Two decades ago in Concord, California, I sat across from a woman at a small agency on Monument Boulevard called Pelican Travel. I went in pretending to plan a trip for a college assignment. I left confident I had been mistaken for the wrong kind of customer. When I tried to find the place again, it was gone—and eventually so was every trace that it had ever existed. This is my personal memory of a travel experience, a story that won’t stop changing when I try to tell it.
#nightfallcrypt #psychologicalhorror #truestory #paranormalconfession #urbanlegend
#nightfallcrypt #psychologicalhorror #truestory #paranormalconfession #urbanlegend
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00:00I went alone the first time. That part never changes. My assignment was to observe a local
00:06business and write about its operations. I picked pelican travel for no good reason,
00:12beyond the fact that it wasn't a chain, and the sign made me smile.
00:18The pelican was wrong, proportions askew, like a child put it together from a memory of a pelican
00:24instead of the bird itself. The storefront was one of those end units with a single narrow room,
00:32blinds tilted to half-hide the world. A bell hung crooked above the frame.
00:38When I pushed the door, it made a sound unlike a bell at all, but like a spoon hitting a
00:45jar.
00:47Inside, one room, two desks, a faded map of the world, so bleached at the edges that Australia
00:54looked like it had been erased and drawn again, a small, square fish tank without fish.
01:01The air held a clean chemical tang, Windex or something sharper, and underneath it,
01:08a faint sweetness, like oranges kept too long in a cupboard. A man was finishing at the far desk,
01:17signing a form with the kind of nervous concentration people get when they're pretending they aren't
01:22anxious. The woman behind the desk had the energy of a stopped clock. Conservative blouse, hair pinned
01:31too tightly, a smile that showed teeth yet did not. She said, I'll be right with you. And the man
01:41said,
01:42sure. And I remember the scrape of his chair legs on the vinyl floor. The sound is what I remember
01:49first
01:50when I tried to tell this story. A small, embarrassed scrape that wanted to be quieter than it was.
01:58The man left with a packet of papers. The woman stacked something, forms, brochures, whose colours I
02:06have tried to name over the years and cannot, and then turned the smile at me.
02:13Welcome to Pelican, she said. How can we help you travel? For the assignment,
02:20we were supposed to ask polite, ordinary questions. I made myself a customer to make it easier.
02:27I'm looking to go abroad, I said. Maybe Europe. She nodded, unhurried, and pulled a clipboard from
02:36beneath the counter as if she'd been saving it for me. The clip made a sound when it snapped open,
02:42a metallic nibbling. Where in the world would you like to go? She asked. Her voice had a local
02:51softness, perhaps Concord or Walnut Creek, with the edges smoothed out for customer service.
02:59I said something about hiking and seeing the old cities. I added, because I was twenty,
03:06and quoting things I thought sounded like adventure, that I wanted to meet the locals.
03:14She wrote, and the pen scratched across the paper.
03:18Of course, she said. Most of our customers are only interested in locals.
03:25The sentence passed through me like a draft under a door. I nodded, because nodding is what you do to
03:32keep conversations moving when your brain catches. Her pen paused, then resumed.
03:39Your dates are flexible? Sure, I said. Next month or the month after?
03:48Next month is good, she said. We have some availability next month.
03:55I wish I could say I saw the red flag waving, but nothing waved. Everything in the room was still,
04:02every corner squared and sensible. The fish tank light hummed, the map peeled at one corner as if bored.
04:11The window showed the parking lot, a triangle of sky, the same leaning palm.
04:19I breathed the air, and it smelled like office things and the disappointed sweetness of old fruit.
04:28She asked about the budget, accommodations, and whether I preferred cities or remote villages.
04:35Each time, my answer became the line her pen made. When she asked if I had a specific region in
04:42mind,
04:43I said, I saw a video about Budapest. And then she did something small with her face.
04:51Not a frown, exactly. A tiny unalignment.
04:58Of course, she said. The pen touched down, lifted. Are you comfortable answering a few additional questions?
05:09I remember saying yes. We both leaned forward, the way you lean when the world narrows to the desk
05:17between you and the person who is writing your answers into a shape you cannot quite see.
05:24So, she said lightly, what age range are you thinking?
05:30The question slid through the air like a glass knocking very gently against another glass.
05:37I laughed without meaning to.
05:40I'm sorry, for your booking, she said. There are some limits in certain markets.
05:49However, if we keep the itinerary flexible, we can arrange the service as needed. Do you have a preference?
05:56Her voice stayed sanded smooth, as if we were still talking about whether I wanted a window seat.
06:04What kind of service? I asked. Her eyes lifted to mine.
