“Did you leave the letter yesterday?” Aidan whispers. He’s pressed almost entirely into my back as we stand there in the alley listening to the drip from the guttering.
I glance up at the faded brick and boarded-up windows to the high roofline above where a grimey satellite dish juts into the sky. I can’t believe people live here, and I can’t believe I’m standing in this alley with my best friend in our school uniforms. The navy blazers and crisp khaki pants feel like big red targets in such a rundown neighborhood. I know we shouldn’t be here, and I know I shouldn’t have brought Aidan, but I was scared to come alone.
I’m even more scared when I knock again and no one answers, nothing happens. The warped steel of the door is wedged tight into the jamb, and the knob doesn’t turn at all when I try. A square of thick glass woven with metal provides no view at all of what lies beyond the door. Rusted bolts secure an equally rusted letterbox to the inset niche of the doorway, and I peek inside again to see the envelope with my letter is gone.
“Yeah,” I say to Aidan. “I left my letter.”
I didn’t let Aidan see what I wrote, but he knows exactly why I’m here. We’ve been friends since the third grade, ever since my mom and his mom started playing bridge together on Saturdays at the country club. He’s the type of friend to keep a secret, but I’m not sure he believes me. What I wrote in that letter, about the boat and everything I see, he knows the story, but I’m not sure he believes me. No one believes me, but I think the person on the other side of this door might.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe no one’s here. I knock again, louder, almost hurting my knuckles with the furious pounding.
“Hey!” I shout, loud as I dare. “Hey, open up! Please! I’m the one who wrote to you!”
Aidan grabs my arm. “Ethan!” he hisses. His round eyes go even rounder in his round face.
He was pudgier as a kid, faintly freckled and full of dimples, but puberty eased out some of the awkwardness and turned him out okay. He’s got this curly blonde hair that’s so pale it’s nearly milk, and I know of at least two girls in school with crushes on him now.
I kind of had a crush on him when we were thirteen, but mostly because I was starting to realize what was wrong with me. Before I ever fell from the boat, I mean, and became even more wrong than ever. No, back then I was just realizing how much more I like Aidan’s dimpled cheeks and pasty-pale chest when we’d go swimming together at the country club. I was supposed to watch the girls in their bikinis, but I spent too much time watching my best friend.
Much as it’s mean to think I don’t find Aidan so attractive anymore, it’s a relief not to have an awkward crush on my best friend. Sometimes though, I wonder if maybe I shouldn’t have tried going for him after all.
“Ethan,” he hisses again. I let my mind wander, with him so close and pressed against me in the narrow brick nook. “Ethan, let’s go. No one’s here.”
I wonder if he thinks I’m being crazy again. He’s too sweet to ever say it, but I wonder anyway. “You can go,” I say. “I’m going to wait. Maybe he’s not just here yet.”
“You don’t even know this person,” Aidan says. “You can’t trust the stuff you read on the internet, Ethan. I know you’re good with computers and the black web–”
“Dark web,” I tell him. “It’s called the dark web, or deep web, and it’s just parts of the internet you can’t find on Google. You always act like I’m breaking the law just looking at it.”
“It’s where you can hire a hitman or buy drugs or talk to pedophiles, you mean. You’re going to get in so much trouble if your parents ever figure out you spend all that time online looking at that stuff.”
“I’m not trying to hire a hitman. That’s not the stuff I look at. I just want answers.” I kick at the door in frustration, but the leather toe of my Oxfords don’t make a dent.
“Ethan…”
The look he gives me is one I hate. It’s that one where he doesn’t believe me anymore, where he thinks he already knows all the answers and doesn’t understand why I don’t accept it. It’s the same look I used to get from my mom and my therapist, before I started lying better about it.
Suddenly we both hear it. Aidan flinches and grabs my arm to tug me back a step. The metal-on-metal slide of the lock is followed by the steel door snapping open a few inches. I only see darkness and the glint of a heavy chain.
“You wrote the letter?”
The voice is husky, warm, shiver-inducing and just what I expected.
