Sometime after three a.m., Emma awakens to see a man standing in the darkened corner of her bedroom. He’s mostly obscured by the door’s angular black shadow.
She blinks, expecting the figure to vanish like a fading dream.
He’s still there.
She focuses her eyes and the room sharpens. A ray of moonlight catches a rumple of coat fabric on the apparition’s shoulder. A fold of flabby neck flesh. And the rim of a hat. Like something a gangster might wear in an old-timey film.
Staring at her.
Watching her sleep.
She doesn’t dare move. Not even a toe. If he sees that she’s awake, the fragile moment will shatter. He’ll spring forward and slice her throat or gouge out her eyes or worse. She blinks again, trying to find more detail in the darkness, trying not to open her eyes too noticeably wide.
The figure doesn’t move, either.
She realizes she’s holding her breath. Her lungs burn. She draws in a mouthful of air as quietly as she can, a gentle hiss between her teeth. She wonders if he can hear it.
How long has he been standing there, watching me?
The room teeters on a knife-edge.
Emma lives alone. This bedroom is on the second floor. Her phone is charging downstairs. There are no guns in the house. And no neighbors close enough to hear her scream. She considers hurling off the blankets now, jumping to her feet and bolting past the stranger and down the stairs. But it’s still too dark to be certain. He might still be just a hanging coat, she tells herself. An illusion.
To her left, there’s a bedside lamp with a pull chain. She slides her hand toward it, inching her fingers under the bedsheets like a serpent underwater.
Silence.
The figure hasn’t moved. And he hasn’t seen her hand move—not yet, at least. Emma shuts her eyes and focuses on the ambient sounds. The low roar of the waves. The rattle of raindrops on roof shingle. She tries to locate the stranger’s breathing or the flex of his coat, but he’s eerily quiet. She braces for the creak of a floorboard announcing his first step toward her bed. It never comes.
One, she counts. Her hand slides free of the blanket now, her fingers spider-crawling up the cold porcelain. Feeling for the chain.
Two.
She finds it. A dry click between her fingers. Did he hear that? If so, he still hasn’t attacked. No motion.
Three?
She’s afraid to break the stillness. But she swallows her fear. She’s fully awake now, her muscles tense under the sheets, and she must be ready. No excuses.
Three.
She tugs the chain. A nuclear flash. She winces in a blaze of light and throws the blankets left while heaving her body right, landing hard on bare feet. She spins—elbows up for defense—and kicks into a sprint for the bedroom door. As she hurtles toward it, she glimpses the spot where the hat-wearing stranger had been standing, now a bare wall.
He’s gone.
She’s alone in the bright bedroom.
Was he even there?
Emma tries to fall back asleep but can’t.
She decides to clear the house room by room.
First, the upper floor—a master bedroom, a bathroom with dual vanities, and a walk-in closet. She checks every corner, every shadow, every gap where an intruder might lurk.
Upper floor: clear.
Then downstairs. The main floor is daunting—a cavernous family space plus an open kitchen and dining area exposed to the outside by three walls of floor-to-ceiling glass. Part beach house, part aquarium. Then two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a laundry room with a chute to the upstairs. Long sight lines, yet honeycombed with dangerous hiding places. She opens every door and scans every square inch. She methodically flicks on lights as she goes, creating a growing safe zone of light. It’s satisfying, like claiming territory.
First floor: clear.
One level left.
“Fuck this basement.”
A staircase leads down into a mouth of darkness. She stops in the doorway, inhaling the cave-like odor. A few steps down, the stairs take a ninety-degree turn under a low copper pipe, noticeably rust-eaten. Even at five-foot-three, Emma has to stoop. Then ten steps deeper, whiffing mildew and mouse scat, like entering the house’s stomach. At the bottom her bare feet touch cement foundation, slick with moisture.
It’s always damp down here. Basements are rare near beaches for this very reason. Even with a sump pump, as in this house, it’s impossible to keep a coastal basement dry. The only light downstairs is controlled by a plastic outlet on the concrete wall to her left—too dark to see. She’s feeling for it with outstretched fingertips when something moves behind her. A current of air touches her exposed lower back. She recognizes it immediately, the warmth of it. It’s an exhaled breath.
