Rule One Said I Was the Only Person Awake After Midnight, but My Mother Never Sleeps novel · Chapter 18 of 24
Chapter 18: Lantern Night
My card stayed taped over his for four weeks, and Mr. Coe never once came down to take it off.
On the first of February the families came up the drive at dusk with lanterns in the backs of their cars.
There were tin lanterns and paper ones, and a kid with a jar of battery candles.
The full moon came up over the far shore, huge and orange, and then white.
I opened every curtain on the lake side of the lobby at eleven, and nobody tried to stop me.
The tower window was dark.
At 11:30 the families walked their lanterns down the lawn.
They set them in a long line along the shore, where the snow met the ice.
The woman in 210 stood at the top of the lawn with her cane and counted heads.
Travis wasn't there.
He'd taken a kitchen chair down to the boathouse level an hour before and dropped the iron bar across the lake door from the inside.
"Anything wants in that way tonight," he'd said, "it can talk to me."
The thing wearing the doctor stood on the porch in his overcoat and the scarf his daughter had given him.
He had a blanket over his shoulders and a cup of cocoa.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of Rule One Said I Was the Only Person Awake After Midnight, but My Mother Never Sleeps are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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