“Getting sick of this shit.”
The next morning, Emma paces room to room and spreads a fine layer of sand under every door and windowsill. Just a dusting, too faint to draw the eye, but enough to imprint an intruder’s shoe treads. So next time—if there is a next time—she’ll have evidence.
She rechecks the doors. Still locked.
The ghost’s appearance was fuzzier this time. The night was stormy and the bedroom was near pitch-black. She sensed a humanoid shadow by the closet door, but she couldn’t make out any features at all. No hat. No coat. Through the haze of sleep, she couldn’t even be sure if he was really there at all, were it not for the small noise he made this time.
Scritch-scratch.
Just audible over the rainfall. Dry and papery.
Scritch-scratch.
It might have been this sound that woke her, subtle but alarmingly close. She can’t be certain what it was, exactly. It could have been as innocent as scratching an itch.
Scritch-scratch.
By the time she snapped fully awake, the bedroom was empty. Again.
Emma is still mostly convinced that she’s dreamt this figure. It’s the most logical explanation. The only logical explanation.
She’s been haunted by nightmares ever since she arrived here. And up until now it’s always been the same dream: that she’s trapped underwater. Far below and still plunging into frigid blackness, watching the watery stars fade above. Her mouth is open. She’s already inhaled. It’s already done and she has drowned, her lungs and throat and sinuses full of chilled seawater. But somehow, like Immortal Shawn, she’s not dead. She’s only awake and alone in darkness, at the end of the world.
She always tries to think about Shawn as she falls asleep—sometimes she even hears her own half-asleep voice slur his name—but it never works.
The same nightmare. Every night.
She was due a refresh, right?
Still, she checks the sand throughout the day. If her unknown friend enters—or exits—he’ll leave a shoeprint. And Emma will know.
“I’m not crazy.” She sips her tea.
Not crazy, Laika agrees.
She’s surprised by her own calmness. This can’t be how hauntings or home invasions usually go. But in truth, it’s another valuable distraction. With the cartloads of e-books slowly losing her interest, she finds it a relief to have a new project to focus her energy and intelligence upon. She knows that in the Hollywood version of this, she’s supposed to gasp and cower and wring her hands, but she truly hopes this stranger is real, because a serial killer would still only be Emma’s second-biggest problem.
Her biggest, she sees every day.
So often she forgets it’s there.
Next to the house’s back door, just beside her sandy sneakers, rests a frayed green Osprey backpack. She’s owned it since college. She’s taken it caving, mountain climbing, and hiking through the Grand Canyon on a six-day honeymoon trip with Shawn. It smells like sweat and trail dust, blisters and laughter, early morning granola bars and sex under the stars. But right now it weighs sixty pounds, its zippers bulging and fabric stuffed taut with rocks she can’t remember gathering.
SEE ANYONE SUSPICIOUS LAST NIGHT? she asks.
Deek frowns and shakes his head.
Then he writes: WHY?
She’s not sure how to answer this without sounding paranoid. Will the old prankster laugh at her? Will he even believe her? She almost tells him about the ghost in her bedroom, but decides she should leave out everything she can’t prove—which is basically everything. She tries to focus on Hangman, which she’s losing.
Another stick figure swings.
Today’s word? Deek fills in the letters. EMBOLISM
“Bastard.”
He smiles coyly in her telescope. But this also gives Emma an idea—because his first word, in their very first Hangman game over a month ago, was also medical: propofol (a powerful anesthetic, according to Google). Now embolism. Maybe Deek’s vocabulary is a tell. Maybe this will crack his mysterious past wide open.
She writes: YOU WERE A DOCTOR!
She underlines it twice.
Deek checks his telescope and then shakes his head. No.
NURSE?
No.
SOMETHING MEDICAL?
Still no.
“You know what? I don’t care.”
He grins and writes: YOU’LL NEVER GUESS
To Emma, this reads like a dark promise. “Yeah? Give me time, old man.”
Sometimes she examines the sum total of what she knows about her neighbor—his antique firearm on display, his penchant for “made you look” practical jokes, his isolated and alcohol-assisted life amid hoarded junk and memories—and wonders: Exactly who the hell are you?
And . . . can I trust you?
She isn’t naive.
Even her husband had secrets.
Years back, they were moving into their first apartment when one of Shawn’s Rubbermaid bins tipped in his truck. He’d been mortified when she saw inside it, like it contained human body parts instead of N Gauge sectional track. He was terrified of what she’d think of his hobby, and this broke Emma’s heart. She thought his model trains were fascinating. And even if she hadn’t, she would’ve lied.
