very much of it in the dark) – no other buildings or signs of a town anywhere around.
But the sign did say ‘motel,’ and there weren’t any other offers on the table, so I turned into the parking-lot and parked outside the office. The lights were all on outside, lighting up the raw anyonymous brick of the empty courtyard, but I couldn’t see any signs of life within.
I rang on the doorbell. No answer.
I rang again. A vague creaking sound came from inside. Then nothing.
Again. This time I could hear definite stirrings and signs of movement.
Usually you get a blast of whatever’s playing on TV when the proprietor comes out into the office to book you in for the night, but there was none of that this time. Nor was there anything particularly picturesque about the guy who opened the door to me.
He looked as flat as the bricks of his house, a kind of man-composite, neither large nor small, old nor young, fat nor skinny ...
‘Could I have a room for the night?’
No answer.
‘You’ve got your ‘vacancy’ sign lit up.’
(‘Kind of appropriate, really’, I might have added, as he chewed over the import of this complex set of sentences.)
‘Out the back,’ he said, finally.
I was going to say ‘grunted,’ but he didn’t really sound the words that hard. It was more like they had no savour in his mouth – as if he was simply reading them off a card, or reciting them from some distant memory.
‘My car? You mean, park it out the back?’
He nodded. ‘Come back for the key.’
It’s not like any of this is unusual. We all know the drill about stopping at these highway motels and motorcamps. The manager generally has something else going on in the house that they’re anxious to get back to – dinner, or a video, or their favourite programme, and it’s actually kind of a relief that they’re seldom anxious to shoot the breeze with you. This guy did seem a bit over-laconic, though – like he was in danger of losing sight of the basic need to make a living renting units if he took it much further.
Anyway, be that as it may, I got back into the car, drove it round behind the house, then returned to find a key lying on the mat outside the door. He hadn’t even charged me, let alone told me where my room was, but the number was written on the key and I guessed he must be a trusting soul. Either that, or just too bored with the whole business to care whether I went zooming off in the morning, having stripped the place bare ...
I don’t recall what room number it was. It’s tempting to call it ‘13’ and make the whole thing sound spookier than it was. There weren’t many rooms there, though – just a single line of them on the far side of the courtyard, so I guess it was probably something like 3 or 4. Maybe even number one. Who knows?
In any case, it wasn’t too hard to locate it, unlock the door, check out the generic furnishings – and pretty much collapse into bed. I didn’t have the energy even to make myself a cup of tea, let alone go foraging for anything to eat. I promised myself a slap-up breakfast at the first town I came to in the morning, but I just couldn’t face another conversation with mister faceless in the main office.
The sign on the door had said something about milk in the morning, so I hoped I might be able to make myself some instant coffee then, at least – enough to get me back on the road.
It’s funny how hard it can be to get to sleep when everything around you is dead quiet. It’s just not an experience one encounters in the city. There’s always some light, some noise coming from somewhere. You learn to filter it out, to fall asleep anyway – but then, when it isn’t there, somehow you miss it.
That’s what happened to me, despite being so dog-tired to start with. The blackness outside was as thick as velvet, the silence almost palpable. After a while I realised that I needed something to react against, so I tried putting in earplugs so at least I’d have the slight tinnitus they bring on in your inner ear.
That worked better, much better. But it also means that I’m still not sure if I was fully asleep or just dozing fitfully when it happened.
Someone was shaking me. I had a vague memory of having heard some voices, even of a kind of dark figure looming over the bed, but this was unequivocal. I was being shaken awake.
‘Wake up! Wake up!’
A voice was shouting at me, but it came through muffled, only half-audible. The earplugs! That was why. I tried to sit up, to swim up into full consciousness.
There was a woman standing beside my bed. She wasn’t shaking me any more, but I had to presume that she was the one who’d been ordering me to wake up.
‘Wha .. What’s going on?’
(I’m seldom at my best when woken in the middle of the night. Maybe some people spring up out of bed fully conscious, ready to face any peril, but I’m not one of them ...)
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked me.
By now I’d taken out the earplugs, so I could hear pretty well. Luckily I hadn’t stripped down completely before going to bed, but I was still conscious of being only half-dressed, in t-shirt and underpants.
‘This is my room. I rented it – for the night.’
‘You rented a room,’ she repeated. ‘But how did you get in here? Did you just break in?’