She recoils with surprise and her elbow bumps a shelf. Some heavy object drops to the cement, a sound as earsplitting as a gunshot.
She’s lost the light switch. Total darkness.
The next breath is just inches behind her. It’s deeper, almost snotty. A cold nose presses wetly against her bare skin.
“Laika,” Emma whispers, “you are the worst guard dog on earth.”
She finds the switch. Let there be light.
Laika is a golden retriever, but she isn’t quite golden. She’s an English cream breed with a near-white coat, because of which onlookers often mistake her for a white Lab or a Great Pyrenees. Emma crouches now to ruffle the silky fur under Laika’s ears. “You would have barked if Ted Bundy was inside the house. Right?”
Black eyes answer her. Flat, dumb, and eager.
“Right?”
Nothing.
“Right?”
Behold the void.
Maybe not a bark, Emma decides. But friendly-to-a-fault Laika would have followed an intruder upstairs, eagerly nudging his thigh for attention. She’s feeling better now. The figure in her bedroom was just a leftover fragment of a nightmare.
Basement: clear.
Emma is perfectly alone. The way she likes it. This solitary house—ten feet above sea level, three hundred from high tide—is her safe vessel, a tiny pinprick of light on a vast shore. Sometimes she looks out the windows and imagines she’s the last survivor on earth. Only voided sky, miles of dune grass, and the dull crash of the breakers beyond.
On the main floor, she verifies that the front and back doors are locked (they are) and that every window is untouched (they are, impeccably). After that, what can you do? An intruder couldn’t have escaped without tripping the perimeter of motion-sensor lights outside. Still, she keeps the interior lights on while the Pacific sky grays with dawn. Even with every room searched and her golden retriever’s keen senses on her side, she still has to remind herself that the stranger can’t possibly be locked inside the house with her.
Back upstairs, she’d hoped the bedroom lamp would reveal her own clothes draped carelessly over a chair where the figure had stood, or a raincoat hanging scarecrow-like. But there is just a bare wall. And she knows she saw the rim of a hat.
Right?
She brews ginger tea and studies the windows, trying to focus her eyes on both the foggy coast outside and the room’s interior reflection, half expecting to notice the figure standing behind her in a violin-screeching jolt. She’s seen that movie before.
She pours Laika a bowl of food. The retriever sniffs at it indifferently.
“I know,” Emma says. “I’m not hungry, either.”
By the afternoon, she has read two more e-books from start to finish. One decent, one quite good. They’re quick hits, four hours apiece, comfortable little dioramas with flawed detectives and quirky suspects and bloodless murders. Red herrings. Tragic backstories. She already has another downloaded for the evening. It’s nice to submerge yourself in someone else’s world, to luxuriate in the handcrafted details and admire the false ceilings. In happier times Emma liked to read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and she knows she’s slumming on Amazon’s bargain and free listings. She’s not reading for pleasure, exactly, or enrichment—but then again, there’s nothing wrong with reading to escape, is there?
At the end of each, Amazon prompts her to write a review.
She declines.
She’s forgotten the name of that weird author, but the experience still needles her. She rarely engages with strangers, even online. Since she arrived on this beach three months ago, she’s taken great efforts to cut all social threads and cocoon herself from human contact. Her books teleport in from cyberspace. Her groceries coalesce magically at her door. Whenever she hears a delivery van coming down the quarter-mile driveway, she hides. Time slows to a strange and turgid crawl when you’re a grown-ass adult hiding under a window.
She’s lost twelve pounds since arriving here. Not on purpose. Maybe something is wrong with her body, but eating has become a dull and unrewarding process, as joyless as sitting on the toilet. Some days she forgets entirely. Others, she wishes only to sleep and must drag herself down the halls like a zombie. The house seems to be miles wide. Boiling a kettle of ginger tea is insurmountable. Nothing is worth the immense labor it will take.
She’s not sure when she last heard a human voice. Four weeks ago?
Or five?