That Christmas, she’d wanted to buy him a new locomotive, but the options were dizzying (and shockingly expensive), so she settled on a striped blue train conductor’s hat.
He’d laughed. Even I think this hat is fucking terrible.
It’s an atrocity, Emma agreed.
I love it.
I knew you would.
Afterward, he always wore that hat in his train basement. The year they married, he began construction of his largest layout yet—four feet by eight, a double-track masterpiece of rolling plaster hills and lichen shrubbery. An epic trestle. Two tunnels. A small town that gradually accumulated plastic buildings and cars. Emma was usually afraid to touch it, but sometimes she sat and watched her husband paint tiny boxcars or soak strips of plaster, as he explained every small step in building his miniature world.
In return, she taught him about the stars.
On clear nights they’d slide out the second-floor window onto the roof, after midnight when the city lights were dimmest. In the summer, she’d show him Aquila, Corona Borealis, and Cygnus. In the winter, Orion, Gemini, and the Bull’s Eye. Sometimes she named the constellations in Russian, the way her grandfather first taught her when she was five.
You never told me about your grandpa, Shawn said once as a shooting star traced overhead. Courtesy of the Perseids, a spectacular August meteor shower.
I don’t have many memories of him, Emma answered. This was true. And her family has always embarrassed her—her selfish and alcoholic mother, her Houdini-escape-act of a father, her uncertain family tree. She is the sole survivor of her own lineage, and only her grandfather truly lives in her heart. The rich, smoky scent to his clothes she always liked, that she associated with love and safety. The cigarettes that would later kill him.
Why do you like space so much? Shawn asked her.
She deflected. Why do you like model trains?
I’m serious.
She considered for a long moment.
Her husband was patient. He waited in silence, watching the sky for the next meteor.
It’s . . . it’s like being inside the oldest, greatest clock, she said finally. I don’t believe in God. But sometimes when I look out at the universe, I want to. There’s so much wonder out there. Planets made entirely of diamonds or ice, worlds where it rains molten glass whipped into knives by hurricane-force winds. Deep, dark places where the laws of physics as we understand them simply cease to be. Swirls of red and violet nebulae hundreds of light-years across. A human lifetime, traveling at the speed of light, couldn’t even cross a tiny fraction. She smiled. I guess I’m in love with the beauty and terror of it.
Shawn never interrupted her. But this time he came close.
I hope I have more time with you, he said abruptly. Like, I know statistically we probably have forty or fifty years together, give or take. Assuming you stop smoking.
I’ll quit, she promised.
But I hope there’s something after death, too. Because I know you’re right, that being immortal would be agony. But I guess . . . I guess I just want to know you for longer than forty years. It’s not enough time.
She stared down at the driveway. Tears prickled in her eyes.
I hope so, too, she said.
Shawn vowed he’d haunt her if he died first. She laughed and told him she expected nothing less. Wrapped in his arms, feeling warm and safe and small, she realized they weren’t even paying attention to the best meteor shower of the year.
He kissed the top of her head. I love you, Em.
I love you, too.
These nights were the exception, though.
More often, their comfortable evenings at home were spent apart. Rather than joining each other in their respective worlds, she would read alone with Laika curled at her feet while Shawn quietly toiled on his model trains downstairs.
She regrets this now.
You never know how finite your time together really is until it’s up.
Around noon, Emma’s flip phone vibrates on the dining table. An abrupt and shattering intrusion, as harsh as a buzz saw.
Nope, she thinks, raising her e-reader to ignore it.
Her phone rings again.
Still nope.
Buzz. A text message now.
Oh, come on.
Weeks ago, she unplugged the house’s landline phone and stuffed it in the pantry. This cell phone is a burner she bought in Idaho; a prepaid Cricket briquette that cost forty bucks at a Love’s truck stop. There’s only one person alive who knows this number.
“Jules.”
Which means it must be important.
Reluctantly Emma opens her phone and finds an image still loading, squeezing pixel by pixel through the sluggish Wi-Fi. She reads the text message first.
Emma LOOK what the doorbell camera saw last night
Strand Beach Police Department
Incident No. 000671-12C-2023
12:35 PST
Operator: Strand Beach Police.
Caller: Hi. I, uh, need to make an incident report for last night.
Operator: What’s your name?
Caller: Jules Phelps.
Operator: And what happened?
Caller: I’m in Portland for the winter, but my doorbell camera caught a weird man standing in front of my beach cabin last night. Really weird. I have a house-sitter there. Her name is Emma. She was home at the time. I’ll, uh, email you the photo—
Operator: What did this man look like?
Caller: I . . . don’t even know how to describe it.
