The Cellar Rock Knocker

by Paul R. Panossian

Celine dialed Alton Summers, and put it on speaker so Evan could take notes. Summers was the last on the list of names they’d been assigned, and Evan secretly hoped he didn’t answer. They’d racked up several deliveries already, and given the roads’ present condition, he wasn’t sure how this would go.

To his relief, the call went to voicemail after a single ring.

“Hello, Mr. Summers,” Celine said, reciting the script she’d repeated thirty times now. “I’m calling on behalf of Blue Ridge Samaritans. We’re doing welfare checks and free deliveries of food, water, and other supplies to anyone who needs them. If any of that interests you, give me a call at–” she counted off her number, and hung up.

“Well,” Evan said, scrawling “no answer” by Summers’s name, “one less trip to make.”

Celine eyed him from the driver's seat. “Got somewhere better to be?”

He flashed a toothy grin. “Only you would find a way to work when everything in a two-hour radius is closed.”

She served him a hearty whack on the shoulder. “We’re doing something nice,” she scolded. “You can always be a degenerate–”

The phone went off.

Evan sighed as he crossed out the note he’d just made.

“Hello?” Celine answered, shooting Evan a silent warning to behave. “Is this Alton Summers?”

“I apologize for missing your call, miss,” an elderly voice shout-spoke on the other end. “I had to make sure you were real, cause, well, you know these days...”

Evan bit a fist to restrain a guffaw, which Celine permitted with the thinnest crease of a smile. There had been some pretty odd ducks on their list, but that was a new one. 

“Yes, sir, we're very real,” she assured him, not missing a beat. “Just calling to see if you were in need of–”

“Can you send someone to check on my neighbors?” Summers interrupted.

“Your neighbors?” Celine trailed, grasping for a reply outside her canned lines.

“Mikey Scepter and his wife Donna,” Alton explained. His rushed holler made Evan suspect this was a story he’d been dying to tell someone. “They was passing by with their boy every mornin’ after the storm, but nobody’s shown in the past couple days, and I can’t reach ‘em by phone. I’d go myself, but my drive is blocked, and after my hip…I don’t think I’d make it down the hill.”

Celine seized on his defeated silence to bring him back into her wheelhouse. “Were they bringing you food or–”

“I’m good on food,” Summers huffed, as if the suggestion was irrelevant. “We was just checkin’ on each other is all. You know, how folks do.”

They did know. They’d seen it over and over in the wake of the storm. There had been no opportunistic spike in crime, no looting, no violence. Just neighbors looking out for one another in their time of need. The hurricane might have torn their city apart, but its inhabitants had taken those ragged edges and knitted them back together tighter than ever.

Evan surmised that was part of what had inspired Celine to volunteer.

The rest was simple restlessness. Bringing food and water from the relief station to the elderly and disabled in their building took them a couple hours at most, and that included lingering in the ever-open doorways to trade on the latest news and rumors. Once that was done, there was little left to do but drink the day away until the power came back on. Which was fine with Evan. He had a case of warm beer, and a shelf of novels to read by candlelight, but Celine seemed desperate for more.

She’d found her way to his place the night of the storm, and, much to Evan’s pleasure, hadn’t left since. They’d been anchors for each other in those first harrowing days when the flood waters had yet to recede and the scope of the disaster was known solely by what information trickled in by word of mouth.

Once the situation stabilized, though, and they fell into a routine, Evan had noticed a pernicious silence taking residence in the idle hours. Was it boredom? Or stress? Or doubt about the future? Or, he’d wonder in the growing lapses, was it him? So when she’d mentioned the Samaritans, he'd jumped at the chance to show the former girl down the hall he had more to offer than a couch and a bed.

It seemed to be working, too. The strain had gone out of their interactions almost at once, and they started joking again and trading jabs.

Evan just hoped as Summers rambled on, they hadn't bitten off more than they could chew.

“Mikey said he’d be by with his chainsaw,” Summers was saying, “and we'd get that damn pine cleared off my drive. That was two days ago.”

“Have you tried calling the police?” Celine cut in. 

“Gave ‘em a ring yesterday mornin’,” Summers said. “Soon as phone service came back. Told me they'd add ‘em to the list. But then I hear the deputy in the background say he heard the boy, Tommy, the other evenin’ by the trail to Cellar Rock Park.”

“Maybe their phones were off. Or out of battery?”

