Page 52 of The Midnight Knock

The clock struck twelve. The noise cut out. All of it, at once, just like that: the moaning from the mountain, theSHRIEKSfrom the desert, even the clamor behind the walnut door. The wind died down to a mournful breeze. It played across the porch and the parking lot like the last gasps of the past.

In the silence, in the cold, they heard a new sound from the desert.

It was the whisper of tires on a gravel road.

Tabitha went pale. Thomas looked at her, almost triumphant.

“I told you he’d still come.”

THE MIDNIGHT KNOCKETHAN

12:00 a.m.

Headlights washed through the office’s windows. In the glow, Ethan saw the scene around him with a startling new clarity. Kyla and Fernanda stood near the dead fire. Hunter was beside Ethan, his hand still clasped around Ethan’s arm. Through the windows near the fireplace, a sea of yellow eyes watched them from the dark.

Thomas and Tabitha stared at the front door: him looking smug, her resigned to whatever was coming.

The car outside, this new arrival, pulled to a slow stop. The engine cut out. The headlights went dark.

A metal door whined open.

At the edge of his vision, Ethan saw Kyla take an instinctive step away from the noise. Her shoulder brushed the mantel above the fire and sent something falling to the floor. It landed with a loud crack: a warning shot.

Ethan’s eyes followed Kyla’s to the floor to see what could make such a noise. It was one of the grooved stone eggs.

A foot stepped onto the gravel outside. Another joined it. The metal door swung closed. Those feet crunched across the parking lot, thumped up the steps of the porch, creaked across the wooden boards. They came to a stop on the other side of the office’s door. A tall shadow stood on the other side of the frosted windows. For a moment, it didn’t move.

A long, long silence stretched.

And then, there was aknock

Knock

Knock.

No one moved to answer the door. Ethan didn’t think any of them would dare. But after a polite pause, the door opened regardless, and a man stepped inside. A tall, slim man dressed in a pale gray gabardine suit with a matching hat in his hand. No one wore suits like that anymore. It was a little faded, a little worn around the edges, utterly unmistakable.

The man had small, cool eyes. A faint hook of a smile that looked like it would try to sell you something at the slightest provocation. The index finger of the man’s right hand ended at the second knuckle. A mass of scar tissue was seared to the joint.

The new arrival spoke with a soft twang. An eerie formality.

“Evening, folks,” the man said. “Room for one more?”

It was the man from the diner in Turner. The man who’d told Ethan the story of the Dust Road and the Brake Inn Motel. The man who’d warned him that sometimes the road getshungry.

The man Ethan had seen in the gloaming of the mercury lamps an hour ago, waving to him from the edge of the parking lot.

He wasn’t a ghost. He wasn’t a hallucination. When the man stepped into the office, his shoes made the floorboards creak. He threw a shadow from the lamp on the desk. It made no sense how the man could be here—if nothing else, how had he made it safely past the horde of creatures outside?—but there was no denying that hewashere. In the flesh.

Smiling so tight his teeth ground against each other like stones.

The man made his way across the room. He stepped over Ryan Phan’s corpse, hardly blinking at the carnage. He gave Ethan a nod, pure Texas courtesy. “Good seeing you again, Mister Cross.”

In his wake, the gabardine man left a strange odor, a blend of stale cologne and staleness itself, like he’d spent years gathering dust in an unused room.

The gabardine man rested his hat on the front desk, pulled over the motel’s leather-bound register. He plucked up the thick fountain pen that rested on a little tray beside it. Unscrewed the cap. Balanced the pen’s weight in his hand. Even with his mangled finger he seemed able to write just fine.

The gabardine man smiled to the twins. “Been an age since they’ve all been together in one place like this.”