The Unread Message at the Pines Motel on Old Route 9

In the summer of 2019, I spent a week at the Pines Motel on Old Route 9, just outside of Ellsworth, Maine. The motel was a relic—a sagging two-story building with a flickering neon vacancy sign and a gravel lot that caught the heat of July like a skillet. I was there to clean out my uncle's room after he died, but the front desk clerk gave me the wrong key. The room I opened was not his. It was occupied by someone who had been gone a long time, but whose presence was still pressed into the wallpaper like a shadow. The bathroom mirror was covered in old tape, the lamp on the nightstand had no bulb, and the dresser drawer held a single photograph of a woman I didn't recognize, her face scratched out with a key. That night, the motel's phone rang in my room at 3:15 AM—a ring that didn't come from the handset on my nightstand, but from the wall behind the headboard. I answered anyway. What I heard was a voice I knew, speaking in a language I'd never learned, telling me something I was never supposed to understand. #ThePinesMotel #OldRoute9 #EllsworthMaine #UncleStephen #WrongKey #Room107 #TapedMirror #ScratchedPhotograph #ThreeFifteenAM #WallPhone #UnknownLanguage #Uncle'sSecret #FexingoHorror #HorrorPodcast #InboxZero #LunaReads #SmallTownMaine #SummerHorror Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo