Chapter The Midnight Knock - Ethan
THE MIDNIGHT KNOCK ETHAN
Headlights washed through the office’s windows.
In the glow, Ethan saw the scene around him with a startling new clarity.
Kyla and Fernanda stood near the dead fire.
Hunter was beside Ethan, his hand still clasped around Ethan’s arm.
Through the windows near the fireplace, a sea of yellow eyes watched them from the dark.
Thomas and Tabitha stared at the front door: him looking smug, her resigned to whatever was coming.
The car outside, this new arrival, pulled to a slow stop. The engine cut out. The headlights went dark.
A metal door whined open.
At the edge of his vision, Ethan saw Kyla take an instinctive step away from the noise. Her shoulder brushed the mantel above the fire and sent something falling to the floor. It landed with a loud crack: a warning shot.
Ethan’s eyes followed Kyla’s to the floor to see what could make such a noise. It was one of the grooved stone eggs.
A foot stepped onto the gravel outside. Another joined it.
The metal door swung closed. Those feet crunched across the parking lot, thumped up the steps of the porch, creaked across the wooden boards.
They came to a stop on the other side of the office’s door.
A tall shadow stood on the other side of the frosted windows. For a moment, it didn’t move.
A long, long silence stretched.
And then, there was a knock
Knock
Knock.
No one moved to answer the door. Ethan didn’t think any of them would dare.
But after a polite pause, the door opened regardless, and a man stepped inside.
A tall, slim man dressed in a pale 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, cool eyes. A faint hook of a smile that looked like it would try to sell you something at the slightest provocation. The index finger of the man’s right hand ended at the second knuckle. A mass of scar tissue was seared to the joint.
The new arrival spoke with a soft twang. An eerie formality.
“Evening, folks,” the man said. “Room for one more?”
It was the man from the diner in Turner. The man who’d told Ethan the story of the Dust Road and the Brake Inn Motel. The man who’d warned him that sometimes the road gets hungry.
The man Ethan had seen in the gloaming of the mercury lamps an hour ago, waving to him from the edge of the parking lot.
He wasn’t a ghost. He wasn’t a hallucination.
When the man stepped into the office, his shoes made the floorboards creak.
He threw a shadow from the lamp on the desk.
It made no sense how the man could be here—if nothing else, how had he made it safely past the horde of creatures outside?
—but there was no denying that he was here. In the flesh.
Smiling so tight his teeth ground against each other like stones.
The man made his way across the room. He stepped over Ryan Phan’s corpse, hardly blinking at the carnage. He gave Ethan a nod, pure Texas courtesy. “Good seeing you again, Mister Cross.”
In his wake, the gabardine man left a strange odor, a blend of stale cologne and staleness itself, like he’d spent years gathering dust in an unused room.
The gabardine man rested his hat on the front desk, pulled over the motel’s leather-bound register. He plucked up the thick fountain pen that rested on a little tray beside it. Unscrewed the cap. Balanced the pen’s weight in his hand. Even with his mangled finger he seemed able to write just fine.
The gabardine man smiled to the twins. “Been an age since they’ve all been together in one place like this.”
That awful silence persisted, broken only by the scritch-scratch of the fountain pen across the register’s paper.
Just as he had in the diner in Turner, Ethan felt himself slackening in the gabardine man’s aura, almost mesmerized, as if something about the man was simply so strange, Ethan’s mind couldn’t function in his presence.
What was the name the man had given himself at the diner?
What was his name?
Hunter didn’t seem so afflicted. He gave Ethan’s arm a hard jerk, and Ethan stumbled backward, toward the door.
Without looking back, the gabardine man said, “Leaving so soon, Mister Cross?”
The words rooted Ethan to the spot. He barely found it in himself to say, “Who are you?”
“The wiser question would be to ask, ‘Who is he?’ ” The gabardine man turned to point the sharp golden nib of the fountain pen at Hunter.
“Your tarnished warrior. The bruiser with the beautiful eyes. This strange man you’ve lashed your fortunes to.
I warned you about him, didn’t I, back in the diner?
Told you he had a railroad spike where his heart ought to be. ”
Ethan felt panic coursing through Hunter’s palm. Who would have thought such a thing was possible?
The gabardine man smiled. “Has your man told you his old nickname? They used to call him ‘The Hunter of Huntsville,’ back in the penitentiary. He had a savage reputation around those parts. It’s where he met poor Mister Ryan Phan here. The two men shared a cell together.”
Hunter gave Ethan another pull.
“You knew him?” Ethan jerked his arm free. He looked from the corpse on the floor to Hunter and back again. “You were in Huntsville?”
“The maximum-security unit, even,” the gabardine man went on. “Everyone wondered, of course, how Hunter wasn’t on death row, considering the way your man used to make a living.”
Ethan only said again, “Huntsville?”
Hunter stared back.
“He killed families, Mister Cross,” the gabardine man said.
“Whole households. Mothers, fathers, children, even the pets. It was a specialty for Hunter, and a very lucrative one at that. If you were a criminal who wanted to wipe out the competition in the most efficient way possible, you called this fellow right here. I even believe Franklin O’Shea had a cause to hire him, once or twice. Did Hunter really never tell you?”
Ethan wasn’t entirely stupid. He’d always suspected that a man as skilled at violence as Hunter—a man with a past he never discussed—had probably endured a few brushes with the law. You don’t deep-fry a person’s hand without a little practice at brutality.
But Ethan could have never imagined Hunter capable of what the gabardine man was describing.
Or maybe he could imagine it, and that was the worst part of all.
Mark my words. This man is going to get you into the sort of trouble you cain’t never get out of.
The gabardine man just kept talking with the same courteous twang.
“Of course, you have secrets of your own, don’t you, Mister Cross?
Your name isn’t even Ethan. You used to be named Carter, but after your brother’s suicide you took on his life to escape your own.
The clothes on your back are your brother’s.
The truck you drove here. Your wallet and the ID inside—all his. ”
Ethan turned to stare at the gabardine man. “How do you—”
He didn’t get the chance to finish. Hunter wrapped an arm around Ethan’s chest. The other slammed something heavy into the back of Ethan’s head.
The room swirled. The lamp went dark. Ethan was suddenly moving, though not of his own volition. From very far away, Kyla shouted, “Wait!”
And then he was out.