She’s been told introverted personalities recharge with alone time, something like managing a social battery. And while that’s accurate—because most people tend to exhaust the ever-loving shit out of Emma—she’s always pictured herself more like clay, a shapeless form that reluctantly morphs to meet the daily needs of her surroundings. Smile at the neighbor’s kids. Pay the car insurance. Make a dental appointment. And here on this desolate coast, she’s discovered a worse truth—that without a job, tasks, friends, family, Emma Carpenter will happily float apart. Every molecule of herself will take the path of least resistance. Sometimes she glimpses herself in mirrors or reflective glass, a gray and unformed face she doesn’t recognize. Eyeless, mouthless, nose flattened to soggy mush. Her own ghost.
Very little frightens her—the worst thing that can happen to any human already happened to her months ago—but she fears what she becomes when she’s alone, where her mind will go if she lets it wander.
Her steady diet of digital fast food—ninety-nine-cent distractions good, bad, and everything in between—is enough to keep her occupied.
For now.
A storm is coming.
Emma first sees it from the laundry room while she climbs up onto the dryer, opens a tiny window, twists her spine into a scorpion-arch, and smokes a cigarette. She cranks a plastic Dollar Tree fan with each puff, making certain every ash grain flutters outside while she watches thunderheads loom over the ocean. Then she squishes her cigarette with licked fingertips and tucks it into a ziplock bag with the others.
Sure enough, raindrops tap the windows while she starts reading her third e-book on the sofa. The wind growls and she wonders if she’s really hearing a forgotten closet door click open in the next room. Or stealthy footsteps downstairs? Gloved fingers gripping a machete?
Periodically she stops reading and listens.
This house is full of sounds. Even after living here three months, she still discovers new oddities. Doors refuse to shut. Gutters drip a steady heartbeat. The guest toilet sometimes flushes itself. The first time she heard this happen from across the house was bone-chilling, but now it’s something of a charming quirk, like a ghost occasionally stopping by to take a shit. This is Emma’s first time house-sitting, and it feels so much more invasive than merely renting. Maybe it comes down to whether it’s your silverware in the kitchen drawer or theirs, but she feels like a burglar at nights, padding guiltily through a stranger’s family room.
The house’s owner? A nice lady from Portland named Jules Phelps.
At least Emma thinks it’s a lady.
They’ve never physically met.
And part of why it feels so invasive is that Emma can’t help but draw conclusions about Jules’s private life. It’s unavoidable. You can’t not do it. There’s blood pressure medication and stool softener in the bathroom closet—Jules must be middle-aged or older? There’s an antique Polaroid camera on the shelf—Jules must dabble in photography? One bedroom has been recently cleaned, but a teenage musk still clings thickly—Jules must have raised a son? On a poster there, a stoic samurai warrior kneels under a thicket of moonlit bamboo and sharpens his sword. Maybe the boy went off to college. Maybe he moved. Maybe Jules murdered him and his hacked limbs are rotting in the walls right now.
Maybe Emma has just been reading too many crime novels.
But something about that room has always disturbed her. She finds herself avoiding the teenager’s bedroom and keeping the door shut, lest its ill energy seep out in a cloudy funk of Axe body spray, Mtn Dew, and socks. And something else—something sour. Stale. Yeasty.
Keep reading.
It’s none of Emma’s business. She’s here to run the heaters, watch for roof leaks, and bring in Jules’s mail. Everything else is like the waves: white noise.
The ropelike eleven-mile island of Strand Beach (known by locals as the Strand) joins the mainland with one single-lane causeway. It’s a flat and grassy landmass dotted with remote houses like this one, all separated by acres of negative space and mostly served by one road called Wave Drive. There’s spotty cell service, weak water pressure, and when the weather cooperates, just enough satellite internet bandwidth for Netflix in 480p. No surprise that ninety-nine percent of these homes are dark October through April—summer retreats owned by well-to-do urbanites like Jules, locked down and mothballed for the miserable rainy season. In annual precipitation, Strand Beach is second only to a certain Washington town a short drive north, famous for its sparkling vampires.
Out here, Emma doesn’t have neighbors in the plural—she has a neighbor. This lone confirmed human occupies the next house up Wave Drive, a quarter mile north. From her reading spot on the sofa, the distant structure resembles a tombstone set against watery sky. She can see a faint interior glow. And in the living room window, a whiteboard.
