The Night Sister

by Jennifer McMahon

“ ‘When Death comes knocking on your door

  you’ll think you’ve seen his face before.

  When he comes creeping up your stairs,

  you’ll know him from your dark nightmares.

  If you hold up a mirror, you shall see

  that he is you and you are he.’ ”

  Piper shivered. She remembered Grandma Charlotte reciting that same little rhyme to them years ago, not long before everything changed.

  Lou’s singsong voice sent chills through Piper. She wanted to beg her to stop, not to go any further. Lou closed her eyes tight, and began to rock slowly as she spoke.

  “First, she went into her bedroom, where Daddy was sleeping. She crept right in, quiet as a mouse. But he must have woke up, because they started arguing.”

  “Could you hear what they were saying?” Piper asked.

  “No, but there was a lot of noise, yelling and stuff breaking, and Mama screaming. Then: bang!”

  Piper jolted.

  “All I could think was that I had to hide. I jumped out of bed and stuffed the pillows under the quilt so she’d think I was in there, sleeping. I saw that once. In a movie.”

  Piper nodded. “Then what did you do?”

  “I opened the window that leads to the roof. Levi and I used to do it all the time. We’d go out there sometimes to watch the stars.”

  Piper nodded. She remembered going out that same window when she slept over at Amy’s—how they’d sit out on the roof and puff at cigarettes Amy had stolen from her grandma, take sips of the salty cooking sherry they’d found down in the kitchen. Amy would pretend she could name all the constellations, but Piper knew she was making it up. Amy’s sky held nightmarish images: a toad swallowing a little girl, the queen of the spiders, a hand wielding an ax.

  “Mama came back down the hall. I stood right by the window, listening. I heard Mama go into Levi’s room.”

  “ ‘Mama?’ Levi called. ‘What are you doing?’

  “ ‘Saving you.’

  “ ‘From what?’

  “ ‘Nightmares.’

  “Bang! Bang! Bang!”

  Piper leaned back, as if the shots had been fired into her own chest.

  “Then she came for me. I saw the light when she opened the door. I was right beside the window, crouched down low. She walked up to my bed, and without pulling back the covers, she fired the gun again. Then she went back out into the hall, and there was one more shot. It was quiet after that.”

  Lou’s eyes looked as glassy as a doll’s.

  “I stayed out on the roof even after everything got quiet. I didn’t want to see inside.”

  Lou was silent for a moment, perhaps imagining what she might have seen if she’d gone inside. Piper struggled to keep herself from picturing it.

  When she spoke again, her voice was shaking. “Finally, Jay Jay came out and found me, and he carried me back inside. My face was pressed against his chest. He told me to keep my eyes closed, not to open them until he told me to.”

  “Jay Jay?” Piper asked. She’d forgotten that Amy used to call Jason that. But how did Lou know?

  “Mama’s friend. He’s a police officer. He came to the house to visit Mama last week. He must have said something that made her sad, ’cause when I walked in that afternoon, she was crying. Jay Jay was holding her hand.”

  Piper let out a little gasp, then faked a cough to try to cover it up.

  “But that night,” Lou continued, “when he carried me through the house and told me not to open my eyes, he was the one crying. And I knew that whatever had happened was real, real bad, to make a police officer cry.”

  Piper thought of a hundred things she could say, maybe should say—words of comfort or empathy, reassurance—but everything seemed grossly, insultingly inadequate. The refrigerator hummed. The clock on the stove ticked. Soda bubbled and ticked in their cans. A radio played off in another room, the music so faint Piper wondered if she might be imagining it. She thought of the little transistor radio Amy used to carry around tuned to the top-forty station.

  “One time,” Lou said suddenly, “Mama took me to the city and I saw a little stone man with wings carved into the top of a building.”

  “A gargoyle?” Piper asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, smiling. “That’s what I imagined I was up there on that roof, holding still, trying not to breathe. A gargoyle.”

