Page 54 of The Midnight Knock

“You were in my dream,” Kyla said. “The dream of the dead city.”

His smile tightened. “Ah. So you finally remembered.”

On no, Miss Hewitt. It is I who shall have audience once more.

Here, in the office, the man touched his scarred knuckle to his temple. “My name is Jack Allen. Lovely to make your acquaintance again.”

Still standing near the window next to Kyla, Fernanda finally spoke. Her voice sounded slow, heavy, just like Kyla’s mind. “How did you drive through the dark? How did you make it past the creatures outside?”

“That is a wise question, ma’am.”

Leaving his hat on the desk, the man named Jack Allen ambled toward the back of the office, the fountain pen twirling back and forth between his fingers. Back and forth. Back and forth. He nodded at the grooved stone egg that rested on the floor between the two girls, the one Kyla had knocked from the fireplace’s mantel. “It’s been ages since anyone has touched one of those. Have y’all not figured out what they’re for?”

Fernanda said, “What do you mean? I have never been here before. I have never seen you.”

“You always are the slowest to believe. Ironic, considering the way you’ve kept yourself alive for so long at Frank O’Shea’s house. I’d imagine that you—you of all people—would understand the world doesn’t quite function the way we think it should.”

Kyla found herself unable to move in Jack Allen’s presence. Every nerve in her body was urging her to move torunto fuckingGO—

But she couldn’t. Even though Jack Allen felt like some horror out of one of Fernanda’s stories, a lethal trickster from the realm of the dead, Kyla found herself unable to move an inch. She only watched, mesmerized, as Jack Allen twirled that fountain pen: back and forth, back and forth, the sharp gold nib winking in the light.

“You want to know something funny, ladies? The mountain behind this motel is known as Mount Apache, but the Lipan Apache never dared come near this place. When they arrived in Texas a few hundred years ago, they heard warnings from the local tribes about a terrible curse that had been put on this mountain. The locals said that it had once been a sacred place, a place of great power, but it became corrupted when a great being fell from the sky and crashed into the mountain’s heart. A fell god. The Lake That Travels. The local tribes said that after the great being’s arrival, the mountain was haunted by long nights and terrible beasts, creatures out of a nightmare. Monsters that bore the features of everything a man could fear.”

Outside, in the dark, a creatureSHRIEKED.

“There’s a legend about a party of Apache braves that came to scout the mountain for themselves, to see if perhaps the local tribes were simply trying to scare them away with these purported horrors. The legend of the Apache braves has several variations, but the results are always the same. As night came, as darkness rolled over the mountain, the braves died, one by one, until only a single young man was left behind to warn his tribe of the hell he’d seen. No one came here after that. Even the white men waited a long time to settle out this way. It wasn’t until the tribes were finally broken, the old legends long buried, that some fool finally built this motel.”

Jack Allen paused, considering.

“You want to know the definition of madness, ladies? Even though there was no record of anyone ever having lived here, whenour erstwhile motelier arrived to survey the land he’d purchased—sight unseen, I might add—he discovered a vacant two-story house siting right at the foot of the mountain. He said—and this is the God’s honest truth—that that old house seemed like it had always been here. ‘Since the beginning of time,’ apparently. You’d think the man would have taken that as a warning, but fools are fools.” Jack Allen’s hooked smile widened. “Tell me, Miss Hewitt—have you figured out how to reach the house? Without being torn to shreds, of course.”

Kyla found herself shaking her head.

“Pity. This motel is just a distraction, really. A way station. The house—thehouseis what matters. Or, to be more precise, what the motelier discovered in the basement of the house, back in 1955.”

One of those great, bellowing moans echoed from the mountain.

Jack Allen chuckled. “It’s getting restless.”

He arrived, at last, at the back of the office. With a slow, effortless grace, he reached a hand into the pocket of his gray suit and removed a simple brass key. He slid the key into the walnut door. He smiled.

It was only as the man began to turn the key in the door’s lock that Kyla and Fernanda, at the same time, remembered what waited on the other side of that door. The warning that the twins had given them after Sarah’s death.

At midnight, three things will happen.

The door will open.

The lights will go out.

And anyone who’s not with us will die.

Kyla reached for her gun.

Fernanda seemed to jerk back to life. She held out a hand. “Stop! Don’t open—”

Jack Allen hardly acknowledged her. The man half turned in her direction, made a flinging motion with his hand like he wanted to shoo her away, and Kyla didn’t realize anything was amiss until she heard a wet squelching noise, like a finger pressing into ripe fruit, and twisted on her heel to see the black barrel of that heavy fountain pen jutting from the socket of Fernanda’s left eye.

Jack Allen had flung the pen with such force—such practice—that golden nib had buried itself in her skull.