The Rain Engineer
He remembered the houses leaving Monterey: cream-colored boxes, tented and flapping in the coastal breeze, like a scattered but secret carnival. They do that for the termites, the clerk at the Shell station with the scarred jaw had explained to Turk on his way out of town from the funeral. And here he was—fifteen miles outside of Tucson, on the return trip home from Hattie’s funeral, staring through the windshield at the tented motel while the sky roared down the unexpected:
Rain.
Rivers of rain-wash pooled on either side of his grandmother Hattie’s hand-me-down Toyota. It had been a gift from the family to Turk—Turk the struggling actor, the unorthodox dreamer sullying the line of Thomas professionals. In the beam of the car’s headlights the tenting covering the motel—black, not cream-colored like the houses in Monterey—shook and writhed in the wind. A sign with large block letters hung over the doorway like a sash announcing a small town parade:
Pardon Our Dust! Renovations in Progress!
“Screw it.”
He pulled the car off the road, nearly hydroplaning as he slid to a stop beneath the neon sign that had first drawn his attention. He cursed and stretched his neck. A knot the size of a baseball had started to form between his shoulder blades from the long drive and the horrible night sleep the night before on his cousin Craig’s pull-out couch. He stared back at the tenting. Termites he could deal with. He wasn’t sleeping in a car in the middle of the desert, in the middle of a freak rainstorm. He jerked the car door open, slammed it behind him, and ran to a white rectangle of a doorway exposed between the fluttering tent flaps.
A few moments later he stood panting and drenched in a dim-lit room. As his eyes slowly adjusted, he focused on the gray bulge—a woman—smiling back at him from behind a small desk.
“Come in! Come in!” her nasally voice hailed. “Get out of that mess!”
“I’m sorry. I know it’s late, but I’ve been—”
“No apologies needed!” rasped the woman.
He stepped closer. He could see her better now. She had a small, pinched face, and when she spoke her eyes stayed fixed on the ceiling. Don’t stare, he thought. Some kind of handicap. He lowered his gaze to the desk while the woman’s pale hands scrabbled across the dusty surface until they found the lid of a drawer. After some fumbling and metal clinks, a key was brandished into the light. Smiling, eyes still focused on the ceiling, the woman handed the key over to Turk.
On a sliver of tape, he read the fine black marker: No. 8.
“Should I give you a card? For the reservation?”
The lady’s face spasmed and settled. “No! No need! You’re beat! We’ll work it out tomorrow! Get some rest!”
Turk hovered at the desk for a few more seconds while the woman turned away, crouching towards the suggestion of another door farther back in the darkness.
“Okay. Thanks…Goodnight.”
He made his way past the desk to the stairs where a sign reading “Rooms 1-8” shone through a thick film of dust. Climbing the stairs, he found the corridor and followed it until he reached the room. Unlocking the door, he let out a sigh of relief. It looked normal enough: single bed, side table, one window blacked out by tenting. Shabby, but normal. He found the bed and collapsed. Above him, a dark square of tarp like a tile shivered in a section of the ceiling. A few drops of water dribbled out, splattering against the floor. He watched the spot anxiously for a few more seconds. When no great deluge gushed forth, he closed his eyes, dissolving into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Sometime later in the night he awoke to the scratching.
He jolted up. The side lamp was still on. The scratching sounded again—louder and more insistent than before. He peered across the room in the direction of the closet. Creeping over, following the scratches, he threw open the door. He threw his hand over his mouth as the noxious smell invaded his nostrils.
The walls of the closet were oozing—oozing and bubbling with pink liquid. Out of an opening in the wet pink wall, he could see the hand—reaching out, grasping for his face. He jerked back, feeling breath choke in his lungs. There was a face! A face in the wall! Its mouth was open as if trying to speak, but only a hoarse whisper came out. Before it folded back into a deeper layer of pink, the words came bubbling out of the wall.
“Get out…You’re inside it…”
Turk shuddered and fell backward, tripping on his own feet, hitting the floor.
Then the ceiling flew apart.
Paralyzed with terror, he watched the black tarp fly off, the ceiling ripping away like paper, revealing in its place the largest creature he’d ever seen.
It lorded over the hole that was once a ceiling. A blinding light came through the hole—a lure—dangling down, like something used to troll the darkest haunts of the ocean. Outside the sharp glare of the light, Turk could see a vast network of organs lower down—all rippling and folding over themselves like sausage links. Then the creature’s face: leering, its eyes sunk deep into flesh the color of cobalt. The wicked, leering face peered down at him above the network of organs while a set of wings—large and black as clipper ship sails—rose above him, blotting out the moon and stars. From a network of spouts in the wings water poured like a hundred city fire hydrants busted open. It was the rain that had stopped him on the highway…
The engineered rain slowed to a steady drip. Right before the creature bent down, swallowing him up in its wings, Turk saw her:
The lady from the desk, dangling from the creature’s body like an umbilical puppet, her eyes still fixed above her, her mouth smiling in pure exaltation.
***
J.R. Potter is the author and illustrator of the critically-acclaimed teen mystery series Thomas Creeper about a mortician's son and apprentice turned detective for the dead. His graphic novel work has appeared in the pages of Image Comics and his short fiction has been published by The Portland Review and Owl Canyon Press. By day, he is equal parts music teacher, bartender, and dog lover. He is honored and delighted to be included with fellow lovers of the macabre in Grim & Gilded.