06:11Something behind the pupils moved like a shadow in shallow water.
06:17Local. Local, she said. Direct to your room is extra.
06:22Or we can handle it off-site.
06:25The world in that room tilted, not much. Just enough to send a filament of cold through my chest.
06:33This is where, every time I tell it, the timeline thickens, like honey cooling.
06:39I was 20, alone, wearing a thrifted blazer that was too oversized in the shoulders.
06:48I didn't want a scene. I wanted to be the kind of person who knew what everyone else already knew.
06:56I don't understand, I said. She put the pen down.
07:03Are you sure you're familiar with the kinds of arrangements we make here?
07:08Travel arrangements, I said. The room sounded different when I said it.
07:16Thinner. As if I had spoken into a box.
07:22She held my eyes for another second. Then she gathered the papers with quick, practiced hands,
07:29as if snow had begun to fall and she had to bring in the laundry.
07:33I'm sorry, miss, she said. We're not able to help you today.
07:39She stood up, already moving around the desk.
07:43We're closing. I checked my watch because there was a rule she was breaking,
07:49and rules are something you can hold. It was 3.45. The sign in the window, white letters on red,
07:58promised they were open until 5. I said nothing about the sign.
08:04She opened the door for me, her face arranged into a professional kindness that I cannot recall
08:11outside that room. The spoon-struck bell made its sound again as I stepped back onto the sidewalk.
08:18In the car, my hands shook against the steering wheel hard enough to make it squeak.
08:24The palm above me drew a thin net of shadow over the windshield. In the rectangle of glass on the
08:31door,
08:32I could still see the layout. Two desks, the tired map, the silent tank.
08:40I sat until my body cooled. People who hear this ask,
08:47Why didn't you call someone? Why not the police? I don't answer that part anymore.
08:54The short version is that I was young, and whatever had brushed against me in that room had left me
08:59ashamed for reasons I couldn't name. Shame is a glue. It keeps your mouth closed longer than you think it
09:08can.
09:09When I told my friends, people from class, people from church,
09:14they looked at me the way people look at a corner of a room someone else has pointed to.
09:20You didn't know about Pelican, one said.
09:24That place.
09:26Another shook her head and said I should be careful where I went alone.
09:30No one used the words I could not make myself use. But one of the guys said,
09:35They've got a warehouse. Someone told me he wouldn't tell me who. He said I shouldn't go looking.
09:43I didn't. Not then. Life moved on the way it does when you have exams and shifts at the coffee
09:51shop.
09:52And your mother calls to ask if you're staying hydrated because the summer is lingering the way it
09:58does out there. Hot on the skin until October. But a bad question can live in your pocket like a
10:06stone.
10:07I kept touching it without meaning to.
10:10At night, when the house was settled and the freeway hissed faintly in the distance like rain that never
10:17arrived, I would think of the woman's face, the pen, the way the bell didn't ring like a bell.
10:26The second time, I did not go alone. I brought a friend, Lila, who was louder than me and better
10:34at being angry. We planned nothing. We said we would drive by, see if the place still looked the same.
10:42If the open sign were on, we would go in. We went on a Sunday because I thought they would
10:48be closed,
10:49and I could be brave from a distance. When we turned into the lot,
10:54the palm shadow fell across the hood of Lila's car like a wrist with veins under it.
11:00The pelican sign was gone. In its place. Ghost bolts where the bracket had been. A paler rectangle
11:10on the wall. The impression of letters you could only see if you didn't look right at them.
11:16The window had paper taped over it from the inside. On the glass, in the lower right corner,
11:24was a small square of adhesive residue where something, perhaps a permit, ours, had been.
11:33The door was locked. Lila cupped her hands and peered through the gap where two sheets didn't meet.
11:42Empty, she said.
11:45I leaned against the warm glass and couldn't see anything except light. But my body knew before my
11:51eyes did. Inside, the room had changed its shape. You can feel a room even when you cannot see it.
12:00The heat off the window smelled different, too. Closer to dust. Farther from that sweet note I hadn't
12:08known I was remembering until it wasn't there. Maybe they moved, Lila said. Check the business
12:18license with the city. I said I would. I didn't. Because this is where the parts start to disagree
12:27with each other. I remember driving past that unit two or three times in the weeks that followed,
12:33always quickly, often pretending I had another reason to be on that side of monument. Some days,
12:41the blinds seemed to be there again, halfway tilted. Some days, the paper was taped back up.
