Might not be such a bad thing.
A sign appeared on the road up ahead:BRAKE INN MOTEL, NEXT RIGHT.
Ethan’s eyes followed the arrow painted at the bottom of the sign. A quarter mile away, at the foot of the black mountain, he saw the outline of a building: horseshoe shape, unlit neon sign, another taller building in the distance behind it.
Nine empty rooms. Twelve cold beds.
“Hunter?” Ethan said.
“Yes?”
“What if the motel’s abandoned?”
Hunter glanced back, puzzled by the question. “Then we kick down a door and make you a fire.”
A gravel drive split off from the main road up ahead, but the boys didn’t bother walking that far. They crossed the open desert at a diagonal, faces screwed up against the wind pouring down the mountain. The sun had neared the mountain’s peak—trembling at the tip, threatening to slip down the other side—and the cold world had somehow become colder. By the time they arrived at a gravel parking lot, Ethan was so desperate for warmth he would have gladly walked through the gates of hell.
The Brake Inn Motel didn’t look nearly so grand.
Like he’d seen earlier, the main body of the motel was a squat horseshoe: long middle section, two arms stretching toward the road and framing this parking lot. A raised porch with a metal overhang ran around the motel, its roof studded every few yards with heavy-duty mercury bulbs, all of them currently dark.
The motel’s walls were sided with dark wooden shingles. The doors were painted a bright turquoise, the same color as the chevroned metal bars welded over the windows of each room. All of it looked clean. Practically new. As they drew nearer, Ethan could see that athird, shorter arm extended backward on the left-hand side of the motel, so that the building looked more like an incompleteH. This shorter arm appeared to hold some sort of dormant restaurant, its lights all dead.
Ethan counted doors. The Brake Inn Motel had nine rooms.
And twelve cold—
Twenty yards behind the motel—or maybe it was thirty, the distance was strangely difficult to gauge—an old two-story house stood right at the foot of the mountain. In contrast to the bright colors and clean lines of the motel, the house seemed like a product of another age, if not another part of the world altogether. Ethan didn’t know the first thing about architecture, but he was pretty sure all of the house’s peaked roofs and gables and fussy trimmings probably meant it was a Victorian. The place must have once been lavish; it had a front porch so wide you could have fit half of Ethan’s old shop inside, but why would anyone have built something so grand in the middle of absolute nowhere?
After a few steps, Ethan realized something stranger: he couldn’t seem to take his eyes from the house, and yet the longer he looked at it, the more anxious he began to feel. Something wasoffabout the old house behind the motel. It seemed to have too many windows, too many doors. Its angles all felt slightly out of true, as if it hadn’t been built completely square. Even the building’s dimensions seemed to shift and adjust themselves with every step Ethan took. The porch suddenly looked smaller than it had a moment before, yet the front wall looked somehow wider. He noticed a window in the middle of the house’s second floor that he would swear hadn’t been there a moment ago. Ethan blinked, half expecting the window to be gone when he opened his eyes again.
The window was still there. Ethan saw a small glint of light behind the glass, maybe the reflection off a mirror, but the longer he stared, the less certain he became that he’d seen anything at all.
“Look,” Hunter said, finally drawing Ethan’s attention free from the house. “Someone beat us to that fire.”
A small chimney jutted from the end of the motel’s left-hand arm, rising up from a room that was clearly the office. A trail of smoke curled away into the fading sky. Ethan smelled burning wood. Herealized that the man in the gabardine suit back in Turner must have just been toying with him—the story the man had told about an abandoned motel and its mysterious disappearances had just been something to pass the time, a little petty torture—but Ethan couldn’t bring himself to feel entirely relieved.
Hunter wasn’t happy either. After a few steps across the gravel parking lot, he slowed down, stopped. “The cars. Look.”
There were two cars already parked here. One was a bright red Range Rover parked outside room 4. The other was a white sedan parked at the motel’s sole gas pump.
A Chevy Malibu.
“That car passed us an hour ago,” Hunter said. “Those girls were in a hell of a rush. Why are they still here?”
The boys took two more cautious steps across the parking lot, and now Ethan could get a clearer view of the gas pump next to the Malibu. He stopped. He stared.
The pump was an ancient model, a relic. Its body was a metal rectangle with a brilliant aquamarine paint job and a glass dome on top of the rectangle, the wordGULFpainted on the side in bold white letters. The pump had no credit card slot, not even a meter. The wordsCONTAINS LEADwere printed clearly near its handle.
“Who still sells leaded gas?” Hunter said. “How old do you think this pump is?”
Ethan knew the answer to that second question, though it still didn’t make much sense. Why would something this out-of-date be standing outside a motel that looked so new?
He swallowed. “A gas pump like this—it’s from the fifties.”
KYLA
She hadn’t seen the white boys arrive. If she had, she wouldn’t have left her room, more out of shame than anything. Ever since she and Fernanda had left the two men out in the cold on the side of the road, Kyla had seen the eyes of the older boy haunting her everywhere she looked. Back in the car, she’d seen the way that tall boy was clearly into some mess that went way over his head. She’d seen the way he was acting tough, callous, so he wouldn’t be scared.