Operator: Can you try?
Caller: Just have someone look at the photo, please.
Operator: And your house-sitter—
Caller: Her name is Emma.
Operator: She didn’t see this man?
Caller: No. She says she’d noticed something set off the motion lights, but she didn’t open the front door. I’m so glad she didn’t.
It’s just . . . I don’t know. Emma is just a young woman living alone with her dog, defenseless, all the way up the Strand, with no help for miles.
She must be absolutely terrified.
“There you are,” Emma whispers.
Jules’s doorbell camera photo has finally loaded in black-and-white night vision. In the grainy foreground stands a figure, big-bellied and broad-shouldered.
Its face isn’t human.
It has no mouth. Its lips seem to have grown together and fused with ropy flesh. Its skin is rubbery, its eyes sunken and unreadable. Two tall black horns protrude from its brow, curved and goatlike. The image is time-stamped for last night.
She remembers being so close to opening the door. The latch just a free-floating millimeter from unlocking, her fingers wrapped around the doorknob. Just a twist.
So close.
It’s difficult to tell in low resolution, but based on the orientation of the porch railing, the stranger in a Halloween demon mask seems to be standing just off-center. To the left of the door, just outside the peephole’s view. Exactly as she suspected. Waiting for Emma to open the door.
Laika chuffs. I told you.
This is vindicating. Her ghost is real. She’s not crazy. And it’s not lost on Emma that as deviously as this stranger avoided her view through the peephole, he overlooked the doorbell camera. He allowed himself to be photographed in close-up. The cops can practically read the Walmart barcode on his rubber mask.
“Dumbass.”
Jules has already called the police. And via text she confesses—with an apology—that her prior house-sitters have reported similarly unsettling nighttime incidents. Most notably: Jules’s son stayed here last winter, and one night in January he’d heard loud barking echo up from the beach. This wasn’t unusual—just a stray dog or coyote—until he realized it wasn’t an animal at all. It was a human voice pretending, yipping, snarling, howling. It seemed to subside after a few minutes. Then, after midnight, he awoke to hear a stranger circling the house, quietly testing the locked doors and windows with timid clicks and gentle exploratory taps. A dry run for a burglary, perhaps.
This is why Jules has motion lights.
And a doorbell camera.
You could’ve mentioned that in the Craigslist ad, lady.
With just under seven hundred permanent residents, Strand Beach is remote but hardly crime-free. Transients sometimes make camp by the rocky seawall at the island’s northernmost edge. Every summer, a few returning families find their cabins ransacked by squatters. Darker things have happened here, too. In 2011 a local high schooler famously went missing, and only the girl’s purse was found washed ashore, waterlogged and empty. Speculation still abounds on her true fate. This explains a mournful signboard Emma remembers reading in front of a local church: happy 26th birthday, laura b. we miss u
According to Jules, local police will monitor the house and check in regularly. The island’s unique geography means all traffic must first pass through town before reaching Emma’s house, creating a secure bottleneck. What else can you do? Emma can’t leave. Without this lease she’s homeless again, and she doesn’t know a single person within a thousand miles. And technically, no crime has been committed.
Yet.
Unless Emma can prove she wasn’t dreaming, that the figure wasn’t just at her door but physically inside the house. Which she plans to do.
Tonight.
She has a plan.
In the meantime, she’s getting annoyed by Jules’s incessant texts. Every time she manages to focus on her book (which is already difficult, as the novel’s detective duo has an embarrassingly hard time catching a killer who repeatedly puts himself on a damn guest list), a grating electric buzz jolts her back out.
Emma THANKS AGAIN for watching my house
She’s welcome.
I SO appreciate it
Yep.
Sorry about the weirdo
It’s fine.
My son said the isolation REALLY got to him some nights out there. He always felt like someone was watching him through the windows. Crouched in the tall grass. Waiting. And he’s a man, so he didn’t even have to worry about being raped.
Jesus Christ, lady.
Want me to order you a Taser? I found a good one
Emma starts to type: Oh, wow. That’s nice of you to offer, but that sounds too expensi—
Buzz! Another text.
Too late, bought you a stun gun
Buzz!
Five stars on Amazon
Buzz!
Wait, not sure if batteries are included
Buzz!
Yes they are
Emma silences her phone. Then she sets down her e-reader—still unable to focus—and goes to smoke her daily cigarette through the tiny laundry room window. As she cranks her plastic fan, she can’t help but scan the tall grass outside for a crouched figure. His motives still unknown.
Jules has no idea who the stranger is.
Nor do the police.
But as Emma pinches and bags her cigarette, she realizes: I might.