  —

  Crystal returned from the store an hour later with a carton of cigarettes and an enormous bottle of generic diet soda. She soon made it clear that Piper’s babysitting services were no longer needed. As Piper drove back to Margot’s house, she replayed Lou’s simple, terrible story over and over in her head, sorting through all the details one by one.

  What had Jason been doing at Amy’s last week? Surely, if Margot had known about this visit, she would have mentioned it to Piper. Which meant he’d kept it a secret, but why? Each possibility she let herself imagine was worse than the last.

  But something else felt wrong about Lou’s story, too.

  The realization was gradual, the way night falls in the summer—the light fading slowly, so slowly it’s barely perceptible—and then you see fireflies, stars. There all the time, but only now visible.

  Jason had clearly said that Lou had blood on her feet when he found her on the roof. If she’d crept out the window when she heard the first shot, stayed there perched like a statue while the nightmare inside went on, where did the blood come from?

  1989

  Piper

  The condos where Piper and Margot lived with their mother were only a short walk from the motel, on the back side of the hill. Sometimes, when Piper walked down the path that led to the field that surrounded Amy’s swimming pool, she thought of Narnia. Of how going to the motel was almost like stepping through the wardrobe and into another world. Amy and her grandmother were about as exciting and exotic and otherworldly as you could get. Especially now that they’d found Sylvie’s suitcase and had a real live mystery to try to solve.

  Piper knocked on Amy’s front door now, with Margot beside her. Her shin stung and throbbed from yesterday. When she’d pulled back the gauze this morning, it was red and puffy. Piper had smeared on some bacitracin and covered it in Band-Aids. She’d managed to hide the injury from her mom, quickly throwing on a pair of sweatpants before her mom got home from work. If Mom saw it, she’d freak and might forbid Piper and Margot to go to the motel. She already didn’t really approve of Amy and her family and worried that the old motel might be dangerous. Piper didn’t need to give her proof.

  “I really don’t like you girls spending all your time over there,” Mom had told them. “There are other kids your age around, you know. What about that boy who lives in C Building? He seems nice. Maybe you should spend some time with him.”

  “Jason Hawke?” Piper snorted. “Mom, please. He’s a dweeb.”

  “He is not,” Margot argued. “He’s got this cool telescope, and star maps that glow in the dark.”

  Piper rolled her eyes dramatically. “I rest my case. Total dweeb.”

  Piper knocked on Amy’s front door again, louder this time. Grandma Charlotte had a hard time hearing. And if Amy had the music on upstairs, she wouldn’t hear, either.

  “Are we going to start searching all the rooms today? Or that old trailer?” Margot chirped.

  “Don’t know,” Piper said. “We’ll see what Amy’s got planned.”

  “I’ve got all kinds of awesome stuff planned, but it would help if you two would get your butts over here a little earlier!”

  Amy had sneaked up behind them. She was rocking back on her heels, practically dancing. She had on a Joan Jett T-shirt and the same ripped cut-offs she’d worn yesterday.

  “I’ve been waiting for you for hours!” she said.

  “Sorry,” Piper said. “Mom went into work late, and she wanted to do this family-breakfast thing, and then we had to call our dad.”

  Last year, their dad moved to Texas
with his new wife, Trish. Piper and Margot only saw him for one week in the summer and one week in the winter. Piper didn’t mind. She really hated Trish, who had been the family’s dental hygienist. It made her want to gag, thinking about how this woman had once had her gloved hands inside her mouth; had scraped and polished and forced floss between Piper’s teeth. She’d had Piper chew the red tablets that showed, like bloodstains, the places she’d missed when she brushed.

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Amy said. She had very little patience for anything that wasn’t directly connected to her. “Come on, let’s go to my room. I want to show you something.”

  Amy slipped between Piper and Margot and yanked open the front door.

  “Who’s there?” Amy’s grandma called out from the kitchen.

  “Just me, Grandma.”

  “Oh, Sylvie! You startled me.”

  “It’s Amy, Gram,” Amy called back. “Still just Amy.”

  The staircase was opposite the front door. Amy started up the wide, carpeted steps, the other girls right behind her. She took a right at the top of the stairs and went to her bedroom, at the end of the hall. “Come on, come on—wait till you see what I found! You guys are gonna flip!”

