She - the house - was starving. He knew this from the way the floorboards creaked out words like feed, visitors and Jacob we need this. She showed no signs of going back to sleep like she used to after a week of him delaying, placating and doing just about everything he could to avoid firing up the Vacancy sign out front.
She was far more cunning than he realised though and her reach went beyond her walls, through her pipes and out onto the highway that spanned the horizon before them. It cost her to bring them in but she hungered and he would rather hear her beg for scraps than help her - help them both - thrive like the good old days.
He barely noticed the low water pressure, he'd been in an exhausted haze for weeks since she started speaking to him through the pipes in the walls. The same pipes she'd been rearranging and strategically severing, forcing through the tarmac to leave jagged metal shards for unsuspecting tyres.
It took two hours before the first victim drove straight over them and skidded to a halt several inches away from the front door. He ran outside to help them, not even thinking before he brought them inside and tried to call an ambulance but she had thought ahead again. She'd disconnected the landline and the power supply to his room overnight so he had no way to summon help.
All it took from there was one carpet slowly unfurling to drag the injured man down to the manager's office where her open mouth awaited. The wallpaper was grey and even her tongue looked a tad shriveled compared to its normal self.
Guilt overwhelmed him - from neglecting her to dragging an innocent man to his death to a lifetime more of this if he was lucky... but he'd never been too lucky. He'd never been more than the lure to her angler fish, the worm to her hook, the siren song to her shallow waters and now he was tired.
Just as she'd started to chew on her food, he closed his eyes and fell forward into her maw. Screaming with your mouth full is hard enough to do as a human with a front-facing head but with hers being a hold in the floor, she had no way to spit him back out.
She could either choke and die or chew and live a little longer, hoping the next manager would be as kind to her as he'd been for over forty years. Forty years of late night laughter shared between them, of repairing her aching floorboards and treating her to fresh paint twice a year and using her name like she was still a person.
She gasped for breath between each sob, the meat in her mouth broken and slowly suffocating her.
Every curtain closed at once as her sobbing turned to muffled gagging turned to silence.
The motel collapsed within minutes of her death and two people were seen walking away hand-in-hand.
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