Ethan
he remembers climbing the old wooden stairs on his way to the house’s second floor.
He remembers this long hall where he walks in a daze, the boards creaking beneath him.
He recalls this single, unlocked door. He recalls this room, dead center of the house: a long room with one window, no furniture, something waiting against the far wall, something tall and square and shrouded by a black sheet.
He remembers voices whispering from behind the sheet. He remembers
It was Kyla who stared instead.
Three objects rested inside on the window’s sill. One was a simple leather pouch with a jute drawstring. The other was a black circle of plastic with the word Nikon printed on it: the lens cap of Sarah’s camera.
The third was a folded piece of paper. A letter, written in a man’s hand.
Sarah,
Don’t try to steer the wind. The ceremony is drawing them together all on its own. It wants to be repaired. You’ll know when it’s time to check into the motel. There won’t be any mistaking it. And when it’s time to check in, here’s what you must do.
I am so sorry.
The instructions that followed were simple, clear-cut. They read less like an occult rite and more like the repair guide for a foreign engine. Ethan found himself nodding along. Understanding.
Remember, Sarah: suicide will not work.
The substance of my father’s mirror is like no other material on our planet.
Which makes sense: he always said it was glazed with a little piece of Te’lo’hi itself, back when the creature first fell to the earth.
A fragment of the mirror can break away easily, and even though it seems to be metal, Dad swore the material can burn like wood.
The bottom of the note was a final line:
And if anything goes wrong, if you need protection from the ceremony’s power, he said it can be drunk like water, whatever that means.
The letter was signed,
The Chief
Ethan folded up the letter. He crossed the room and stared at what had been concealed beneath the black sheet.
It was a tall, rectangular mirror glazed with a quicksilver substance, like chrome.
The silver should be reflective, but when Ethan neared the mirror, he didn’t see Kyla in its surface. He didn’t see the room around them.
Instead, Ethan saw himself and Hunter leaving Ellersby. He saw the fire starting in the shop. He saw them checking into this motel. He saw Hunter coated in blood. He saw himself screaming.
He saw himself and Hunter lying on the bed of their room: Hunter naked, fresh from the shower, curled up against the small of Ethan’s back.
He heard Hunter whisper, “Can I hold you for a minute? Just like this?”
More images came, too fast to make sense of them, but it was enough. With a strange, wet, tearing sensation—like a baby tooth coming free—Ethan felt the block in his mind loosen and release. The pain in his head disappeared.
He remembered last night.
Ethan remembered what Jack Allen had told him about Hunter. He killed families, Mister Cross. It was a specialty for Hunter. He remembered headaches, the smell of menthols, pain. He remembered everything.
Ethan understood what had happened to Sarah Powers.
Kyla was still staring at the mirror. In a dazed voice, she said, “You’re not seeing the same things I’m seeing, are you?”
“I doubt it.”
“It’s beautiful. And awful. And sad.”
“It’s life.”
Ethan came nearer to the mirror. He held the Zippo into the crack between the mirror’s back and the wall it leaned against. The lighter finally sputtered, died, but not before Ethan found words carved there in a language he didn’t know.
He’d seen those characters before, though: words like this were all over the little room that had been locked away in the back of the motel’s office.
“This mirror is what The Chief’s father brought with him to the motel. It has the instructions to the ceremony. He probably needed the twins’ father to help him decode the language.”
Kyla only nodded. She couldn’t take her eyes from the mirror’s surface.
Ethan saw several places around the mirror’s edge where shards of the strange silver substance had been broken away. Two more pieces came away easily in his hand. He handed one to Kyla. She pulled her eyes away from the mirror with an obvious effort.
“What is this?”
“I think it’s the secret to fixing everything. I think it will let us remember everything when we wake up tomorrow.”
“Remember tonight, you mean?”
“Yeah. Like the twins can. We won’t have long to stop the ceremony, but maybe this will give us a chance.”
All this time, that plaintive moaning from the mountain had gone on and on. Kyla tilted her head toward it now. “Are you sure that’s what we want? To let that break loose?”
“It doesn’t sound dangerous to me.” Ethan frowned. “It almost sounds sad.”
“Sad people do terrible things.”
Ethan studied the shard of silver in his hand. He let out a long breath.
“I spent my whole life trapped in a shithole. I’m not going to spend eternity stuck in another.”
He carried the silver fragment in one hand and the stone egg in the other. Back out of the room. Back down the stairs.
Kyla followed him, clearly reluctant, out into the night. “Where are you going?”
He didn’t answer her right away. The Guardians still stood where they’d left them, stationed in two parallel rows, but their heads had lifted, turned, to stare at the mountain.
Above the house, at the mountain’s peak, a silver light was beginning to shine.
A moan came, and the light trembled. The whole earth seemed to shake with it.
Ethan looked at his watch. 3:47.
Around the side of the old house, he found a large spigot set into the ground.
Near the spigot was a heavy metal lid, almost like a manhole cover, and beneath the lid was a hole just wide enough a slim person could slip inside.
In the starlight, he saw a metal tank resting beneath the hole.
A massive crack had split the tank’s bottom half. Ruined it, no doubt.
“Some kind of septic system?” Kyla said.