12:50Once I saw a man inside, or I told myself I did. Just the suggestion of someone standing where the
12:57map
12:57had been straight-backed, not moving. When I circled the lot to pass again, the glass showed me only
13:06myself. I graduated. I moved. The assignment sank under other papers in a box that went in and out of
13:16storage with the rest of my belongings from my twenties. I got a better car with a better radio
13:23and learned songs by heart, so I wouldn't have to be alone with my own air. Years clicked off.
13:32Concord became a place I passed through on my way to somewhere else.
13:38And then a month ago, 22 years later, I woke at 4.11am. I remember the digits like an address,
13:47and knew I had dreamed of pelican travel. Not the conversation or the woman's mouth around the
13:54smile. The sign. The pelican drawing itself. The beak is drawing itself longer. A pencil line going out of
14:07bounds. It's strange how one dream can turn the lock on a door you've been walking past for 20 years.
14:15I got up, sat in my kitchen with the refrigerator working in the corner like a small steady ocean,
14:23and did what everybody does now when they want to confirm that something exists.
14:30I searched for it. Pelican Travel, Concord, California, Monument Boulevard.
14:38I wrote the address the way my memory thought it should go, stitching cross streets together.
14:44The results turned their empty pockets out. A different pelican on a different coast.
14:50A pelican yacht charter company with glossy photos of people who looked like they had never been hot in
14:57October. A dead link that led to a hosting provider's error page was as cold as an empty office.
15:06No business registration in the database. No archived page on those websites that hoard the internet's
15:14dead. Nothing in the map history except a photographic blur, where a palm always seems about to lean into
15:22the frame. I texted a number I hadn't used in years, and it bounced. I messaged someone I knew when
15:32I
15:32was 20 and got a politely confused reply from a stranger. I called Lila's old landline out of reflex,
15:40and got that sound you get now. The one that means, not just out of service, but out of time.
15:49You can tell yourself you misremembered a street. You can say to yourself that a sign's color,
15:55or a room's shape shifted in transit from then to now. But the bells sound, the taste of the air,
16:03the exact place where the woman's pupils changed. Those don't misfile themselves. Or if they do,
16:14something is doing the filing. And that's worse.
16:19When memory disagrees with reality, reality wins. That's what people tell you. But they don't tell
16:27you how long you sit with the loser's consolation prize. The feeling that turns the light in your
16:33kitchen colder, that thickens the air in your chest. I went back. I told myself I was running an
16:41errand, and I let the car lead. The monument was wider than I remembered, and also closer,
16:48cars jostling, the usual chain restaurants wearing their plastic faces.
16:54I turned into the lot, and parked in the same strip of shade the palm still made.
17:00The unit where Pelican had been, where it had not been, was a blank now. A dentist, maybe.
17:07The letters on the glass were a cheerful font, the colour of toothpaste. When I got close,
17:15I could see the places on the stucco where the old bracket holes had been filled, painted,
17:21and filled again. Paint never forgets its own wounds. I pressed my fingers to the glass without
17:29meaning to, as if the surface might take my prints and accept them as proof.
17:36A hygienist vacuumed the floor, looking through me. To the right, a narrow alley ran between buildings
17:44to a back lot where the dumpsters lived. Hot air came through that funnel, carrying the smell of wet
17:51cardboard and something metallic. The alley didn't lead to any answer. It led to the back of the unit,
17:59where there would have been a door you weren't supposed to use unless you worked there.
18:04There was, as there always is, a door. It had new paint and a new lock. But when I stood
18:13beside it
18:14and listened, I heard something that did not belong to a dentist's office. A thin, rhythmic knock that
18:21lived somewhere inside the wall. Not a human knock. Not a pipe, either. It was like the sound a bell
18:29would
18:30make if you lay it on its side and asked someone to tap it from the inside with a pen.
18:36Once. Twice.
18:39A rest long enough to doubt I had heard it at all. Then. Once. I don't scare easily anymore. Time
18:50sands things. But I stepped backward like you do when you've found the edge of a drop in the dark
18:56and have no interest in confirming it. The heat in the alley shifted. Not cooler. Not warmer. Just
19:05different. The way a room's air changes when someone else has come in behind you. Before you have turned to
19:14see. I turned. And no one was there. The alley held its breath. The knock didn't return. The dumpsters
19:24sweated in their corner. I felt, very precisely, the shape of my keys in my pocket and the way the
19:32metal teeth lined up against my palm. It s a thing you learn if you re a woman. What you
19:38could grab.