‘No, of course not,’ I replied. By now I was starting to feel a bit angry. What the hell was this strange woman doing in my bedroom at night, asking me all these stupid questions? ‘I got a key from the guy in the house. He told me to park around the back, and then to come back and collect it.’
‘He – told – you – to – park – around – the – back,’ she repeated.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said. ‘Why? What’s the problem? Was he not supposed to? Are you not taking guests at the moment?’
The whole thing was sounding stranger by the moment. Who was this woman? His wife? His daughter? Was she mad, or touched somehow? Or was it the old guy himself who was a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic?
It was a bit hard to see why she looked so surprised by it all, though. It was a motel, after all. How anomalous could it be to find a guest sleeping in one of the rooms?
‘What did he look like, this ‘man’ you’re talking about?’
‘Look, I don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on here, but I just drove in to rent a room for the night. I didn’t break in, and I picked up the key from the old man in the most normal way possible. If there’s a problem with me staying here, then I’m happy to drive on instead, but you can hardly expect me to pay for the night if you won’t let me sleep here ... He acted like he had every right to rent me a room, and there’s just no way I could have known if he was supposed to be letting me in ...’
I subsided, slowly, as I saw that she wasn’t really listening. The expression on her face, which I’d interpreted before as rage or indignation, I now saw to be an extreme tension bordering on fear. She was looking around the room as if she couldn’t quite believe what she saw here, couldn’t compute what was going on.
‘Who the hell is he? Who are you, for that matter?’
‘I’m his daughter,’ she replied, in a rather milder tone than she’d used up until then.
‘So you didn’t know he was renting out rooms behind your back? I take it this is your place, not his?’
‘No,’ she said, softly. ‘You see, he’s been gone for two years.’
‘Gone?’ I said. ‘You mean, shot through, disappeared?’
‘I mean gone. Dead. He’s been dead for two years now.’
‘That’s impossible … An old man, kind of stringy looking? Sandy hair?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, it must have been somebody else, then. Someone else who was in the house, and who gave me a key to this room.’
‘Who?’ she said.
‘How could I know that? A neighbour, a friend – someone with a sick sense of humour ...’
‘It was him,’ she said simply. ‘What did he actually say to you, do you remember?’
‘He said ‘round the back’ – and he kind of nodded at the car. That was it, basically.’
‘It was him. I know it. I’ve never seen him myself, but some other people have. At first I thought they were just having me on, but I guess I can’t really keep that one up any more.’
‘You’re the one who’s having me on,’ I said. ‘This is just some trick you play on the tourists. I suppose you’ve got a video camera playing behind the mirror, or something like that ...’
‘No,’ she said simply. She must have been in her mid-thirties, I suppose – kind of heavyset but not unattractive. She didn’t look the type to sustain such an elaborate practical joke, if you know what I mean. And yet ...
‘I don’t believe in ghosts’, I said (somewhat futilely, under the circumstances).
‘Neither do I,’ she replied, ‘but who else could it have been? Nobody lives around here but us ... But me’, she corrected herself. That little correction rang true, to me. She was quite used to living there in the house, with her Dad. The idea that he was still ushering in random motorists to stay in their units was shocking to her, but not – somehow – entirely beyond belief.
‘I’ll leave you to sleep, then,’ she continued.
‘You’ll leave me to sleep! How the hell do you think I’m going to get to sleep after what you’ve just told me? With either your Dad’s ghost or some psychotic neighbour wandering around?’
‘I’ll leave you to sleep.’
She was receding now, into the darkness of the room.
It struck me, then, that she’d never turned on a light at any point during the conversation. The lock clicked as she went out, clattering slightly as she pulled out her pass-key from the other side of the door.
The whole thing seemed stranger and stranger, the more I thought about it (and there wasn’t much else to do, alone in that strange little brick-tile motel room) ... It didn’t add up, somehow. Why had she come in to accost me like that? I might have been dangerous, after all – especially if I had broken into the unit.
How could she have missed my car, parked safely (I hoped) behind the main building? Why hadn’t she woken me up by turning on the main light in the room? The simplest explanation: that she was a little bit crazy, seemed by far the most logical one as I thought through what she’d told me.
The ghostly motel-owner had looked just rather spooky – I remembered again how curiously flat he’d seemed. But a loony daughter flitting from room to room in the dark made a lot more sense.
