Pt-13 I Work At an Auto Repair Shop Next to a Ancient Graveyard and a Victorian Church

OFF TO ARIZONA PT 2 OF 3

The first day passed without much excitement. That probably sounds strange considering Frank had just informed me we were driving across the country to stop an ancient desert entity responsible for greed, misery, droughts, economic collapse, and apparently several generations of terrible life choices. But compared to the week I'd already had?

It almost felt relaxing.

The highway stretched endlessly ahead of us, cutting through state after state in long ribbons of asphalt. The frozen forests eventually gave way to rolling hills. The hills became open farmland. The farmland became wide stretches of country that seemed too large for the number of people living in it.

The further west we traveled, the more the world seemed to flatten out. Towns appeared on the horizon and disappeared behind us just as quickly. Gas stations stood alone in the middle of nowhere like tiny islands. Diners glowed beside highways at night beneath flickering neon signs and dust clouds. Frank drove almost the entire first day. I offered to drive twice, and he ignored me twice. By the second night, we found ourselves sitting in a diner somewhere in western Texas that smelled strongly of coffee, grease, and poor financial decisions.

The place looked like it hadn't changed since the seventies. There was wood paneling covering the walls, the booths were cracked and sticky, and a jukebox sat in the corner collecting dust.

A waitress who looked older than the building itself refilled Frank's coffee six separate times without ever asking if he wanted more, and he drank every cup.

I was halfway through a burger when I noticed Frank staring out the window. Outside, the parking lot sat quietly beneath a pale orange sunset. There was no sign of life except for a tumbleweed rolling lazily across the pavement.

"Frank." No answer. "Frank."

His eyes remained fixed outside. "What?"

He slowly looked back at me, and for a second, I thought he looked relieved. Then he shook his head. "Stop staring and finish eating."

I knew immediately it wasn't nothing but I kept eating and finished as fast as I could. By the time we left, the sky had gone from orange to a dull, washed-out blue that made everything outside look temporarily unreal. We got back on the road before either of us spoke again. Night came on slowly in a way that felt heavier the farther west we went.

Streetlights grew more spaced out, towns became smaller, then fewer, then just names on exit signs that flashed past before I could properly read them. At some point, I stopped trying to keep track of where we were. The truck finally slowed as the highway thinned out into packed red dirt. A faded sign flickered ahead of us, half the bulbs dead, the rest struggling through a weak red glow that spelled MOTEL in uneven letters.

The sad excuse for a building sat just off the exit ramp like somebody had built it with the intention of coming back later to finish it and simply never did. It was a long, sun-bleached rectangle of cracked stucco and faded paint. Whatever color it had originally been had surrendered years ago beneath wind, dust, and neglect. Now it existed in varying shades of tan and gray, blending into the surrounding landscape so completely that it looked less like a building and more like another piece of desert rock.

A row of identical doors stretched along the front beneath a sagging overhang supported by wooden posts that had long since started to warp. Several of the porch lights were burned out. The ones that still worked cast weak yellow pools across the walkway, creating more shadows than illumination. The office occupied one corner of the property. Its large front window glowed dimly beneath fluorescent lights that gave everything inside a sickly pale color. A plastic cactus sat in the window next to a stack of tourist brochures so faded that whatever attractions they advertised had probably closed years ago.

The lot itself wasn't much better.

Cracks split the asphalt in every direction, some wide enough to grow stubborn patches of desert grass. Oil stains covered large sections of the pavement, overlapping each other like rings in a tree trunk. A rusted ice machine sat against the side of the office building with a handwritten OUT OF ORDER sign taped to the front. If I am being honest, I doubt it ever worked to begin with, by the looks of it.

Beyond the motel, the desert stretched outward in every direction. Just endless miles of dry earth, scrub brush, and death.

Frank parked near the far end of the lot, completely diagonal. Not that there were any clear parking marks left to be seen anyway. The engine clicked quietly as it cooled, and for a moment neither of us got out.

He opened the driver's side door and climbed out without saying a word. I grabbed my duffel and followed him into the cool desert air. The silence out here was different. Even though home was a small huck town, there was always something signaling life: traffic, wind through trees, dogs barking. But out here… there was nothing.