“Nah, that aint right,” Summers said. “What’s a five-year-old doin’ out there in the dark?”

“They could have lost track of time,” Celine offered noncommittally. “So Mr. Summers, we’re also delivering cases of bottled water, as well as buckets of grey water for flushing toilets. Do you think you could use anything like that?”

A pause followed, during which the thunder of generators and helicopters filtered through the windows.

“I’ll take the bottled,” Summers answered.

Evan noted it on the list.

“Perfect,” Celine chimed, “You said you were by Cellar Rock?”

“Uphill from the rock,” Summers confirmed, giving an address that Evan jotted down—not without some dismay at the unfamiliar zip code.

“One more thing,” Summers added. “I’m probably bein’ overcautious, but it’s maybe safer y’all don’t knock when ya get here.”

“Overcautious of what, sir?” Celine asked. She wasn’t leaving that to chance, and Evan loved her for it. He’d lost track of the times the volunteer coordinator had emphasized staying safe.

“I guess I probably shouldn’t be saying this. Don't want y’all thinkin’ old Alton’s lost his marbles.” He chuckled, though Evan thought it sounded forced. “It’s just been a little strange out here since the storm. People was always superstitious ‘round these parts, and we had a major landslide at the rock, which if you know the legend…”

Evan, who’d been in the area for just short of a year, raised an eyebrow, but Celine nodded, and he made a mental note to pick her brain about it later.

“Anyway,” Summers carried on, “Few mornings back, Mikey comes by like he done every day, ‘cept this time he’s alone. And lookin’ like hell: hair stickin’ up like fingers been runnin’ through it, face pale as a fishbelly, and rings round the eyes dark as a raccoon’s. And I see he’s taken to wearin’ a sidearm. Now, folks out here are pretty passionate about their 2A, but Mikey was never one to open carry. When I ask, ‘where’s the family?’ he gives me this look like I’d made an off-color comment ‘bout his lady or somethin’. He stops at the top of the stairs and says, ‘Alton, were you pokin’ round my place last night?’

“Missy, I was struck speechless. ‘Me?’ I says once I’d got my bearings. ‘At your place? How do you reckon I’d do that, Mikey?’

“Y’all won’t see it till you get round my way, but that pine layin’ cross my drive comes up to my chest, and it's a long way down the hill to the road. What with my hip, I been more or less homebound for now.

“I guess Mikey’s been takin’ this all in for hisself, cause it looks like every muscle in his body went loose.

“‘I dunno what else to think, Alton,’ he cried and slumped down on my porch rocker so hard, it banged the sidin’.

“So I asks him, ‘Think ‘bout what?’

“And he says, ‘The knockin’!’

“‘Knockin?’ I says. ‘Like visitors?’

“‘No,’ he says, his head hanging ‘tween his knees. ‘Like somethin’ else.’”

“Like pranksters?” Celine suggested, and Evan didn’t care for the sudden intrigue in her voice. The last thing they needed was to get sucked into some senile delusion.

“That’s what I thought, too,” Summers said, “but supposedly they kept at it, and when Donna told him not to answer, they started in on the walls. Then the roof! Imagine that! Sharp little taps, he said, in groups of threes.

“‘So how’d I get mixed up in this?’ I ask. ‘Sounds like an animal.’

“Mikey bowed even lower, and talked into his boots, and what he told me made me go cold all over. ‘Cause it wasn't just knockin’, Alton,’ he said. ‘It was talkin’, too. And the voice on the other side sounded like you.’”

“Okay, Mr. Summers,” Celine interjected in a tone that said she'd heard enough. “We’ve got a lot of deliveries today so if all you need is that water, we’ve gotta get moving.”

“It’s true!” Summers belted, realizing he’d taken it too far. “And he said there were strange footprints by the crik–”

Celine let out an audible sigh. “If you feel unsafe, sir, we can arrange for an extraction team to come get you.”

“And go where?” Summers asked, seemingly offended at the very suggestion. “Some shelter downtown? I been in this house more’n thirty years. I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

“Well then,” Celine said, her service rep jingle restored, “if that’s everything, we’ll see you in a few hours.”

“My neighbors,” Summers barked. “While you’re out here, can ya check on them, too?”

Another sigh, right into the receiver. “What’s their address?”

He told them and Evan put it down next to Summers’s.

Celine ended the call promptly after that. Before she could, though, Summers managed to toss in: “Oh, and probably best not to knock on their door, either. Mikey said next time, he’d be greetin’ those clowns with his shotgun.”

“We really doing this?” Evan asked, tapping the Scepters’ address.

“You mean you don't wanna find out if they’ve been abducted by evil spirits?” Celine grinned from behind the wheel. There was a gleam in her eyes; a daredevil sizing up their next jump, and in that moment, her sweat-salted skin aglow, her unkempt hair burning in a golden shaft, Evan thought she’d never been more beautiful. Despite all the loss and uncertainty of the past week, right there by her side was the only place he cared to be.

His immediate instinct was to lean in and kiss her. Instead, all he said was, “You’re way too nice.”

She rolled her eyes. “If it was up to you, we’d be passed out on the couch by now.” She opened the door, and the thrum from outside became a roar. “Come on,” she shouted. “Let’s get these supplies. People are counting on us now.”

Evan trailed her out of the jeep. “Hey,” he called across the hood, “Did you call me a degenerate?”

“What are you thinking?” Celine asked.

They leaned shoulder-to-shoulder against the grille, examining the squiggle on her phone to the Scepters’ address. A trip that last week might have been a scenic hour's drive through the mountains now had an ETA of two hours, twenty.

Evan knew what he thought. The sun was low, and the volunteer coordinator had explicitly warned against travelling at night. Not to mention they’d be breaking the emergency curfew.

Besides, he was physically, mentally, and emotionally drained. Since their departure from the aid station downtown, time had flown by in a whirlwind of spotty connections, blocked roads, and improvised routes.

Still, he didn’t want to outright say they should quit.

Despite the day’s trials, he’d never lost that euphoric attraction. If anything, it had grown steadily stronger, swelling with his pride and admiration for his companion as she navigated the ravaged landscape around them. Even the destruction they’d encountered along the way, heaped with memories now reduced to rubble, seemed to have brought them closer, galvanizing their bond in a kinship of loss.

So when she’d asked, Evan took his time answering. He sensed the question had been posed for his benefit alone, and didn’t want to spoil the mood by saying the wrong thing.

Celine’s phone rang before he was forced to take a stance. Some friends of hers were grilling the meat in their freezer before it went bad, and wanted to see if she and Evan were hungry.

After a steady diet of chips and granola bars, the question might as well have been rhetorical.

“What about Alton Summers?” Evan asked, emboldened now that he was off the hook.

Celine bit her lip. “We’ll go first thing tomorrow,” she said. “I can show you the Cellar Rock, and we’ll make a day of it.”

“Sure, ” he shrugged, nodding his assent. Two back-to-back stops and a literal walk in the park? He wasn't going to argue with that.

Plus, he had another reason to avoid Cellar Rock after dark, one he’d rather not admit, even to himself. On a rational level, he knew Summers’s story was paranoid drivel, but a more primal part insisted they leave it alone. At least until daytime when things seemed to abide by saner rules.

“Think I should give him a call?” Celine asked, sounding guilty.

“Nah,” Evan said, wanting to avoid that can of worms altogether. “He’ll figure it out.”

The evening went smoothly after that. A small crowd had gathered to partake in the feast, and though this was Evan’s first time meeting Celine’s friends, it was nice to spend time in a tight-knit, group of well-intentioned people, even if they weren’t yet familiar to him.

It felt normal, Evan realized, which was something they hadn’t felt in a while.

It seemed to have done Celine some good, too. She came alive among the friends and neighbors filtering through, and was more than a little flirty with him. They both drank too much of the moonshine being passed around, and walked home with their hands in each other’s back pockets, stopping every few blocks to make out.

Things were going so well, that when they got back, he almost told her about the hotel down on the piedmont his work had offered to put him up in.

“We have a way out!” he’d wanted to cry! “Real food, showers, and no rationing water, gas, or the use of our phones!”

Then she was pulling him into the lightless cavern of his room, and the whole thing was lost to the night.

“Whoa.” Celine said, frowning at her phone. “Listen to this.”

They’d slept in that morning despite the heat, and it was well past noon before they were ready to depart.

When she'd turned her phone back on for directions, there was a voicemail from Summers waiting.

“Hello? Missy? Is that you?” Summers’s voice crackled from the speaker.

And then Evan heard it, fuzzy and muffled, yet impossible to deny: a series of knocks, in a tight group of three, exactly like his neighbor had described.

Though he kept his features impassive, a cold column of spider legs crept down his spine.