With a handwritten message.
“Finally.”
She lowers her e-reader. She steps over Laika, snoring on the bearskin rug, and approaches the nautical telescope by the window. She leans into the eyepiece, adjusting focus until her neighbor’s faraway message sharpens into clarity.
It’s . . . a stick figure. Hanging from a hand-drawn gallows.
“Damn.”
Another loss. Her guess—oxygen—wasn’t even close.
She doesn’t know her elderly neighbor’s full name, only how he spontaneously introduced himself via whiteboard one afternoon (HELLO. I’M DEEK). For a week or two prior, his board had contained a friendly invitation (WANT TO PLAY HANGMAN?), which sounds like something Jigsaw might say if you’ve never heard of the popular whiteboard game Hangman. Emma hadn’t.
In short: One player tries to guess the letters of a mystery word while the other draws a stick figure in a noose, adding a limb for each incorrect guess. A complete stick figure means the poor guy hangs. Deek, as it turns out, is an absolute beast at Hangman. His guesses are surgical, his words impenetrable. Emma hasn’t won once.
It’s impossible to know someone through a telescope, but as is true of house-sitting for a stranger, you find yourself logging observations anyway. Emma knows the old man lives alone amid heaps of junk—an entire Ikea sales floor of crowded furniture, bulging file cabinets, towers of stacked books, and a (presumably) uninstalled toilet on the back porch. She knows he keeps an antique revolver framed over his fireplace. She knows he drinks only coffee before three and only whiskey afterward—and that on his most shit-faced evenings, he sometimes lights off aerial fireworks directly from his balcony.
Usually Emma lets hours pass between Hangman guesses—the pleasantly glacial pace to life on the Strand—but she glimpses motion. The old hermit is in his kitchen. So she uncaps her dry-erase marker, draws a gallows on her own whiteboard, and picks a word.
He guesses it in four turns flat.
ZEPHYR?
“Asshole.”
She’s not sure how he does it.
Sometimes she likes to study her neighbor’s rainy windows for clues and speculate on the exotic past career of a man who lives alone with a cowboy gun and five tons of hoarded crap. She’s been guessing for weeks. Antiques dealer? Archivist? Retired movie star? He does look a bit like George Clooney, if you stuck Michael Clayton in a dehydrator. Whatever his past, the man who calls himself Deek is a fascinating mystery.
Now her neighbor stands up from his telescope, as if startled by a sharp noise. He picks up his blue marker and writes on his board: WHO IS THAT?
Emma pauses mid-sip.
She sets her tea mug on the table—a bony click—and raises her hands in an exaggerated shrug: What?
He’s writing more. But the storm intensifies, battering the windows and blurring his words with running droplets. She squints into her telescope.
MAN IN YOUR LIVING ROOM
BEHIND YOU
She leans back from the eyepiece. She senses a faint chill in the room behind her, like a breeze of displaced air. But she ignores it and raises her marker.
NICE TRY, she writes.
He’s kidding, she knows. And she won’t fall for it.
A quarter mile away, the old man shakes his head. He waves behind watery glass. Then he turns back to his whiteboard.
I’M SERIOUS, he scrawls. WHO IS THAT?
He points at her.
No. Behind her. Into the adjacent living room. Ten feet away.
She refuses to look behind herself. “Nope.”
HE’S RIGHT THERE
“Yawn.”
HAS KNIFE
“A knife? Be more imaginative.”
She holds rock-hard eye contact with her neighbor through windows streaked with rainwater, holding it, holding it, long past the point when any self-respecting serial killer would have grabbed her scalp, twisted her head back, and cut her throat. Finally the old man gives up and shrugs. Begrudging defeat.
I win, she thinks.
Deek is an incessant practical joker, and this only deepens the old man’s mystery. Maybe the boredom out here maddens everyone a little differently, but this is the third murderer to stalk Emma’s house. He’s also told her that the structure is haunted, that Jules previously ran a burlesque show out of the basement, and that the prior house-sitter was a serial killer. There are only so many pranks you can pull from a quarter mile, so last week (presumably after observing she was a reader), Deek recommended the single worst e-book she’s ever read: Murder Mountain by H. G. Kane.
