A night in early October, 2007. I was driving route 9 through western Massachusetts when the rain turned to sleet and the signs just... stopped. No town line, no gas station, no lights. Until I saw the vacancy sign of the Foxglove Motel — a tired neon pink foxglove flower, flickering. The clerk at the desk was a thin man in a green jacket who didn't look up when he checked me in. Room 7. The key was brass, heavy, warm. I slept for maybe an hour before I heard it — not a sound, but the absence of sound. The rain had stopped. The heater had stopped. Everything had stopped, except the footsteps in the hallway. Slow, heavy, like someone dragging something soft. I didn't open the door. I didn't look through the peephole. But in the morning, when I went to check out, the clerk handed me a receipt with my name already written on it — the same name I gave him the night before. But I had never told him my name. He just... knew. And the foxglove on the sign had one fewer bloom than when I arrived.