“If it is,” Summers declared, “I want you to know I ain’t answerin’.” Whatever defiance he’d meant to project was undermined by the nervous waver on his voice.

“It's too dark to see out–Oh hold on.”

The ensuing static was a low flatline.

“That sounded like…Mikey’s boy?” Bewilderment twisted the comment into a question.

There was the click of a latch being turned, and he all but whispered, “Ima call you back,” before ending the call.

The two exchanged a look whose accusation Evan failed to recognize until it broke like an overtaxed levy. “I knew I shouldn’t have given in to you yesterday!” Celine cried.

“Me?” he said in as incredulous an inflection as he could muster. “We didn’t go because of your friends.”

“But it’s what you wanted,” she pouted. “I could tell.”

He rested a beseeching hand on her shoulder. “Even if that was true,” he said, “you can’t really think something happened to him.”

Celine pinched the small of her nose with two fingers.

“Do you?” Evan demanded.

“I guess we’ll find out,” she said and started the jeep.

“So what’s the big deal about this rock?” Evan asked as yet another convoy of utility trucks rumbled by.

The first leg of the trip had been quiet. Evan had kept to his window on the passenger side, letting his driver focus on the patchwork of sideroads and detours winding them out of the city. He’d originally planned on using the time to break the big news, but a less than conversant atmosphere had made him hold off. The hotel could be perceived as a major step. He needed to approach the subject with caution.

Somewhere in the mountains, though, the trees had opened up to a ridgeline of deep, smoky emerald, and Celine's grip on the wheel had relaxed a notch. Maybe not enough for an announcement like the hotel, but the story of Cellar Rock, he thought, could be a good place to test the waters.

“No big deal about the rock,” Celine answered with an impish grin. “Just that it seals the entrance to the underworld.”

“Really?” Evan inquired, happy just for the smile.

“That’s the legend,” Celine said. “The natives supposedly avoided the area. Claimed spirits from before man’s covenant with nature lived beneath the hills. And to their credit, there is a cave system, most of which remains unexplored.”

“So where have these spirits been all this time?”

“That’s the thing,” she said, “When whites started settling the area, they experienced stuff, too. The story varies depending on who tells it, but something out there got under their skin. People started panicking, pointing fingers, and there were even accusations of witchcraft and ritual sacrifice.

“So one night, a posse forms, to settle it once and for all. They went to the cave that was supposed to be the gateway, and shoved this big boulder over the mouth.”

“And that worked?” Evan asked, unable to mask his disdain for such simple-minded reasoning.

Celine shrugged. “I guess. Things calmed down, and nobody got burned for being a witch. But every so often someone will report hearing voices in the night or seeing strange figures moving through the trees.”

“Bumpkins,” Evan muttered.

“I dunno,” Celine answered dreamily. “These are very old hills.”

“Looks like no one’s home,” Evan said, not taking his eyes off the well-shaded house in the windshield.

“Their cars are here.” Celine observed without conviction. She didn't have to mention the open front door whose murky fissure admitted of nothing within. 

There were, however, as she'd said, three vehicles parked in the driveway: a pickup, an SUV, and a van with “Scepter Painting” stenciled on the side.

Still, neither of them moved to exit the jeep.

The blinds were drawn, and despite the toys scattered on the lawn, a forlorn silence lurked beneath the cicadas’ solemn canticle. That, coupled with the “No Trespassing” signs they’d passed on the way in, hardly inspired confidence for their endeavor.

“Should we honk the horn?” Evan suggested.

Celine gave him a look that said, “Don't be ridiculous.”

“We said we’d check.” She opened her door. “So that’s what we’ll do.”

He followed her out and across the yard.

“Hello,” Celine called, as they mounted the porch, and Evan caught her by the wrist before, out of dumb reflex, she could knock on the screen door.

She offered a sheepish smile, and he shook his head, and they both peered into the darkness within.

It didn't look abandoned. Once his eyes adjusted, Evan could distinguish an entry cluttered with shoes, mail, picture frames, and keys. If he strained a bit more, he could descry a coffee table covered in water bottles and melted candles. A board game was spread on the floor before it, and a bag of jerky was open on the couch.

Wherever the Scepters were, they’d left in a hurry. And without their keys.

But he didn’t believe anything had actually happened to them.

Did he?

Neither spoke as they arrived at the fallen pine, whose mighty girth Summers hadn’t exaggerated. Celine had to slide Evan the waters through the gap underneath, and their hands got sappy on their climb over.