For that, she writes: YOU OWE ME 99 CENTS
WAIT. Deek pauses. YOU ACTUALLY BOUGHT IT?
She nods.
SERIOUSLY?
She nods harder.
WOW. SORRY. The old man pauses and shakes his head, genuinely baffled. AND YOU READ THE ENTIRE THING?
She smiles guiltily. Deek vastly underestimates her spare time.
OKAY, he writes. LET ME POSE YOU A QUESTION
“Sure.”
YOU OPEN THE FRIDGE
She nods.
YOU TAKE A SIP OF MILK
“Okay.”
IT TASTES SPOILED
She sighs. “I know where this is going.”
DO YOU:
A. THROW THE MILK OUT?
B. DRINK THE ENTIRE GODDAMN CARTON, TO MAKE SURE IT’S SPOILED?
She pretends to laugh for Deek’s telescope, but it’s soundless, airless. She appreciates the old man’s eccentric sense of humor—at least she thinks she does, the same way she’s pretty sure she appreciates tiny, expensive oysters served raw—but Deek can’t possibly understand her situation. He’s still just an onlooker. Since arriving here Emma downloads her e-books by the cartload, picking Amazon’s free and bargain lists clean every week. It’s not about the story’s quality. It’s about distracting herself, putting her mind on a treadmill.
Anything is better than being alone with her thoughts.
Even Murder Mountain.
Still grinning, Deek writes: EVER HEARD OF THE CLASSIC FILM “PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE”? I THINK IT’S QUITE SKILLFULLY MADE
She rolls her eyes.
AN INTELLIGENT AND SCARY FILM
“Dick.”
KILLER STILL BEHIND YOU, BTW
“Maybe he’ll murder you next.”
I CAN LIP-READ
She’s almost certain he can’t. It’s too far.
Among hundreds of vacant summer homes, it’s something of a statistical miracle that two occupied ones should happen to be adjacent like this. Emma visualizes herself and Deek as the pilots of two spacecraft on differing vectors, briefly passing within eyeshot of each other. Able to transmit and receive written messages for as long as the window lasts.
His grin fades. He writes: YOU DOING OK?
She tries not to overthink her answer. YEAH
YOU SURE?
Oh, come on. Now for the real stuff, the parts of human relationships that Emma has always been deficient at. Suddenly even a quarter mile feels too close. She draws another Hangman scaffolding—but he’s still writing, leaning crookedly against his whiteboard before stepping back and revealing: I SAW YOU
She freezes. What?
ON THE BEACH
YESTERDAY
A faint chill crawls up her spine as Deek adds a question mark with an emphatic dot: WHAT WERE YOU DOING?
Then he leans back into his own telescope.
Watching her.
Waiting.
Emma twirls her dry-erase marker between her fingers. She smiles weakly, guiltily, unsure if the old man really can read lips. If his magnification is powerful enough to detect a lie.
Say something, Emma.
He’s waiting for her answer.
Say anything.
Finally she does.
JUST OUT WALKING. I’M FINE
Then she caps her marker and returns to the sofa. This time she nearly trips over Laika, who wakes with a surprised snort. She hates feeling studied in her neighbor’s lens. Deek’s spaceship has veered alarmingly close to hers. She lifts her e-reader and pretends to read her current book—a police procedural about a serial killer who attends his victims’ funerals—knowing the old man is still watching her. She pretends not to see him. She waits until she’s certain he’s lost interest and moved on.
For the rest of the day, she avoids her telescope—even approaching it might invite another long-distance exchange—but if she squints, she can still read Deek’s message.
EMMA—IF YOU EVER NEED TO TALK, I’M HERE
She reminds herself that these telescopes magnify both ways. She’s being watched, too. And strangely, over several months, dozens of hanged stick figures, and countless whiteboard conversations, she can’t remember ever giving her name.
Deek has always been superhumanly good at guessing, right?
When Emma walks the beach, she likes to close her eyes and let her mind go perfectly, painlessly blank.
If you could have one superpower, what would it be?
In a past life, she was twenty-two, sharing a seven-dollar bottle of wine with her boyfriend over a chessboard in her studio apartment. Trying to focus on blurry pieces. Laika was just a pup back then, a white roly-poly pawing at their ankles.
