Chapter 1 #2
I buy a volume on Hessian regimental records and walk back to the cottage in the dark.
Beyond the commercial blocks, the streetlights thin out and the trees close over Crane Lane.
My phone illuminates only the next few feet of gravel.
Woodsmoke hangs in the cold air, and the silence between my footsteps lasts a little too long.
The place is exactly as I left it. I go inside, pour a glass of wine, grab a sandwich and sit at the desk with the folder spread open beside the sketch.
The regimental records from Tom's shop cross-reference with several of my mother's photocopied documents. Most of those reference the same anomaly she flagged in her margin notes: Johann Brandt's debtor substitution paperwork, inconsistent with the standard pattern.
My mother found the loose thread. She pulled it far enough to write to archivists in two countries and sketch a man's face before she locked everything in a drawer and walked away.
I flip through the German correspondence, marking pages I'll need to translate. The sandwich is mostly eaten but the wine goes warm. The house settles around me with the small sounds old buildings make at night, the ticking of pipes and the creak of wood adjusting to the cold.
When I look up from the documents, someone is standing at the edge of the yard.
He's visible through the front window, near the tree line, positioned where the light barely reaches the grass. He wears a dark coat cut long over tall boots, period clothing that in any other town would mean a reenactor who wandered off-route.
But the reenactors are downtown, performing for tourists. This figure is outside my cottage close to midnight, watching me through the glass with the stillness of someone who has been waiting.
I open the camera and start recording before I leave the desk. If he runs, I want his face. If he doesn't, I want proof he was here.
I walk to the front door.
Every rational impulse I have says stay inside, call the police, let the lock do its job.
But I've built a career walking toward the thing that tells me to turn around.
I've spent hours with a dead woman's research, wondering what she found here that scared her badly enough to leave.
The answer to what drove her out of this cottage may be standing three steps below me.
I open the door. I keep the phone recording and my free hand on the frame. He is below me in the full wash of the lamp, and I remain behind the threshold with the lock inches from my hand. It isn’t safe. But I’m not surrendering every advantage to get my answers.
The cold hits first, October air sharp enough to sting. He's closer than he appeared from inside, at the bottom of the steps with his chin angled up toward the light. The lamp catches his features fully.
I know that face. I stared at those pencil lines for half the afternoon, traced the cheekbones and the jaw and the layered, corrected eyes. The sketch on my desk matches the man in front of me line for line.
He speaks first. Low, rough, the consonants shaped by a German accent I can't place more precisely. Nothing theatrical about it.
"You shouldn't be here."
My breath fogs between us. It didn't when I stepped outside.
"This is my house," I say.
The words come out steady. The answer to what frightened my mother out of this cottage may be standing at the foot of my porch, and I am not closing the door until he gives me a reason to.
He studies me as if my refusal to run is an inconvenience he'll need to account for.
Then he's gone.
The light shines on the place where he stood. Two deep boot prints mark the grass. There are no others leading toward or away from them.
I step as far as the bottom stair and stop. The darkness past the lamplight is deep enough to hide someone within arm's reach. Professional curiosity does not require me to offer a stranger better cover.
Inside, I lock the door and check every window.
Then I pull up the recording and scrub backward.
He's there. On the screen, his coat and boots and lifted chin are sharp against the dark yard.
I hear my own voice say This is my house.
Two seconds later, one frame holds him at the foot of my stairs and the next holds empty grass and the same two boot prints.
There is no blur of motion, no dissolve.
Between one thirtieth of a second and the next, he is simply gone.
I scrub through the sequence three more times. The audio is continuous, no skip or gap. The time stamp runs clean. The frames before and after the disappearance are properly sequential, with no corruption, no encoding artifact, no dropped data. The recording is intact. What it shows is impossible.
I upload the file to cloud storage and email myself a copy before I do anything else.
I set the phone down and pull out my mother's journal. I read the entry one more time.
I want to stay, but I lack the courage. God help whoever tries to break the curse.
I look at the sketch. The cheekbones, the jaw, the reworked eyes all match what I just saw on my porch.
My mother drew this decades ago and locked it in a desk she never mentioned to anyone.
Outside, something strikes the wood. A sharp, singular impact, like a hoof.
I don't open the door again.
The novel can wait. Tomorrow, Tom Hadley is going to tell me why my dead mother's research references his family's collection—and what he knows about the man who just disappeared from my yard.