Page 110 of The Midnight Knock

KYLA

The front room of the house had no light, no windows, but the air seemed to glow with a strange latent illumination. The room was bare, the ceiling tall, the walls somehow longer than they should have been. To her right, she saw a photograph of the mountain behind the motel. The photograph bore a small plaque.

IT SLEEPS

On the other wall, she saw the stars and planets and a great black void in the heart of a familiar solar system.

IT WAKES

Dead ahead, there was a tall door held shut with a massive silver padlock.

Ethan withdrew the silver key he’d taken from the locked room in the back of the motel’s office. A twist, and the padlock popped free. The door seemed to ease itself open, leading to a set of stairs that went down and down and down, disappearing into a well of perfect dark.

Kyla traded frowns with Ethan. A weird electric heat came up out of that darkness, brushed her cheek. She’d felt that heat before.

“I think I know what’s down there,” she said.

Kyla wasn’t afraid of the dark, but the void under the house was something entirely different. The strange light that filled the front room seemed to stop at the head of the stairs. With nothing to guide them but the tiny flicker of the Zippo lighter, they started down—Ethan first, then Kyla—into a black that felt deeper than nothing. The flame was barely strong enough to reveal one step on the staircase, and then the next, and then the next. There were no railings on the stairs, and no walls.

Just empty air in all directions.

Empty air, growing hotter by the second.

Kyla’s heart was beating so hard she was afraid it would somehowmake her stumble. A few steps down, the mountain started to moan again, and this time the sound had a weight—a desperation—that told Kyla they were near the end. The sound rattled the stairs, rattled their teeth. It came and went, came and went, like a siren, a wailing animal. A warning.

It was coming from below them.

At last, the stairs ended at a rough dirt floor. To the left, to the right, an unfinished basement seemed to stretch away toward a black infinity. Ahead was what they’d come for. A wall of white stone stood in front of them, its surface covered with fine, whorling grooves. The pattern was like those of the eggs in their pockets: loops like fingerprints, galaxies, waves. The wall was dizzying, in a way. Lovely.

Familiar. Kyla had seen walls just like it in her dreams.

Unlike the eggs, the pale stone wall had a seam in its grooves. The outline of a tall rectangle stood in the wall’s center. It was clearly a door.

Kyla pressed her hand to the stone. It radiated that weird heat.

“The city,” she said. “The city in the mountain. It’s on the other side.”

The door trembled with another moan from whatever the old tribe had sealed away. She gave the door a push, but it didn’t budge. There were no handles. No knobs. The groove in the stone was deceptive: she couldn’t even fit a fingernail in the gap.

“I guess we know what convinced the twins’ father and the old Chief to buy this place when they saw it,” Ethan said.

“This door is part of the seal, isn’t it? The seal the ceremony created,” Kyla said. “The old tribe locked away the city when they left. They sealed it behind here.”

“Sounds like a decent guess to me.”

“Does that mean that if the ceremony were to break, the door would open? That anyone could go to the dead city?”

“I guess so. But why would anyone want to do that?”

Kyla swallowed. “So they could have audience once more.”

Ethan shuddered, rubbed his head. “Let’s get back upstairs. Something’s waiting for us.”

ETHAN

The fragmented memories were coming quickly now. When he and Kyla emerged from the basement, they found another set of stairs waiting for them. Stairs leading up. These stairs hadn’t been there when they arrived at the house and yet somehow Ethan felt they hadalwaysbeen there. The stairs

he remembers climbing the old wooden stairs on his way to the house’s second floor. He remembers this long hall where he walks in a daze, the boards creaking beneath him. He recalls this single, unlocked door. He recalls this room, dead center of the house: a long room with one window, no furniture, something waiting against the far wall, something tall and square and shrouded by a black sheet.