Chapter Ethan
ETHAN
The angles of the old house were all wrong.
It was the only way Ethan could describe it.
None of the doors hung completely square, none of the hallways ran entirely true.
The front room was bare of furniture or windows—there were no lamps, no lit fires, no starlight—and yet the air seemed to glow with its own faint silver illumination.
Ethan saw plain wood floors opening onto a hallway to the left and another to the right.
He chose a hallway at random. It was a long straight tunnel of plain wooden paneling.
It stretched on and on and on, far longer than the bounds of the house should have been able to contain, and yet when Ethan reached the end of the tunnel, he realized it must have curved back on itself without his noticing.
The hallway deposited Ethan right back where he’d started, in the bare front room.
What was this place?
Ethan tried the other hallway. This one had a corner every ten feet or so: left, right, right, left.
Once, twice, as he came around one of the hall’s endless corners, he caught sight, up ahead, of someone vanishing around the next.
It was a challenge to make out many details in the soft light, but Ethan thought he saw Hunter rounding one corner.
The next time he saw someone, they looked like Fernanda.
Once, Ethan saw someone who looked like himself.
And then the hallway deposited him again back where he’d started, in the bare front room, only now it wasn’t so bare. Where the other hallway had been, Ethan now found a solid wall. On the wall hung a large black-and-white photograph in a stark wooden frame.
It was a picture of the mountain. Beneath the photograph was a small brass plaque that read:
IT SLEEPS
The hall he’d just come from was gone, replaced by another wall with another photograph, but it took him longer to make out what he was seeing in this picture.
The image looked like it had been taken from a satellite somewhere at the edge of the solar system.
There were stars, and planets, and with a little patience Ethan could identify Neptune and Jupiter.
Where the Earth should be, however, Ethan saw a small blue orb exploding around a column of silver light. The light seemed to pierce the planet from one side to the other, like a stick through a ripe berry, and as he watched he saw the silver light in the photograph grow brighter. Brighter.
The light vanished, leaving behind nothing but a terrible void—darker than any black he had seen before—where the earth and the moon should be. The void expanded. It would consume the rest of the planets sooner than later.
Another plaque rested under the photograph. The plaque read:
IT WAKES
The air of the front room shifted. To his right, opposite the house’s main entrance, he now found a door set into the wall.
Ethan hadn’t seen that door when he’d stepped inside, and yet somehow he knew it had always been there, waiting for him.
The door was simple: varnished oak, brass hinges, a pattern of six even squares lathed into its surface.
It had a brass knob, but above the knob was a latch held shut by a massive silver padlock.
Ethan gave the lock a tug, gave the door a kick, but it was no good.
The latch was shut solid. The door would not open tonight.
When Ethan stepped away from the door, he found his final surprise. A plain wooden staircase was waiting for him, going up.
It sleeps.
It wakes.
Upstairs, Ethan found another plain hallway, and in this hallway, there was another door. A dull silver light glowed around the door’s frame. A distant rush of sound—like the whisper of a hundred voices—leaked through the air.
The upstairs door was unlocked.
Jack Allen found him eventually. When the man came at last into the upstairs room, Ethan didn’t try to run. He’d been sitting, for as long as he could remember, on the room’s bare floor, staring at what he’d found inside.
The hem of Jack Allen’s sleeve brushed the back of Ethan’s neck.
Ethan said, “How long have we been trapped here?”
Jack Allen stared, too, at what had been hidden beneath the sheet. Almost reverently, the man said, “I lost count around night fifty. And that was a long time ago.”
“And it’s the same every night? Over and over, we keep coming back to the motel?”
“More or less. You’ve never come here before.”
“That’s what Tabitha meant by ‘the others.’ She was talking about us. About the versions of us that died here on all those other nights.”
“I have no idea.” A rustle of fabric: a shrug. “Tonight’s been different. Normally Hunter breaks your neck when it’s obvious the Guardians of the mountain are going to get into your room. You never feel a thing. He’s a master of his art.”
It took a while for that to sink in.
“What about Sarah Powers?” Ethan said. “Does she die every time?”
“Of course. None of this would work if she didn’t. Everything proceeds from her death. Like a river from a wound in the earth.”
It sleeps.
It wakes.
They watched shapes and faces, time and space. They watched something that neither of them, not even Jack Allen, could quite comprehend.
Ethan finally found the shape of a possibility. “So if we keep Sarah from dying, we can stop it. Stop all of it.”
“You might want to be careful with that, son. You have no idea the powers at work here.” Jack Allen smiled: those teeth grinding together like stones.
“Just like you don’t understand the rewards that can be won.
I tell you, Mister Cross—I will be granted audience once more.
I will ascend to a purer form. I will make a purer world. ”
“You’re insane, aren’t you?”
“No. I am a totem of unbounded potential. I will drink of the source.”
Ethan swallowed. He had no idea what this could mean, but he doubted it was a good idea for a man this crazy to be granted any kind of power. “No. We’re going to stop you. We’re going to find a way.”
“You want to know the truth of it? When you wake up tomorrow, you won’t remember a thing.”
Jack Allen moved so fast, Ethan hardly felt the fingers in his hair, the knife move along his throat. Ethan felt a great warmth running down his chest.
“See you tomorrow, Mister Cross.”