Page 123 of The Midnight Knock

Sarah Powers hesitated in mid-step. She looked at Ethan as she walked past, looked at him again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But is your last name Cross? This is going to sound crazy, but I think I knew your mother.”

RYAN

Maybe it was the fumes of the road. Maybe it was his tight helmet, the rumble of the bike, the broken nose he’d gotten out of his fight with Stanley in Mexico City yesterday. Maybe it was the weird silver glare he’d half imagined he’d seen passing over the sky a couple hours back. Whatever the reason, Ryan had a headache that could fell a horse. The way he’d parked out of sight of the motel now seemed like a terrible idea: every step across the desert was like a knife through his skull.

The pain slowed him down. Slowed him down enough to notice, for the first time, the way the curtain of room 4’s window flickered as he stepped into the motel’s parking lot, the glint of what almost looked like a camera lens. It was gone before Ryan could even be sure it had been there at all—could it have been an illusion at the edge of his vision, like the aura of a migraine?—but it left an uneasy impression regardless.

Who would want to take his picture? Not Stanley Holiday, that was for sure. If the big man had seen Ryan coming, he would have shot him with a bullet, not celluloid.

But then a stranger question came to mind. Why had Ryan thought that this wasthe first timehe’d spotted that glint of glass?

A dour man in a red uniform waited for him in the office. Ryan said, “Is it just you?”

The man studied him. “What makes you say that?”

Ryan was suddenly very confused. “I… I don’t know.”

A few minutes later, stepping back out into the parking lot, Ryan saw another curtain move. A familiar face frowned at him from the window of room 9. An impossible face. And yet somehow, with a surge of déjà vu—and another stab of pain in his head—Ryan was not surprised. The man motioned toward the end of the building, out of sight of the other windows, and Ryan nodded. By the time Ryan joined him, he almost felt like he’d done this a million times before.

“The Hunter of Huntsville,” Ryan said. “Am I crazy, or do I smell trouble here?”

“You have no idea. Can I have a smoke? I’ve got a migraine like no other.”

Ryan hesitated. What a coincidence. “All I got is menthols.”

“Better than nothing.”

Call him superstitious, call him deranged, but as Ryan clicked open his Zippo and lit up their cigarettes, he almost felt as if the pain in his head was trying to tell him something. Towarnhim of something. Somehow the pain was reminding him of six weeks ago, of Huntsville, of the night he and Hunter had awoken in their bunks to hear a horrible low moan leaking from the cell next door.

It had been midnight, and The Chief had been dying.

“I see it. Iseeit,”The Chief had wheezed. The old man let out a gasp of tears.“The world purged in silver light. The time where all time stops. Twelve souls to begin again. A man in gabardine with blood on his blade.”

In the dark of their own cell, Ryan had whispered to Hunter, “What the fuck is he talking about?”

Hunter had been silent, which was how Ryan had known the man was afraid.

No one called the guards. No one came to help.

The Chief said,“It sleeps. It wakes.”

“It sleeps. It wakes.”

“IT SLEEPS. ITWAKES.”

The Chief might have been Indigenous, but he never really talked about his heritage. He wore a feather around his neck, but it felt like more of an accessory than a symbol. He didn’t pray to anything. He didn’t talk about the past, or ancestral spirits, or tomahawks, but he did once punch the lights out of a dickhead in the yard for calling him a medicine man and prancing around with some bullshit war cries.

For a man pushing seventy, The Chief still had a good right hook.

Things changed. In the wake of the visits that a strange beauty named Sarah Powers had started paying him, The Chief had grown pensive. He’d dug out a leather pouch from his belongings and started carrying it around with him everywhere. Ryan and Hunter had always shared their meals with the man, but lately The Chief had become so distant they felt like they weren’t eating with anyone at all.

But speaking of Sarah Powers, on the night The Chief died, in the middle of his delirium, the man had suddenly fallen into a silence that was worse than all the babble. Ryan had listened as The Chief dragged himself from his cot. As he’d made his way to the cell’s barred door.

“Hunter,” The Chief had whispered. “Hunter, please, I need you.”

Ryan had watched from his own bunk as Hunter went to their door. “What is it?”