Chapter 13
thirteen
THEO
The sinking building on Mercy Street was worse than last week.
I could see it from half a block away, the left side dipping lower into the soft ground, the front door now a trapezoid.
One entire wall leaned inward at an angle that shouldn't have been possible without the whole thing collapsing.
The bricks were buckling in a spiral pattern that I'd been documenting for months, and every time I came back, the spiral had tightened.
Oleander stood on the sidewalk beside me, his hands in his coat pockets, staring at it with the expression of someone recognizing their own reflection in something ugly.
"It's trying to fold itself shut," he said quietly.
I didn't answer. I was already adjusting my settings, crouching low against the rusted fence across the street.
The light was doing something useful for once, hitting the cracked glass at an angle that made it look like the windows were swallowing the sky rather than reflecting it.
I held my breath and clicked the shutter.
"Why that angle?" Oleander asked from behind me. "From here it just looks like a pile of broken wood."
I smiled without looking up. "Because from here, the sky looks like it's falling into the attic. I want the viewer to feel the weight of the atmosphere."
I stood up, brushing dirt from my jeans.
He was watching me with genuine curiosity, his head tilted slightly, and I realized he was the first person who'd ever asked me about the why instead of the how.
Rowan didn't ask about my work. Julian listened when I talked about it but never initiated.
Oleander looked at the building and then looked at the way I was looking at the building, and the difference between those two things was everything.
"Most people just ask if the lens is expensive," I said.
"It's hard to ignore the feeling in this town," he said. "Everything feels like it has an agenda."
We moved around the perimeter for the next hour.
He pointed out things I would have walked past, the way the ivy seemed to be pulling the bricks down rather than climbing them, a shattered window that looked like a row of teeth.
He had an editor's eye for detail, precise and structural, and the way he described decay sounded like someone diagnosing a sentence that had gone wrong.
I found myself shooting faster, trying to keep up with the observations he was feeding me.
The cold eventually got to him. I could see the shiver working through his shoulders before he tried to hide it. I gestured to the stone wall across the street.
"Break time. Sit."
He sat, our shoulders briefly touching, the warmth from his coat seeping into me.
I wanted to photograph him. I'd been wanting to since the church, the way you'd photograph something you were afraid of losing.
The light was hitting the side of his face at exactly the right angle, catching the curl of his hair and the sharp line of his jaw against the grey blur of the East Side behind him.
"Don't move," I said, lifting the camera with my free hand.
He tensed. "Theo."
"You don't have to look at me. Just stay where you are."
He let out a breath and turned his face toward the sinking building.
I took the shot. Then two more, adjusting the focus, pulling him sharp against the soft ruin of the background.
Through the viewfinder he looked like the only solid thing in a dissolving world, and I felt something tighten in my chest that had nothing to do with composition.
I lowered the camera and checked the display.
The first frame was clean. The second frame was clean. The third frame was not.
Behind Oleander, standing in the blurred background where there had been nothing but empty sidewalk and buckling brick, was a shape.
Tall, broad-shouldered, hands at its sides.
It wasn't a smear of light or a compression artifact.
It had weight. It had posture. And it was standing close enough to Oleander that if it had been a living person, its hand would have been resting on the back of his neck.
My fingers tightened on the camera. I didn't show him the screen. I swiped past the frame and put the lens cap on.
"Get anything good?" he asked.
"Maybe," I said. "The light's changing. We should go."
I stood up and pulled him with me. We walked back to the car and I could feel the shape of what I'd seen pressing against the inside of my skull, demanding to be examined.
It wasn't just in the town anymore. It wasn't just in the alleys and the abandoned buildings and the dark corners of the bar.
It was behind him. Specifically, deliberately, possessively behind him.
Whatever was haunting Hollow Vale had chosen a favorite, and I'd just caught it on camera standing close enough to touch.
I drove us back toward the center of town in silence, still thinking about the diner, about the way Oleander's face had crumbled when I showed him that photo. He'd lied to me then. He'd recognized the shape and he'd lied, and I'd let him, because pushing wasn't how I worked.
But this was different. This wasn't a shadow in an alley that could be explained away. This was a figure standing behind a specific person in a specific frame, and the person in question was sitting three feet away from me pretending he didn't know why.
I saved the photo to a separate folder on my camera, one I'd started a week ago. I'd labeled it simply: Oleander. It was getting full.