The Deal (pt. 1)

They say that making a deal with the fae usually ends poorly for the human. I didn’t set out to make a deal with the fae and I’m not entirely sure when the deal happened. But I am reasonably sure that I ultimately ended up making a deal with the fae.

I suppose I will find out soon enough, whether it was a neutral fae or a malicious one. Let me back up a bit.

I am Joreth, the Innkeeper of The Inn Between. I have been trapped in Hell for 25 years. Also known as Florida. I moved here at the turn of the century to finish my degree only to get stuck here when I could never make enough money to leave. I was not aware that Florida was a hell vortex.

Fast forward past the beginning of the end of the world and I somehow managed to find nearly enough cash to tentatively start planning. So my spouse, Franklin, booked a plane trip out here to help me assess and see if we couldn’t finally make this happen. Seeing as how this was supposed to be our plan for our honeymoon when we got married … how many years ago now? Six?

Anyway, Franklin flew out here and took one look at my existing RV and promptly agreed with my initial assessment that it would likely not last through one more Florida hurricane season. Especially when the awning collapsed during the first normal rain day. So I started looking for used RVs for sale.

We finally got someone on Facebook Marketplace to respond to my inquiry (there are a surprising amount of scammers who put fake ads up and then don’t respond to anyone – not sure how that’s supposed to work), and we went to look at a class C motorhome. Franklin immediately said it was great, the engine was great, the price was great, we should take it!

I pointed out that there was no back bedroom, leaving only a cab-over loft bed and a kitchen table that converts to a bed, and it was 10 feet shorter than my existing RV. It was going to be really hard to squeeze in 3-5 people, given that we have family popping in and out to join us at various points throughout the trip. So we thanked the guy for his time and took our leave.

Shortly we scheduled another viewing. This time for a motorhome that was exactly the same make and model as my current RV, only a few years newer. Franklin said it was great, but a touch pricey, and we had just scheduled a viewing with another interesting-looking RV for the next day. So we thanked this owner and said we should know by the end of the weekend if this would work for us.

The next day, we looked at the very interesting RV. We brought my boyfriend along, and after driving instructions that included “turn off the paved road”, we finally found it. The husband was not home but his wife let us climb all over the RV and turn on the engine, and Franklin got really excited over this one. He said it looked great, the engine was great, the price was great, only the brakes were not so great. So we told the wife that we would schedule an inspection with a nearby mechanic and call back to coordinate.

Franklin immediately got on the phone and found 2 different mechanics who would look over different parts – apparently one place would do an engine inspection but not the brakes (they did not have a lift for an RV) and another place did brakes and tires but not engines.

So I texted the owner to coordinate an inspection, and he abruptly refused to let us take the RV off the property. He said he would not drive it anywhere, so I offered to drive it myself and leave my own car and license behind in good faith. He refused to let me take it anywhere. So we tried locating a mobile RV mechanic to come to the property, but everyone insisted it had to be put on a lift to inspect the brakes.

Dejected, I started looking for another RV. Several days passed with no luck. The listing for the interesting motorhome reduced the price. Apparently we are not the only ones who refuse to purchase a vehicle without test driving it. We continued to hem and haw over whether we should risk it and just buy the RV and factor in the cost of new brakes to the reduced price.

And then … I saw The Listing. It only had a couple of external pictures, but it looked different than others. It looked like someone had already made it their own, but I couldn’t see the inside. The price was also too good to be true. So I kept searching.

But this listing kept showing up in my searches. After a couple of days, on June 28th, I messaged the owner asking for interior pictures. What she sent me was … not clear. I could not tell at all what I was looking at. So I sent the listing to Franklin along with the pictures she sent to me.

Franklin also could not tell what he was looking at, but he was intrigued. The price helped. I messaged the owner and asked to schedule a viewing. She responded immediately asking if we could come see it that day. It was possible, but it was 3 hours away (normally a 2 hour drive, but something massive shut down the interstate that day, which we wouldn’t find out about until we made it back home).

We hurriedly dressed and packed ourselves into the car, and hit the road. And sat. And sat. And crawled forward. And sat some more. The skies darkened the further east we traveled. This is when Franklin started dropping hints about ominous circumstances.

My driving directions told me to turn right. I turned into an apartment complex. This doesn’t seem right. I drove through the complex, following the directions, but found nothing but apartments. This was definitely not right.

I drove back out of the complex and noticed a driveway / frontage road that ran along the fence to the apartment complex. After making sure there were no cameras or police, I did a left-hand U-turn from the apartment driveway into the suspicious driveway and drove until we found a gate locked with a padlock.

Referencing her notes, she said that she would not be able to meet us there, but she gave us the combination to the padlock. So I got out of the car, opened the bike lock and cable, swung open the chain link door, got back in the car, drove through, got out again, and closed the door behind us.

“That was weird,” Franklin said.

“Yeah, she’s just trusting us to roam around her RV without supervision? And letting us into the storage yard?”

We drove through what looked like a strange vehicle graveyard, all the way to the back, until we saw the white class C nestled in between a derelict speedboat and a broken down food truck. It looked exactly like the picture. I hoped the looming storm clouds overhead weren’t foreshadowing.

We opened the side door and peeked inside. Strangely, her pictures were accurate. We still did not know what we were looking at. I’ll write a whole detailed post describing the inside. Half of the features were unrecognizable, the other half were amazing. One of the unrecognizable structures opened up to reveal a “gold coin”. Neither one of us touched it, probably instinctively. One should not accept fae coin. We wandered through with our mouths open, feeling very surreal.

“I kinda love it,” Franklin said.

“I’m not sure how I feel about it, but I think I kinda love it too?” I said back.

Eventually we closed everything up and bundled ourselves back in the car just as the misting turned into real rain. We left the vehicle that Franklin called the “fae chariot” behind us and I texted her to say that we love it and want to get it inspected, when can we schedule that? We haggled on a date and made plans to come back in a few days when she could “have a copy of the key made”. That was weird. We drove home as the rain and a sense of uneasy promise pressed down on us.