A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Toll Booth, Part 2

Elias’ head buzzed with what happened earlier with the Hitchhiker and the revelation of the road. Perhaps he was approaching this all wrong. He felt uneasy, as though he’d broken some unwritten law of the Toll Booth — forcing a round peg into a square hole.

It was dark now, the moon swallowed by thick storm clouds. Thunder peeled in the distance, steady and low, like drums before a charge. Then he smelled it: rain.

The first drops came fat and round, tapping against the windshield. Then came more, and more, until the desert vanished in sheets of water. The wipers struggled, squealing against glass, useless against the flood. Elias leaned forward, squinting into blackness, until he caught it — a glow ahead.

Neon.

Like a beacon in a drowned world, the sign sputtered through the storm: GATES MOTEL. The “S” flickered like it was clinging to life. Pink and blue light bled across the lot, turning the puddles into oil slicks.

He pulled in, tires splashing, and froze at what filled the lot.

A horse-drawn carriage stood crooked by the office door, reins dangling. Beside it gleamed a Roman chariot, bronze slick with rain. A Model T Ford tilted on three wheels, as if it had been dragged here from some dust-bowl ditch. A Cadillac hearse loomed at the far edge, its windows black, though Elias swore something shifted inside.

There were newer relics, too: a VW bus with flowers dripping color down its sides, a pickup with ropes and chains piled in its bed. And then — absurdly, impossibly — a single stone wheel leaned upright in a puddle, heavy and crude, as though it had rolled straight out of prehistory.

Lightning flashed. For an instant, Elias thought he saw a hulking shape crouched beside it, but the vision was gone before he could blink.

Shivering, he killed the engine, stepped into the storm, and hurried toward the lobby.

The lobby reeked — wet carpet, stale liquor, and the sweet rot of green apples left too long in the sun. A gramophone wheezed a broken waltz in the corner, the same bar skipping over and over. And the place was crowded.

“Look what the storm dragged in!” a man in a tattered tuxedo bellowed from a chair, raising a glass that sloshed onto his bowtie.

Laughter rippled through the room. A woman drowning in lace and tarnished jewelry leaned forward on the sofa, cheeks painted too red, lips smeared crimson across her impossibly white teeth. “Don’t just stand there, darling,” she crooned. “Come in, come in. You’ll catch your death out there. And we can’t have that before the room takes you.”

In the corner, a man in a faded military coat pounded his cane in rhythm with the skipping waltz. “House rules! House rules!” he barked.

Elias tried not to look at them, but his eyes found the strangest figure of all.

Near the fireplace sat a hulking man draped in a fur hide, his brow jutting, hair thick and matted, a stone club propped at his side. A caveman.

Elias froze, fear coursing through his veins. He braced for a grunt or a snarl — more likely a clubbing. Instead, the man looked him up and nodded, calm and deliberate. His voice was low and precise, spoken in impeccable turn-of-the-century English.

“Pay no mind to them. They thrive on noise. Harmless enough. Mostly.”

The room howled at that, the tuxedo man nearly choking on his drink. “Hear that? Mister Stone Age thinks he’s the King of England!”

But the caveman only turned back to the fire, straight-backed, unbothered. In a room full of shrieking grotesques, he was the most civilized presence there.

Behind the counter, the innkeeper finally stepped forward, and Elias nearly recoiled.

Her face was a mask of old paint, powder caked in layers until it cracked around her eyes and mouth, making her look perpetually startled — as if she’d seen a ghost centuries ago and never recovered. A towering powdered wig listed to one side, nearly brushing the warped ceiling. Her gown sagged and bunched, a patchwork of lace, velvet, and curtain fabric stitched together by someone who’d only ever heard tell of 17th-century fashion.

When she spoke, her voice came out in a mangled Cockney lilt, broad and theatrical, like a parody dragged from the cheap seats of a playhouse.

“’Ello, luvvie,” she rasped, stretching her lips in a painted grin. “Welcome t’ the Gates, where we takes what’s owed an’ you takes what’s left. Ain’t no coin nor credit ‘ere. Nah, nah. Price is secrets, see? Yer darkest, yer dirtiest, yer never-whispered sins.”

She shoved a massive leather ledger across the counter. Its cover was burned with the word PAYMENT.

Elias frowned. “I don’t— I don’t have cash.”

The jeweled woman shrieked with laughter, bracelets jangling. “Cash! He thinks it’s cash!”

The tuxedo drunkard slapped the arm of his chair. “We pay in truth, traveler! And truth don’t come cheap.”

The innkeeper leaned closer, the waxen mask of her face cracking at the corners. “Write it down, nice an’ neat, or the key won’t bite fer ya. Simple as a guv’nor’s purse, it is.”

