The Twins
The end of the day is just the beginning.
It was one of the few things their father used to say about running this motel, back in the months when he and The Chief prepared for their grand reopening.
Not that the men had any intention of running the motel like an actual business.
Not that their father ever cared about the place.
Like so much else, their father never really explained what he was trying to say, almost like he didn’t trust his children to understand him.
Had their father known, even then, that Thomas really wasn’t cut out for this kind of thing? Tabitha had always had the keener mind; Father had never forgiven her for it.
All of these people had once had hopes, lives, futures. Just like Thomas and Tabitha themselves.
No more.
In 1955, their guests had stopped here because they’d run out of gas.
The gas pump outside had been empty by the time they’d arrived—The Chief had seen to that, but thankfully Father had left a few cans stockpiled in the twins’ room.
It had been enough for Thomas and Tabitha to load up the guests’ cars with their suitcases and bags and drive the vehicles into the desert, around the side of the mountain, out of view of the road.
Thomas and Tabitha walked back together, silent.
This was what they had done the first day. This was nothing Tabitha could change.
Thomas and Tabitha stripped the beds, cleaned the windows, scrubbed out the blood left behind in the bathtub of room 5.
But as Tabitha watched the events of the day play out, she thought also about last night, the most recent last night, the night in which Kyla Hewitt regained her memories and killed Jack Allen before he could begin his midnight rampage.
For all the good it did them. Not three hours later, when Tabitha had wrapped up her story, as Ryan Phan and Fernanda went to check on Stanley Holiday and Kyla and Ethan asked more questions, Tabitha had smelled danger.
She’d stepped into the cafe’s kitchen and discovered Thomas standing in a rainbow haze, the stoves all pouring gas, a book of matches in his hand.
I have to stop you, Thomas said, tears in his eyes. He says that if I don’t stop you, everything will break.
Tabitha remembered the spark as Thomas struck the match. The next thing she knew, she was here, waking up again, just like always. She was observing her own memories like a woman watching a film.
She’d never had patience for the movies. Her mind always wandered. Now, for instance, as Tabitha watched herself fix the linens on room 5’s bed, she wondered if Jack Allen Cross was even more dangerous than she’d once thought.
She wondered if maybe, after these endless nights of death and pain, her brother might have finally lost his mind.
And then, at four o’clock, the silver glare passed over the sky, and once again the world was in motion.
There was so much Tabitha still didn’t understand about their father’s ceremony, but she knew that the silver light signaled the moment when a new loop properly began.
Without deliberate intervention, things would repeat as they always did—an object in motion, after all, will remain in motion—but after the silver glare faded from the sky, anything was possible, at least theoretically. At least for the next twelve hours.
Tabitha never did get used to that thought.
Here in room 5, she tossed pillows onto a bed, where they landed at just the right angle to look dense and inviting. She heard a familiar tink of glass: that crack, the one that changed everything, spreading again over the bathroom’s mirror.
What she did not hear was the steady scrubbing of Thomas’s brush on the porcelain of the bathtub.
Instead, Tabitha heard only silence in the bathroom. The hairs rose on the back of her neck. The first twitches of anxiety spread in her belly. That silence was new. That silence might be bad.
Better safe than sorry, she thought. Tabitha eased a hand behind the nightstand. She unplugged the cord of the room’s heavy brass lamp, just in case.
The air shifted behind her, and Tabitha knew she’d been right to be afraid.
Tabitha wrapped both hands around the lamp, gripping it like a cudgel, and began to turn, but she was too late.
Before she could even get her momentum going, something wrapped itself around her neck and jerked Tabitha backward, away from the nightstand.
The lamp slipped through her hands, landing hard on her foot, but she didn’t feel the pain.
She was too busy clawing at her throat. She tried to scream but found she lacked the air.
For his part, Thomas was trying not to cry.
In his fists he held the two ends of a tightly wound towel.
It served as a decent garrote, just as Jack Allen had promised him it would.
Tabitha was not the only one who’d taken stock of last night’s events as the twins had watched the earlier, immutable part of their day play out.
And when the silver glare set the world into motion again, she was not the only one who’d known that something drastic might need to happen.
The only difference? Thomas wasn’t entirely alone.
“It’s fine, son. It’s fine.” Jack Allen’s whisper was soothing in his ear, paternal. “She’s not really dying, you know. The two of you will start over again together tomorrow, right as rain.”
Tabitha fought. Thomas wept.
“You’re doing the right thing, son,” Jack Allen said. “You’re saving the world.”
At long last—much, much longer than Thomas would have thought possible—Tabitha finally stopped struggling. Her face had turned blue. Her eyes bulged hideously from their sockets. Thomas eased her to the floor, his chest heaving, and pressed a finger to his sister’s throat. He found no pulse.
“It’s fine, son,” Jack Allen whispered again. “It’s fine. You’ll see her again tomorrow. She just needs to calm down a little.”
There was a knock at the adjoining door that connected this room to room 4. Sarah Powers said, “Is everything okay?”
Thomas caught his breath. He forced himself to smile. “Just dropped a lamp. Nothing to worry about.”
There was a pause, their cousin clearly not entirely convinced, but in the end, she said simply, “I’m going to the house out back. I’ll see y’all when it’s time.”
“Good luck over there.”
Thomas heard steps across the back porch. The faint whisper as Sarah’s boots crossed the dirt.
He rose. He replaced the lamp his sister had dropped.
Plugged it back in. Tried to smooth a dent the fall had made in the lampshade and gave up.
He hooked his hands under Tabitha’s shoulders and started dragging her toward the front door.
He’d get her into the supply closet. She’d be fine there for the night.
She’s not really dead, Thomas told himself. She’s not really dead.
There wasn’t time for more thinking. The guests would be here any minute, and Jack Allen had so many instructions.