The generator kicked back to life, but it took a moment for the lamps outside to return to their full brightness. A dim twilight reigned around the motel, a gloaming of mercury vapor.
And then it cleared, the lamps brightened, if not quite back to their old strength. The generator was getting weaker. The lamps’ light didn’t extend as far as it had a moment ago.
The circle of light around the motel had shrunk.
In the office, Thomas shook his head. “Did you see that?”
“I was watching the desert.”
“Maybe a mercy.”
“You sound scared.” This was also new. She turned, surprised. “What happened?”
Thomas’s eyes were trained on the windows to either side of the office’s front door. Watching the parking lot. “He’ll come tonight.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I’m starting to think he never really leaves.”
ETHAN
A moment before the generator stalled, he hesitated outside the back door to room 3, the key in his hand, watching Hunter and Fernanda make their way around the far corner of the porch. Fernanda had really, really not wanted to split up—“Do they not screen horror movies in Dallas?” she’d asked Kyla. “You never, ever split up.”—but in the end, Kyla had persuaded her with some simple logic.
“We saw Ethan and Hunter heading to dinner five minutes before we heard Sarah talking with someone in her room.” Kyla had looked at Ethan. “Y’all stayed together that entire time, right?”
“Yes,” Ethan had said, which was the truth. Hunter hadn’t left his side since he’d returned from his smoke break, almost an hour before Sarah’s death. “You can ask Thomas. He was with us in the cafe from the minute we arrived.”
Kyla looked at Fernanda. “So you don’t have any reason to be afraid of going to search Stan’s room with Hunter. He couldn’t have killed Sarah. Neither of them could.”
Hunter had given Kyla a small smile at that. He looked almost abashed. For his part, Ethan could only think of the fry cook at the diner in Turner and the smell of flesh swimming in hot grease. Ethan wasn’t sure if anyone could ever be entirely safe from Hunter, but Kyla was correct about one thing: the man was one of the few people at the motel with a solid alibi.
Unlike others still here.
Hunter had said simply, “We meet back here, room four, at eleven thirty. No questions. Okay?”
Ethan had said, “Okay.”
Now, as Hunter and Fernanda stepped out of view, Ethan heard a strange sound rolling in from the desert. It wasn’t anotherSHRIEK, but a murmur. It sounded like a man was out there, talking to himself in the dark.
Kyla heard it too. “That almost sounds like Stanley.”
And then the generator stuttered, the lights flickered, and Ethan unlocked room 3 as fast as he could. “Get inside. Quick.”
Room 3 was laid out like all the others: a short back hallway, a bathroom to the right, the main room up ahead. The curtains on the room’s front window were open, giving Ethan an unobstructed view of the parking lot.
And there, in the moment’s half-light—in the eerie gloaming of mercury vapor as the lamps flicked back to full strength—Ethan saw a man standing at the parking lot’s far edge, watching him through the chevroned bars of the room’s window. The man stood near the motel’s neon sign with his hat in his hand, looking for all the world like he’d wandered in off the road after a long day of travel. Ethan couldn’t be certain, but in the weak half-light it almost looked like the man was wearing a suit. A gray gabardine suit. The kind no one ever wore anymore.
The man was staring at Ethan. Straight at Ethan. He raised a hand in greeting, and Ethan saw that there was something wrong with his index finger. It was too short. It ended at the second knuckle.
The man’s face broke out in a tight, tight smile.
Be seeing you, Mister Cross.
The lights came up fully. The man dissipated like smoke on a breeze—here one second, gone the next. Ethan stared and stared and saw nothing in the parking lot but the deep treads Stan Holiday’s tires had made as they went slewing toward the road.
And yet Ethan would swear he could still hear the sound of the gabardine man’s tight smile hanging in the air, the teeth grinding together like stones.
“Did you see that?”
