Stranger Than Shitty Sheets and Rubber Ding-Dongs

Mathew Gostelow

Eight prosthetic legs, just strewn around, like someone had smashed the mother of all spiders. A jam jar half-filled with spunk. Lenny said it was from a bull, most likely, but I wasn’t so sure. A Transformers lunch box with twelve live snails inside. An urn containing the ashes of someone named Professor Johnson Whiskers. Lenny said it was a cat, most likely. Hard to tell though. And dead bodies, of course. Too many dead bodies.

When I tell people I’m a cleaner at a cheap motel—the one by the woods on the edge of town—they nearly always say the same thing.

“Oh, Gwen,” they say, “I bet you’ve seen some strange things in those rooms, haven’t you?”

They’re thinking of shitty sheets and rubber ding-dongs, of course. And I’ve seen my fair share of those. But on a scale of one to strange, they barely even register. Sometimes I’ll reel off a few of the weirdest things that ever got left behind, just to watch the expression on their face change. The truth is a whole lot more bizarre than what most people can imagine.

But if someone really goes on and I want to shut them right up, then I tell them about the owl man.

Lenny says when the guy checked in he was twitchy. Shifty. He sees a lot of blokes like that. And it is blokes, mostly, not women. But this guy, the owl man, he was creepy too. Lenny said he looked weirdly greasy, like a waxwork on a hot day. Great big amber eyes—too big—swimming about on his face like a pair of fried eggs, Lenny said. That’s why he called him the owl man. He spoke funny too, this bloke. Slow, deliberate, with a weird accent—I know, I know, glass houses and stones, but the owl man talked even stranger than me. Lenny said it was like the guy was just pretending to be a person. Like one of those robots they have in Japan—lifelike but also deeply wrong in some way that’s hard to pin down.

And he was really serious about not being disturbed—the owl man was—kept saying he’d need five days to himself, uninterrupted. Offered to pay more if we’d leave him alone. Thing is, Lenny has a policy. The rooms get cleaned every three days, no question. Otherwise people get too wild, too stinky, too filthy.

I’ll clean around people on that third day, if I have to. There was one time I was hoovering and wiping and tidying in a room where this man and woman were clearly doing some sort of black magic sex ritual who-knows-what. They were both naked under the covers, every now and then peeping out. And he’d written all over her in black pen, like she was a doodle pad you keep by the phone.

They had the curtains drawn, candles dripping wax everywhere. I didn’t stare, but they were obviously embarrassed and I felt awkward. They had music playing on a little portable tape machine, it sounded like a choir, so I told them I liked it, just to make conversation.

“It’s Handel’s Messiah,” muttered the man. “But we’re playing it backwards.”

I nodded and started hoovering around the shapes they’d drawn on the carpet in chalk. There was a plastic model of a horse in the middle of the floor. Glossy black, it was, with a red saddle and bright white eyes, head down, looking furious. Radiating menace. I gave it a wide berth. As I left, the woman thanked me quietly, so you could tell they were good people.

It was cringey, but I’d rather walk in on a black magic sex ritual than a dead body any day. Normally when people tell Lenny they don’t want to be disturbed it’s because they came to the motel to end it all. Sometimes they go through with it, but mostly they don’t, thank goodness. If they do, it’s generally pills, or some other kind of drugs. Needles and powders, glass pipes and tinfoil. There’s no blood that way, but there’s plenty of puke. Puke and piss with an overdose, that’s what you get. And their bodies seem to rot quicker than usual, too. Makes the room smell like arseholes and dodgy beef.

That’s the thing about a motel. Whatever room you check into, odds are that someone died in there. Probably on the bed. People have screwed there, shat there, died there. Sometimes all at once.

People assume I do it for the money, cleaning a grotty motel at my age. And that’s part of it, but I also need something to do, so I don’t just fade away, or check into a motel myself one day and ask not to be disturbed. I don’t mind working early mornings and late nights—I don’t sleep so much nowadays anyway. And I kind of like Lenny. He’s easy company and he doesn’t expect too much of me.

