Page 67 of The Midnight Knock

Thomas sometimes wondered how many more nights of this their brains could handle.

Tabitha sometimes wondered if they’d already gone too far.

Her brother reached for the towels in her hands. “You’ll ruin everything. We have our instructions.”

“I don’t care.”

“You read what Father wrote.”

“You don’t even know what it means.”

“?‘Death sustains it.’ That seems pretty unambiguous.”

“You never were good with primary texts.”

She pushed past him. Actually pushed him, hard, and carried the towels to the room’s front door. Tabitha didn’t have time for doubt. When she’d awoken in her bed this morning, alive and unbutchered despite the events of last night, she’d felt a shift in the air, a fragility. Everything in the motel feltofftoday. Hollow. Like it might crumble with one good kick.

Something had changed last night. Things were finally starting to shift.

Her brother, she knew, felt the same way. He wasn’t half as excited about this change as she was, but then they’d never agreed on the particulars of what they were supposed to be doing here.

Tabitha carried the towels out of room 5. She wasn’t entirely certain how, but when the twins forgot to leave towels in room 5’s bathroom yesterday—when the crack in the mirror had distracted them from their usual routine—last night had been different. The guests haddone somethingfor the first time in ages. They hadn’t hunkered down in their rooms. They hadn’t all been slaughtered the instant the lights died.

Instead, they’d tried to understand Sarah’s death. They’d formed a team.

And not a minute too soon, as far as Tabitha was concerned. Whatever Thomas might want to believe, she was under no illusions. Things were breaking down. The generator seemed to be getting weaker and weaker by the night. The Guardians of the mountain were growing more raucous. She sometimes thought they might be afraid.

Maybe the ceremony would hold for another hundred nights. Maybe even a thousand. But eventually things would crack. The seal would loosen. Whatever their father and the old Chief had locked away, it would be free again, and Tabitha had her doubts about whether another seal could be put in place in time to keep it contained.

So why not give the guests the chance to work together? To answer some questions of their own?

As Tabitha opened the door to the supply room that waited under the porch’s covered walkway, she caught a glint of light from the old house that stood behind the motel. She looked up just in time to see Sarah Powers fiddling with her camera in the window of a room upstairs.

Tabitha had many questions about Sarah Powers, a cousin who had somehow been born decades after the twins, but was almost fifteen years their senior.

Thomas caught up with Tabitha in the supply room. He grabbed her by the arm, tried to pull her backward, as if he could rewind time and return these stupid towels to the precise spot he’d left them.

But then he heard a sound behind him. He went stiff.

Tabitha smiled. She’d timed this perfectly.

The rumble of the Malibu’s motor reached them from up the road. Tabitha dropped the towels to the floor of the supply room and pulled her arm free of her brother’s grip. He had nothing more to fear from her. This was the only thing she would do to interfere with the evening’s proceedings. She would let the guests arrive in their due time: Kyla and Fernanda, Ethan and Hunter, Stanley and Penelope. The furtive Ryan Phan, so easily forgotten.

Soon, Tabitha would help her brother slash Stanley’s tires. Stan Holiday was the only guest who had stopped here voluntarily and parked within range of the lights, meaning he was the only person at the motel with gas in his tank and easy access to his vehicle. He was the only person the twins had feared, on the first night, might leave before the ceremony could begin. The twins would dispose of the knife beneath the front porch. They would switch on the motel’s sign in the moments after Hunter and Ryan, concealed against the wall facing the road, lit up a pair of menthol cigarettes.

Things could proceed however they wanted after that. An experiment, like every other night. Tabitha had simply adjusted a few control parameters.

She pushed back her hair. She smiled at her brother. She said, “Let’s go greet our guests.”

THE WOMAN IN ROOM FOURETHAN

7:30 p.m.

He hadn’t felt like himself for hours. Earlier this evening, not long after the truck ran out of gas, a strange silver light had passed over the sky, so bright it had almost blinded him. The light had given both Hunter and him a monstrous headache. Hunter’s headache had seemed painful enough, but Ethan’s temples had throbbed so hard he’d found it almost impossible to reach the motel. Every step across the desert seemed to twist a screwdriver behind his eyes. By the time he dropped their battered old gas can at the pump outside and stepped into the office, Ethan was almost afraid there was something seriously wrong with his brain.

It wasn’t just the pain in his head. An awful sense of déjà vu, sticky as the residue of a nightmare, seemed to be leeching through his skull. The feeling had only grown worse in the time Ethan spent in the office, spent in his room, spent with Hunter on his bed.

The feeling was more than just mere anxiety, the dread of all that had happened in the little town of Turner. When Ethan looked back on that diner now, his horror didn’t seem to come from what Hunter had done to the fry cook: the depths of violence Hunter had revealed, the danger it had placed them in.Frank is going to kill you faggots!