I swallow dust and terror. “Yeah.”
“And him?”
I tilt my head some to try seeing past the sliver of darkness and then look at Aidan’s terrorized expression. “A friend,” I say.
“He stays. You come in.”
Aidan grabs my arm again. “Ethan,” he whispers. “Ethan, don’t do this. Let’s go.”
“Okay,” I say to the darkness. And then to Aidan, “Okay. It’s okay. Wait here for me.”
Aidan looks up and down the alley. “Here?” he asks. He’s already pale enough without going white-faced with fear on me like this.
“Or go wait in the car. Circle the block or something, I’ll call you when I’m done. Okay? Please,” I beg him. “Please, Aidan.”
“God, Ethan, just be safe.” His arms go around me in a fast hug before he steps back. He’s got these big brown eyes, puppy dog eyes, and they’re full of worry as I square my shoulders and face the steel door.
The door closes enough for the chain to slide back, and then it opens again. I step forward into the darkness, and before my eyes can adjust the steel door slams shut. A man’s shadow steps around me and works closed the lock and chain.
He’s tall, broad-shouldered and strong through the jaw, with a short shag of inky-black hair. Darkness swathed one side of his face as he turns to look at me, and as my eyes adjust further to the dim light I see it’s an eyepatch he’s wearing. The eye watching me is dark and knowing, like it can see right through me. I shiver, even though the air is warm.
Heavy scents of incense and melting wax threaten to choke me. Across the room I see glimmering candles set into a bowl of blood-red glass rocks, and the strange lighting flickers over all the shadows that make up the small entry. There’s a dark curtain swept across the back part of the room and another curtain guarding a doorway to our left.
“This way,” he says. I follow him through the curtain to find stairs. We go up, up, and up. I count the floors and feel my stomach roll as there’s one too many. I counted three floors from the outside, but there’s four landings.
He stops at the top and looks at me with that same piercing gaze. “You are certain about this?”
There’s a slight accent to the words, something mysterious in a way that’s suiting, a way that should be cliche but isn’t. Everything about this is what I expected and yet so awful, so real, not crazy just like I’m not crazy but maybe I wish I was. It’d be easier if I was.
My hands start to shake and sweat. “You read my letter?”
“I read your letter,” he says.
I shiver again, that voice of his seeping into my bones like cold autumn chill. “Then you know I’m sure.”
He nods and leads me down a short hallway to another curtain. His hand presses on the fabric but doesn’t whisk it aside. I see flickering light escape along the floor and wall as the velvet curtain sways. “It is not too late to leave.”
“I’m sure,” I tell him. “I want to know.”
“I was afraid you would say that.” He pushes the curtain aside, and the room beyond is everything I expected to find and worse.
Spread across the wooden floor are russet lines and symbols, an unmistakeable pentagram drawn in what I fiercely hope isn’t but know for sure is blood. Old blood, obviously old blood, everything about it looks old and worn. A long table runs along the far wall. Bones, candles, books, silver knives and bowls, all manner of things like this is some Halloween display. It’d be hokey, it’d seem fake, if not for the fact I know I counted three floors but walked up four flights of stairs.
“Go in,” he says.
I shuffle into the room. I’m scared to step on any part of the giant pentagram, so I have to edge along the wall toward the table.
“You can sit,” he says. It’s only when he gestures that I see the two folding chairs leaned up in the corner. Just the two chairs, like he was expecting to do this, and I don’t even know what to think about that.
I take one, pop it open, and sit. He comes over and does the same. I look up at the light fixture and then feel my mouth go to dust again when there isn’t one. The room flickers as if a huge candelabra should be up there swinging, but there isn’t one. There are no windows, no lit candles, just all this flickering light in a room I know shouldn’t exist.
My knees start shaking. I have to put my equally shaking hands between them and clench everything together to stop the trembling. I think about the boat, the water, everything I’ve seen and that voice calling to me the other night — I think about all that, and I am so scared.