There’s also Ari, of course. She’s my daughter and she’s the reason I moved here, to the States, in the first place—to be close to her. We don’t talk so much nowadays, and we see each other even less. But it’s enough for me to know I’m nearby, if she needs me. And as long as she’s here, I’ll stay.

Anyway, the owl man. He asked not to be disturbed, so I didn’t go in there until the third day. But when I did, it was like a crime scene, like something on TV. The first thing was the smell. Hit me like a punch on the nose, it did. Made my eyes water. Dead things. Rancid meat. Drains. The whole works. It takes a lot to make me gag nowadays, but I was dry heaving in the doorway.

When I’d pulled myself together, I called out.

“Hello? Housekeeping.”

Nothing.

So I went inside, expecting to see the owl man dead on the floor, or on the bed. I wanted to work out what we were dealing with before I went to get Lenny. It was a twin room, and there was a puddle of liquid shit on the carpet between the beds. Looked like it was full of small bones. Like the guy had eaten a whole bucket of fried chicken without chewing. No wonder he got sick. It was going to be a bugger to clean.

There was broken furniture. The bedside table and the wooden chair were smashed to splinters. Both beds were messed up, like someone had been tangling in the sheets, restless, and there was a stain on one, like a big sweat patch. Or piss maybe. On the other bed, there was a necklace with a long silver pendant, shaped like a tooth—like a lion tooth—but with intricate designs embossed all over it. Sitting there in the middle of all the shit and chaos, this beautiful necklace. I leaned over, staring at it, and for a moment I forgot the stink and the mess and the damage.

I called out again as I approached the bathroom, still expecting to find the creepy guy sick, or passed out, or worse. What I found was worse. So much worse. Blood everywhere. Sprayed across the walls in a gigantic pattern, like a set of deep red butterfly wings. Spattered across my reflection in the small mirror above the sink. It looked like somebody had exploded in there. Like the time I was heating a chicken curry and forgot to pierce the film and the whole thing burst inside the microwave. Sauce and bits everywhere. It was like that. But worse.

On the floor was a crumpled heap. At first I thought it was a pile of towels soaked in blood. But as I looked, I realised it was skin. Like someone had unzipped a human suit and let it drop to the floor. But there was no zip. And this wasn’t an outfit, it was a thick layer of human skin and flesh, lying in a pool of blood. Either the owl man had skinned someone, or someone had skinned him—that was how it looked. 

I’ve seen plenty of horrible things in my time, but nothing like that bathroom. My head swam with the smell and the shock of it all. I’m shaking now just thinking about it.

When I’d recovered a bit, I was going to fetch Lenny, tell him the bad news, tell him to call the police. But then I did something shameful, something I’m embarrassed to tell you. Before I left the room, I went to the bed and I took the necklace. It was heavy—solid silver, that long tooth shape covered in intricate lines. So beautiful. I told myself he was dead, or he was on the run. Either way, the owl man wasn’t coming back for his jewellery.

Within an hour, the room was cordoned off. Blue lights everywhere. I was questioned. Lenny was questioned. Other guests were questioned. One guy got arrested because the police caught him panic-flushing a bag of drugs down the toilet. But nobody could really tell the cops anything useful. He was a weirdo who didn’t want to be disturbed. That pretty much describes a lot of the guests. 

A couple of days later, I went back in the room and did my best to clean it, but Lenny knew he’d have to cough up for a refurbishment. Everyone in town seemed to know about what had happened. Bits of it anyway. The story got twisted—people saying the bloke had eaten someone, or had sex with a dead body. Stuff like that. I didn’t correct them, and for a few days it was mostly all anyone talked about.

I wore the necklace, hidden under my clothes. Cold against my skin. I still don’t know what possessed me to take it. I swear, I’m not a thief by nature. I’ve worked hard for the little I have. But wearing that pendant made me feel good. In a strange way that really makes no sense, it made me feel closer to Ari. I don’t have many beautiful things in my life nowadays, perhaps I don’t deserve them. But maybe that’s why I took it—just to be close to something beautiful. To be close to Ari.