The silence that greeted them on the other side was a rerun of the Scepters’, right down to the open front door.

They passed a newer model pickup parked between the house and the rusted shell of a muscle car—a project, Evan speculated, many years since abandoned.

The property was a menagerie of such projects. Some, like the back addition and gazebo were complete. Others, like the raised beds on the side of the yard, were forgotten relics, returning to the forest.

Evan tried to imagine inhabiting a single space for such an extensive span. He wanted to someday own a home, but hadn’t persisted anywhere long enough to settle. He wondered if Celine wanted a place like this. Picturing them growing into their home, their lives intertwining with projects that they’d start and sometimes never finish, warmed his thoughts, and he reminded himself, as they mounted the steps, to bring up the hotel.

Celine took one peek in and shook her head. Evan didn’t need to look for himself. He left the waters by the door just in case, but it was clear that–bad hip or not–the old man had vacated.

“Should we report them missing?” Evan asked, back in the jeep.

“Sure,” Celine said, though her tone lacked enthusiasm. “But first,” she added. “I’ve got a proposition.” The way her eyes lit up like lanterns in the gloom made Evan ache with desire, but also made him nervous.

“So, I’ve got a proposition of my own,” Evan said, steeling himself. Celine rolled over to face him on their makeshift bed in the jeep. Half-dressed from fooling around, he sought the glimmer of her eyes in the surrounding night.

He’d been initially leery of camping out at Cellar Rock State Park. Though her logic, that it would keep them off the roads—and thus from breaking curfew—was sound, he didn’t necessarily buy her argument that, without power, there was no difference between his bed at home and the jeep’s folded-down bench.

Evan could think of at least one major difference, and against all reason, it made his hair stand on end. Which, it went without saying, was the same reason Celine wanted to stick around.

Then she’d pulled the bottle out of her bag, adding: “We might as well have some fun while we’re here,” and the matter was put to rest.

Besides, he’d told himself, there had to be a logical explanation for all this, even if he couldn’t see it at the time. And though it had yet to present itself, he was glad to have gone along with her plan.

The park itself had been a bit of a wash. The adjacent creek had buried the area in an avalanche of earth, debris, and fallen trees. After a few nips from the bottle, however, they’d salvaged the evening, hopping like birds from trunk to trunk, peering into gaps in the rubble for a glimpse of the rock—or anything else that might be hiding in the wreckage.

The liquor had taken the edge off of Evan's anxiety, and though his heart fluttered whenever Celine stuck her head down a crevice, it was tempered by the contentment of being with her. It was actually sort of exhilarating. Even when a set of strange tracks in the mud led them to a ragged maw of roots and chewed planks, that warm, fuzzy cloud never abated. Staring down the darkness of that tight, winding gullet, her hand hot in his, a hint of her sweat tickling his breath only enhanced the thrill beating through Evan’s veins.

“Think it goes all the way to the rock?” he asked, savoring the sticky press of her skin as they crowded the entrance.

“I don't know if it's even still there,” she answered, squeezing his fingers. “Dare you to find out.”

He leaned in until the walls closed in around his ears, then stopped. The shift in the air was instantly apparent. The swampy vapors of sediment and decay so thick on the surface were displaced by a cold exhalation of old must and damp stone. He eased himself out of the shadows, back into the sun.

“Scaredy,” Celine taunted with a playful bump.

“After you,” he retorted, forcing a grin. Still, he slackened a bit when she, too, retreated a step. He could no longer regard that claustrophobic abyss without an insistent feeling that it stared back.

A second later they were romping off in another direction, and that thin chill receded behind the cloud.

By nightfall, they were once again giddy and rambunctious, and Evan had barely spread the comforter Celine handed him from the back before a frisky onslaught had arrested his work.

Now, as he tried to gather his wits, the forest seemed intent on robbing him of his calm. Its depth pressed at the windows, infiltrating the peace within with the ceaseless chants of its legions.

“I got an email,” he went on, searching for signals in Celine’s obscure features, but that was as far as he’d ever get.

Three metallic reports rang against the car, vanquishing whatever petty notion had occupied his mind.

Evan didn’t have to ask if Celine caught it, too. Her bulging eyes made that abundantly clear.

Agonizing seconds crept by during which they heard only cicadas, his gaze flying from the door, where the sound had originated, to each window, straining against the night that seemed to peer back.