Frank walked around to the bed of the truck and dropped the tailgate. I expected him to grab his luggage and “tools”. Instead, he reached beneath a tarp and pulled out a shotgun. I watched him check it and fidget with it before he slid it into a canvas case. I sighed and started walking toward the motel office. A bell above the door jingled weakly as I pushed it open, quickly met with the sound of dying fluorescent lights. The lobby looked exactly how the outside had promised it would. Old magazines sat on a table in the corner, a coffee machine occupied a counter near the wall, and based on the color of the coffee inside, I suspected it was either fresh or had been brewing continuously since 2006.

I stepped toward the front desk.

"Hello? Is anyone here? We need a room—"

Frank walked past me and held up a key.

I stared at him.

"You already have a room?"

"Yep."

"How?"

Frank started walking toward the door again. "I reserved it."

"When?"

"A while ago."

I followed him back outside. "Frank, we didn't even know we were stopping here."

"I did."

"How?"

He looked at me for a long moment before opening the door to room twelve. "I have rooms reserved all over the country."

I blinked. "What?"

"In case I need them."

"You have motel rooms reserved across the entire United States?"

"More or less." Frank opened the door.

The motel room smelled faintly of old carpet and detergent, trying its best to cover something like cat piss mixed with vodka. The overhead light buzzed softly as Frank stepped inside and immediately locked the door behind us. Frank set the shotgun case against the wall beside the door and crossed toward the dresser. A key ring appeared from his pocket. There had to be fifty keys on the thing, maybe more. He tossed the ring onto the dresser, and the weight of it hit the wood with a metallic THUNK.

I stared.

Frank noticed. "What?”

"Are you secretly a serial killer?"

"Nope. Even if I was, I definitely wouldn't tell you.”

"Normal people - FRANK - don't have nationwide emergency motel networks."

Frank nudged the key ring farther onto the dresser with one finger. "Well, DANNY, normal people also don't fight graveyard zombies.”

I sighed and dropped onto the edge of the nearest bed. The mattress springs immediately protested my weight with a long squeal. The room felt smaller with every breath I took. It was definitely lower than 3 stars on Yelp. The walls were stained in places, the air conditioner rattled constantly despite being turned off, and somewhere in the distance I could hear the faint hum of trucks moving along the interstate.

Frank pulled a folded map from his bag and spread it across the small table beneath the window. I watched him run a finger along a network of highways and back roads.

"How far are we from Arizona?"

"About eight hours."

I groaned.

"Get some sleep."

"It's not even ten."

"We leave before sunrise."

I glanced toward the window. Outside, darkness had swallowed almost everything. The motel parking lot sat beneath a handful of weak yellow lights, and beyond them was nothing but desert.

Flat, black, endless, desert. For a moment, I found myself wondering where the thing was and what it was doing.

A strange thought slipped into my head. I turned my head to look at Frank and asked, "What if we're too late?"

Frank's finger stopped moving across the map. Then he folded the map closed. "Then we'll do what everybody else does."

I frowned. "And what's that?"

Frank switched off the lamp, and the room fell into darkness. "We kill ourselves. ”

“Frank, what the fuck.”

Frank let out a cigarette, lunged, cackled, and within seconds began snoring. I lay down facing the window, my hand resting on the curtain to close it. The lot lights shut off, and the glass became a black mirror. It reflected the faint shape of the room at me. I lay back fully onto the bed. The mattress gave again with that same exhausted squeal. For a while, I just stayed awake and listened, but my thoughts didn’t stay on anything useful. Instead, I thought about Arizona and something that feeds on what people become when they stop being careful with their own desires.

How the fuck does working on cars have anything to do with my current situation! I mean fuck!

Next thing I knew, I was waking up to Frank banging on my headboard.

“Wake up,” Frank said.

I blinked hard, my brain lagging behind my eyes. The room was still dark, but the coming dawn had started to leak in through the curtains, laying faint gingham patterns of lavender across the walls

“What time is it?” I mumbled.

“Time to leave.”

I pushed myself up slowly, joints stiff, hair a mess, and my shirt wrinkled. The room came back into focus piece by piece. Frank was already dressed, of course. He looked like he hadn’t slept well, but if I snored like that, I wouldn't sleep well either. There was a coffee cup in his hand that definitely hadn’t come from this room.

