The glow-in-the-dark clock on the wall was glowing green when Emma Carter woke up to the vibration of her cell phone. It was 3:33 a.m. She reached for her charging cell phone on the nightstand and squinted at the blue light - the sender said "Jacob," but the number had been canceled by the telecom company two weeks ago.
** "Don't come to me, they eat up the time." **
An overexposed photo was attached to the bottom of the text: at the end of the cracked tarmac, the crooked neon sign flashed "SILVER MO__", and the missing letters made the remaining "MOON" look like the bloody mouth of some creature. Emma's fingers trembled on the callback button until she heard the mechanical electronic voice: "The number you have dialed is not available."
By the first light of morning, she was sitting in a hard plastic chair at the Clark County Sheriff's Office. Sheriff Thomas Grayson pushed in a cup of instant coffee, the brown liquid shaking in a mug emblazoned with a police badge." Ms. Carter, I apologize." He removed his cowboy hat, revealing gray sideburns shaved too short, "But your brother's case is closed, and surveillance shows he walked into the desert of his own free will."
"With this?" Emma flung her cell phone onto the table. The screen was fixed on the last photo Jacob had sent, and the vines wrapped around those neon tubes were writhing eerily. A muscle in the side of the sheriff's neck twitched as he turned to open the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, and the musty smell spewed out along with the yellowed newspaper.
Across the front page of the July 15, 1955 edition of the Nevada Sun ran the chilling headline, **MOTEL MIDNIGHT VAPORIZATION CASE! Six travelers evaporate! **In the black-and-white photo, she saw the motel-the same crumbling porch, the same rusted sign, even the crooked angle was indistinguishable from the photo Jacob had taken.
"Every twenty-five years." The sheriff rubbed his thumb over the scorch marks on the edge of the newspaper, "Forty-eight, seventy-three, ninety-eight... Now it's 2023's turn." He suddenly coughed violently, and as the cuff slipped, Emma caught a glimpse of a dark red scar on his left wrist, shaped like an inverted cross.
The cactus outside the window twisted and distorted in the heat. As Emma grabbed the paper and stormed out of the station, Sheriff Thomas's voice caught up with her, "Some sandstorms trap time, Ms. Carter, and the Silver Moon Inn is the bottleneck of the hourglass."
She didn't notice the bloodshot eyes staring back at her from between the cracks in the shutters of the sheriff's office. Much less did she realize that on the back of that 1955 newspaper, scrawled in pencil, were seven matchmakers, the sixth with her silver necklace around his neck--at the moment glowing on her chest.
(END)