Veiled Horizon

The first thing I noticed was the smell. Not the rot, though that came later. Not the river either, though the river had its own opinions about how the air should taste. What I noticed was cinnamon. Someone had been burning cinnamon sticks in the room next to mine, and the smoke had crept under the door and made itself at home in my curtains, my sheets, the soft tissue of my lungs.

That was three days before the woman in 4B stopped answering her door.

I live in the Halcyon, which is a lie of a name if there ever was one. Twelve floors of red brick and bad plumbing on the south side of the city, wedged between a laundromat that's been "under renovation" for two years and a parking garage that swallows cars whole. The elevator works maybe twice a week. The radiator in my bedroom makes a sound like a man choking on a chicken bone. But the rent is cheap and the walls are thick and nobody asks questions, which is all I've ever needed from a building.

My name is Marcus Webb. I fix things for a living. Appliances, mostly. Sometimes locks. Sometimes people's problems, though that's not officially on the invoice.

I was in the middle of fixing Mrs. Okonkwo's refrigerator when the knocking started. Her unit is on the sixth floor, directly above mine, and she'd been complaining for a week that her milk was warm and her ice was sweating. I had the compressor pulled out and a screwdriver between my teeth when I heard it. Not knocking at her door. Knocking at mine. Three floors down. Which shouldn't have been possible, because sound doesn't travel like that through concrete and drywall, not unless someone is hitting the door hard enough to crack the frame.

I told myself it was the pipes. The Halcyon has pipes that bang and groan like a living thing. But the rhythm was wrong. Too deliberate. Three knocks, a pause, three more.

Mrs. Okonkwo was watching me from her kitchen table. She's eighty-three years old and sharp as a tack, and she doesn't miss much. "You hear that," she said. Not a question.

"I hear the pipes."

"That's not pipes, Marcus. Pipes don't knock in threes."

She was right. I knew she was right. But I also knew that the last time someone knocked on my door in threes, it was my brother, and my brother has been dead for six years.

I finished with the compressor, wiped my hands on a rag that used to be a t-shirt, and told Mrs. Okonkwo I'd come back tomorrow with a new thermostat. She nodded but didn't smile. She's been in this building longer than anyone. She knows things.

The hallway on the fourth floor was dark when I got back down. The overhead light had burned out sometime in the spring, and the landlord, a man named Petros who lives in a house with a pool on the other side of the city, hadn't bothered to replace it. I navigated by memory and the thin strip of light under my neighbor's door.

The knocking had stopped. But the cinnamon smell was stronger now, thick enough to taste, and it was coming from 4B.

I stood there for a minute. Maybe two. The woman in 4B moved in eight months ago. I'd spoken to her exactly once, in the laundry room, when she asked if I had a quarter. She had a name I couldn't pronounce and eyes that never quite landed on anything. She paid her rent in cash, always on time, always in an envelope slipped under Petros's office door. She didn't have visitors. She didn't make noise. She was the kind of neighbor you forget exists until you need to remember.

I knocked. Nothing. I knocked again. The door drifted open, just an inch, just enough for the smell to pour out like water.

Here's the thing about being a person who fixes things. You develop a certain relationship with brokenness. You learn to read it, to listen to it, to understand what it's trying to tell you. A broken refrigerator hums a particular tune. A broken lock has a particular resistance. A broken person, well. That's a different kind of repair. But I've done that too.

I should have called someone. The police, the landlord, anyone. Instead I pushed the door open with two fingers and stepped inside.

The apartment was empty. Not empty like someone moved out. Empty like someone had never moved in. No furniture, no clothes, no dishes in the sink. The walls were bare except for a single clock, stopped at 3:17. The floor was clean enough to eat off, which was strange because the rest of the building hadn't seen a mop since the Clinton administration.

But the smell. The cinnamon smell was coming from the kitchen, and when I walked in, I saw why.

There were candles. Dozens of them, all burned down to stubs, arranged in a circle on the linoleum. In the center of the circle was a photograph. A photograph of me.

I don't mean a photograph I'd seen before. I mean a photograph taken from inside my apartment, from the corner of my living room, the one with the broken window that looks out onto the alley. I was sitting on my couch. I was reading a book. The timestamp in the corner said three days ago.

My hands went cold. The kind of cold that doesn't come from temperature. I looked around the kitchen, at the cabinets, the drawers, the refrigerator. All empty. All clean. Except for one thing. On the counter, next to the sink, was a single coffee mug. My coffee mug. The one with the chip on the rim that I'd been meaning to throw away for months.

I picked it up. It was still warm.

The knocking started again. Not at the door this time. From inside the walls. Three knocks, a pause, three more. And then a voice, muffled but clear, coming from somewhere behind the plaster.

"You're early," it said. "You're not supposed to be here yet."

I dropped the mug. It didn't break. It landed on the linoleum with a dull thud and rolled in a slow circle, and I watched it, because watching it was easier than looking at the wall, easier than asking the question that was already forming in my throat.

Who are you?

But I didn't ask. Because I already knew. I knew from the photograph. I knew from the cinnamon. I knew from the way the voice sounded like my own, only younger, only less tired, only less broken.

I knew, and I ran.

I ran down the stairs, past the broken elevator, past the laundromat with its papered-over windows, past the parking garage that swallows cars whole. I ran until my lungs burned and my legs gave out and I was standing on the corner of a street I didn't recognize, in a part of the city I'd never seen, with no memory of how I got there.

And that's when I realized. The Halcyon wasn't on my street anymore. It wasn't anywhere I could point to on a map. It was just gone. Like it had never been there at all.

I stood on that corner for a long time. The sun went down. The streetlights came on. And somewhere, in the back of my mind, I could still smell cinnamon.