  Amy’s room had belonged to her mother and Sylvie once upon a time, and still held some relics from those days—the twin bed and dark headboard with hazy old shellac, two banged-up wooden dressers her mom and Sylvie had used, and a matching bedside table. But there were differences: the boom box dominating the bedside table; the posters of Guns N’ Roses and Annie Lennox; the vivid purple that Amy had painted the walls and ceiling. There were plastic beaded curtains hanging in the window, and when the sun hit them, prisms of color shot out and danced around the room.

  Piper loved being in Amy’s room. It was like being let into a magician’s secret chamber—you never knew what you’d find, what Amy might do next.

  “Look at this,” Amy said. She was over at her desk. Piper saw that the old typewriter from the attic was sitting on top of it, a piece of paper fed into the machine. She moved closer and saw the words Amy had been typing:

  Sylvie, Sylvia Slater, Miss Sylvia Slater, Where did you go, Miss Sylvia Slater?????

  The hypnosis book was there, too, on a pad of paper, with a bookmark stuck inside. Amy had started reading it and taking notes.

  Amy was waving an envelope around. “So, when I took the typewriter out of its box, I found this stuffed at the bottom.”

  Piper read the address on the envelope out loud: “Mr. Alfred Hitchcock, Universal Studios, Hollywood, California.” There was a four-cent postage stamp on the upper right corner. She saw that the return address was Sylvia Slater, Tower Motel, London, Vermont. “Wait, like Alfred Hitchcock the movie director?”

  “Who’s Alfred Hitchcock?” Margot asked.

  “He made all these freaky old movies, like The Birds and Psycho,” Amy said. “You’ve seen that one, right, Piper? That crazy shower scene?” She mimed stabbing the air with an invisible knife, making high-pitched sound effects with each thrust: “Eee-eee-eee!”

  Piper shook her head. “Uh-uh.” She wasn’t allowed to see anything scary, anything that was rated R.

  “Oh my God! We totally have to rent the video! I can’t believe you haven’t seen it! You know the best part? It’s at a motel! Just like this one. It’s even a motel no one ever comes to because of the highway—he could have taken the idea from right here.”

  Piper shrugged. “Sure, sounds cool. But what does the letter say?”

  Amy pulled it out of the envelope with a flourish, handed it over. It was neatly typed on Tower Motel stationery.

  Mr. Alfred Hitchcock

  Universal Studios

  Hollywood, California

  October 3, 1961

  Dear Mr. Hitchcock,

  I have a new twist on my old movie idea for you. There is a motel. It has 28 rooms. Everything seems normal and nice and almost perfect there. But that’s not the way it really is. Because this motel has a 29th room. A place where the darkest secrets you can imagine are kept.

  Here is my plan: I am going to discover all the secrets of the 29th room, then I will come to Hollywood and tell them to you in person. I think that if you hear my story, you will agree it would make a wonderful, dark, twisted movie. The kind of movie only you can make.

  I will be in touch soon, I promise.

  Sincerely yours,

  Sylvia Slater

  Tower Motel

  328 Route 6

  London, Vermont

  “Bizarre,” Piper said. “What’s she even talking about?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it? She’s saying this motel has a secret room somewhere, a twenty-ninth room, and she went looking for it. And check out when this letter was written: October 3, 1961. It’s the day before she disappeared! I checked with my grandma this morning—Sylvie was gone on the morning of October 4.”

  “But how could there be a whole other room in the motel that you don’t know about?” Margot said.

  “Maybe it’s not a real room,” Piper guessed. “Maybe it’s like a…a—whaddaya call it?—a metaphor or something. Or maybe she just made it up to get his attention?”

  Amy shook her head. Her face was flushed and feverish-looking. “No. I think it’s a real place, a secret room somewhere in this motel. And if we really want to find out what happened to Sylvie, we’ve gotta find it.”

  “So where are we supposed to start?” Piper asked.

