It was cold. This was nothing new, it was always cold here.
Except when it wasn’t.
Karol shivered at his desk, throwing the blanket off in irritation when a draft crossed his hand. A window had come open again, somewhere in this house.
His grandfather’s house. It was drafty, but it was in decent repair, and contained the quiet Karol thought he needed. And it wasn’t a window open like he’d thought; it was the front door. Solid wood, it wasn’t prone to blowing open.
He listened. The wind sang outside. There was a crack; that was the fireplace in his room. What was he listening for? A footstep? A breath?
He turned around to the dark hallway. Too dark. If he didn‘t get back to his desk soon, his mind would start to fill in the gaps.
A light would help. Karol pressed the wall switch, met a pair of eyes, then flipped it back off.
...
That wasn’t right.
He pressed it again. Now here was the entryway of his grandfather’s home, the mat, the bench with his boots tucked underneath. Empty hallway stretched before him.
Karol blinked, shaking his head.
It was getting harder to differentiate what was real, and what out of that was actually real. A couple books sat on his desk already, but he ignored these and fished a slim volume from another stack and opened it to the middle. He flipped back a few pages.
This particular book was in English, which annoyed him. His grandfather didn’t speak English. He flipped to the first page and read the publisher’s information. He turned back to the page he’d been on, one with a protective symbol. It would be better than nothing.
The wind was picking up.

Around midnight, the battery in his watch died. He’d let his phone die, too. But his work was done. The door bore the circle he’d picked, done in careful chalk.
A snowflake drifted past his face.
Karol checked his watch. He was sure that midnight had long since passed. Wind roared against the shutters. It was late, too late to eat, but who he shared the house with now didn’t care to judge him.
Soup in the fridge. Carrot, chicken, cabbage.
Karol paused, spoon in hand. When had he seen a snowflake? He hadn’t gone outside. He’d been in the room, door pressed steady against the wall, the protective symbol drawn on the exterior.
The exterior of the decidedly interior door.
Snowflake?
It was so late. Maybe it had been a bit of dust. His eyes ached. His glasses were dirty, too. He pulled them from his face, bringing them down to his lap to wipe the lenses.
Without his glasses, looking around was just a formality. Everything around would be a blur, and the figure sitting across from him at the table would be gone once he blinked.
Before he’d even started to believe himself, he blinked. The figure was gone. But Karol stayed where he sat, hands limp in his lap. The hair on his right arm was stirring.
It was so late. His chest tightened and ached. It occurred to Karol that the symbol on the door would only apply to that room, and he’d walked right out of it to have some soup.
It’s the lamp, he told himself. The shade cut the light in a way that created the shape at his side. The feeling of static was just his fear. The ticking of his watch was…
It was still ticking. The second hand hadn’t moved since three minutes before midnight.
It was so late. If he just put his glasses back on, he could-
He could see nothing. There was nothing there. Hands shaking, Karol took a deep breath, no longer hungry.
It was so late.

The ticking seemed to grow louder as he settled into bed. Cheap watch, the gears rattled audibly with every tick, mocking his nervous heartbeat. Karol’s hand shot out from under the quilt, snatching the watch from his bedside and flinging it at the door by its band.
It hit the wall in the hallway after sailing through the doorway, the doorway of the door he’d definitely closed and locked.
Grandfather would say he clearly hadn’t drank enough. Karol stared at the ceiling, wondering silently if raki was any use in an exorcism.
«Damn.»
He’d sworn aloud, the first word he’d spoken the entire evening, and it had changed the silence in a way he wasn’t expecting. Whatever he’d called silence before, hadn’t been true silence. Now, it was the silence of a power outage. Something was gone, something that had been part of the background until just now. There was the wind again. It wasn’t that.
Karol wondered if the power were actually out. He would have heard it, every appliance and streetlamp coming to a sudden halt. Straining to listen, he waited for the refrigerator’s groan.
Nothing he could do about a power outage tonight, he decided. Karol closed his eyes.
He opened them again. The neighbor’s dog wasn’t barking.
This was a good and normal thing, he decided. Karol closed his eyes once more.

