The Twins
Moments before the girls in the Malibu arrived, Tabitha stepped out from behind the desk.
Thomas paled. “What are you doing?”
Tabitha heard the creak of Thomas’s step on the boards behind her. He called her name. She didn’t stop.
He caught up with her in the bathroom, just in time to see Tabitha bundle up the stack of towels Thomas had left on the vanity when they’d prepared the motel for another night’s work. He said again, “What are you doing?”
“Repeating what we did yesterday.”
“Yesterday was a mistake.”
“But the mirror cracked again today.”
“It was a fluke. It wasn’t like the first night. Put them back.”
“Maybe the first night was the real mistake.”
The twins studied the mirror of room 5’s bathroom.
Again, today, a crack had spread down the glass a moment after the clock struck four.
It was identical to the crack from yesterday, though perhaps that wasn’t quite true.
This crack might have been a hair wider.
It was hard to say. Their memory wasn’t what it used to be.
The twins were the only ones who remembered last night.
Every night. They’d long ago acknowledged that the human mind wasn’t designed to function under these conditions.
How was a person supposed to remember a hundred identical nights?
(Was it even a hundred? Could it be more?) All of those memories melted together, each lodged in the same place inside the brain.
They were like layers of sediment over an archaeological record, slowly crushing themselves into dust.
Thomas sometimes wondered how many more nights of this their brains could handle.
Tabitha sometimes wondered if they’d already gone too far.
Her brother reached for the towels in her hands. “You’ll ruin everything. We have our instructions.”
“I don’t care.”
“You read what Father wrote.”
“You don’t even know what it means.”
“ ‘Death sustains it.’ That seems pretty unambiguous.”
“You never were good with primary texts.”
She pushed past him. Actually pushed him, hard, and carried the towels to the room’s front door.
Tabitha didn’t have time for doubt. When she’d awoken in her bed this morning, alive and unbutchered despite the events of last night, she’d felt a shift in the air, a fragility.
Everything in the motel felt off today. Hollow.
Like it might crumble with one good kick.
Something had changed last night. Things were finally starting to shift.
Her brother, she knew, felt the same way. He wasn’t half as excited about this change as she was, but then they’d never agreed on the particulars of what they were supposed to be doing here.
Tabitha carried the towels out of room 5.
She wasn’t entirely certain how, but when the twins forgot to leave towels in room 5’s bathroom yesterday—when the crack in the mirror had distracted them from their usual routine—last night had been different.
The guests had done something for the first time in ages.
They hadn’t hunkered down in their rooms. They hadn’t all been slaughtered the instant the lights died.
Instead, they’d tried to understand Sarah’s death. They’d formed a team.
And not a minute too soon, as far as Tabitha was concerned.
Whatever Thomas might want to believe, she was under no illusions.
Things were breaking down. The generator seemed to be getting weaker and weaker by the night.
The Guardians of the mountain were growing more raucous.
She sometimes thought they might be afraid.
Maybe the ceremony would hold for another hundred nights.
Maybe even a thousand. But eventually things would crack.
The seal would loosen. Whatever their father and the old Chief had locked away, it would be free again, and Tabitha had her doubts about whether another seal could be put in place in time to keep it contained.
So why not give the guests the chance to work together? To answer some questions of their own?
As Tabitha opened the door to the supply room that waited under the porch’s covered walkway, she caught a glint of light from the old house that stood behind the motel. She looked up just in time to see Sarah Powers fiddling with her camera in the window of a room upstairs.
Tabitha had many questions about Sarah Powers, a cousin who had somehow been born decades after the twins, but was almost fifteen years their senior.
Thomas caught up with Tabitha in the supply room. He grabbed her by the arm, tried to pull her backward, as if he could rewind time and return these stupid towels to the precise spot he’d left them.
But then he heard a sound behind him. He went stiff.
Tabitha smiled. She’d timed this perfectly.
The rumble of the Malibu’s motor reached them from up the road.
Tabitha dropped the towels to the floor of the supply room and pulled her arm free of her brother’s grip.
He had nothing more to fear from her. This was the only thing she would do to interfere with the evening’s proceedings.
She would let the guests arrive in their due time: Kyla and Fernanda, Ethan and Hunter, Stanley and Penelope.
The furtive Ryan Phan, so easily forgotten.
Soon, Tabitha would help her brother slash Stanley’s tires.
Stan Holiday was the only guest who had stopped here voluntarily and parked within range of the lights, meaning he was the only person at the motel with gas in his tank and easy access to his vehicle.
He was the only person the twins had feared, on the first night, might leave before the ceremony could begin.
The twins would dispose of the knife beneath the front porch.
They would switch on the motel’s sign in the moments after Hunter and Ryan, concealed against the wall facing the road, lit up a pair of menthol cigarettes.
Things could proceed however they wanted after that. An experiment, like every other night. Tabitha had simply adjusted a few control parameters.
She pushed back her hair. She smiled at her brother. She said, “Let’s go greet our guests.”