THE STREETS OF Windale are abandoned. I’m able to walk right down the middle, along the yellow dividing line between lanes. The windows of the houses crouched together along Hazleton Avenue stare down at me. Not all of them are empty and dark, as I might expect in a frozen, nightmare version of a small town. There are lights on in some, the curtains stilled in the act of swaying in the breeze. They’re not all completely haunted-looking, but it’s still unnerving.
My ears are full of the falling-stone sound of slow thunder, a perpetual rumble like a bass drum still booming from a particularly hard hit. If I make it out of this madness, I might not do so with all my hearing.
I wander the roads and tiny thruways of town, kicking rocks and beer cans along the way and watching them slow down and halt in midair without ever touching the ground. The air is mostly stagnant and stale, but every now and then I catch a whiff of freshly mowed grass, of hot dogs on a grill, of the sickly sweet scent of fabric softener wafting from a dryer vent.
“What are you doing?” I mumble to myself. “What the hell are you doing, Sonya?”
But I keep walking.
My first instinct is to head to the Triangle, to the place where all my comfort is, the place where Gabe and Kim and Charlie and I find ourselves most often when we’re not up on Dagger Hill. The diner or the movie theater or even the police station. From where I stand on Main Street, I can see the white rectangle of the Sunrise’s marquee and the fountain in the middle of the intersection, with its arcs of water stopped midstream as if they were an ice sculpture. I can see one chrome-plated corner of the King Street Diner, and right next door, wedged between that and the theater, the Stuck Pig, the only bar in town and not always as friendly as the one on Cheers.
My head down, I watch my feet move me away from Main Street and toward the west side of town, where the new strip mall sits along with some of Windale’s oldest relics.
That’s where I’m headed, for some reason. Not to Dagger Hill or to the Triangle or to anywhere very familiar. The same silent certainty that dragged me out of my house is pulling me in this direction, which is somehow comforting because at least I have a direction.
My smile fades when I look up at the shadowy mass of the plane in the clouds. Still hurtling toward destruction.
I realize suddenly that I’m on Raspberry Street, passing right in front of the Windale Medical Center. Guilt squeezes around my heart like a fist. Poor Charlie is in there somewhere. Well, not in there exactly, not in the stark white building I’m staring at right now. But in the same version of this place that exists in my Windale, Charlie is there, either alone or alone with Chet—I don’t know which would be worse. Probably worried sick about his mom, about Kimberly, maybe even about Gabe and me, because he was probably too doped up to remember we were there last night.
In the same way that I can still see the crash in my mind’s eye, I can see Charlie on top of the boulder just before it happened. Making us promise to always be there for each other. I can see him tying the four of us here together forever, and sudden guilt squeezes me tight, fueled a little bit by anger, too. Hatred, even, for the secrets I force myself to keep and the things I’m too cowardly to talk about out loud. I promised Charlie I would always be there, but only because I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that maybe I didn’t want to.
I do my best to shake it all off and push onward, leaving the WMC behind. I make a right onto Allegheny Road, then a left onto Perkiomen Avenue and follow that for two blocks until it cuts off at Baker Street, along which sits the strip mall with Ricky’s Video Rentals, a sleezy-looking adult bookstore, a Wag’s, a Pizza Hut, and Duncan’s Arcade.
Although I feel a certain unexplainable pull toward Ricky’s Video Rentals, that’s still not where I’m going. I take another right onto Baker Street and follow it north.
A few blocks up, I come to an expanse of cracked, buckled blacktop that used to be a parking lot. It’s overgrown with weeds and littered with rocks and trash. There’s a plastic grocery bag caught in a tangle of crabgrass, frozen in time, filled up with the unmoving breeze. It looks like a white flag of surrender.
At the other end of the forgotten parking lot is the forgotten structure to which the lot belongs—an L-shaped, two-story motel that was once called the Widow’s Lodge. The wrought-iron staircases leading up to the second-floor walkway have flaked off all their paint and are rusted over, sagging away from the structure, only holding on by a few loose bolts. The roof has collapsed in on itself in places, punched through by years of rain and snow and ice. The room numbers on the crackling, splintered doors are oxidized barnacles, barely legible in the shadowy light of the storm. Windows are broken, puking up moth-eaten curtains. Walls are peeling paint and creeping with mold, covered up in spots by colorful graffiti. There’s a neon VACANCY sign in the office window that’s hanging on by a single chain, a crooked, confused grin on a place that’s older than my parents.
The place is obviously haunted. That’s what everyone says, anyway. It’s another one of those spooky Windale stories that come with the small-town vibe. Monsters up on Dagger Hill, a haunted motel, some mysterious deaths over the years. Sometimes I wonder if other places around the world have taller tales than the ones I’ve heard in Windale.
