The Night Sister

She’s out of time.

Moving into the hallway, she latches the deadbolt on the front door (silly, really—a locked door will do no good), then stops at the closet and grabs her grandfather’s old Winchester. Rifle in hand, she climbs the stairs, the same stairs she’s climbed her whole life. She thinks she can hear young Piper and Margot following behind her, whispering, warning her, telling her—as they did all those years ago—to forget all about it, that there is no twenty-ninth room.

Amy takes each step slowly, willing herself not to run, to stay calm and not wake her family. What would Mark think if he woke up and found his wife creeping up the steps with a gun? Poor, sweet, clueless Mark—perhaps she should have told him the motel’s secrets? But no. It was better to protect him from it all as best she could.

The scarred wood beneath her feet creaks, and she thinks of the rhyme her grandmother taught her:

When Death comes knocking on your door,

you’ll think you’ve seen his face before.

When he comes creeping up your stairs,

you’ll know him from your dark nightmares.

If you hold up a mirror, you shall see

that he is you and you are he.





Jason


The call came in at 12:34 a.m.: a woman reporting that gunshots and screams were coming from the old Tower Motel.

Jason was putting on his coat, but froze as he listened, dread creeping into his chest and squeezing his heart like an icy hand.

Amy.

Even though he’d already punched out, and even though he heard Rainier and McLellan were on their way to check it out, Jason decided to swing by on his way home. It couldn’t hurt to take a look, he told himself. He knew he should leave it, should just get in his truck, drive home, and crawl into bed beside Margot. He should put his arm around her, rest his hand on her belly, and feel the baby kick and turn in her sleep.

But there was what he should do and there was what he needed to do. And as soon as the call came in, he knew he needed to go out to the motel. He needed to see if Amy was okay.

He was at the motel in ten minutes, his headlights illuminating the faded and rotting old sign: Tower Motel, 28 Rooms, Pool, No Vacancy. As he turned up the gravel driveway and drove past the crooked tower and decrepit motel rooms where, as a boy, he used to hide out, he felt strangely faint; then he realized he wasn’t letting himself breathe.

Idiot.

Amy’s house was at the top of the driveway, perhaps twenty yards beyond the low-slung buildings of motel rooms. Rainier and McLellan’s cruiser was parked in front of it, and the front door of the house stood open. Every light in the house was on, making it look too bright and all wrong somehow—like something you weren’t supposed to stare directly at, something dangerous, like an eclipse.

He’d been here just a week ago. Amy had called him at the station, out of the blue, saying she really needed someone to talk to, and would he come? He was taken aback; other than saying a quick, impersonal hello when they ran into each other around town, they hadn’t talked, really talked, since high school.

“I can come on my lunch break,” he’d answered without hesitation.