“Where did you get that?” I asked.

“Lobby.”

“There’s fresh coffee in the lobby at- what, four in the morning?”

Frank took a sip. “I dunno about fresh air, but it was still warm.”

I swung my legs off the bed and stood, immediately regretting it as the mattress springs gave one last protest underneath me. Frank tossed something onto the bed beside me. It was a grease-stained paper bag.

“Eat,” he said.

I looked inside. It was some kind of breakfast burrito, slightly flattened and definitely greasy. Frank was already ready to go by the time I finished it. I threw the bag into the small trash under the desk, grabbed my duffel, and stepped outside.

The desert had changed overnight. The motel looked more worn than it had last night, like time had pressed harder on it while we were sleeping. I climbed into the passenger seat while Frank turned the engine over. The motel behind us stayed still as we pulled away, shrinking into the rearview mirror like a dream forgotten more and more throughout the day.

The drive stretched on in a steady, unbroken line through the desert, distance measured more by time than anything visible on the ground. At first, the landscape stayed familiar in its emptiness; long stretches of dry earth and scattered brush slid past the windows with a slow consistency that made it easy to lose track of time. Gradually, though, small signs of change began to appear without drawing attention to themselves. A fence line leaning under years of neglect cut across the horizon and disappeared again. A rusted frame of some old machine sat half-buried in sand.

Farther along, structures began to appear more often. Single buildings were set too far apart to belong to a town, roadside remnants of places that had once tried to function in isolation. Thin trails of smoke occasionally rose in the distance, and though they were faint, they suggested that life out here still gathered in pockets somewhere. The radio struggled to hold onto stations, slipping between fragments of voices and static as the truck moved through different stretches of signal range.

Frank drove without interruption, eyes fixed forward, only shifting his hands on the wheel when the road demanded it, while I drifted between watching the horizon and letting it blur into nothing as the hours passed. By the time the light began to change and the sun lowered toward the edge of the world, the emptiness had started to feel less absolute, replaced instead by something uneven and unsettled, as if the land itself was becoming more aware of where we were headed and what we were headed there to do.

By the time the sun had retired for the night, we had finally reached something that resembled a real town. Where there had once been empty stretches between towns, now held small clusters of structures gathered around intersections. Fuel stations stood closer together. Roadside businesses reappeared in even intervals, some still operating, others half-abandoned but not fully surrendered.

The road signs began to carry names instead of numbers, each one closer together than the last, until Frank finally slowed and signaled off toward a side route that cut into a low stretch of desert where the land dipped slightly before rising again in uneven waves of sand and rock. The road there was older, less maintained, with a surface that had long given up on being smooth, and the truck rattled softly as we followed it deeper until a few buildings came into view.

The first one I noticed was an auto shop. It was a long, low structure made from heavy corrugated metal and aged concrete block, built with function taking priority over anything resembling design. A faded sign hung above the garage doors, its paint bleached by sun and wind until the lettering was barely readable at a glance. Two large bays faced the open lot. One of the doors was fully closed, the other left partway open, cutting a horizontal slit into the dark interior. Inside, fluorescent lights flickered unevenly, leaving sections of the shop in alternating bands of brightness and shadow.

The concrete in front of the bays was fractured in long, branching lines. Dark stains had soaked into it over time and refused to fade. Above the roofline, a small wind flag shifted. Along the outside walls, tools and equipment were stored with a strange consistency that didn’t match the roughness of the building itself. Tires were stacked on welded metal racks. Chains hung from hooks driven into concrete. A few vehicles sat outside in different stages of repair, though none of them looked like standard work orders; they looked paused, as if whatever process had been happening to them was interrupted rather than finished.

Behind the shop, the land dropped into a graveyard cut directly into the slope of the terrain. The ground there was hard and dry, broken by low scrub and scattered stones that pushed through sand instead of sitting on top of it. Graves were spaced without order. Some were marked with wooden crosses bleached pale by the sun, their edges cracked and splintering. Others were simple stone markers half buried by drifting sand, their inscriptions worn down until the letters had thinned into unreadable grooves. Several plots had no markers at all, only low mounds that blended into the surrounding earth until they were almost indistinguishable from natural rises in the desert floor. Wind moved through constantly, dragging fine sand across everything and slowly softening whatever shape the ground still held.