19:40How it did feel in your hand. I hated that the feeling fit into this memory. I hated that it
19:47made
19:48the old feeling true. I left the alley and walked the length of the building as if the answer might
19:54be
19:54hiding at the edge of the lot. At the far end, a maintenance door stood slightly ajar,
20:00a hash of cooler air slipping through. Inside, a cinderblock hall, a mop sink, and a dead vending
20:09machine with its labels peeled. My footsteps were too loud. I was halfway down when I smelled it for the
20:17first time since I was twenty. That faint, wrong sweetness that lives under something clean.
20:23Not orange anymore. More like fruit that has been boiled into a syrup and left to go dark.
20:31It pulled a string in me. It tied them to now and made them the same room.
20:38The hall turned right. I turned with it before I could decide not to, and that was how I came
20:44to a
20:44door that had no business being there. Too thin for a commercial back door, the wood painted a domestic
20:51white, a small brass knob rather than a bar. The paint around the knob had a polish where hands had
20:59touched it many times. No sign, no label, only a thumbprint smudged into the gloss like a moon.
21:08I let my hand hover above the knob. The air here was neither cool nor warm.
21:16It was precisely the temperature of the skin.
21:21You know how stories go when someone opens the wrong door. I did not open it. I pressed my ear
21:28against
21:29it instead and felt the wood's grain against the cartilage. On the other side, a slight moving sound.
21:37Paper against paper. And another. Lighter. The nibbling click of a clipboard taking in a sheet.
21:48Somewhere behind me, down the hall, the vending machine made a sound like a coin dropped and rejected.
21:55The noise popped the spell. I stepped back and took one too quick breath that made me cough.
22:04When my eyes watered, the hallway shifted left and right, as if intending to leave without me.
22:12I told myself I had imagined the clipboard because I had come for it. That the sweet smell lived in
22:20my head
22:21because I had carried it all these years in my pocket with the stone. I told myself it was a
22:28dentist's
22:28office, a mop sink and a maintenance hall with an old door of no consequence at all.
22:36Then I saw the paper taped to the baseboard, half covered by dust. It had fallen behind a rack,
22:45maybe, and been swept aside rather than picked up. I'm going to say what was on it,
22:52and you're going to think I'm furnishing the story when what I'm doing is trying to stay true.
22:59At the top, in a serif font, Pelican services. Not travel. Services. Below, a table with columns
23:09whose headings were blocked out with a marker, thick and laborious, as if to blot would be to erase.
23:16The marker had bled. The air in the hall was too damp for it to dry. Under the black bars,
23:22the imprinted letters still ghosted through. City. Dates. Method. There were check boxes down the side.
23:31Some were ticked with a square, careful hand. Some were empty. Beside one of the empty boxes,
23:39a note in small cursive. Ask for range. I did not pick up the paper. I did not take a
23:47photograph.
23:48I did not do any of the things the person you imagine yourself to be would do.
23:53I stood very still, listening for the pen inside the wall. The pen did not move. The knock did not
24:02return. The vending machine whirred itself to sleep. I left by the same open door and did not pull it
24:10closed behind me, because the air in my lungs had become the hallway's air, and I wasn't yet sure it
24:16would work outside. Back in my car, an old song came on. One I used to play when I was
24:23twenty and thought
24:24I was invisible. The street outside the lot was busy. The palm made its net. None of this is special.
24:33But I sat there with my hands curved around the steering wheel, and knew with the certainty that
24:40sometimes arrives without asking that I had been inside Pelican again. Not the office in the photo
24:48in my head. Something that had worn it, then shed it. Like a snake with better paperwork.
24:56You can visit the city and inquire about obtaining a business license.
25:01I have now, and there's nothing registered to that name.
25:05You can ask the property management company who occupied the space in that year.
25:11I have now, and the person on the phone told me the records from that period were incomplete.
25:18And the way she said incomplete made my skin crawl. You can search old newspapers and find nothing but
25:27chain grand openings and a robbery three doors down that didn't make the metro section.
25:34If you want to do it better than I did, you can.
25:39I won't.
25:41At night, I hear the bell that isn't a bell in my kitchen, when the refrigerator kicks on and the
25:48house holds itself perfectly still. The sound is on the same shelf as my plates and my measurements for
25:55making rice. A practical sound, a domestic one, changed just enough not to be what it should be.
26:05And there are other changes. The kind of person listening will think I'm adding,
26:11because I'm the kind of person who sees meaning in the wrong type of light.
26:17The map in my memory peels from different corners now. Australia moves.
26:23The fish tank sometimes contains one fish, and at other times it is empty.
26:30The man at the other desk is older now than he was when we first met.
