of anyone. I saw no one, but that feeling of being watched remained, a prickling at the back of my neck.
The shovel felt heavy.
God help me. I plunged it into the dirt and began to dig.
The ground was softer than I expected.
2
Elfrieda Leech sat up in her bed and cocked her head.
She heard something.
A creak of the floorboards, the groan of old wood.
The numbers on the analog alarm clock beside her bed flipped from 3:03 in the morning to 3:04 with a slight mechanical whir and the click of plastic on plastic.
As she did every night, Elfrieda set the thermostat in the hallway to seventy before going to bed—seventy-two during the daytime, seventy for bed, always—yet her bedroom felt horribly cold. She listened for the steady drone of the furnace but heard nothing.
An icy breeze slipped over the nape of her neck and her shoulders, and that wasn’t right, either. She never opened the windows.
Never.
Another creak. From the hallway this time, she was certain of that.
Elfrieda kept a loaded .38 in her nightstand drawer. She also had one in her dresser, another taped to the back of the toilet, two more in the living room (the first under the left couch cushion and the second taped to the bottom of the end table) and yet another in the kitchen on the counter in a metal tin labeled flour. Although she had never fired a single shot, each weapon was cleaned and meticulously oiled every other Thursday. The first had been purchased two days after she was attacked by those horrible people in white, the ones who wanted things that did not belong to them. She purchased the others in the years following, after deciding she no longer wanted surprises in her life. First only one, then the second when she realized she couldn’t get to that first gun hidden in the bedroom if she was in the kitchen, then the others when she decided a weapon should always be within arm’s reach, regardless of where she was in her apartment. She nearly bought one for her purse too, but that seemed silly since she no longer left home. The nice man who had sold them to her did so over the phone and even delivered for an additional fee.
The .38 from her nightstand felt cold and heavy in her hand as she quietly lowered her feet to the floor and crossed the room, ignoring the arthritic pain burning in her legs.
Although she lived alone, she aways closed and locked her bedroom door. A yellow bathrobe hung from a hook on the back of her door. She pushed the robe aside and pressed her ear against the wood. The door was solid wood, not that cheap pressboard junk they sold today, but a thick slab of oak, original to the apartment.
She heard nothing.
Elfrieda began to wonder if she heard anything at all. Maybe it was nothing more than the settling of the old building or the expanding and contracting of the structure itself as it always did when spring ushered away the cold grip of winter. Maybe she dreamed the sound, imagined the sound entirely, maybe—
Another squeak.
The board beneath her bare left foot moved slightly when weight found that same board on the opposite side of the door.
Somebody was standing there.
Elfrieda drew in a deep breath, tried to steady the hand holding the .38—she was shaking so. “I have a gun!”
Her intended shout came out muffled and weak, the thick wood of the door eating her words.
From the other side came a man’s voice—soft, pure. Sounding more like the music created by a finely tuned set of chimes than the spoken word. “I know you have a gun. You need to put the gun down and unlock the door.”
Elfrieda set the gun down on the top of the dresser and flipped the lock on the doorknob.
“Now open the door and step back,” the voice said.
She did so without any hesitation.
The door swung open. A man was standing there. He had dark hair and darker eyes and a smile that somehow put her at ease, even though that was darkest of all. Behind him stood two women in long, white coats. Both watched but remained silent.
As Elfrieda completed each instruction, she wondered why she was doing as she was told. She didn’t want to. She wanted to point the gun at the center of this man’s chest and pull the trigger and keep pulling the trigger until the chamber clicked empty. She