He crosses his long, lean legs and rests easy in the chair. He’s wearing perfectly normal clothes, just boots and jeans with a tight black shirt that shows his strong biceps. He’s possibly one of the most handsome men I’ve ever seen, and that kind of thinking makes heat rise in my face. I feel so impossibly young and stupid in that moment, sitting there in my school uniform.
I know what I look like. I’ve got big blue eyes and my mom’s pretty face, a soft tousle of bright gold hair, my biceps aren’t bulging with muscles but are just sleek and pale, I’m not as small as Aidan but no one’s ever going to expect me on the football field. I look young. I am young. I know he’s looking at me and just seeing a dumb rich kid, a perfect fish out of water, but that’s not my fault. I don’t know what happened to the boy that fell off his dad’s boat, but I’m the kid they pulled back out and got to breathing again. I’m the kid sitting here knowing that if anyone’s going to have answers for me, it’s this handsome one-eyed man in a room without shadows.
“So, your letter,” he says.
When he says nothing else, I just have to nod and say, “My letter.”
He watches me for a long moment and then shifts to recross his legs in a different casual fashion. “This room,” he says. “Is it bright or dark?”
“Bright,” I tell him. “There are no shadows, not even under the table or under you. Nothing in this room has a shadow, and nothing in this room casts light.”
A slow, lazy smile spreads over his face. “No shadows,” he agrees.
I pull my lower lip into my teeth. “So it’s real? I’m not crazy?”
He laughs, low and chuckling so that I shiver again for the rumbling sound of it. He’s only sitting there, watching me with a strange, knowing smile and looking at me with a piercing eye that seems to see everything.
“You could be crazy. How is it I would know? But, these things that you see. That you see them, it does not make you crazy. I see them, too, and know many others the same. You had to know already, to have written such a letter and left it for me here.”
The breath I release is one I have held for so long. Perhaps it’s the breath I held going into the water when I was fourteen. I laugh some, so relieved that I could cry, and rub at my face. This is happening, this is real, if nothing else I know that I’m not alone anymore.
I start to explain, and it turns rambling from how nervous I am. “I saw online, I saw that this place, you, people talk about the kind of stuff that happens here, the kind of stuff you can do, about talking to the dead and curses, or breaking curses, and I just thought if anyone could help it would be this place, you, so I just…”
I see the man look confused at first, and I stop talking once he starts to look angry.
“Who is it that says these things?” he demands. “Who has told you these things of me?”
“I – I don’t know, the internet. Forums. Internet forums.”
He stares at me, and I brush a hand against my side to feel the reassuring rectangle lump of my phone. I told Aidan I would call, and Aidan knows where I am. Then again I counted three floors and went up four flights of stairs.
“Forums,” he repeats.
“Yeah. Um, occult forums. A lot of them are obviously fake, um, or voodoo type stuff, Santeria or Wiccans, but this one, I just … I felt like it was right. It looked right, when I got here. I felt it was right. I knew you could help me.”
“You felt drawn here,” he says. He nods, satisfied with that answer when he wasn’t before. Suddenly I wonder if he even knows about the internet, and I feel an anxious burst of terror that he might not know about something so basic as the internet.
“Tell me of this that saw you back,” he says. “Your letter told of something that saw you.”
I nod and tuck my hands into my knees again. “I saw a man, a dead man. Car accident, I think, because he was in the street, and he was all beat apart and bloody.” I shudder and close my eyes, feeling sick all over again. My grandfather died in his sleep, so it was parchment paper skin and wispy white hair, dark-staring hollow eyes. Not everyone dies so peacefully as Poppa.
“Normally they never see me. They don’t seem to see anything, they’re just … there. Not even where they died, I don’t think, I don’t know, but this one was in the street. I tried not to look. I didn’t want to look, but I saw him staring at me.” My palms itch with sweat as I rub them on the khaki press of my knees. “I crossed the street, and his head turned to keep watching me. But I don’t – I don’t think it was him. I’m not sure. It didn’t seem like him, the dead guy, I mean–”
He holds up a hand to stop my rambling, mercifully stopping me from needing to explain further. “Something used this dead man’s eyes to see you.”
