The Jasmine Motel

The night had been a slow bleed of hours, the kind that only happens when you’re young and immortal and stupid. My name is Lena, and that June night, I was crammed in the back of Hunter’s rust-bitten sedan, the air thick with the ghost of some wedding toast. My best friend Eloise was in the passenger seat, her head lolling against the window, and Hunter was gripping the wheel with the intense concentration of a man who’d had one too many glasses of cheap champagne.

The highway was a black ribbon unwinding through the Malaysian countryside, and every set of headlights that passed was a knife in my chest. Eloise and I were useless, our licenses still wet with ink, and the burden fell on Hunter, whose driving was becoming dangerously experimental. I saw a sign – not the usual green government one, but a hand-painted plank that read ‘SELAMAT DATANG, REHATLAH’ in peeling red letters, with a crude arrow pointing down a gravelly side road. A motel. At that hour, it was a lifeboat.

We rattled up the drive, past clusters of overgrown hibiscus that seemed to drink the moonlight, until we reached a low, sprawling building with a veranda that sagged like a tired smile. The main entrance was a single glass door, fogged with humidity, beside which a flickering neon sign promised ‘BILIK SEWA’ – rooms for rent. But there was no name, just the outline of a faded jasmine flower painted above the door.

Inside, the air hit us like a wall – the cloying, narcotic scent of jasmine, so thick it felt like we were breathing petals. A young Malay woman, no older than twenty-two, stood behind a narrow desk. She had long, black hair that fell past her waist, and her smile was small, practiced, as if she’d done it a thousand times. Her name tag just said ‘Siti’ in a font that seemed old-fashioned. She didn’t look at us with curiosity, but with the quiet patience of someone who’d seen every kind of tired traveler stumble through her doors. She passed us a single brass key, number 7, and gestured down a dim corridor. ‘The only room left,’ she said, her voice a soft murmur. ‘The other guests are sleeping. Please be quiet.’

We found Room 7 at the end of the hall, and the key turned with a grainy resistance. The room was small, the walls a sickly cream, and two single beds stood like tombstones, their sheets crisp and white. A window looked out onto an unlit courtyard, and a rattan armchair sat in a corner, its seat worn with age. Eloise and I claimed the bed nearest the door, leaving the far one for Hunter. He collapsed onto it without a word, his eyes already closing, and within minutes his breathing evened into a drunken slumber. Eloise was asleep in seconds too, her hand dangling off the edge.

But sleep didn’t come for me. The jasmine scent was stronger here, seeping through the cracks in the walls, a sweet, heavy blanket that made my skin crawl. I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling fan, which rotated with a groaning rhythm, stirring the air but not the scent. Then I heard it – a faint scratching, like fingernails on wood, coming from the wall behind the rattan armchair. It would pause, then resume, a maddening, irregular pattern. I told myself it was a rat, a gecko, a pipe. But the rhythm felt deliberate, almost like a secret language tapping out a message I couldn’t understand.

I sat up, my heart knocking against my ribs, and looked at Eloise. Her face was slack, peaceful, but something was wrong. Her breathing was too shallow, almost imperceptible. I touched her shoulder, and her skin was cold. Not cool, but cold, like a stone from the bottom of a well. I shook her harder, and her eyes fluttered open, but they were wrong – the whites had a faint yellowish tint, and her pupils were dilated, fixed on something behind me.

‘Lena,’ she whispered, her voice dry and rough. ‘The lady at the desk… she’s outside the window.’

I snapped my head toward the window. The courtyard was dark, but there, just beyond the glass, a pale face hovered. It was Siti, but changed. Her hair was not black but a murky brown, and her eyes were sunken, hollow, and fixed on me with an intensity that pinned me to the bed. Her lips moved, but I heard no voice. Instead, the scratching in the wall grew louder, faster, desperate, as if trying to claw its way out.

I scrambled to the door, but the handle wouldn’t turn. I threw my weight against it, but it was solid, planted. Behind me, Eloise began to mumble, a stream of words in a language I didn’t recognize, guttural and old. Hunter stirred on his bed, but didn’t wake. The scratching reached a crescendo, and then, suddenly, silence. The face at the window was gone.

I was trembling, my sweat turning the air cold around me. I turned back to Eloise, and she smiled – but it was wrong, too wide, her teeth too many. ‘She says we can leave in the morning,’ Eloise said, her voice unnaturally calm, as if she were reading from a script. ‘But we have to give her something first.’

I felt my stomach drop. ‘What?’ I managed to breathe.

Eloise’s head tilted at an almost broken angle. ‘A piece of our story. Each night, a memory. For the jasmine to keep blooming.’

I looked at the window. The face was back, floating there in the dark, watching me with a patient, starving hunger. The scratching resumed, but now it was in the room, coming from under the floorboards, from inside the walls, all around us. I realized then that this wasn’t a motel. It was a trap, a beautifully perfumed snare for weary souls. We had walked in, and somewhere in the jasmine-scented darkness, pieces of us were already being harvested.

I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, morning light was filtering through the flimsy curtains. Hunter was groaning, holding his head. Eloise was stretching like a cat. The room looked ordinary, harmless, the scent of jasmine just a lingering trace. I looked at Eloise, and for a split second, I saw a flicker of something ancient in her eyes, there and gone. She smiled at me, and her teeth were normal, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes.

‘Ready to go?’ she asked, and her voice had a new softness to it, a gentle hiss that I’d never noticed before.

I nodded, not trusting my words. I packed our meager belongings, and when we checked out, Siti was behind the desk, her smile the same. She handed me a small, white jasmine flower with a stem that glistened, as if fresh.

‘For the road,’ she said.

I took it. I couldn’t help it. And as we drove away, I found myself pressing the flower to my nose, inhaling its sweetness, and a wave of drowsiness washed over me. I heard Siti’s voice in my head, soft and inevitable: ‘You’ll be back, Lena. You have so many stories left to tell.’

The road stretched ahead, and Eloise was humming a tune I didn’t recognize. The jasmine flower went into the glove compartment, but its scent clung to every breath, and I knew, with a terrifying certainty, that in that motel, we had not just spent a night. We had spent a night of our lives, and the debt was still unpaid.