Room 6 Is Never Rented, and the Book Says Why

It was an off-season seaside motel, the kind that survives on truckers and people whose plans have gone wrong, and I was the second category. The clerk was an old man who ran the desk like a man who'd run it a long time. When he assigned my room he ran his finger down the key board and skipped, without a flicker, a hook labelled 6 — went from 5 to 7, handed me 7, and would have said nothing if I hadn't been nosy and tired enough to ask why 6 was empty on a night he clearly needed the money.

He looked at me for a moment, deciding something, and then he did something I didn't expect: he reached under the desk and brought up an old bound register, the paper kind, decades of guests in fading ink, and he turned to a page maybe forty years back, and he put his finger on a line.

A guest had checked into room 6. Name, date, a car registration in the old format, a signature. And then — nothing. No check-out. The column where the departure date goes, blank. The old man told it plainly, in the flat way of a story told many times: the man in 6 never checked out and was never seen to leave. The room was found locked from the inside, chain on, his things there, his car in the lot, and him gone — not dead in the room, gone, a locked room with no occupant and no exit, a small impossible absence the police of the day wrote up and closed because there was nothing to write. The car sat in the lot for months. Nobody ever came for it. Nobody ever came for him.

'We keep it for him,' the old man said, nodding at the 6 hook. 'In case he comes back and wants to settle up.' He said it without a trace of a smile, and then he told me the rest, which is the part I actually can't shake. They don't rent 6 — not out of pure superstition, but because they tried, over the years, and it doesn't take. Guests put in 6 leave in the night, or ask to move, or check out at dawn grey-faced and won't say why. One or two, over the decades, reported the same thing: waking to find a man standing at the foot of the bed in old-fashioned clothes, patient, not threatening, holding out a hand as if waiting to be given a key. So the motel stopped fighting it. They keep 6 empty, made up fresh, the bed turned down, a key on the hook, ready. For him. In case he comes back to settle up.

I slept in 7. Through the wall from 6. I did not sleep well, and around 3 a.m. I heard, from the next room, the room that is never rented and was empty and locked, the small sounds of someone settling in for the night — a case set down, a tap running, the creak of a bed taking a weight. In the morning I checked out early, like the grey-faced ones, and I didn't say why, and the old man didn't ask, because he knew, and as I left he glanced at the 6 hook where the key still hung, and said, mildly, 'Quiet night for him. He likes the company next door.'

I have stayed in a lot of cheap motels. I have never asked about an empty room again.