Elias hesitated, pen hovering over the yellowed page. The book crawled with other hands’ confessions, each written in frantic scrawl: I let him drown. I never loved her. The baby wasn’t mine.

And then, for a moment, the Cockney lilt vanished. Her grin sagged, her eyes dead and hollow. “Be careful what you surrender,” she whispered, her voice flat, inhuman.

Elias’ heart jolted.

The moment snapped, the grin plastered back on, the lilt returning in full. “Go on then, luvvie! Ain’t no one checks in wifout payin’. We keeps the books nice an’ proper ‘ere, we do!”

The laughter swelled around him again, rattling the walls, but Elias barely heard it. He felt the weight of the pen in his hand, the empty page waiting for him to stain it with truth.

Elias stared at the blank page, the pen heavy in his hand. The laughter of the grotesques swelled around him, the gramophone needle scratching the same bar of music like a taunt.

The ledger seemed to breathe, waiting.

He lowered the pen. His hand shook as the words formed, jagged and uneven:

“I left Mason the night of the fire. I could have stayed. I didn’t.”

The ink bled into the yellowed paper as though the confession had been starving for it. The moment the last letter left the tip, the ledger snapped shut of its own accord.

The innkeeper’s painted face stretched into its awful grin, but her voice dropped — no Cockney, no act. Just cold, flat certainty:
“Now it belongs to us.”

Elias’ stomach turned. He tried to lift the pen again, but his hand felt lighter, hollower, as though something vital had been scraped out of him.

The caveman by the fire stirred. “It never leaves, you know,” he said, voice low. “They’ll whisper it back to you. Again and again.”

The ledger vanished beneath the counter, and the innkeeper slid the blank brass key across the wood. This time, Elias didn’t need to ask how it worked.

The ledger snapped shut. The air in the lobby shifted — thicker, heavier, as though everyone had heard the words Elias had written without needing to read them.

The jeweled woman leaned forward, grinning too wide. The soldier thumped his cane in rhythm, chanting “House rules! House rules!”

Then Elias felt it. Eyes on him.

The man in the tattered tuxedo, slouched in his chair with his glass raised, was no longer laughing. He was staring. Too directly, too intently. His grin collapsed into something sharper, revealing disturbingly pronounced canines.

Slowly, deliberately, he opened his free hand.

A flame bloomed in his palm. Small at first, then curling higher, orange and hungry, casting warped shadows on the ceiling. The fire didn’t burn him. He let it lick his fingers, never breaking eye contact with Elias.

“You remember it, don’t you?” the drunkard whispered, voice suddenly clear and sharp, the mockery gone. “The fire. How you walked away.”

Elias’ throat closed. His heart pounded against his ribs.

The caveman stirred, rising slightly from his seat. The club rested against his knee, but his voice was steady, commanding:
“Enough.”

The flame winked out instantly.

The tuxedo man blinked, the grin snapping back, laughter bubbling from his throat as if nothing had happened. He sloshed his glass and shouted, “Another round for the new guest!”

The chorus of grotesques roared with laughter again, but Elias couldn’t shake the afterimage — the flame burning in that man’s palm, and the weight of his own secret now alive in their mouths.

He fled the lobby, laughter still clawing at his ears, and rounded a corner.

Elias stopped short. His eyes went wide.

The hallway stretched out before him like a royal gallery. The carpet was a deep, regal purple, so thick and soft it swallowed his footsteps. The walls gleamed with endless patterns of gold fleur-de-lis, shimmering faintly in the warm light. Silver sconces jutted from the walls, their globes glowing steadily like jewels in a ballroom.

The air was rich with jasmine and citrus, a perfume so clean and intoxicating it made his lungs ache with relief. The stink of mildew and rot from the lobby seemed very far away.

For a moment, Elias let it fill him. He thought, treacherously: Maybe it’s worth it. Almost worth giving up a secret, just to stay here.

The key pulsed in his palm, warm as blood.

Before him, the polished mahogany doors waited, stretching endlessly into golden silence. Each bore a nameplate or symbol, some familiar, some strange, each humming faintly with expectation.

The grotesques were gone. The only sound was his own breath, shallow in the perfumed air.

Elias tightened his grip on the key. Somewhere, one of those doors was waiting for him.

He came upon the first door, “T. London” it read in tidy script.  He shrugged, slid the key in the lock and opened the door.  

Shrill screams and begs for mercy greeted him.  He stood in the doorway suddenly paralyzed with fear. His eyes were forced to drink in his new surroundings.  Curved stone walls partitioned like cells and cordoned off with old and rusting metal bars.  

Elias’ breath caught in his throat. The screams clawed at his ears, raw and ragged, not echoes but alive, as if bodies were writhing in every cell.

