A new moan rolled down the mountain, and this time it didn’t stop. The sound grew louder, louder, matched only by theSHRIEKSof the things in the night. A wild wind buffeted the motel. The generator sputtered, struggled: a lamp died outside, another. The circle of light was weakening. Shrinking. The guests stood in the cold office, lit only by the lamp with the green glass shade. Hunter’s corpse was still sprawled across the floor. The twins stared at Kyla from behind the counter.
Stanley was locked away somewhere. Penelope was nowhere to be seen.
11:57.
11:58.
11:59.
The thing in the mountain: it sounded like it was screaming.
12:00.
The moment the clock struck midnight, the noise cut out. All of it, at once, just like that: the bellowing from the mountain, theSHRIEKSfrom the desert. The wind died down to a mournful breeze. It played across the porch and the parking lot: the last desperate breaths of the past.
In the silence, in the cold, they heard a new sound in the desert.
It was the whisper of tires on a gravel road.
Headlights washed through the windows of the office. A car pulled to a slow stop outside. The headlights went dark. The engine cut out.
A metal door whined open.
A foot stepped into the gravel outside. Another joined it. The car door swung closed. The feet crunched across the parking lot,thumped up the steps of the porch, creaked across its wooden boards. The feet came to a stop on the other side of the office’s front door. A long, long silence stretched.
And then someoneknock
Knock
Knocked.
No one moved to answer the knock. Kyla didn’t bother. After a polite pause, the door opened, and a man stepped inside. A tall, slim man, dressed in a gray gabardine suit with a matching hat in his hand. No one wore suits like that anymore. It was a little faded, a little worn around the edges, utterly unmistakable.
The man had small, dark eyes. A lopsided hook of a smile. The index finger of his right hand ended at the second knuckle. A mass of scar tissue was seared to the joint.
The man spoke with a soft twang. An eerie formality.
“Evening, folks,” the man said. “Room for one—”
Jack Allen broke off when he finally saw the shotgun braced against Kyla’s shoulder.
She pumped a round into the chamber:chunk-SHUNK.
“Fuck off,” Kyla said.
She fired.
The contents of Jack Allen’s head scattered over the front porch. His gray gabardine hat flew away into the night. An awful smell of rot—of absolute decay—flooded everyone’s noses.
A strange creeping itch, like the tickle of a million small fingers, played along the back of Kyla’s neck. Through the echo of the shotgun’s blast, the wet spatter of brain matter and pulverized bone, she heard a voice whisper just beside her ear.
“Well played, Miss Hewitt. Well played.”
The sensation left her. Kyla ignored it all. She turned the shotgun to the front desk, pumped another round into the barrel.
She said to the twins, “You fuckers have some explaining to do.”
TABITHA’S STORYETHAN