Cold terror crushes my chest. He says it so casually, as if offering me a perfectly reasonable explanation. I don’t understand any of this, what it means that I see the dead or why he would say something used a dead man’s eyes to watch me cross the street. I wish I was only crazy. I wish so desperately that I was only crazy.
“Tell me of this voice. The one that calls for you.”
It takes me a moment to unglue my tongue from the dry roof of my mouth. “What should I say?”
“Does it call by name?” he asks, tone sharp.
“No. No, not my name. It’s not even words, or at least, I don’t think I understand them if they are. Or I mean I can’t tell you what it said. Just that I heard it calling for me. I – I’m sorry I can’t explain it any better than that. I didn’t understand the words, but I understand what they meant.”
He nods slowly. “I will tell you now, and this is important so hear me well. Never give the truth of your name. What it is you were called, before you knew to call yourself, it is powerful. Hold it close and guard it well. Is this understood?”
“Yes,” I say. “I think so. I mean, It’s like the internet, um, a username. How I signed my letter?” He really doesn’t know about the internet, I can see by the way brows draw tight. I swallow nothing and say, “Understood.”
“If this voice that calls you were to call you by name, you would answer,” he says. “Is this call one you want to answer?”
I hesitate before shaking my head. “No. I guess not. I don’t want anything to do with this. I want – I want it to stop. Can you make it stop?” I lean forward some, hands clutched between my knees. “Can you make me normal again?”
He laughs, and there is no kindness in it. “No,” he says. “If that is the help you ask, go ask someone else. You are as you are. I am not to change that, and you must know this of yourself. Is this understood?”
My shoulders sag with disappointment, but I nod. “Am I in danger? That voice I heard, this call I heard, what is it?”
One of his shoulders lifts and then falls with wanton disregard. “Without knowing, how can I say? You should not have come here. I will help you to forget these things, so you will not know them any longer. That is best, I think, than what you ask of me. I cannot take this from you, is this understood? It is yours now. But I will help you forget it.”
“I don’t understand,” I say. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“You wish not to see such things, not to hear such a voice call you?”
I nod eagerly, and I see him smile in a way that is neither kind nor cruel.
“It will cost,” he warns. “What you ask of me. It will cost.”
“I don’t care,” I say. “Anything. I just want it to stop. I don’t want anything to do with this stuff.”
He smiles again in that same way, so I don’t know if he’s mocking me or sad for me. “You do not even know what it is you deny.”
“You’re right. I don’t. And I don’t want to know.” I’m deciding this as I say it, but I know it’s true. “I just wanted to know if it was real. Now I know I’m not crazy, but, I think I might go crazy if I have to keep seeing dead people everywhere and hearing voices. Once I saw something, I thought I saw something, like a – a double-vision, of a woman walking only I saw her and I didn’t see her, and I just – I don’t want to see anything like that ever again. I want to be the kid that hit his head and fell. Please, I want to be him again.”
The tears are messy, embarrassing, and I hate them. I hate myself for crying like this. It’s all this relief and fear pouring out of me, so that I bury my face into my hands and hunch low on the folding chair. I’m such a dumb kid and know it, but I want to be a dumb kid.
I want to worry about midterms and college admissions. I want to worry about trying to tell my mom I’d rather ask Aidan to prom than Stacy Gershwin, instead of having to worrying about lying to my mom that everything’s fine, I’m not crazy, it was just stress and now I’m okay. I don’t want to lie awake anymore so scared of what I might see, what I might hear, and what it means. I don’t even want to know why anymore. I just want it to stop.
A hand rubs over the hunched line of my back. It’s the man’s hand, warm and strong, so that I feel a weird flutter that stifles my tears.
“I will help you,” he says. “Ach, you are young. I will help you.”
I stop crying, embarrassed, and peek up from between my fingers. He straightens away from where I’m sitting and nods, firm and precise. As I watch, he walks to the table and pushes aside a stack of books.