  “I think we have to look through that suitcase again. Maybe there’s a clue in there. Then I think we need to search the motel, room by room.”

  “And that old trailer, too!” Margot said, caught up in the excitement.

  “Every inch of this property,” Amy agreed, nodding. “Come on, let’s start with the suitcase.”

  Jason

  Jason was hiding out in Room 4, watching and waiting to catch Amy alone. He had a second pack of cigarettes, taken from his brother’s stash. He knew it was risky—surely Brian would notice that the carton was down by two. But his older brother was busy with his summer job at Joe’s Pizza, and whenever he wasn’t working the oven, he was out with his girlfriend, spending what little money he made. Jason counted on Brian’s being too distracted to count his smokes.

  Jason was bored. Tired of waiting. He peeled the cellophane off the pack, opened it up, and took one out. Holding it between his index and middle finger, he stuck the filter between his lips. He’d never smoked before, never even thought about it, but Amy smoked. Or at least she said she did.

  He went to the nightstand to get the ancient pack of Tower Motel matches and chipped glass ashtray, stopping to admire himself in the mirror. In his brother’s black Pink Floyd T-shirt, with a cigarette between his lips, he looked like a boy Amy might talk to. He messed up his hair a little, trying to give himself a disheveled, rock-star kind of look.

  He carried the ashtray and matches over and sat back down by the window so he could keep watch for Amy. He struck one match. The head crumbled. Match two sputtered a bit, then died. Three, four, and five fell apart. He pulled a match from the back row and struck it, watched with surprise as it snapped to life. Just as he brought the lit match up to the end of the cigarette and began puffing, he caught movement out the window, through a crack in the blinds.

  Someone was in the tower. Coughing, eyes watering, he stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray, keeping his gaze on the old stone building.

  A shadowy form moved up toward the open doorway, then shuffled back and was lost in the darkness. He’d seen a pale face, a long blue shirt—or a dress, maybe.

  He jumped up, threw open the door of Room 4, and sprinted across the driveway toward the tower. He stopped when he got to the doorway and looked around. Empty.

  He stepped inside, smelled dust and cement.

  Then he heard it: a sound from up above, a scuttling sound, like a giant crab moving sideways across the floor, claws scraping wood.

  “Amy?” he called in
a croaking whisper. “That you?”

  With his heart feeling like it was creeping up into his throat, he went to the ladder and climbed. When his head got to the top, there was nothing. Only an empty room. And a hole in the wooden floor. Not surprising—the boards all looked half rotten. And hadn’t Amy said something about Piper’s falling through?

  “Amy?” he called again, voice hopeful but small, lost in the dark gloom of the room. Filtered sunlight came through the narrow slit windows. In real castles, he knew, windows like this were used to shoot arrows through in battle.

  Very carefully, he pulled himself up and walked to the next ladder, testing each footstep, his eyes glued to the place where the floorboards had collapsed.

  At the second ladder, he climbed again, rising to the top floor. There was nothing there, either. Only the wide-open sky up above, clouds so low they cast shadows over the tower and motel. A blue jay scolded him from a nearby tree.

  He tried to tell himself that he’d been seeing things. That he’d imagined the figure in the doorway.

  But, try as he might to convince himself, he knew it wasn’t true. There had been someone there, and now they were gone. Impossible, but true. People, real flesh-and-blood people, couldn’t just disappear.

  So maybe it was a ghost, a little voice told him.

  But Jason had never believed in ghosts. And he wasn’t about to start now.

  Piper

  Piper, Amy, and Margot arrived at the tower just in time to catch Jason scuttling out.

  “What are you doing here?” Amy barked.

  Jason’s hair was all messed up, and he was wearing a T-shirt that was about ten sizes too big. He looked like a scarecrow. More than that, he looked just plain scared—eyes wide and frantic, face pale and sweaty.

  “Nothing, I was—”

  “You were trespassing! That’s what you were doing. There are laws against that, you know.”

  “There was…someone,” Jason said lamely.

  “Where?” Amy demanded.

  “In the tower. I saw someone go into the tower. Someone wearing blue.”