Beyond the graveyard stood a small church built from sunbaked adobe and baby pink stucco. The walls were thick and uneven in places where repairs had been layered over old damage. Hairline cracks ran across the surface in branching patterns, showing where heat and cold had worked the structure over time. A single bell tower rose above the front, square and slightly off-center, its edges chipped and worn. The tower did not sit perfectly straight; it leaned just enough to be noticeable without suggesting collapse. The roof was flat with a low parapet, portions of it crumbling to reveal rough brick beneath.

The front doors were heavy wood reinforced with blackened iron straps, their surface worn smooth in places from years of windblown sand. A faded cross sat above them, nearly matching the color of the wall behind it. Narrow windows ran along the sides of the building, set deep into the walls so little light reached inside. The glass was dark enough that nothing of the interior could be seen. Around the church, the ground was the same desert soil as the graveyard below, broken only by scattered rocks and stubborn scrub plants that clung to whatever life the earth still allowed.

Frank eased the truck forward and brought it to a stop at an angle in front of the shop. The engine ticked as it cooled. He opened his door and stepped down first, boots hitting gravel that crunched softly under his weight. I followed a second later, duffel bag slung over my shoulder. The heat hit immediately, dry and steady, carrying the familiar smell of dust baked into metal and old oil that never left the ground.

The auto shop sat quietly in front of us. The fluorescent lights inside the open bay flickered once and settled. Somewhere behind the buildings, a windmill creaked lazily as it turned. Then the side door of the shop opened. A woman stepped out carrying a rag in one hand. Even from a distance, I could tell she was older, but not fragile old, more like weathered old….tired.

The desert had worked on her face for decades, carving lines around her eyes and mouth the same way it carved dry creek beds into the landscape. Gray hair had escaped from beneath a faded ball cap, and her work shirt was stained with enough grease to suggest she spent more time fixing vehicles than managing the place.

She spotted Frank immediately. "Well, I'll be damned," she called. The woman's expression shifted into something that almost resembled a smile. "Took you long enough."

Another figure appeared behind her, younger this time. A woman probably around my age stepped through the doorway carrying a socket wrench. She stopped beside the older woman and looked us over without saying anything.

Her gaze landed on me, then on Frank, then back to me. I immediately got the feeling she was trying to figure out why Frank had brought an idiot with him.

"Good morning, Martha.. Katie," Frank said.

The older woman snorted. "Well, I don't know about good."

The younger woman folded her arms.

"This him?"

Frank nodded. "Unfortunately, I am him.”

I stepped forward and offered a small wave. "Hi. I'm Danny." They didn't acknowledge me; instead, they stared blankly at me as if I had just spoken another language.

I looked toward Frank. "Wow. Good to know everyone here is friendly."

Martha barked out a laugh. "Friendly?" she said. "Honey, nobody out here wastes energy being friendly until they're sure you aren't gonna get them killed.”

Katie finally pushed herself away from the doorframe. "Or possessed."

"Or possessed," Martha agreed.

I looked between them. "That's a scary thing to say to somebody you've known for twelve seconds."

"It's Arizona. And surely it's not the scariest thing you have heard…knowing Frank and all." Katie replied.

Martha tossed the rag over one shoulder and started walking toward us. "Come on. You two look like hell."

"Thanks," I said.

Martha stopped in front of Frank and looked him over. For the first time since we'd arrived, neither of them spoke with their words.

Frank looked the same as he always did. Whatever Martha was looking for, she seemed satisfied she had found it.

"You see it?" she asked quietly.

Frank nodded once.

The humor disappeared from her face.

"How bad?"

Frank glanced toward their graveyard.

"Bad enough.”

Katie's posture changed immediately, not dramatically, just enough that I noticed it.

"What did you see?" I asked.

Nobody answered.

"Cool. Love that. Love being included."

Martha ignored me and looked back toward the shop. "Let's get inside before we continue this conversation."

"Why?" I asked.

She pointed toward the graveyard without looking at it. “We deal with a lot of similar things that you do at my shop. The sun is settin, and unless you want to be wendigo food, I suggest you haul boots inside."

I waited for somebody to laugh, but nobody did.

