2. Helsa #2
It was the feeling of being watched — not looked at, not noticed, but watched , in the deliberate focused way that made you grind your teeth.
I'd read somewhere that humans are hardwired to detect it, some residual predator-awareness from the days when something with more teeth than us was a genuine daily concern.
I had always thought that was slightly overdramatic .
I thought differently about it now.
I couldn't reach my neck because of the boxes. I turned my head instead, as far as I could, and looked back down the street.
Empty. A parked van. A fox sitting on top of a recycling bin, watching me back with complete indifference.
Just a fox.
"You all right?" said Greta.
"Yes. I just thought —" I turned back around. "Never mind."
We kept walking. The road curved slightly as it ran toward Dalry proper.
We were moving into the warehouse district now, the stretch of the route I had always liked least even on bright afternoons.
It had a end-of-day emptiness to it — the kind that accumulates in industrial places after the workers leave and before anyone else has a reason to be there.
Loading bays stood open onto darkness. Chain-link fencing topped with razor wire that exists to make a point rather than actually stop anyone.
The big building on the corner, the one that had once been MacAllister Packaging, its windows either boarded or broken depending on the floor, a FOR LEASE sign that had been weathering on the brickwork for so long it had become part of the architecture.
That one had shut down in March. Something about the contracts moving to a facility outside Shenzhen. Forty-three jobs. I remembered because two of the kids in my Tuesday afternoon group had had parents who worked there.
The tingling was back.
Different angle this time. Not behind me — to the left, from the direction of the old packaging building, from somewhere in the dark space between the loading bay doors. I kept my eyes forward and said, very quietly, "Greta. "
"I know," she said. “I felt it too.”
That was the thing about Greta. She didn't miss much.
"It's probably nothing," I said.
"Probably," she said, in a tone that didn't commit to anything.
We were walking slightly faster than we had been. Not quite running. After all, we hadn’t really seen anything yet. Except a cute fox.
I readjusted the boxes and told myself I was being ridiculous and approximately forty percent believed it.
The clang, when it came, was enormous and made me scream.
It came from somewhere to the right — a metal door, or a fire escape, or something large and hollow falling onto concrete — and I left my body entirely for a moment, the boxes nearly going with me, my heart doing something so aggressive in my chest that I felt it in my back teeth.
"Okay," I said. "Faster. Let's go faster."
We went faster.
The sounds multiplied. A scrape here. A knock there.
Something that might have been footsteps on gravel but was too heavy, too slow to be a cat or a fox or any of the other things I was frantically cycling through as explanations.
Somewhere behind us came another clang, softer this time, like a door settling shut.
Greta moved closer to me. We were not quite shoulder to shoulder but almost. I was aware of her breathing in a way I hadn't been sixty seconds ago.
"Don't look up," I said. I don't know why I said it. It felt right.
"I'm not looking up," said Greta.
"Keep walking."
"I'm walking. "
"We're nearly at the end of the —"
I stopped.
The figure at the end of the street was big.
I mean genuinely, structurally big, the kind of big where your brain does a quick recalculation and comes back with an answer it doesn't entirely trust. He was standing under the last working streetlamp on the block, which meant I could see him clearly… which also meant I wished I couldn't.
He was wearing cargo pants. Standard enough.
Below that, work boots, also standard. Above the cargo pants, a high-visibility vest of the kind worn by people on building sites, which would have been entirely unremarkable except that he'd layered it over what appeared to be a floor-length waxed-cotton riding coat, the old-fashioned kind with a cape across the shoulders.
In June. On an evening that was approximately nineteen degrees.
He was also wearing swimming goggles pushed up on his forehead.
His face was the part that stopped me from cataloguing his outfit and started me taking his presence seriously, because his face was wrong in a way I couldn't immediately articulate.
Not wrong like injured, not wrong like distressed.
Wrong like the expression on it didn't quite correspond to the situation.
He was watching us with the focused, assessing look of someone doing a calculation, and the calculation had nothing to do with the riding coat or the goggles or any of the rest of it.
For one genuinely stupid moment I thought: Is this someone from the school? Is this a prank?
