Page 93 of The Midnight Knock

Ryan said nothing. That tingle crept up his arms. It wasn’t guilt he felt, or fear of being found out. He really hadn’t done much tonight to hide, at least nothing very serious. He hadn’t killed anyone. He hadn’t helped cover up the murder.

He just didn’t want to think about the reason he’d gone to see Sarah Powers, earlier in the evening. It scared the shit out of him, thinking about the things The Chief had said the night the old man died.

The mountain—

Tell Sarah, the mountain—

“I know you killed her,” Kyla said to Ryan: flat, thoroughly unbothered. “I’d just like to know why.”

That jerked him out of the past. “You what?”

“You have no real alibi. You went to Sarah’s room at some point before eight o’clock this evening. You even stole a roll of film from her. Considering the scraps of burned-up photo negatives we found in Sarah’s room yesterday, I’m going to go out on a limb and say she took a picture of you that she shouldn’t have. You aren’t supposed to be here. You wanted to make sure there was no trace you’d ever come by.”

Ryan’s head was spinning, mostly because he was impressed. Not because he’d killed Sarah, of course, but because very few people could stitch together so many clues so wrongly.

“If you’d just admit it, we can move on to bigger problems,” Kyla said. “Like how the hell we get out of this place alive.”

Ryan took a sip of water. This was going to take some work.

“I did go to Sarah’s room before eight o’clock, yes, but not to kill her. And I went back an hour ago and found the burned film you’re talking about. I assume it came from this.”

Reaching into the pocket of his jacket, Ryan removed the rolled-up length of camera film he’d retrieved from a strange black cylinder in Sarah’s bathroom. He rested the roll of negatives on the bar. “I don’t think those burned pictures were as exciting as you want them to be. Look at how neat and clean the cut at the end of the film is. A killer jacked up on adrenaline wouldn’t have made such a clean slice.”

Ethan said, “So if the killer didn’t burn the pictures, who did?”

“Sarah, obviously. The film is flawed—there’s weird gray smudges all over it. Sarah probably decided the last few shots just weren’t worth keeping.”

“But why would she burn them?” Ethan said. “Why not just throw them in the trash?”

Ryan shrugged. Fernanda plucked up the roll of film and held it to the light.

Kyla just stared at Ryan until he kept talking.

“I didn’t kill Sarah,” he said. “Yes, I did go to her room. That was around seven fifty. I went because I wanted to talk to her about something. I slipped through the front door while everyone was at dinner, but it didn’t do me any good. Sarah was already dead.”

“How convenient,” Kyla said.

“You can believe me or not.” Ryan stared Kyla in the eye. He wastelling her the truth. “I didn’t hurt her. And I didn’t steal any film from her either.”

Kyla didn’t look impressed. “So Sarah was dead by seven fifty?”

“Yes. Very. She looked exactly the way she did when Tabitha found the body a few minutes later. I’d slipped back out of the room by then. Stanley must have caught a glimpse of me around that time, but I got into the supply closet without much attention. That’s where I was, trying to figure out what the hell was going on here, and then all the screaming started.”

“There’s more, though, isn’t there? Because you said in my room that you thought Sarah was already dead by seven thirty.”

Fernanda looked away from the film in her hands. “That’s impossible. I told you earlier that I heard Sarah speaking to a man in her room at—”

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but could this wait?” Tabitha said. “Time isn’t slowing down, and we still have a lot to cover.”

KYLA

Kyla felt it too. The clock on the wall showed 1:10. A lamp above the bar flickered. Was it a bad bulb, or was the generator already starting to fail again?

Tabitha said, “By 1955, this motel was bankrupt. It had been built by a fool entrepreneur who’d made a little money on an oil well in Odessa. This mountain never really had a name, so he started calling it ‘Mount Apache’ and tried to make it into a tourist destination. Which is foolish on its face. The Apache never lived here. In fact, they told terrible stories about this place.”

Outside, the wind was picking up again. Kyla recalled a similar story from Jack Allen last night, shortly before he reached a hand into his gabardine pocket and removed that shining brass key.

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.