What is this thing in my motel room?

 

In case you're wondering what that glowing, out-of-focus miasma is--don't worry, it's not a ghost. It's much, much worse.

I recently spent a night at the Green Lake Motel on upper Aurora Avenue. There are plenty of inns on this charming byway--where signs on telephone poles let you know your license-plate number is "being recorded" for a "prostitution and drug watch"--but choosing the Lake was easy: The place had class. So much was evident from the piles and piles of stained mattresses crowding up the parking lot:

 

Evidently, I was going to be treated to a mattress in my room that was fresh off the factory floor. The box spring, though, was another matter. Mine had a long rip in it that was sutured with duct tape. It had taken more pounding than Jake LaMotta:

 

There were other features to my room that you wouldn't find in, say, a Budget Holiday Inn. Note this hole in the wall. I spent the night imagining it housed the motel's resident spirit, a syphilitic imp named Peter Pustule. Peter would hobble out with condoms and crack if you poured a 40 outside the entrance to his little tunnel:

 

The TV had me checking the broken-down neon motel sign outside. The Emerald Inn is the name of a still-operating motel down the street:

 

But it was the paint job that impressed me most about the Lake. Remember that classic TV-news expose where the (unlucky) reporter illuminates motel rooms with a black light? Well, I had a black light, too, and it turned out that people unknown had decorated the walls of my room with drips, smudges, and encrustations of I-don't-know-what. It wasn't shellac, the substance it most resembled, because it was water-soluble. (I tested with a wet napkin, which I now rather regret.) The blot on the referring page hovered right above my bed like a malevolent presence. These snail tracks were on an opposing wall:

 

To the Lake's credit, I tried the light back at my own apartment and found things much less clean than I liked to imagine they were. Still, there wasn't any obvious slime slapped around. And how does somebody's slime get to be five feet above the ground, anyway?