Page 127 of The Midnight Knock
Again, in her gut, Sarah knew this was right.
In the bathroom, Sarah sliced away the last six photographs from the roll with a pair of nail scissors—the photos of the night’s guests—and dropped the remainder of the film back in the development tank. She stepped into the main room. At the cluttered little corner table, she gathered the few tools she would need. Into a plain dinner plate, Sarah placed a shard of silver metal she’d broken away from the mirror in the eerie old house out back. She pulled a match from a matchbook printed with the motel’s name. She struck a flame and eased it, carefully, to the shard of silver.
Even though it seems to be metal, Dad swore the material can burn like wood.
And so it did. The shard of the mirror caught the fire easily. It began to burn: smokeless, odorless, and intensely hot.
Something strange started to thrum in the air of the room the moment the fire got burning. It reminded her of the electric pulse of the powerful magnets she’d once used in her physics lab, but dialed up out of all proportion. A furious energy. It crackled on Sarah’s skin, lifted the hair from her neck, sent her stomach somersaulting. She smelled hot ozone burning the inside of her nose.
Sarah knew—knew—that it was the power of the mountain, a sliver of the power of the thinginsidethe mountain, let free by the flame.
Te’lo’hi.
You know this is serious, Sarah, The Chief had written.I really do believe the fate of the world hangs in the balance here.
When Sarah felt that pulse in the air, the last of her doubts fell away. If a single shard of Te’lo’hi could expel this much energy, imagine the damage the full thing could unleash.
Sarah looked again at the film, the photographs of the night’s guests.All the old traditions say that photographs—real film photographs—capture pieces of the soul. Originally, the people participating in the Te’lo’hi ceremony would gather in person around the flame, but my father believed that their pictures should be enough.
Thomas and Tabitha, the girls from the Malibu, the boys: all of them would be trapped here, maybe forever, and they’d done nothing to deserve it. But that was life, right? Bullshit happens for no fucking reason. Just ask the Apache.
But then something caught Sarah’s eye. Looking again at the photograph of the twins, she saw something just past them, a strange gray shape like a flaw in the film. She saw it in the next shot, and the next, and the next. Sarah fished her bifocals from her bag, brought the negatives under a better light. Squinted.
At the edge of the photograph with Thomas and Tabitha, lurking in the corner of the office, was a man in a suit with a hand raised in greeting. He was smiling to Sarah. Smiling so hard she almost imagined she could hear the teeth—
She heard them now—shereallyheard them—grinding together like stones. The sound came from just over her shoulder. Right by her ear.
A sensation like a hundred little legs scuttled down the back of her neck. A man whispered, “Lovely to finally meet you, Miss Powers.”
Sarah muffled a yelp and dropped the film into the fire.
She watched its ends curl up with flame. The energy thrumming through the room took on a new depth, a new urgency. The junk on the side table began to tremble. The strange, grooved stone that The Chief had left her when he died started to vibrate on the table, pulsing almost in time with the energy in the air.
This was it. There were no special words, no “medicine mumbo jumbo,” as her mother would have called it. Sarah wasn’t sure she would have been brave enough to say them. She had worked for long enough at the bleeding edge of quantum physics to know there were forces in this universe that the human mind had yet to fullycomprehend. Might even be incapable of truly grasping. Sarah knew she was playing with one such force now. She could feel it in her bones. She knew what had to come next. She knew, and despite all her preparation, all her plans, it terrified her.
But her boys would be safe. Her sons, the ones who never wanted to see her again—whatever she did in this motel, she could die knowing her boys would never see that awful silver light.
Murder, Sarah.Yourmurder.
In his last letter, The Chief’s handwriting grew shaky.Suicide will not work.It’s not just about death. It’s about the act taking a life, removing the soul from the body by force. It’s a terrible, powerful thing.
Someone will have to kill you.
There. I wrote it. I wrote it and I hate it. I don’t know how you’ll do it, but you have to convince someone to take your life before the fire goes out. It’s the only way. Theonlyway.
I am so sorry.
Sarah could only hope she’d done enough to make that happen, earlier tonight in the motel’s office. That her lies had been good, but nottoogood.
They were.
At 6:31, the front door of her room eased open, and the Hunter of Huntsville slipped inside without a sound. He seemed ill at ease, almost distracted, glanced at the windows and the door and said, “Let’s get this show on the road. We don’t have much time.”
PENELOPE
Something was wrong. Penelope didn’t understand how she knew this—just like she didn’t understand how the heck her sister was speaking in her ear after being literallydeadfor three years—but whatever the reason, Penelope knew that things weren’t working quite like they were supposed to. Adeline sounded scared. Petrified.
“They’ve ruined it,” Addy said, more than once. “They’ve ruined everything.”
