Page 96 of The Midnight Knock

“Father and The Chief grew strange in the months after they bought the motel. Our dreams grew worse. We all knew that something terrible was coming, but Thomas and I had no idea what the men had planned. It clearly frightened them. It’s like they didn’t want to poison us with their knowledge. Finally, one morning, they told us everything was ready. They were to reopen the hotel that night.”

Kyla said, “And everyone came.”

“Yes. It defied belief, how quickly this lonely little place suddenly filled with people. Father and The Chief seemed… maybe not happy, but relieved.”

“Frank’s mother was one of those guests, wasn’t she?” Fernanda said, glancing away from the film that had fascinated her all this time. “And Stanley’s?”

“Yes. All the people I described earlier. The newlyweds, the hikers, the—”

An idea struck Kyla, another memory from last night.

Your grandfather was always kind to me.

“The Black guy who checked in, what was his name?” Kyla said.

Tabitha looked suddenly ashamed, faintly found out. “I forget.”

“No, you don’t. It was Hewitt, wasn’t it?”

But before Tabitha could nod, Kyla again heard that whisper behind her ear that had haunted her since she arrived last night. She realized, now, why the voice was almost familiar.

It sounded almost—but not quite—like her father.

The voice whispered, just behind her ear. “Who else did you think it could be?”

ETHAN

Kyla shook her head. “My grandfather was an engineer for the power companies. He traveled all over the country working on dams and shit. I didn’t find out until I was grown, but apparently, he committed suicide somewhere out here, coming back from a work project. Just wandered into the desert and never came back. Or at least that’s what my dad told me. Are you telling me my grandfather checked into this place that night? That he got trapped here, the same as us?”

Tabitha said, “I am so sorry. Our father and The Chief were playing with a power I don’t think either of them understood. There were… consequences.”

Ethan said to Kyla, “Is that why you moved here? You were looking for answers into his disappearance?”

Kyla said nothing. She studied her hands, her face completely empty. Ethan would have guessed, in that way he sometimes could, that the girl might have initially come out here to west Texas in a very bad frame of mind. Might have even had a strange, morbid desire to follow in her grandfather’s footsteps.

Or maybe he was imagining things. His head was throbbing. How was the pain getting worse with time, not better? He said to Tabitha, “So what exactly happened that night? After everyone checked in, what did your father do?”

“More importantly,” Ryan said, “what doweneed to do?”

“I don’t know.” A blast of wind shook the back of the cafe. Tabitha’s nerve seemed to be failing her. “Father and The Chief kept us in the dark, right until the end. I served our guests dinner that night. Thomas poured drinks. We cleaned up. Father and The Chief gathered everyone together for a commemorative photograph, our grand reopening, and that was the last we saw of them. Father took Thomas and I to our room. He told us to bolt the door and not open it, whatever happened. Whatever we might hear outside. Father said that if all went well, we would wake up tomorrow, us and him and The Chief, like nothing was the matter. But then he gave us somethingstrange. Two pieces of a silver material. Like metal, but softer. I know how odd this sounds, but he told us to swallow them. And when the silver touched our tongue, it dissolved like water.”

“What was it?” Kyla said.

“I have no idea. He said that it was a precaution in case anything were to go wrong.”

Outside, in the dark, a familiar sound came: oneSHRIEK, three, a wave. Ryan said, “Those fuckers are getting restless.”

“We heard them that night too,” Tabitha said. “We call them the Guardians. They had never come out until that night. During all the months we spent preparing to reopen the motel, the desert was silent. The mountain—”

As if it heard its name, the mountain moaned.

“That night in ’55, the mountain grew noisome too. The sounds outside were… awful. Thomas and I were terrified. We thought my father and The Chief had acted too late. That the seal had already broken. It sounded like the world was ending. But then, a little after four o’clock, between one moment and the next, things just… broke off. I don’t know how else to explain it. We didn’t remember falling asleep, but we woke up in our beds. It was morning. Everything was quiet. Normal. Except we were the only two people here.”

“Nine empty rooms,” Ethan said. “Twelve cold beds.”

“I think that’s how it looked from the outside, yes, back in ’55. Thomas and I didn’t know yet, but we’d awokentoday. Now. In your time. We didn’t know, that first morning, how many decades had passed while we were asleep. We found the motel just as we’d left it the day before, like it had been preserved in amber. Only a few things were different. We found a letter and a pair of stone eggs in the office. They were—they were the only real clue Father left us.”

Tabitha faltered there at the end. Ethan knew, in an instant, there was something she’d chosen not to tell them. Seemingly trying to cover the slip, Tabitha reached into her pocket and pulled free the folded piece of paper she’d taken earlier from her room. She unfolded the paper and passed it to Ethan, who laid it out on the bar between Kyla and himself. The writing was sloppy, clearly done in a rush, and the pain in Ethan’s head made deciphering it almost impossible.