Anyway, in the days after, things started happening around town. Incidents, you’d call them. First there was the boys coming home from football practice, cutting through the park not far from my apartment. One of them got hurt, bruised up really badly. They all said a big man had burst out of the trees in the darkness and knocked them to the ground, flailing madly, making a screeching noise. They said he had wild eyes, shining like headlights. And—get this—one of the boys swore the man had a big pair of wings on his back. Leathery wings, they said. He didn’t fly, though, just ran off.

People started saying they’d seen eyes shining in the dark all over town. Some said they were small like a cat’s. Others said they were huge like torches. Lenny said it was cats or torches, most likely, and I tended to agree with him. People around here sometimes get a bit carried away.

The same week, Lenny kept pointing out the vapour trails in the sky. He’s kind of obsessed with them at the best of times. Thinks it’s the government testing chemicals on the population, making the frogs gay or who-knows-what. But for a few days, there were a lot of lines in the sky, more than usual. And one time, as I looked at them, I felt like they were a message. Like a strange new alphabet. I don’t know how to explain it. Like I said, people get a bit carried away sometimes, me included.

When I was cleaning at the motel, I kept getting this feeling like somebody was watching me, just out of sight, at the edge of the woods. Once I heard a rustling in the trees and turned to see a big yellow eye shining in the dark. Then there was more rustling and it disappeared. Lenny said it was a deer most likely, or one of the foxes that come to eat garbage in the parking lot. But I wasn’t so sure.

Three dogs died that week. Family pets attacked in backyards, ripped up, guts pulled out. Like a wild animal had gone at them, something big. Fences got smashed, claw marks on trees nearby. Maybe bears, people said, even though bears had never come into town and attacked dogs before.

Soon after, I heard the screeching. I was rolling the trolley between rooms when the most unholy noise came from the trees. A high-pitched, piercing, angry noise. It sounded close too, this furious scream. And somehow I felt like it was directed at me. I froze. Strained my eyes, staring into the dark of the woods. I saw nothing, but the sound grew louder. Not a wolf’s howl or a bear’s growl, the only way I can describe it is a screech, like train brakes maybe, metal scraping metal, but you could tell it came from an animal.

I jumped as sudden movement broke out in the trees, loud, fast, violent. Made my heart skip a beat. Branches shook and there was a sound of splintering wood. I felt like something was rushing towards me, like it was coming to attack. Only nothing was there—nothing visible at least. But I felt it: something hit me, a blast of warm, animal-smelling air as though a cattle truck had just bowled past, really close. It blew my hair back, took the breath from my lungs. A shock of emotion carried on that gust. Raw sadness and loss like I’ve never felt before, nor since. It filled me up. I stood for a moment: frozen, shaking until my knees gave way. I crumpled, right there in the grit and gravel outside the motel, sobbing, staring into the darkness through a blur of tears.

After that I took off the necklace. I hung it on a branch of one of the small pines at the edge of the woods. I went back to work, and every once in a while I looked over and saw that long tooth pendant glinting. When I came back in the morning, it was gone.

And that was the end of it. No more kids got hurt, no more dogs attacked. No more eyes in the dark. Even the vapour trails calmed down a bit. And nobody else ever exploded inside the motel—as far as I know, at least.

The sunset that day, after the necklace disappeared, was fiery orange. And the sky was full of vapour trails, curves and angles soaring above the swaying trees. Intricate, beautiful patterns like the embossing on that silver necklace. So beautiful, it made my soul soar.

Mathew Gostelow (he/him) is a dad, husband, and writer living in Birmingham, UK. Some days he wakes early and writes strange tales. If you catch him staring into space, he is either thinking about Twin Peaks or cooked breakfasts. His work has been published by Lucent Dreaming, Janus Literary, The Ghastling, Ellipsis, Stanchion, Roi Fainéant, Cutbow Quarterly, voidspace, and others. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Spare Parts Lit in 2022, shortlisted for the Welkin Prize in 2023, and has won prizes from Bag of Bones Press and Beagle North. You can find him on Twitter @MatGost.

“Stranger than Shitty Sheets and Rubber Ding-Dongs” by Mathew Gostelow © 2023