Chapter 26
twenty-six
THEO
The knocking was different this time. Light, uneven, carrying a weight that made the wood of my door groan before I even touched the handle. I knew it was Oleander.
I pulled the door open. Oleander stood there, looking like a man who had spent the last several hours losing an argument with himself.
His hair was a mess of damp curls and his coat seemed to swallow the light around him.
He looked exhausted. He looked like the only thing in this town that wasn't rotting in a spiral.
"Theo," he said. Just my name.
I stepped back to let him pass. The air he brought with him was colder than the draft coming through the window frames, smelling faintly of old paper and sandalwood.
He stopped dead in the center of the living room. I watched his back go rigid as he took in the transformation of my space.
The walls were gone. Or rather, the paint was gone, buried under layers of glossy prints and matte contact sheets.
Hundreds of them. I'd used red twine and pushpins, mapping the anomalies of Hollow Vale like a detective hunting a killer who didn't exist in three dimensions.
Photos of the sinking church. Photos of the way the shadows pooled under the pier.
And, more than anything else, photos of the silhouettes, the dark shapes that shouldn't have been in the frame but always were.
"You've been busy," Oleander whispered. He walked toward the wall, his fingers hovering inches away from a shot of the abandoned schoolhouse. In the corner of the window, a dark blur shaped like a man stood watching the camera.
"It's a puzzle," I said, leaning against the doorframe. "I'm an artist, Oleander. I document things. I find the patterns. That's what I do when things get loud."
He turned to look at me. "It's not a puzzle, Theo. It's a barricade. You're building a wall of paper so you don't have to look at what's actually standing in the room with you."
I laughed, but it sounded brittle. "I'm looking at everything. That's the whole point of the twine, Oleander. It's all connected. The way the buildings lean, the way the fog sits, the way your husband's ghost seems to have a favorite bench in the park."
Oleander stepped toward me. Then another step.
He didn't stop until he was in my space, until the heat radiating from him was the only thing fighting the cold of the apartment.
He reached out and touched my chest, right where my camera usually hung from its strap.
The strap was there, but the camera was on the table behind me.
"Put the camera down, Theo," he said.
"It's not up. I'm not taking pictures."
"The one in your head is," he said. "The one you use to filter everything so it doesn't hurt. The one that makes me a subject instead of a person. Turn it off."
He was right. I'd spent my entire life looking through a viewfinder because it was safe. Because you can't get hurt by a composition. You can't be betrayed by a focal length. If I could just frame the world correctly, I could control the narrative of my own loneliness.
"What do you see?" Oleander asked, his hand still resting over my heart. "When you're not looking through a lens, Theo. When you're just standing here in the dark with me. What do you see?"
I looked at him. Not as a study in light and shadow, not as a point of interest in a decaying town, but as the man who had ruined my ability to be detached.
"You," I said. "I just see you. And that's the scariest thing in this room."
Oleander's expression softened. He moved closer, his fingers curling into the fabric of my shirt. The smell of him was overwhelming, salt and rain and a desperate, beautiful life.
"The notebook," he whispered, his forehead coming to rest against mine. "Dominic's. It's full of the symbols he used. If it's a blueprint, it might show us how the door was built."
I felt the old obsession, the need to see, to document, to solve. "Show me. If it's a blueprint, I can map it. I can find the source."
Oleander pulled back just enough to look me in the eye. There was a resolve there that made my conspiracy walls look like the scribblings of a child.
The temperature in the room plunged. Oleander went rigid, his hand still on my chest, his eyes snapping toward the hallway behind me.
I turned around.
He was standing at the end of the hall, everything my camera had been catching for months, except now he was three-dimensional and standing six feet away. His mouth was pulled into something that wasn't quite a smile, and his eyes were empty.
I'd spent months photographing this shape without ever seeing it in the room. And here he was, looking past me at Oleander like I wasn't even there.
Oleander didn't move. He just whispered, "Don't look at his eyes."
The shape held for five seconds. Then it dissolved backward into the shadows, folding into the dark like smoke being pulled through a vent. The cold lifted. The scent of sandalwood hung in the air for another minute before it faded.
"That's him," I said.
"That's what's left of him," Oleander said.
The silence stretched between us. I could feel my pulse in my fingertips, my whole body running hot with something that wasn't fear exactly but lived in the same neighborhood.
"I need to talk to Rowan," Oleander said. "He needs to know what we're up against."
I nodded, though letting him walk back into the fog felt like a bad idea. "Go. But come back. Don't let the fog swallow you before I can get the notebook."
Oleander walked to the door before he looked at me one last time, and then he was gone. The door clicked shut, leaving me in the middle of my living room, surrounded by a thousand frozen moments of decay.