“I have money,” I think to say. “If this is expensive. I can pay you.”
When he smiles over his shoulder at me it’s with kindness, finally, so that I feel absurdly guilty for my tears. I pull upright and wipe at my cheeks. I start to smile, but that lasts only until I see him turn around holding a knife in one hand.
“Go to the center,” he says. He nods at the pentagram on the floor, and I am paralyzed with fear.
Somehow I get to my feet. I step gingerly over the red-mud stains that must be blood, old blood, so much blood to have made this, and he is standing there with a knife watching me with that one dark eye. Worse is the pull I feel that tells me where the exact center of the star is, so that I stand precisely with my feet together as if magnetized. I hold my hands straight down at my sides. I don’t tremble, because I can’t move. I lock into place.
He approaches with the knife and bowl but does not cross the sweeping curve of the circle. He walks along it instead, just outside the faded lines. “Are you certain this cost is one you will pay?”
It is only because I can feel the vibration in my throat that I know it is my voice that answers. “Yes.”
“Are you certain this desire is one you want granted?”
“Yes,” the vibration says again.
I am without fear, without thought, without anything other than watching him circle. My eyes don’t move, nothing in me moves except my lungs and heart, but yet I see him walk the circle all the same. He walks the circle around me and then comes forward along one of the slanted lines of the star.
“Look at me,” he commands.
I look. I see his hand lift, the hand holding the knife. I feel nothing, no fear, no concern, no flinch of pain as the knife descends into my eye. There is darkness and wet dripping, this room without shadows fading. I am nothing, I am nowhere, I am under the water again with my head a brilliance of split skin and agony, I am not that moment because that moment is not me and never was, oh I am none of these things and all these things and dizzy with it, oh I am none of these things and nothing, I am nothing, there is nothing.
I wake with a scream. I strangle the sound into quiet as soon as I realize it’s happening, as soon as I realize that I am awake. I don’t remember sleeping. I’m in the room without shadows lying on the floor, the ceiling above so simple and strange with all the light that shouldn’t be seen.
As I lift my head and try to make sense of things, I see him sitting in the corner on the folding chair. His legs are crossed so casually as he watches me. Even the eyepatch seems to be staring, and it’s the closest thing to a shadow in the room.
Memory lashes like a whip, and I slap a hand over my face. I blink several times and feel frantically for anything missing, anything stabbed. I rub at my eyes until tender technicolor blooms over the red-black glow of my closed lids.
“Easy,” he says. The word is thick, not just from his nothing accent. I swallow nothing, there is nothing. I’ve forgotten nothing and remember everything.
I bolt to my feet. “Is it done?” I think to ask. I scratch dry palms over my khakis and look down at the bright red lines crossing the floor. Bright without shadows, and my loafered feet shuffle against the floor. I feel no different, but something’s happened, he’s done something.
“It is done,” he affirms. He walks to the curtain and casts it back. “Go home. Do not look close at things you do not wish to see. Try to forget, Abel.”
I leave, I run down three flights of stairs, I burst out the warped metal door into the fading twilight and see it’s been two hours since I left Aidan. Two hours, and three flights of stairs, my hands are shaking as I call him. I’m going to forget all about this.
“Ethan!” he bursts. “Thank God! Okay, where can I pick you up?”
“Um, same place. Same place, I’m here in the alley –” I hang up and run to the street. I bounce anxiously until Aidan’s rambling old sedan putters up to the curb. I maul open the car door and throw myself inside.
His eyes are as round as his nose. “How’d it go?”
“Fine. Fine — I think, I don’t know yet. He did something, it’s fine.” I push my feet into the floorboard of the passenger seat and sink down low with my arms crossed. “He said he’d help me, so, I guess I’ll just wait and see. We don’t have to talk about it. It’s fine.”
Aidan drives me home, he stays for dinner, we go to school, I don’t see one dead thing for the rest of the semester except a splattered bug on his car’s windshield. Until the dead cat starts talking to me, everything’s fine.