After a moment, Martha turned and started walking toward the open garage bay. Katie followed her. Frank grabbed his duffel from the truck bed and headed after them. I stood there for a second, staring at all three of them.

Then I sighed. "One day," I muttered, following behind them, "I'd really like to meet a normal person in normal circumstances."

Frank glanced over his shoulder. "Normal ceased to exist for you after you walked into my shop that morning."

"Yeah, well, if you know a demon that can reverse time, let me talk to them before you kill them.”

Katie disappeared through the side door without waiting for anyone else to catch up. Frank went next, and I hesitated for a second, looking once at the graveyard in the near distance, before following them in.

The moment I crossed the threshold, the temperature shifted. The heat outside gave way to a cool breeze from a massive AC unit in the back corner. The shop smelled stronger on the inside, oil and metal and old dust trapped in concrete that had absorbed it for years. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead in uneven intervals, some steady, some flickering, casting thin bands of light across the floor that made the space feel segmented.

The main garage stretched farther back than it looked from the outside, rows of tools and equipment lined both walls in organized chaos. Engine parts sat on steel tables, tool chests were stacked in columns, and chains and hooks hung from overhead rails meant for pulling engines or lifting frames. Every surface carried old stains that faded into darker versions of themselves.

We passed through the main work area and into a narrower corridor cut between storage shelves. The shelves were packed tight, not just with parts, but with things that didn’t belong in a normal shop inventory. There were old radios, broken clocks, rusted keys labeled with handwritten tags, containers with dates written on them in marker that had long since faded, and many things I recognized from Frank's “storage room”.

At the end of the corridor, Martha pushed open a solid wood door set into the back wall. It opened into a small house. There was no clean transition between the shop and the living space. No hallway meant to separate the two worlds. One moment it was a concrete floor and industrial lighting, and the next it was wood flooring, warmer light, and furniture that had clearly been from the 90's.

The living room was wide and low-ceilinged, built for comfort rather than appearance, with a worn couch positioned directly across from a stone fireplace that bore the layered wear of multiple repairs over the years, its masonry slightly mismatched in places where older stone had been replaced without concern for matching color or shape. Bookshelves ran along one entire wall, packed so tightly with books that newer additions had begun to stack horizontally on top of the older rows, filling every remaining gap. The opposite wall was covered in photographs arranged in uneven clusters that spanned decades, showing the same people in front of the same building at different points in time, the changes in clothing, vehicles, and weather marking the passage of years more clearly than anything else in the images.

Martha walked past the photographs, moving toward a narrow hallway that ran along the back of the living room. The hallway was tight, lined with more framed photos and a few shelves holding small objects that looked left behind in place rather than arranged on purpose.

Martha stopped at the first door on the left and pushed it open. “This is where you’re staying,” she said.

The room was simple. Two beds, a small dresser, and a nightstand with a lamp that gave off a warmer light than anything in the shop had. Frank set his duffel down immediately and let his eyes move across the room once before stopping.

I dropped my bag beside the second bed and looked around. “You really need to update your "storage room”,” I said, letting my eyes track over the dresser, the lamp, and the clean bed that looked softer than clouds. “This is basically the Ritz compared to what we have at our shop.”

Before Frank could clap back at me for that, Martha let out a short laugh from the hallway. “Frank has always been cheap.”

“I'm not cheap.”

“You absolutely are.” Martha leaned against the doorframe. “You know, he used to sleep in the office when he was a teenager because he didn't want to waste gas driving home?”

“Martha, that happened maybe twice.”

“It happened all summer.”

“Well…It was a long drive.”

“It was eight minutes.”

Katie appeared behind her, carrying a stack of folded blankets. “She's right,” she said. “I've heard this story at least fifty times.”

Martha accepted the blankets and tossed them onto the empty bed. “My uncle used to threaten to lock him inside the shop every night.”

"Your uncle threatened everybody for everything," Frank replied.

"He usually had a reason. You are not much different than him now, I’ll bet."

That earned the faintest hint of a smile from Frank.

I looked between them.

"Wait. Your uncle started this shop?"

Martha nodded. "This one, Frank's, and a few others scattered around the South. We grew up in these buildings. After school, we'd come here and sweep floors, stock shelves, change oil, get yelled at, then come back the next day and do it all over again."

