Every hair on my arms stood up. Something old spoke deep in my mind, something ancient and primitive that had nothing to do with my conscious thoughts and did not consult them.
My body wanted to run.
Not in the generalized, anxious, “I’m uncomfortable” way an introvert like me feels at a party. In the very different manner of a prey animal that has identified a predator animal and is now executing survival logic that long predates the capacity for rational thought.
I walked faster instead of bolting, because I was not prey, I was a law student who did bouldering on weekends, and I was not going to run for my life because of a spooky feeling.
By the time we were back to where we’d parked, the feeling had faded to something I could hold at arm’s length and analyze on the drive home. After a shower and a dinner of leftover green chili pasta eaten while standing over the sink, I put on a podcast about American Supreme Court oral arguments because while I enjoy bouldering, Iget offon Supreme Court oral arguments.
By ten o’clock I had myself mostly talked down and by eleven I was in bed. The city was making its regular sounds through the cracked window, and if I lay very still I could convince myself that the mountains were just mountains and whatever I’d felt up there was just a mood. I was probably about to start my period.
I almost believed it.
CHAPTER 1
Two nights later…
Katie
I was brushing my teeth when I heard it.
A thud. Muffled, like something heavy hitting drywall. Then a scraping sound that traveled the length of the shared wall between my apartment and Mark’s.
Pulling the toothbrush from my mouth, I stood motionless, minty foam gathering at the corners of my lips. The bathroom was small enough that the wall was within arm’s reach, and I pressed my palm flat against it. The plaster felt cool. Normal. But there it was again, a low, dragging rasp, as if someone were running their fingernails from floor to ceiling on the other side.
I spat into the sink, wiped my mouth, and padded barefoot to my front door. The hallway of our apartment building was the kind of place that tried hard to look charming and mostly succeeded during daylight hours. It had clay-colored walls, wrought ironsconces, and saltillo tile, but at eleven p.m. with half the bulbs burned out it just looked like a tunnel.
I knocked on Mark’s door.
Silence.
I knocked again, harder. “Mark? You okay in there?”
Footsteps approached, slow and measured, nothing like Mark’s usual loping shuffle. The deadbolt turned, and the door opened.
Mark stood in the gap, one hand on the frame. He was dressed, which was unusual for this hour. Jeans and a flannel shirt buttoned all the way to the collar.
I’d never seen him button a shirt past the third button in the four years I’d known him.
His Lobos cap was gone and his sandy hair lay flat against his skull as though it had been smoothed down with water. Or with a hand that wasn’t his.
“Hey.” His mouth formed the word correctly, but his eyes didn’t participate.
“Hey. I heard a noise through the wall. Sounded like something fell?”
“Nothing fell.”
I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. He just stood there in his buttoned-to-the-throat flannel, looking like some sort of store-brand Mark that came in a bag instead of a box. Everything was where it should be, the crooked nose from a bouldering fall in Cochiti, the faint sunburn across his cheekbones, the scar bisecting his left eyebrow, but the overall product felt off.
“You sure you’re alright?”
“I’m fine, Katie.”
He never called me Katie. It was alwaysK, ordude, orbro.
“Okay.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Well. If you need anything…”
“I don’t need anything. Good night.”
