12:01 a.m.
He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but it hadn’t been that. He told himself he should be horrified by what Kyla had just done, that he should try to disarm her, that the girl had just murdered some poor stranger wandering in from the cold—but he didn’t.
The pain in Ethan’s head didn’t dissipate. He couldn’t shake an awful feeling, like he was forgetting the most important thing of his life.
But he recalled the way this man in the gabardine suit, Jack Allen, had spoken to him in the diner in the little town of Turner earlier that afternoon. Ethan remembered the fear he’d felt in his presence, the dread, the way he’d been unable to move once the gabardine man had trained his eyes on Ethan.
Had the man introduced himself as Jack Allen at the diner? Ethan couldn’t recall, but he’d given up wondering how he knew these people’s names.
Fernanda didn’t seem half so sanguine. A hand to her mouth, nausea gurgling her voice, she said, “What have you done?”
Ryan took a step forward to look at the corpse, picking his way over the blood and bits of bone. Of all things, he studied the pattern of the suit’s cloth. “Is that called gabardine?”
Ethan blinked. “I think so. Why?”
Ryan chewed his cheek. He looked, for a moment, very afraid. “How did he get past those things outside? I had a feeling it would be a bad idea to head into the dark.”
“It would be,” Kyla said. She still had the shotgun trained on the twins. They looked petrified beyond words, the both of them. Glancing over her shoulder, Kyla said to Ethan, “Do you believe me yet? That we’ve done all of this before?”
Ethan studied Kyla. He didn’t see madness in her eyes, didn’t see desperation or panic or delusion in the muscles of her hands, the pulse of her veins, the movements around her mouth. When Ethan looked at Kyla, he saw only a woman with a purpose who desperately needed him to believe her. Her claim wasn’t exactly easy to swallow, but he wasn’t stupid. Kyla had somehow known that Ethan’s name wasn’t even Ethan. She’d also known that Hunter and Ryan Phan had apparently shared a cell in Huntsville prison, something that certainly explained why a loner like Hunter would leave their room to go smoke with a stranger (even if it raised plenty of other unsettling questions).
If Kyla was telling the truth—if they had done this a million times before—could it possibly explain these double exposures Ethan had been feeling all night, the persistent sensation of déjà vu? Could they be his mind’s way of struggling to record the same memory in the same place?
Could they be lost memories somehow breaking through?
Ethan wasn’t sure, but he didn’t need to know everything at once. He said, “What should we do?”
Kyla said, “Someone check Jack Allen’s pockets. You’ll find a key. It unlocks the door in the back of the office—”
The thing behind that walnut door, quiet these last few moments, startingSHRIEKINGagain, clawing at the wood.
“—But you might want to take my word on that,” Kyla said.
The gabardine pattern of Jack Allen’s suit was rapidly melting into a single sheet of crimson. Ryan didn’t seem especially bothered by the blood. From the pocket of Jack Allen’s pants, he did indeed find a simple brass key.
And from the inner pocket of the suit’s jacket, Ryan found a plain leather wallet. He flipped it open, frowned at something inside, flipped it closed. Digging deeper into the pocket, he removed a small, grooved stone, the size and shape of an egg.
The sight of the stone stirred a memory in Ethan. Ever since stepping into the office a few minutes ago, he’d avoided looking anywhere near the fireplace. At the lake of blood that had spread there. At Hunter’s corpse, stretched like an oblong island in the lake’s heart.
He looked now, though. And from the lake, he plucked anotherstone egg from the place Kyla had dropped it earlier this evening. Blood had congealed in the stone’s grooves. A familiar weight seemed to anchor the egg in Ethan’s fingers.
Ethan stepped closer to Jack Allen’s corpse and wiped the blood on a clean patch of gabardine. He looked at the mess that remained of the man’s head. He sniffed the air. That stench of rottenness—stale air, decay—still seeped, thick as engine oil, from the crumpled corpse. It didn’t smell like death, like blood: Ethan had smelled that already, back home in Ellersby.
No. This stench was something else entirely. This stench waswrong.
Whatever was going on here, Kyla had been right to kill the man.
“There is another stone like that.” Fernanda plucked a third grooved rock from the fire’s mantel. She weighed it in her hand. “It is heavier than it looks.”
“Gives me the creeps, if I’m being honest with you,” Ryan said, and passed the stone he’d taken from Jack Allen’s pocket to Kyla.
Ethan didn’t feel so bothered by it. He slipped the egg in his hand into the pocket of his jeans. It felt familiar there, somehow. Comfortable.Right.
Kyla lowered the shotgun to look at the egg. She said to the twins, “What are these rocks for? And why did Jack Allen unlock that door last night?”
The twins still stared at her, struck dumb. Ethan thought,This has never happened to them before.
“Answer me,” Kyla dropped the egg in her hand into the pocket of her jacket. She raised the shotgun again. “I said,Answer me.”
