Page 95 of The Midnight Knock
Thomas looked at the corpse in the gabardine suit that lay sprawled near the door. He said, very softly, “How are you talking to me?”
“Don’t act so surprised. You know I don’t play by the rules.” The tingle on the back of Thomas’s neck grew stronger. “You need to hurry, son. If she tells themeverything—well. That might just be the end.”
Thomas closed his eyes. He told himself he should cover his ears.
“Haven’t I been a friend to you before, Thomas? Haven’t we done everything we needed to do to keep this place safe? To cull the chaff?” Jack Allen was smiling. Even without a face, Thomas could hear the man smiling. “It’ll all start again tomorrow, right?”
“If she… if she hasn’t ruined it already.”
“Then tick-tock, Thomas. Tick-tock.”
KYLA
Tabitha said, “There is a great point of contention between my brother and myself. Our father left us sorely uninformed. Back in 1955, he decided that this mountain—Mount Apache, for lack of a better name—was the mountain from which our ancestors had come. He wanted to hike it, explore, maybe do a few digs. He said it was the mountain he saw in his dreams, and Thomas and I believed him. The moment we arrived, we recognized it, all of us.”
She went on. “Our first night here, at the motel, it was obvious the business was going under. The entrepreneur who’d built this place was almost shocked to see guests. He spent most of the night drinking at this very bar. Our father joined him at dinner. It was just the four of us, alone way out here in the desert.” Tabitha stared at the gleam of the bar’s wood, like she could still see the night reflected there. “And then, through that door, a man arrived. The man we called The Chief.”
Ryan pushed his empty shot glass around, clearly debating another. Ethan rubbed his forehead, his migraine obvious. Kyla felt a twinge of sympathy: even after getting slammed into the office’s desk, her own head had been clear and light ever since she’d awoken in her room.
Then she looked at the clock.
“I don’t want to rush you, babe,” she said. “But you really need to pick up the pace here.”
Tabitha nodded. “We’re nearly done. You’ve probably noticed by now the way coincidences multiply around the mountain. Here was ours: The Chief had been doing research of his own into the precursor tribe, trying to reconcile the stories he’d grown up hearing with the true history of his people.Ourpeople. He’d been having terrible dreams of his own, and his journey had brought him here, to this motel, on the very same night as us.”
Ryan said, “He was one of them, too, wasn’t he? Another member of that precursor tribe.”
“Yes. We’d thought we were the only ones left, but here was another.”
“My Chief, the one in Huntsville, said the same thing.” Ryan rubbed his swollen nose. “And then along came Sarah Powers.”
“A cycle. A wheel. Its pull is… extraordinary.”
Tabitha forced down a gulp of water.
“That night in ’55, The Chief and our father quickly realized that they were both here for the same reason. And as luck would have it, the entrepreneur had something to tell them. He’d apparently purchased this land sight unseen, and there had been no mention of any existing structures in the deed of sale. When he arrived, however, he found the old house standing at the foot of the mountain that you still see today. The house had a strange effect on him. He said it felt as if it had always been here.”
Kyla thought of the strange two-story Victorian that had lurked in the background of this place from the moment she arrived. Just remembering the house made her uneasy: even looking at it from the outside, everything about the place just feltoff.
Jack Allen had been right, in the office last night: only an idiot would stick around if they found a mysterious house waiting for them on a plot of land that was meant to be empty.
Tabitha said, “The house made the entrepreneur uneasy. He hardly stepped inside it for the first several months he was here. But without much business to keep him occupied, the entrepreneur decided to finally take a proper inventory of the place. And then he found it.”
The woman trailed off, almost like she was afraid of what she needed to say.
Ethan said, “He found a door, didn’t he? A locked door.”
“He did find a door, yes. But it wasn’t locked at the time. Father did that later, Father and The Chief, because that door leads to a basement, and in that basement is something incredibly dangerous. Incredibly old.”
“What, exactly?” Kyla was getting nervy, impatient. The wind outside was growing stronger.
“I don’t know. Truly,” Tabitha said. “Whatever it was, the entrepreneur agreed to show it to my father and The Chief that very night. My brother and I were told to wait here. Even then, I think The Chief and Father realized they were playing with fire. Whateverthe entrepreneur showed them in that basement, it was enough to convince the men to pool their money and purchase this place together. Then and there.”
Kyla said, “But they never intended to make a dime from this motel.”
“That’s right. All Father and The Chief did was hang a few missing shingles and replace a water tank that had been badly installed. They spent most of their time studying the thing in the basement, comparing it to an object The Chief had brought with him. It was a relic of his own, but again they kept it concealed from my brother and me. All I know is that it bore words—carved writing—and I think that with the help of my father’s scholarship the two men were finally able to decode it. If I had to guess, The Chief’s relic laid out the steps of the ceremony they needed to perform to keep the mountain—the thing in the mountain—sealed away.”
The ground trembled, the air, as a new moan, the loudest yet, washed over them.