One superpower, Em. Go.
She didn’t know.
Flying? Telepathy? Super-reflexes?
She shrugged.
Why is it so easy for some people to talk on and on? She feels broken sometimes. She tries to self-edit in her brain, and by the time she knows what she means to say, it’s too late to say it. She has dashed first dates single-handedly with her inability to maintain a conversation. But Shawn was different, and somehow even back then, she already knew she loved him. He talked enough for the both of them (which took some of the pressure off Emma), but to gently nudge her along, he also liked to tee up bafflingly random questions. What’s your favorite musical? Your favorite vacation? Apparently superheroes were on his mind that night, as Shawn explained his own ideal superpower: to live forever. Immortality.
That’s a fucking terrible superpower, Emma said, sipping directly from the bottle.
He laughed. One of the first times she heard what she would know as a Shawn-laugh: an abrupt, genuine bark of surprise.
Okay, he said. Please explain.
She took a deep breath. No self-editing.
One.
Two.
Three.
Okay, she said. First, if you’re immortal, you won’t age, right? But everyone around you will. Your friends, your family—she tapped her chest—me, hopefully. You’ll watch everyone you care about grow old and fall sick and die, and at first you’ll grieve and move on and form new connections with new people. But you’ll keep using them up. Watching them wilt like spinach.
He nodded. Still listening.
And if you’re immortal, your perception of time will change, too. Ever notice how as you get older, time seems to accelerate? Picture that on warp speed. You’ll be on, like, your eighty-sixth wife and kids, with more descendants than you can possibly care about, and every birthday and graduation will race by in a heartbeat. You’ll start to wonder—what’s the point if they keep turning to dust, anyway?
And that’s not even the worst part.
Somewhere around here, she remembered to breathe.
Eventually, humanity will end. She lifted the bottle and took a long swig. You know it. I know it. Could be an asteroid. Nuclear war. Supernova. Or, in a few billion years, the sun will just swell up into a red giant and incinerate the earth anyway. Right? It’ll happen. And where does that leave Immortal Shawn? You can’t burn up or die. But the earth will be gone. No people, no cities, no ground to stand on. You’ll drift helplessly in the frictionless void of space for eternity. Unable to move and unable to die, no matter how desperately you’ll wish to. And I promise, you will.
Her voice lowered to a whisper.
Floating.
Forever alone.
Wishing you’d picked a different superpower.
She’d set the empty bottle between them like a mic drop. Silence again. Shawn had only stared at her over the forgotten chessboard, staring, staring, until she was certain she’d lost him, or worse, scared him, that the rest of the evening would go fine, but he would politely break up with her sometime next week in search of a less complicated model.
Instead, her future husband smiled.
You should talk more, he said.
Something about this gave Emma a chill.
It still does, six years later and three states west, at the snarling edge of the ocean. Cold seawater laps at her ankles now. Her sneakers are soaked.
There’s a violence to the storm swells on Strand Beach that entrances Emma. You can’t know it from the safety of the shore. You have to be there, with the salty vapor in your eyes, or better yet, inside it, as ten-foot breakers crash at your feet, pushing and pulling with a million rolling tons. Like standing at the edge of a meat grinder—a few steps farther and it’ll rip you away. Even the sound is deep enough to get lost in.
She whispers, “I miss you, Shawn.”
She listens to the roar for a moment longer.
And another.
Another.
Until the hairs on the back of her neck tingle and she imagines a lensed, veiny eyeball crawling up her back. All these weeks and it’s never occurred to her—despite the old man owning a damn telescope—that Deek might watch her at the beach. He obviously was yesterday. Now he’s worried about her, the poor decent guy.
She’d turn and wave cheerily to his house if she could. Nothing to see here.
Everything is fine.
Then she turns away from the ocean, as if it were all a normal afternoon walk, and heads home in wet, squelching shoes.
Everything is fine.
On the way, she notices a second trail of footprints in the dark sand alongside her own. Joggers do sometimes pass through here, although she can’t recall seeing a soul on the Strand today. She looks back, making sure the beach is still empty, and then she walks a little faster.
Everything is perfectly fine.