Then I looked at his face again and thought: No.
"Left," I said to Greta. "We're going left."
We went left .
I heard Greta's sharp intake of breath before I saw the second one.
He was standing in the mouth of the side street we'd just turned into, and he was, improbably, even bigger than the first. The same broad shoulders, the same deliberate stillness, the same expression that was more like the idea of an expression than an actual one.
He was wearing what appeared to be an ordinary rain jacket, gray, entirely sensible, except that he had stacked three hats on top of his head — a flat cap, a woolly beanie, and on top of both of those a baseball cap with the brim facing backward — and on his left hand he was wearing a single yellow rubber washing-up glove, the kind that comes in a two-pack, while his right hand remained bare.
Three hats.
One glove.
"Back," I said. "We're going back."
We went back.
The third one was behind us.
He had been behind us for some time, I realized, possibly since the first clang, possibly longer.
He was the biggest of the three by a margin that was genuinely hard to process.
He had dressed for the occasion in what I could only describe as a bridesmaid's dress — pale pink, strapless, with a tulle skirt that stopped mid-thigh — worn over a full-length thermal base layer and paired with steel-capped work boots.
He was also wearing one normal earring and one earring that appeared to be a small electrical component of some kind, possibly a resistor, and his hair was parted in eight or nine places and combed flat into separate sections, each section going in a different direction, like a map of disputed territory .
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
The tulle skirt stirred in the evening air.
“Th-there h-has to b-be a-a rational ex-explanation for th-this,” Greta stuttered.
To hell with rational. These guys are crazy!
"Run," I said to Greta.
She was frozen solid.
So I dropped the boxes, grabbed her arm, and we ran.
The first warehouse door I hit was locked. The second was locked. The third opened — not easily, the hinge complained about it, but it opened — and we tumbled through it into the dark. I shoved it shut behind us and stood with my back against it, breathing heavily.
The inside of the warehouse smelled of industrial solvent and old wood and something faintly chemical.
The light coming through the high narrow windows was just enough to show me the layout: concrete floor, steel support columns, the skeletal remains of a conveyor system running down the middle of the space.
Empty. Completely, absolutely empty.
I looked around for workers, for a security guard, for anyone, and found nothing.
Of course. Of course it was empty.
Because this was the packaging factory. This was the one that had shut down in March.
This was the building that had sent forty-three people to the job centre and their contracts to Shenzhen and left nothing behind except a FOR LEASE sign and a conveyor belt that nobody had bothered to take when they went.
"Tell me," said Greta, very quietly, from somewhere in the dark to my left, "that you have a plan. "
I pressed my back harder against the door and listened for movement on the other side.
The tram to the airport would have taken twelve minutes from Haymarket. I had been planning to get the 22 bus from the stop outside the station, which ran every ten minutes at this hour and dropped me two streets from my flat. I had been thinking about what to have for dinner.
"I'm working on it," I said.
The inside of the warehouse was the kind of dark that has weight to it.
More shapes resolved slowly as my eyes adjusted: the looming bulk of machinery arranged in rows, conveyor frames stripped of their belts, mechanical arms frozen mid-reach like they'd been turned off in the middle of a thought.
The smell was oil and rust and the damp of concrete that hasn't seen ventilation in months.
Something dripped, slowly, somewhere in the back of the building.
Greta's hand found my arm in the dark.
"Over here," I breathed, and pulled her left, between two rows of the machinery, deeper in, away from the door we'd come through.
We moved as quietly as we could — not quietly enough, our feet finding every piece of loose grit on the floor — until I spotted it: a large pressing machine, maybe eight feet tall, its mechanical arm extended outward like it was reaching for something it had never quite caught.
Wide enough to hide behind. I pulled Greta around behind it and we pressed ourselves flat against the cold metal side and stopped moving.
The skeletal arm hung above us in the dark .
"Don't look at it," I whispered.
"I'm not," Greta whispered back, which meant she had already looked at it. She was trembling — I could feel it through the metal we were both leaning against.
"We're going to be fine," I said.
She looked at me.