Page 126 of The Midnight Knock
And then, last month, she’d started having the dream. The same dream, every night. Every. Single. Night.
A mountain in the desert.
A little motel.
A beam of silver light, washing away the world.
And fear—fear like Sarah had never felt in her life. A sweaty cold horror in the morning. The serrated certainty that this destruction was coming—that this wasreal—digging through her heart.
Sarah had known that if she didn’t do something about it, that silver light would kill everyone on this miserable fucking planet.
And, most importantly, her boys.
Sitting across from The Chief in the Huntsville Correctional Unit, Sarah had popped the cap on her felt-tip pen and opened the journal to a fresh page. “I don’t care what it takes. I don’t care what it costs. Just tell me what I need to do.”
Now, at the Brake Inn Motel, Sarah unscrewed the cap of the black plastic cylinder in her bathroom. With a pair of tweezers, she pulled free the roll of film she’d snapped today. She wiped away the last of the exposure chemicals in which the film marinated, tossed the towel to the floor, held the film to the infernal red light bulb she’d installed above the sink. She’d been worried she hadn’t given the chemicals enough time to soak, but she hadn’t had the time to wait. The ceremony needed to start,now.Sarah knew it in her gut.
She’d learned to trust that, if nothing else.
Luck was on her side. Luck, or something else. The chemicals had done their job: the film was clear. This afternoon, from her vantage point in the upstairs window of the old house, Sarah had snapped a photograph of the two young women—Kyla Hewitt and someone else—climbing from the white Malibu. Later, Sarah caught a picture of the two boys, Ethan and Hunter, walking in from the road, moments before she went down to speak to them in the office for herself.
A few minutes after that, on her way out of the office, she’dsnapped Stanley Holiday climbing out of his van, his granddaughter visible from the back seat.
And last of all, Sarah happened to glance outside—pure coincidence—in time to see a man in a motorcycle jacket steal across the motel’s parking lot, almost invisible in the growing dark. Snap.
Sarah had first come to this motel six weeks ago, a few days after The Chief’s death. She’d found nothing but a ruin: broken windows, a collapsed porch. She’d wandered the empty rooms, sat on a fallen wardrobe, and listened to the silence around her, the wind. She’d felt no strange power in this land, at the foot of this mountain, in the way the ancestors allegedly had. The power to ensure that things always work out the way they should. Sarah hadn’t been sure what that would feel like, but she’d felt nothing but cold.
But when she’d closed her eyes, she’d seen the silver light.
That very night, she’d stepped into a steakhouse in Fort Stockton and sat down across from Frank O’Shea and Stanley Holiday and said, “I can help y’all find your mothers.” To Sarah’s absolute shock, the men hadn’t batted an eye when Sarah had explained her theory that the men’s moms had vanished during an ancient ritual designed to bend time and space. “I guess I always knew it must have been something… unorthodox,” Frank O’Shea had said. “We’ve spent fifty years looking for them in all the normal ways.”
Stanley had been almost desperate, childlike. “You really think they’re still there, at the motel? That you could save them?”
“Yes. With y’all’s help.” A lie, of course. Sarah had had no idea if the men’s mothers could be saved. She’d been hazy on the ceremony’s details. She’d let the men believe that by helping her—by repairing the broken ceremony—they could free their mothers from the motel’s grasp.
Sarah hadn’t told the men that they would, in fact, be trapping themselves here. She’d had no idea what would happen after that. Maybe they could meet their mothers in whatever strange pocket dimension the ceremony would create. Maybe they’d spend eternity living the same night over and over, blissfully unaware. She hadn’t known, and she hadn’t cared.
Frank O’Shea was famous in Huntsville prison, apparently. After the stories The Chief had told her about the man, Sarah had felt nocompunction about keeping O’Shea trapped here. She didn’t believe in justice, but it was probably better for society to have two fewer men like Frank and Stanley on the loose.
Sarah had felt a bit worse for the others, though. Stanley had leapt at the opportunity to help Sarah track down the descendants of the folks who’d disappeared in 1955, or as many as they could find paperwork on. He’d made some calls. He’d put people under observation. He’d said over one of their many dinners at the steakhouse, “I’ve been having the strangest dreams.”
And then they’d waited.You’ll know when it’s time to check into the motel, The Chief had written in his last letter, giving Sarah little to do but while away her life savings in a luxury motel in Marfa. Every morning she’d awaken from her terrible sleep in time to watch a band of golden sun give birth to the desert, again and again, drawing the world out of black nothing like the hero in an old legend.
Finally, this morning, things had changed. Her phone had dragged her from sleep. It had been a sheriff from some nowhere town in east Texas, a corrupt old man named Powell who Stanley had put on the payroll. “Just wanted to let you know those boys you got me watching lit out from town today,” the sheriff had said. “They started a little arson out in Ellersby, but I let them go, seeing how keen y’all feel for them. I hope you’ll remember that when it comes time for my compensation.”
Sarah had said, “Where were they heading?”
“West. They’re heading straight your way.” The sheriff had hesitated. “Ethan’s a good kid, but watch out for the other. He could poison a snake if he wanted to.”
Sarah had hung up without a word. She’d called Stanley. She’d called Frank. She’d told them both the same thing. “Meet me at the motel. Tonight. It’s time.”
And what do you know, The Chief had been right. When Sarah had pulled up at the Brake Inn Motel a little before two o’clock this afternoon, she’d found a building that hadn’t aged a day since 1955. She had found a pair of twins who were somehow in their early thirties and also decades older than Sarah herself. Cousins, long gone. A family legend here, now, in the flesh.
There had been clumsy introductions. The twins were ready and willing to help her, however she needed. They had some sort ofinstructions of their own. Sarah had made them pose for a photograph. She’d been so unnerved at all of this—so terrified to realize that this was really happening, that this was reallyreal—the camera had trembled in her hands.
Looking now at the photo’s negative, Thomas and Tabitha were so blurry they may as well have been ghosts.
It was almost six thirty, and Frank still wasn’t here. Sarah decided she would have to start without him.You should begin around dark, The Chief had written in his letter.My father always said the old powers were strongest at sundown.