“There’s probably one of those around here too.
” Ethan rose, brushed his hands on his jeans, started back for the motel.
“But no. Mom told me stories about when she used to live out this way. Every house had a tank like this. A big truck came once a week and filled it up with fresh water. She had a neighbor who drowned in one. They stopped making tanks like this—with wide lids like this—ages ago.”
“Didn’t Tabitha mention something about how her father and The Chief—the older Chief—had to install a new water tank when they bought the motel?”
Ethan smiled. “They did indeed.”
A tremor started in the earth, violent enough Ethan and Kyla had to pick their way carefully back to the motel. He shouted over the noise, “Did your headache go away when you remembered everything?”
Kyla touched her forehead. “Yes, actually. I don’t think I really noticed it in the office, but I know when I woke up the pain was totally gone. Why?”
Ethan nodded to himself, though it broke his heart. “Because my memories came back, and I’m clear as a bell.”
By the time they reached the motel, the noise from the mountain and the shaking in the earth were so loud Ethan had to shout into Kyla’s ear. “Look for a hatch in the ground. It’ll probably be buried in dirt after all this wind.”
The motel had burned down to cinders. Behind the place the cafe had stood, they found a blasted chunk of metal: all that remained of the generator. In the ruins of the kitchen, they saw several blackened chunks of a man. The remains of Thomas, no doubt, after he blew it all to pieces.
And there, maybe a yard from the kitchen’s back door, Kyla kicked away a patch of dirt to reveal a metal hatch with a recessed handle set into the ground. She gave the hatch a pull. It lifted easily.
Beneath the hatch was another water tank, but it wasn’t empty. A bedraggled face stared up at them from deep in the hole.
It was Penelope Holiday.
The girl was wrapped in blankets, seated on a stack of cushions in a thin puddle of water. A blocky black shape—Sarah’s satellite phone, if Ethan had to guess—was at her side, along with a few empty bags of chips and a candy bar. The girl had clearly come prepared to ride out the night.
But she wasn’t alone.
Another girl, much younger than Penelope, was crouched behind her.
The younger girl was strange, somehow both here and not: her skin and hair were vaporous and pale, her whole body cast with a soft silver pallor.
After everything that had happened, Ethan wasn’t particularly surprised to realize he was looking at a spirit.
A shade. What was Penelope’s sister’s name? Her dead sister?
Adeline.
“NO!” the younger girl screamed, loud enough to be heard over the mountain. “We’ve been safe! We’ve been safe here every night. Now he’ll know where to find us. HE’LL KNOW!”
Ethan felt an icy tingle along the back of his neck. It climbed into his scalp.
Jack Allen’s voice whispered in his ear.
“Thank you, Mister Cross. I’ve wondered for ages where these girls have been hiding.”
Glancing after the voice, he saw a familiar face looming near his ear. Blank eyes. Sharp cheeks. A tight, tight smile. It was Jack Allen, thin and silver and vaporous as the shade of the girl in the water tank.
The man smiled wider. His eyes were inches from Ethan’s own.
“What?” the man said. “Did you think I could ever really die?”
The little girl in the water tank was still screaming at Ethan. “WHY ARE YOU RUINING IT? WHY ARE YOU RUINING IT?”
Ethan held Jack Allen’s gaze. “Why are you doing this? Why do you want to kill us?”
Jack Allen started to laugh. His mouth this close, Ethan could smell the staleness on him: time, rot, a man who’d lingered too long in the dark.
Jack Allen said, “Don’t be afraid, Mister Cross. It’s for a good cause. I will build a grand world atop these corpses. I will create a future unbound by consequence and fear.”
A deafening BOOM came from the mountain, followed by a shock wave that knocked Ethan and Kyla to their knees.
Jack Allen whispered in his ear, “See you tomorrow, Mister Cross.”
The scrap of silver material Ethan had taken from the house dropped from his hand. It shivered across the quaking dirt, dancing right at the edge of the water tank’s hole.
It started to fall.
Ethan snatched it from the air.
Kyla still had hold of her own silver fragment. “What are we supposed to do?”
Ethan glanced over his shoulder: Jack Allen had dissipated, and judging by the way the ground was shaking, they had more immediate problems. Ethan thought back to Tabitha’s story in the cafe.
He thought of the note The Chief had written to Sarah Powers.
Before he could talk himself out of it, Ethan opened his mouth and dropped the shard of silver metal on his tongue.
Sure enough, it melted like water. Warm, tingling water.
Ethan swallowed.
Kyla watched him, nodded, said, “Bottoms up.”
She dropped the silver shard into her mouth. Her eyes opened wide—surprise, no doubt, as it dissolved—and she swallowed.
“Do you feel any different?” she shouted.
“I don’t know.”
No time for more questions. A new sound came, a great crash of breaking stone. It was the last sound the planet would ever know.
Ethan took Kyla’s hand. In the final silence—in this new, absolute hush—a great silver explosion tore free from the crown of the mountain, followed by a shock wave that flattened them to the earth.
There was a blast of silver light, hot and pure, and it blinded them a moment before the heat vaporized everything in its wake. The last thing Ethan thought was:
How many people get to see the end of the