26:34The bell over the door is a different kind of metal. I've tried to choose the versions that make the
26:41least story, and can't. Every time I settle, the pen scratches on the wall, and the clipboard eats
26:49another page. When I dream, I'm back at the desk, and the woman is looking at me as if I
26:57am a document
26:58being held up to a light. She asks me for an age range again, but in the dream, the words
27:05are polite
27:05and clean, like the words for bed sizes. Then she says,
27:12Are you comfortable with delivery? In a tone so reasonable you want to apologize for not understanding.
27:21In the morning, I can hold the dream in my hand like a glass,
27:26and say that nothing in it is real. But then, I go to make coffee. And for a moment,
27:33the air above the sink scales toward the temperature of my skin. And I can smell that sweetness,
27:41like the steam off a pot that has been left too long. And I know something is taking note.
27:48I've started talking to people from that time again. New numbers. Messages that begin.
27:55Do you remember? Most don't. The ones who do remember, remember the story rather than the place.
28:04Wasn't there something about a warehouse? Someone asked me last week.
28:10There might have been. I no longer know whether the warehouse was mine, theirs, or something the story
28:18invented to make itself more convincing. I only know that when I drive the back streets near the old lot,
28:25there are always one or two squat buildings with doors that don't match their size. And I don't stop near
28:33them,
28:34because if you stop near them, you might hear the tap from inside the wall.
28:40Pelican was never a front for anything, except the belief that places are what their signs say they are.
28:47That it existed as long as I believed the bird on the wall had been drawn from life.
28:54More often, it was a place that listened as carefully as I did. That took information the way rooms do,
29:02not caring what you call it, only whether it fits. That asked versions of its one question,
29:09until the answer came out exactly right. The nights are longer now. The kitchen light is too bright or not
29:18bright enough.
29:20When I close my eyes to sleep, I see the woman's pen hesitate over the paper, waiting for the number
29:26I never gave.
29:28Sometimes I think, if I had answered, none of this would haunt me, because there would be a record,
29:36a name on a schedule. A method was selected. The act of doing it proves the existence of a thing.
29:46That thought makes me stand up and turn on another light. I'm telling this now because I want someone
29:53to say they remember the sign the way I do, and the bell that wasn't, and the air that was
30:00too polite to be air.
30:03I want someone to say the word that sits under the other words, so I don't have to. But if
30:10no one does,
30:12I will still have the palm's shadow, and the sound of the chair leg, and the clipboard's nibble,
30:19and the heat-like skin. And maybe that's enough to prove that a place that is gone
30:25can still hold you by the back of your neck as you walk backward out of it.
30:31A week ago, very late at night, I was brushing my teeth when the bathroom fan suddenly turned off.
30:39In the quiet house I heard, from the other side of my bedroom wall, a soft tap.
30:45I froze with the toothbrush in my mouth. The second tap took longer to come than anything has ever taken.
30:54When it came, it came from higher up, as if whoever held the pen had stood to see better what
31:01they
31:01were writing. I went very slowly to the wall and pressed my ear against the paint. The wall's
31:10temperature was the same as my cheek. On the other side, I heard paper move.
31:18In the morning, on my kitchen table, there was a single sheet I did not own. I do not know
31:25how it
31:25came to be there. It was blank, except for the top, where a serif font read, Pelican, and below it,
31:33please confirm range, in small, careful cursive. The rest of the page was ruled, the faintest lines,
31:42like the inside of a mouth. I threw it away. Or I set it under the clock, intending to discard
31:50it.
31:51Or I folded it and put it into the drawer where I keep take-out menus. I have told myself
31:58each of
31:58these so many times that they all feel true. What is true is that I still catch a whiff of
32:04that
32:05sweetness sometimes when the refrigerator stops. And sometimes, in the bone of the evening,
32:13my phone vibrates once and shows nothing. And when I look up, the room has shifted a fraction of an
32:21inch
32:21toward the place where I first heard the question. When I think of the sign now, the bird is drawn
32:29better. The beak is the correct length. The eye is round, patient, and wide. The proportions are
32:39corrected, as if someone revised the drawing from a more reliable memory. I don't know if that means it's
32:46farther from me or nearer. I don't know if it means the woman's pen has found the number and the
32:54clipboard
32:54has clicked shut. I keep the light over the sink on. I sleep like a person watching her own door
33:02close.
33:03I tell myself, it was only a business. It was only a mistake. It was only a sign. I tell
33:12myself that
33:12anything that ends with a period I can place at the end of a sentence like this one.
33:19But when the house is tranquil, and I can hear the softest noises as if the silence is leaning closer
33:26to listen, I could swear I hear the bell over the door, laid carefully on its side, politely tapped from
33:34the inside asking. And I don't answer. And the asking goes on.
33:41is
33:41the
33:41the
33:41the
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