The air was damp and foul. A sour reek of straw, sweat, and rusted iron smothered the perfume of jasmine and citrus that had clung to him only seconds ago. Water dripped steadily somewhere out of sight, echoing off stone in a rhythm that mocked the broken waltz he’d left behind in the lobby.

He stumbled forward, the purple carpet vanishing beneath his feet, replaced by uneven cobblestones slick with slime. The cell doors rattled on their hinges, shaking as unseen hands beat against them. Shadows thrashed across the walls — figures writhing, begging, clawing.

“Please!” a woman’s voice shrieked from somewhere deep in the corridor. “Please, not the axe!”

Elias spun, but there was no one in sight. Just the bars, the stains, and the clatter of chains swinging from hooks.

At the far end of the chamber, a wooden block sat beneath a slit of light. The straw around it was stained dark, blackened with centuries of blood.

And then he saw her.

A figure in a torn gown, hair matted with sweat, stumbling forward with her head bowed. Anne Boleyn — or what was left of her. She moved like a marionette tugged by unseen strings, her hands clasped as if in prayer.

She passed within arm’s reach, never looking at him, her lips moving in desperate whispers he couldn’t hear. And when she collapsed to her knees at the block, the executioner’s shadow fell across her — massive, faceless, axe raised high.

The key in Elias’ hand burned hot, as though urging him to leave before the blade fell.

He closed the door with a thud, panting hard, his back to the door barring it shut as if any of the nefarious goings on would break out into the hallway and consume him.  After recovering and being sure nothing would follow him from that damned room, he trudged along to find a room suitable to place his head for the night.  

He came across another door, Versailles, France.  Elias was hopeful, certainly a posh room like Versailles would be worth his secret.  He tried the key.  Locked.  Sighing at the luck of whomever claimed that room, he carried on.  

He read the plaques on the doors; Hôtel d’Alsace, Paris or St. Petersburg, Russia (Elias could only imagine what was behind that door).  Finally at the very end of the hallway he came to, “L. Bedroom, Washington, DC”.  He slid the key and noticed a slight difference, like it was waiting for this moment.  He opened the door and walked in.

The door creaked inward, and Elias stepped into a silence so profound it pressed against his ears.

The room was stately, solemn. A four-poster bed dominated the chamber, its canopy heavy with dark drapery. The air smelled faintly of wood polish and old paper, undercut by the faintest trace of tobacco. A desk sat in the corner, papers neatly stacked as if awaiting a hand that would never return to them.

The walls were lined with portraits, their painted eyes following him, all bearing the weight of centuries. A grandfather clock ticked in the far corner, steady, patient, indifferent.

And then Elias noticed it.

The chair beside the bed was pulled slightly forward, as though someone had just risen from it. A tall, gaunt shadow stretched across the wall, impossibly long, and yet when Elias turned — there was no one there.

The key, still hot in his hand, cooled suddenly, heavy as stone. The door clicked shut behind him of its own accord.

He was alone.

Or almost.

From somewhere in the silence, a voice sighed, low and weary, a voice he knew without ever having heard it before:

"I am tired… so very tired."

The clock ticked. The portraits stared. And Elias realized the room had claimed him.

Elias sat on the edge of the mattress. The voice should have chilled him, but instead it felt almost like agreement. He was tired too — too tired to care.

He pulled the covers back and lay down, the weight of history pressing close, the air thick with shadows.

The clock ticked. The portraits stared. The sigh lingered in the stillness.

Elias closed his eyes. Sleep claimed him almost at once.

Elias was surprised he actually woke up feeling refreshed.  He looked around.  He was alone, a fact which he was unsure made him feel comforted or uneasy.  His stomach growled and deciding he didn’t much care one way or another, he freshened up and decided to find something to placate his stomach.  

The door clicked open under his hand, and to his surprise the regal hallway had been replaced by something altogether different: a breakfast spread.

The door from the Lincoln Bedroom opened into a dining room dressed like a ballroom. A long buffet stretched wall to wall, draped in spotless linen and glittering with polished silver. Steam curled from domed platters. The air was heavy with butter, coffee, and roasted meats.

A gilt-framed placard rested on the counter, the handwriting oddly elegant:

TODAY’S MENU: RMS TITANIC, APRIL 14, 1912 — FIRST CLASS BREAKFAST

Elias stared.

The spread looked lifted straight from a first-class saloon: smoked kippers garnished with lemon and parsley; grilled mutton chops glistening pink; kedgeree fragrant with curry and golden raisins; cold sliced ham and tongue arranged with mathematical precision. Omelets sat in neat rows, dusted with herbs. Pastries gleamed with sugar lacquer — brioche, rolls, pound cake, tarts — stacked like offerings. A tureen of porridge steamed beside crystal pitchers of milk and orange juice that shimmered strangely in the light.

