8:59am

June 28
California desert-land

Bolting upright, breathing hard, Ike looked around. It was daylight. He was in room 26 in the Hotel California. He grabbed his watch and stared at it. 8:59am. He collapsed back against the pillow, eyes shut, reasoning with his overactive imagination. A dream. It had been all a dream.
'Thank God' he couldn't help but think.
He was tired, wanted to go back to sleep, but a tiny portion of his brain, that he would never acknowledge, was afraid. He couldn't go back to sleep now, even if they dosed him with enough Valium to drop a whole army!

"The last one," the Goddess said as she handed him the black bag. Today, she was the beautiful, guileless woman she had been when he'd first arrived. But that beauty was soured for him now. The dream of her had been too vivid for him to not look at her and for a millisecond see the demon that had possessed her in that dream.
"Thank-you," he said politely enough, but distantly, almost coldly.
"Come back soon," she was definitely a creature of the night, daylight did not treat her pale-dark beauty kindly, made her look sickly. Perhaps she was.
The Chevy pulled out of the gravel driveway and raced down the road. It was only then that the Goddess allowed herself a smile. So he'd thought it was all a dream? Absently attempting to clear the blood from underneath her nails, she turned back to the young boy, standing on the board verandah, near the night-man.
"Go inside. See that the master is . . .uh . . . well taken care of," the boy smiled and winked at her before going inside. He was learning well, that one. Once more, she gazed at the settling dust.
'You think this was all a dream Isaac Hanson? Well, you can check out any time you want, you can drive as far as you like. . . .'

Isaac pulled into the first gas station he found and got a black coffee. He didn't really wake up of a morning until he'd had a coffee, but he wasn't going to stay in that hotel a second more than he had to.
"Rough night mate?" a truckie said, the only other person besides the attendant there.
"You can say that again,"
"What happened?"
"Just had a rather . . . novel . . . experience at a hotel last night,"
"A sheila?" why did everybody immediately assume that a 'novel experience at a hotel' meant he'd been with a woman? In the last 10 years or so, he'd had plenty of novel experiences at hotels, and very few of them involved what this truckie was implying.
"You could say that," let the guy think what he wanted, they'd never see each other again, what did Ike care what this truckie thought of him?
"How long you been driving?"
"About two hours," the truckie seemed to be lost in thought for a second.
"Don't recall any hotels 2 hours from here. What was it called?"
"The Hotel California,"
"Never heard of it. And I've driven every part of this place. You sure?" Ike nodded. He wasn't going to forget that name in a hurry! "Must be new. Although, whatever idiot would set up a hotel in the middle of the California desert is beyond me!" the truckie laughed, "I best be getting back on the road anyway, it's a long drive to where I'm going,"
"Where are you going?"
"There's only two rules in truck-driving boy. Don't drink until it's your day off, and never ask a stranger where he's going," Isaac smiled.
"Good point. I guess I'll leave you to it then," waving, the truckie walked outside, climbed into his truck and drove off. Ike stared into the black depths of the half-cold coffee in the polystyrene cup. 'Must be new' the truckie'd said, but the building had looked so old. Was that whole night just a dream?
"Hey!" Ike called out to the attendant, "What day is it?"
"Wednesday," the man grumbled and went back to his paper. Wednesday.
"You ever heard of the Hotel California?"
"No," Wednesday. A whole night spent in a hotel that wasn't supposed to even exist! What the – he stopped. That was it. That was what she meant. It had happened. All of it. But the Hotel California now existed in his head. Now he knew what the Goddess meant. She'd punished him more than he'd thought. He hadn't passed her tests, and now he was haunted by a hotel he'd spent the night in, that didn't exist, except in his head. The Goddess's words pounded in his head. He knew they were true.
'Check out anytime you like . . . but you can never leave. . . .'


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