The Night Sister

The driveway was full of fire trucks and various EMS vehicles, so he parked along the street, pulled over right by the old motel sign.

He’d seen the smoke billowing as he drove through town. Here it was thick and black, a great cloud covering them; it was rising and spreading, soon to cover all of London. It didn’t smell like cigarettes or a campfire; it smelled dangerous, full of chemicals and melting plastic.

The house was burning, as were the two rows of motel units and the old crumbling tower. His eyes went to Room 4, where he used to spend his afternoons imagining he was grown up, living some other life. Flames shot through the roof, which crumbled down.

The entire London Fire Department was on-site, dousing the flames with high-powered hoses, but it was clear that the place was beyond saving. The goal now was to protect the woods behind the house and motel. If they went up, the condos might, too.

“Any idea how this started?” Jason asked the fire chief.

“Place was soaked in gasoline,” the chief said, hurrying off to talk with some firefighters from Barre who’d just arrived to help out.

Jason stood in the driveway, in the place he’d stood a thousand times, staring up at the window of the house, Amy’s bedroom window. Smoke poured out of it. Flames shot through the roof.

Once upon a time, there had been a boy who’d loved a girl. He followed her everywhere, like a sad dog. Some part of him, he knew, had gone on following her, chasing her through his dreams, calling her name.

Amy, Amy, Amy.

For whatever reason, he’d never really let her go. He’d known it that day last week as he sat across from her at the kitchen table—known it and hated himself for it.

But now it was time.

Time to let go, once and for all.

Jason turned back to the house and watched the smoke rise and take shape: first a phantom, then a bird, a many-headed monster, and, finally, a beautiful girl with streaming hair and the longest legs he’d ever seen. He felt the smoke enter him, tasted it on the back of his tongue, acrid and ruined.

He remembered that long-ago first kiss at the bottom of the pool; the teasing way she’d called him Jay Jay; the crushed cigarettes he’d left her in the tower. He imagined each memory leaving his head, drifting up with the thick black smoke: up, up, up, until it was all just a ruined blur and his eyes burned and he wanted, more than anything, to leave this place for good.

He turned and started back down the driveway, his eyes on the tower. There were no hoses spraying water on it, no firefighters paying it any attention whatsoever. It stood, like a great black, crumbling chimney, flames shooting out the top.

The wooden floor was gone now, as were all the joists. Without the strength of the wooden framing, the tower began to shift, to fall in on itself. The walls of stone came crumbling down in huge clumps of rock and concrete. The fire roared like a great hungry beast.

He thought of Piper’s insane story. Of the secret room that she said was down at the bottom of the tower—the twenty-ninth room, built to chain up monsters, to keep them safe and the world safe from them.

It sounded like a story Amy would have cooked up back when they were kids. He remembered her showing him the blurry Polaroid, telling him it was a ghost, begging him to believe her, to say he’d seen it, too. And then he thought of what she’d been trying to tell him that day last week: how, of all people, it was him she had turned to—him she chose to tell that she now believed the monsters her mother spoke of might be real.

Jason looked up through the smoke and flames, through the ghosts of memories, and saw movement just beyond the tower. There, behind it and to the right, where the yard turned to woods, two sets of eyes were watching.

It was the big black dog and the wild cat. Jason looked up the driveway at the firefighters and police rushing here and there, eyes on the burning buildings. No one seemed to see the animals at the edge of the yard. No one but him.