You wouldn’t believe that I got any sleep after that, but I did. For all I know the whole thing was a dream, though it didn’t seem like one – far too solid and circumstantial.
In any case, I woke up with a start to the sound of birds outside the window. Only then did it strike me that she could have crept back into the unit and cut my throat in my sleep. She did have the run of the whole place, after all. She’d seemed a gentle soul, mind you – not the homicidal maniac type – but then for all I know that could be one of the distinguishing characteristics of psycho killers.
I sure as hell wasn’t going to wait around for any early morning milk deliveries. I’d unpacked very little the night before, so I was back in my clothes and out the door a couple of minutes later. The sun was up, and for the first time I could really see how flat and boring and lonely a spot this was.
There was no answer at the door when I knocked on it. I did feel tempted just to jump in the car and hoof it out of there, but some kind of strange residue of childhood conscience constrained me. There wasn’t anything as useful as a scale of charges up on the door, so I compromised, finally – after knocking and shouting a few more times – by leaving forty bucks under a stone by the doormat.
Maybe I short-changed them, maybe not. It wasn’t much of a night’s sleep, that’s for sure, but I have to say that I’m very glad I paid for it, all things considered.
There was a rural café a wee way down the road, and luckily it was already open for business: early risers in the country, I guess. The proprietor seemed a chatty sort, and as I was ordering my coffee and eggs, he asked me where I’d been staying.
‘Oh, a motel a couple of miles back down the road. Brick place, with a couple of units out the back.’
He looked at me a little strangely, and said ‘Where did you say? You mean, back in the town, thirty, forty miles back?’
‘No, no,’ I continued, half-disposed to give him the whole yarn. ‘I guess it must have been some kind of farm: a house and a couple of units beside the courtyard.’
‘On the main road? This road out here?’
‘Yes.’
‘There’s no motels round here. Not fitting that description, anyway. You’re sure it wasn’t a B & B? Roses round the door, old couple?’
‘No, no, nothing like that – there was a big ‘motel’ sign out the front. It had a big lighted up VACANCY on it. It was kind of a strange place, though.’
‘Strange how?’ he asked.
‘Well, it was an old guy who let me in, but then I met his daughter later, and she seemed to think that there was something funny about that ... I couldn’t quite work out why.’
I found myself consciously shaping and abridging the story as I told it. I didn’t want to blurt out any of the ghost story she’d told me, but nor did I want to close him off from confirming it if there was something in it – some kind of local legend.
‘Mister, I don’t know where you think you’ve been staying, but it can’t have been in the place you’re talking about.’
‘You do know it, then?’
‘Of course I know it. That old farm – house, units. It’s been up for sale for more than six months now. It must have been the big ‘FOR SALE’ notice you saw.’
‘But who’s living there?’
‘Nobody’s living there.’
‘Well, maybe one of the neighbours has been renting out rooms in there on the sly.’
‘I doubt it. Not after what happened.’
‘What did happen?’
‘After the fire, I mean.’
I suppose that’s where I’d leave it if this was just a piece of fiction. But since it isn’t, it doesn’t end so neatly.
I tried to question the guy further, but he seemed to have lost his appetite for conversation by then. I gathered that there’d been a fire on the farm a couple of years before and that most of the buildings had been gutted.
‘Except the units?’ I asked hopefully. He wouldn’t confirm or deny that one – just glared at me sideways.
‘An old man and his daughter?’ I asked again. He nodded, glumly. ‘And where are they now?’ I asked.
‘Both dead,’ he replied.
And that was that. I could have driven back up the road to take another look at the motel, I suppose, but it was going to be a long day’s drive in any case, and I somehow didn’t want to see the picture he was painting for me.
I still don’t have the faintest idea what happened to me that night – a dream I suppose, (or some very inventive gossip from the town wag in the café), but I did learn one thing: don’t scoff at what you don’t understand.
And remember that you never quite know who you’re talking to, especially in an old house on a dark night somewhere near the exact dead centre of nowhere.
Maurice A. Lee, ed.: Influence and Confluence: East and West (2016)[7-13/12/2011]
[4217 words]
[Published in Influence and Confluence: East and West. A Global Anthology on the Short Story. Edited by Maurice A. Lee. ISBN 978-7-5675-5183-1 (Shanghai: East China Normal University Press, 2016): 388-95;
Ghost Stories (Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2019): 17-26.]
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