He woke up from a disorienting dream concerning gas leaks, and made a beeline for the front door once he’d gotten dressed.
Outside, he took several deep breaths, hoping they’d clear his head. The air was biting cold, but there was no frost. Damp gravel stuck to his shoes.
It was dawn, and the streetlamps had given up some time before he’d left the house. It was a pitiful excuse for dawn, there was barely enough light to see by, and the horizon hadn’t even bothered to turn any color other than a soggy gray.
Maybe he’d been too confident. His head didn’t feel any clearer. He made his way now to the corner store on the other side of these sparse woods, tripping over branches littering the path. Karol kept his hands in his pockets. His face was numb.
As he wandered between the shelves, Karol thought about the eyes he’d seen. Disembodied, narrowed, sclera gray. Or was it the other way around? The memory warped in his mind’s eye.
He was supposed to be doing his grandfather a favor. Once it was all done, the old man could come home, leaving Karol and his mother in peace. Salt, he reminded himself. Salt, and something to eat for breakfast. And a water bottle.
He paused by the liquor. Grandfather would be furious if he came home to an empty cabinet.
The gravel was crunching between the soles of his shoes and the dirty floor. Karol pulled cash from his wallet. The cashier avoided his eyes and slid his change across the counter.
The door swung shut behind him, and Karol noted that the sun still wasn’t up. He turned back, but through the glass he only saw the empty counter, no clock in sight.
Karol ate as he walked. Gravel stuck back to his shoes. He could hear the silty grains shuffling between the stones, and it annoyed him.
He stopped in front of the house. He wasn’t the right one for this job. His grandfather had made that clear. But who was? Karol couldn’t envision himself walking into a church, asking a priest for help. Could he email one?
Did priests even have emails?
He found the door locked, and unlocked it before opening it. Shoes off. After the fresh air, the house smelled downright odd; tobacco, some kind of resin, and the sharpness that air took on before a storm. Karol didn’t remember locking the door. Anyone stupid enough to break in would regret it, anyway.
Maybe they wouldn’t, he told himself as he hesitated outside the kitchen. Maybe this was what he’d inherited from his grandfather, and all his mind needed to be told was that the old man’s house had an unwelcome guest. It would explain what he saw as he stood in the kitchen entry.
There had always been something wrong with Karol. But not quite this wrong. This was a new level of detail, waves of flesh and tar that filled the room, rolling in the dim. His throat tightened. He couldn’t bring himself to move closer, to touch it. He stumbled back, turning to the bedroom and slamming the door. The power was still out.
Karol leaned against the door, staring at the floor. He could be rational about this.
Or, perhaps, he could not. The ceiling was too far away. The shadows were too deep. He could hear the crackling, rustling in the kitchen.
There was something in this house with him.
And what if there’s not, he asked himself, taking his mother’s tone. If he’d have stayed in the kitchen, reached out, his hand would have sunk right through, the same way it sank through the insects, the silhouettes, all the spectres he learned to ignore over the years. Anything to avoid embarrassing her.
He could be rational about this.
Karol returned to the kitchen, trying in vain to keep his mind empty of fear, or anticipation.
Someone sat at the table, waiting for him.
This was easier for Karol. He kept his eyes ahead, going to the fridge even as it spoke to him. The mind makes assumptions, he reminded himself. His mind was particularly prone to assuming the worst.
The visitor regarded Karol with cruel interest.
«You carry your mama’s shame quite well, Karolek.»
Grandfather never believed in microwaves. Karol was forced to go around the visitor to fetch a pot from the cupboard, then back around to put it on the stove.
The visitor mocked the stove’s tick-tick-tick as it ignited, holding Karol’s discarded watch aloft, regarding it just as he had earlier regarded Karol.
Karol watched this in the window’s reflection. This wasn’t right.
He squeezed his eyes shut as the pot began to steam. He’d looked for the watch on his way out this morning. It was nowhere to be found. But there it was, the glass of it cracked, dangling from an ashy, tar-smeared hand. «Cheap thing. I may keep it. I like the way it... ticks.»
He cringed at its voice, a stage whisper like distant thunder. It hinted at something more. It threatened. Karol regretted not bringing the salt. He didn’t have any faith in the crucifix around his neck, either.
Brimstone gaze burned between his shoulderblades. «Your mother taught you well.»
Karol frowned at the soup, now approaching a boil.
It laughed. «She ignored you just the same, no? Frightening child. Frightened child.»
Round slices of carrot danced between threads of well-cooked chicken, cabbage leaves like fans in the cloudy broth. It needed salt. Plain soup, for plain Karol, who’d kept himself safe for all his years. Safe from others, safe from judgement.
«You can’t even hate yourself properly.»
Karol looked to his right, down at the floor, acknowledging it as much as he dared.
«I could teach you.»
He wondered briefly if his grandfather left out of annoyance.
«Ignoring me won’t save you, Lolek.»
Two bowls from the cupboard. There wouldn’t be any soup left for tomorrow. Karol set one bowl across from the visitor, then one in front of it. The ceramic met the worn wood of the table with a dull tap. Nothing lit the kitchen, what light there was clung to the visitor like some sort of parasite. A pair of embers met Karol’s eyes, and for a moment he imagined what it saw; a clammy, uncertain face, someone who’d lived two decades dodging existence itself. Embers filled his field of vision, a hand seizing his arm. «Sit with me, Karol.»

Karol stood in front of his grandfather’s house, facing those sparse woods. The sun had quit rising some days ago. The neighborhood stretched out silently in either direction.
Turning away from those woods, he went back inside.