Coffee urns loomed at either end, polished to blinding shine. When Elias poured a cup, the smell was rich and bitter, but beneath it lurked something faintly metallic, like iron or seawater.

The silver cutlery gleamed, each fork and spoon engraved with fleur-de-lis. Even the napkins were embroidered in gold thread, folded with precision, faintly perfumed with lavender.

It was lavish, absurdly so — and unsettling. Elias knew the truth: no ship had ever returned from that breakfast.

He filled his plate with fruit, salmon and some of the other breakfast offerings and looked for a table.  

He quickly spied the surprisingly eloquent caveman from last night sitting in front of a roaring and very inviting fireplace. He was pouring over a paper in some language Elias couldn’t even begin to guess, and the neolithic man did so with a cracked monocle perched in his right eye.

“May I join you?”

“I’d be delighted!” The caveman motioned to the empty chair opposite, “Did you sleep well?”

“Yes, I did, surprisingly…”

“This motel has a way of doing that.  With the right bed and a good breakfast, it almost makes you think payment is worth it” the caveman quipped.

Elias shifted uncomfortably in his seat, the memory from last night painfully fresh.  

The Caveman forked a slice of melon but didn’t eat it, turning the fruit over thoughtfully in the firelight. “That’s how it gets you. The rooms, the feasts, even the quiet sleep. They sweeten the deal, polish the bars of the cage. But make no mistake—your secret is gone, and it’s theirs now.”

Elias set down his fork, appetite evaporating. “So what about you? What did you give up to stay here?”

For a long moment, the Caveman didn’t answer. His eyes were fixed on the flames, the light throwing deep shadows across his heavy brow. Finally, he said, “I gave them the memory of my first fire. The discovery that changed everything for my kind. And now, I sit by the hearth and feel nothing but warmth.”

The words hung heavy in the air. Elias couldn’t tell if it was a confession, a lament, or a boast.

The Caveman finally turned, his gaze clear, steady, almost kind. Elias could see himself in the weathered monocle. “You wrote it down, but you still remember it. That makes you dangerous. They’ll want more from you, Elias. They always do. But the trick is to keep walking.”

“Walking where?” Elias asked.

The Caveman smiled faintly, almost like a father at a child’s question. “The road’s still out there. It always is. When you’re ready, you’ll see it. The storm doesn’t end here—it waits.”

Elias looked down at his plate, the salmon’s pink flesh gleaming like raw muscle, the fruit shining too brightly to be real. He pushed it away.

“I don’t think I’m hungry anymore,” he said.

“Good,” the Caveman replied. He leaned back, the club across his knees, eyes returning to the fire. “Better to leave wanting than to forget what you’ve already given.”

Elias pushed his plate away, the sweet rolls and fruit gleaming too brightly to be real. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Why secrets? Why memories? Why does this place want them?”

The Caveman tilted his head, as if considering whether to answer. At last, he spoke, slow and deliberate.

“Secrets are a kind of power. Think of it. A secret shapes you, binds you, chains you with fear, with shame, with humiliation. And yet you hold it tight, because you know the moment it’s spoken aloud, it changes everything. That tension, that weight, is fuel. When you write it down in the book, the Gates take it. They feast on it. They drink the power you’ve carried.”

Elias swallowed, the words sinking like stones.

The Caveman leaned forward slightly, firelight catching in his heavy brow. “But memories… memories are stronger still. They aren’t just things we hide. They make us. They build us, piece by piece — love, grief, triumph, failure. Take away enough of those, and what’s left?” He tapped his chest with a thick finger. “You. Hollowed out. A husk that eats and laughs and sleeps, but remembers nothing of why. The Motel here and others like it are too weak to harness that much power.  Think of it like Niagara falls trying to power a child’s toy; it would completely overload it!  But there are older and more powerful locales that can and do handle such power…”

Silence stretched between them. Elias stared at the sugared roll dissolving on his plate, suddenly repulsed.

The Caveman eased back into his chair, the massive club across his knees like a scepter. “That’s the bargain here, traveler. You’ve passed the veil into the world behind the world.  Will you stay, or will you go back and try to unlearn what you have learned?”

That last question hung in the air as Elias sped down the road, the Gates Motel growing smaller and smaller in his rearview mirror.  The Motel might be long gone, but what he learned hung over him like the blade of a guillotine hangs over a monarch.  He tried to settle his whirring mind with music.  He popped the mix tape back in.  Riders on the Storm played.  

It did not help.  

Elias pressed harder on the gas. The engine growled. The tires caught the wet asphalt, rubber tearing forward with a hungry roar. He leaned into it, feeling the car surge, the road vibrating under him like a living thing.

Somewhere ahead, the Toll Booth waited. And Elias was done waiting for it.

TO BE CONTINUED.

Elias’ story will be completed September 19, 2025.