The Silver Glare The Twins
The end of the day is just the beginning.
That was the only thing their father had taught them about running a motel.
Would he have taught them more if he’d known it would turn out like this?
Taught them more about this place? More about tonight?
In the end, a single letter was all he left them. Nothing matters more than this.
This: Thomas and Tabitha at the empty edge of the west Texas desert, marooned in the shadow of a mountain no one ever hiked, halfway down a road no one ever traveled.
Thomas and Tabitha ran a nine-room establishment complete with gas pump, cafe, and bar.
A motel with a ludicrous name. A legend from another age.
Thomas and Tabitha were the twin stewards of a place they’d never asked for and could never leave.
Remember: death sustains it.
They split their duties around the motel.
Tabitha cleaned the floors and changed the linens.
Thomas handled the common areas, the bathrooms, scrubbed the blood in the bathtub left over from last night.
Every afternoon, the same routine. The motel returned to perfect condition.
You would think, being this far from civilization, that they would never receive enough business to justify all this work.
You would be wrong. The night’s guests were already on their way.
The day things finally changed, Tabitha was in room 5.
She was standing next to the room’s second bed, stuffing pillows into fresh cases, when she looked out the front window.
The old gas pump in the parking lot. The tarnished gold haze of the desert scrub.
A translucent sheet of blue sky, its horizon so infinitely far it felt like they’d been set adrift in a great uncharted sea.
A sudden flare of light passed over that pale sky. The light was strange and quick and brilliant, like the glare off a tilting mirror. The light was everywhere; it was almost blinding—and then it was gone.
Tabitha never did get used to that light.
There was a soft tick, and the clock on the room’s nightstand flipped over from 3:59 to 4:00.
It was a familiar sound, so common she’d almost forgotten to hear it.
With long practice, she tossed the pillows onto the bed, where they landed with a soft thwump at precisely the right angle to look dense and inviting. Her rag whispered along the headboard.
And then a noise came that she wasn’t used to. A noise that neither of the twins had ever heard before.
There was a faint, high tink from the bathroom, like the sound of a tooth chipping the rim of a shot glass.
A few quick steps and Tabitha stood in the bathroom doorway.
Thomas was frozen over the bathtub, blood dripping from the sponge in his hand, face turned to stare over his shoulder. He was just as shocked as her.
A fine crack had appeared in the bathroom’s mirror. It ran from the top edge of the mirror’s frame to the bottom, bending with a subtle arc on the way down.
Somewhere outside, a door slammed shut. Somewhere down the road, the night’s guests were fast approaching.
Here in the bathroom of room 5, Tabitha and Thomas stared at the cracked mirror with a mounting horror.
“That… that…”
“That’s never happened before.”