Normally, if you stand in the parking lot of the Widow’s Lodge, you can hear a howling sound as the wind cuts through the old iron bars of the railings. Even on the quietest days, there’s at least a soft whistling. I’m a woman of science, yes, but I’ve heard the howling myself. Kimberly and the guys have been with me when I’ve heard it, too. We all know the stories about this place, and we always talked about spending the night in one of the rooms, just to see what might happen. Kim was most excited about that idea, I think. Maybe she was even the one who came up with it, I don’t know. But we never went through with it, and I wish now that we had. I wish the four of us had done a lot of things together while we still had the chance.
Anyway, the rotted, decaying look of the Widow’s Lodge got it its reputation. The howling is what earned it its nickname: the Banshee Palace.
“A little spooky, isn’t it?”
The voice comes from right beside me, and I nearly jump out of my skin. I squeeze a hand over my mouth to stifle the gut-wrenching scream that erupts from my core. Nearly falling on my ass, I stumble backward, away from the sound. I haven’t seen or heard anybody else the whole time I’ve been here. The sound of another person’s voice is so foreign that it almost feels like a violation against nature, as if some unspoken rule has been broken, the one to literally not speak.
When I move away and have the person in full view, I realize that I recognize who it is. Her wispy puff of gray, almost white, hair is as recognizable as the fountain in the Triangle.
Mrs. Rapaport smiles at me from her spot on the sidewalk, hands folded neatly in front of her. “Hello, dear,” she says.
“M-M-Mrs. Rapaport?” I stammer. My heart continues to gallop. “W-W-What the hell?”
The old woman chuckles. “What the hell, indeed. These are strange times, aren’t they, Sonya? Very strange.”
“I … I don’t understand. Why are you here?” It seems like the appropriate question, but only in the sense that I can’t figure out why June Rapaport would pop up in my nightmare. She’s a little crotchety at times, sure, and definitely eccentric, but she’s mostly a pleasant woman. She’s always been kind to me and the others.
“That’s a good question,” Mrs. Rapaport replies. “I suppose I could ask the same of you, but I already have a pretty strong suspicion about that.” Her eyes dart to the Banshee Palace, the moldering husk that it is. “I couldn’t tell you why I’m here, dear. Only that I’ve been wandering around for a while, waiting for something to happen. I’ve opened a few doors, checked in on a few people. Done my snooping, let’s say. But now that I’m ready to go home, I just can’t seem to find a way out.”
“A … a way out?”
“You don’t really still think this is just a dream, do you, darling?” she asks sweetly.
To that, I can only swallow.
“Yes, well,” Mrs. Rapaport continues with a wry smile, “I tried going back to my house, but it turns out that place is infested with those nasty thousand-leggers. Blech!”
I think about what happened at my own house, with my bed, and I wonder if Mrs. Rapaport has had a similar experience. But I don’t say anything, can’t quite find my voice.
“Something brought me here,” she says. “My children have children and even some of them have children, but that old motherly instinct never goes away, I guess. Somehow I must have known you’d be here.”
“But … why am I here?” I ask, directing the question not just at Mrs. Rapaport but at whatever force brought us together.
“Another good question,” she replies. She doesn’t add anything else, though. Turning back to the Banshee Palace, she nods at it. I’m glad that time is on pause, or whatever, because I don’t think I’d be able to handle it if I could hear the howling right now. It would just be too much. “I think you need to go in there.”
“In … there?” I say. “No way!”
Mrs. Rapaport laughs again. “What’s the matter, dear? You afraid of a few ghosts?”
“No,” I say, my voice carrying a defiant edge. “I’m afraid of needing a tetanus shot.”
Up on the second floor of the motel, the door to room 6 makes a noise like someone’s knocking on it. The same urgent, beckoning sound as the knock that rattled my front door. Goose bumps spring up across my arms and legs, up my back.
“Somebody’s waiting,” Mrs. Rapaport says. And even though her voice is as pleasant as ever, when she turns to me this time, I see something new in her eyes, something desperate. “Listen to me, dear. You have to be careful. It doesn’t know we’re here. Not yet, anyway. When it finds out, things are going to change, and not for the better.”
She turns and looks over her shoulder then, as if she hears something—someone calling her name, maybe. A moment passes, then another. She looks at me again and says, “I have to go now. I think maybe this time I can get out. Be careful, Sonya. It knows your fear. Can smell it on you. Maybe that’s what drew you here in the first place. Heaven knows what it’ll do if it finds you.”
Mrs. Rapaport turns and leaves. I reach out to try to stop her, but she’s faster than I expect a woman her age to be. My hand swipes through empty air, and when I look up and down Baker Street, it’s empty. As if Mrs. Rapaport was never there at all.
The knock sounds from room 6 again. My whole body tenses. It’s time to check in at the Banshee Palace.