The next round struck the tailgate at Celine’s feet. She flinched, and stifled a whimper, and Evan might have done the same if the shadow that crept up the fogged pane hadn’t already stolen the air from his lungs.

Later, he'd question what they’d really witnessed. Certain aspects, like the length and number of legs that passed behind the bleary glass, for instance, or the speed at which their hooked tips probed for purchase, generating an improbable lack of noise, must have been embellishments of his overclocked mind.

Other details, however, like the puppety motion of ever-waving of antennae; or the teeming (arms? organs? brood?) mass tucked under its belly—or Celine’s cold whisper in his ear as it rapped on the roof that “It’s searching for a way in!”—had stained his memory too deeply to dilute with doubt.

Mostly, he remembers clinging to her, too afraid even to shudder as the thing tested the jeep with its swift triple-tap. He couldn’t say how many rounds they endured, watching, rigid as statues, as its grotesque shadow crept about the exterior. But he recalls how the final salvo reverberated through the undercarriage, and how the only sounds for what felt like hours after were the cry of cicadas and his thudding pulse.

It hadn’t yet slowed when they heard the voice.

It was faint at first, seeping in from the trees. Nevertheless, there was no mistaking the gruff baritone of Alton Summers.

“Tommy, that you?” it hissed, and its barely-contained fright was another thing he’d never forget. That, and his complete certainty that nothing out there could get him to open the door.

Yet, to his horror, Celine was reaching for the handle. He grabbed her arm before the seal could be broken.

Because while Evan’s heart sank at the dizzying depth from which the voice emanated, there was also something off about it, teasing the limits of his heightened senses. From her eyes’ glossy whites, he saw Celine heard it, too.

“Tommy, you hear me?” Summers’s voice rose again. Closer now, his frightened frustration was even more pronounced, but so was the distortion, fringing each syllable with a buzzy chatter that no human vocal cords could possibly produce.

Celine must have put it together at the same time, because they both made the same mad dash for the front. She brought the jeep roaring to life, swinging them, fishtailing, back onto pavement. Headlights arced past trees and an off-color aberration curled up a trunk. Evan had a snap impression of something like a giant spinal cord covered in legs, then it was mercifully lost to the dark.

A frothy murmur trailed in its afterimage.

“...I’ve got a proposition…” Evan heard it croon, and though the rest was drowned in the bellow of the engine, it didn’t stop him from recognizing his own voice.

They hadn’t gone far when they encountered the SUV. It sat at the intersection with the motor running and its hazards on. Its driver’s side door opened onto the opposite lane. Beyond it, where the divider line fell into sable oblivion, stood a solitary work boot like a forgotten traffic cone. Of its mate’s whereabouts or that of its owner, Evan could see no indication.

Nor, after what they’d gone through, did he particularly care. He just wanted to leave this murky backwater and keep riding until they’d reached somewhere with functioning streetlamps.

Celine, it seemed, had other ideas.

Instead of speeding around as fast as feasibly possible, the jeep was, in fact, grinding to a halt.

“Why are we stopping?” he asked, his panic spiking.

“Someone out there might need help,” Celine answered. Her jaw was set, her lips a thin line.

She opened her door, and he pulled her back for the second time that night. His rejoinder, “We need to leave,” however, came out haggard, wheedling.

“You can stay here,” she replied, “but I’m going.”

The hazards’ lazy strobe made peaks and valleys of her features, and in that stark topography, Evan beheld an untamed range of primal depths and defiant rims, gentle slopes and taciturn walls, graceful rills and sacred hollows. And something else, too. Something piercing yet brittle, like a plea and demand spoken as one. But it was lost among the encroaching branches, their bony fingers mullioned like a cage in a vast, hostile void.

And he just couldn't do it.

He just…couldn't.

So Evan watched as Celine slipped from her seat to the ground. Bleached by headlights, she crossed to the night's edge, before melting in with the veiled reaches beyond.

The cicadas’ song drifted in from the trees, and Evan peered past the rising exhaust and waited.

And waited.

He left for the hotel the following morning. He stayed until the power in his neighborhood was restored, returning only at the behest of the investigators. By the time his lease expired some weeks later, he already had a new one in a city up north.

Though he’d proceed to move several times after, in his dreams he was always back in his old apartment, his door resounding with a familiar knock. And though Celine’s voice would call from the other side, Evan never answered, because no matter what waited out in that hall, he knew it would never be anything of his.