"Mostly get yelled at," Frank added.

"Mostly get yelled at," Martha agreed, nodding her head.

She leaned against the doorframe, her expression softening as her eyes drifted briefly toward the photographs lining the hallway. "My uncle never intended for either of us to own one of his shops, at least not officially. He always talked about selling to a big chain someday and retiring somewhere with a nice fishing boat. Unfortunately, he never got around to it. Before he died, he asked me to offer Frank the one he has now and offered me this one. "

The room grew a little quieter.

"So you inherited them?" I asked.

Martha nodded. "Frank bought his. The others ended up with different owners over the years."

"And both of you just happened to buy the haunted ones?" I asked.

Martha and Frank exchanged a glance. "Those were the only two he specifically wanted us to have.”

“Why?"

"He never said."

"But he knew?"

Martha looked past me toward the window. "I think he knew a lot more than he ever told either of us."

The silence that followed was sad and uncomfortable, thankfully Katie broke it. "Dinner's almost ready,” she said as she looked at a small smart watch on her wrist.

The tension eased slightly.

"Thank God," I said. "I've been eating gas station food for two days."

Katie nodded toward the hallway.

Martha pushed herself off the doorframe.

"Get settled. Then come eat. After dinner, we'll talk about why you're here."

Nobody had to ask what she meant. Whatever we were about to face had already entered the room without ever opening the door.

Katie disappeared down the hallway toward the kitchen while Martha headed in the same direction at a slower pace.

Frank sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled his boots off.

I looked at him. "You never told me there were other shops."

Frank glanced up. "You never asked."

"Frank, I didn't know there were other haunted auto shops."

A few minutes later, we followed the smell of food into the kitchen.

The room sat at the back of the house, beneath a row of windows looking out over the desert. The last of the daylight had settled into a deep orange glow that stretched across the horizon beyond the graveyard. From here, I could see the church bell tower rising above the roofline of the shop. The table itself looked older than everything else in the house. Deep scratches covered the surface, and one corner had been repaired with a metal brace bolted directly into the wood.

Katie carried over a pot of chili while Martha set down a basket of cornbread. Nobody spoke much at first. For several minutes, the only sounds were silverware against bowls and the hum of the air conditioner fighting a losing battle against Arizona.

Eventually, I noticed one photograph hanging by itself near the kitchen doorway.

It showed two teenagers standing in front of the shop.

One was obviously Martha.

The other was Frank.

I nearly choked on my food.

"Jesus Christ."

Martha looked up.

"What?"

I pointed at the photograph.

"Frank used to be not ugly."

Katie started laughing so hard she nearly dropped her spoon. Even Martha smiled.

Frank continued eating. "I may be ugly and old now, but I can still whoop your tail if you want to test it."

"You say that," I replied, scooping another spoonful of chili into my bowl, "but there's photographic evidence that you peaked in high school."

Katie laughed into her drink.

Martha pointed her spoon at me. "Careful. He'll spend the next six months proving he's tougher than you."

I gave a small chuckle and continued to eat. ‘So how long have you two known each other?"

Martha's expression softened a little. "Most of our lives."

She gestured vaguely toward the shop with her spoon."Frank started working here when we were kids. By high school, he was spending almost as much time here as he was at home."

"That's because his home was awful," Katie said matter-of-factly.

Frank kept eating.

Martha shot her a look. "Katie."

"What? It's true."

Martha rested her elbows on the table. "He wasn't much different back then than he is now. Quiet. Stubborn. Thought he could solve every problem by working longer hours than everybody else."

"Sounds familiar."

"Back then, he smiled more."

Frank sighed.

"Uh oh," I said. "We're learning lore."

Katie grinned into her bowl.

Martha continued. "My uncle liked him because he never complained. Didn't matter if it was changing oil in July or crawling under a truck in the middle of a dust storm. If you told Frank something needed doing, he'd just go do it."

Frank shifted slightly at that, weight moving from one side to the other.

Outside the kitchen windows, the last of the sunlight slipped below the horizon. The desert beyond the glass darkened by degrees, colors fading from orange to rust and then from rust to shadow. The church bell tower stood against the evening sky, its outline becoming sharper as everything around it disappeared into darkness.