Second Time

The bolt gave on the second kick.

I had counted on three. It had held for three the first time, I think, or it was the first time I had had the leisure to count, and in the half second of light and wood and noise as the door burst inward, I felt my last small calculation go out from under me. The slide-bolt tore out of the frame with a shriek of screws. The door slammed against the sink. A beam of white light swung in and filled the tiny room so brightly that I couldn't see anything at all, only a dazzling hole in the world with the dark outline of a man in it.

I threw my arm across my eyes.

"Hello, sweetheart," said the voice.

He didn't sound like a monster. That was always the thing about him. He sounded like a man who had come to fix a pipe. I could smell him: the orange rot, the tobacco, the stale sweat of a body that had been working a long time in a hot place. I heard the wet rattle in his chest. I felt his hand close on the collar of my coat, a big flat palm, not rough, not even angry, and lift me out of the tub as if I were a bag of groceries.

The folder fell. The tea tin fell. My phone hit the floor and slid across the tile and lay glowing, face up, a small cold rectangle of blue that said 3:07 and then, as the screen timed out, nothing.

I did not scream. I'm proud of that, in a distant way. I had spent half of my life, or the half of my life I remembered, learning not to, and I had gotten good at it.

He set me on my feet in the hall. There was smoke here, a thick low roiling gray, and the beam of the flashlight turned it into a solid thing, a ghost-colored wall that the light could not get through. Beyond it I could see the orange flicker of the thing he'd done to the entryway, a quivering glow along the baseboard, and a long dark shape on the floor.

It was my mother.

She was on her side, with her knees drawn up, on the tile in front of the kitchen. Her cardigan was torn at the shoulder. One of her slippers had come off, the thin one, and lay a few feet away, upside down. Her hair had come loose from its band and hung across her face, and in the smoky light I couldn't see her eyes. A second man was crouched beside her, a young one, with a cap pulled low and a rag over his mouth. He had a hand flat on her back. He wasn't hurting her. He was holding her down the way you hold a dog that you've been told is dangerous.

Then she moved her head, and the hair fell back, and I saw her face.

I'd been so sure, in the tub, that I knew what it would look like. I had lived with the memory of it for what felt like a hundred years. And I was wrong. It wasn't bloody, or terrified, or contorted. It was quiet. It was the face she wears when she reads a student's essay and finds in the middle of a bad paragraph one true sentence. Her eyes found mine through the smoke. She did not look at the man with the flashlight. She did not look at the one with his hand on her back. She looked at me, only at me, across ten feet of burning air, and her lips moved.

I'm sorry.

No. That wasn't it.

She was saying something else. She was saying it slowly, carefully, in shapes I could read from across a classroom, the way she'd taught me to read the silent mouths of the girls in the back row when I was five years old and she wanted to know whether I could follow a word. I watched her mouth make a short word. Then another.

I love you.

I felt the air go out of the world.

"There she is," said the man with the flashlight, almost gently. "There's the little lady."

I don't remember what he said after that. I know there was a sentence, something about the box and the key and my grandmother. I know that there was a lighter, and the small flame of it moving in the smoke. I know that at some point the beam of the flashlight swung up and found the ceiling, and I saw a long soft fan of gray smoke pooling against the plaster, like the underside of a cloud, and I thought, quite clearly, I should have counted the ceiling tiles. It was an absurd thought. I don't know where it came from. I'd forgotten that it was something I used to do as a very small child, lying in my crib, when I was frightened, counting the cracks in the paint.

The light went out of the room.

It didn't go all at once. It narrowed, as though I were looking at the world down the wrong end of a telescope, a small bright circle of orange and gray with my mother's face at the center of it, and then the circle shrank, and I felt the floor go soft beneath my feet.

And then, from somewhere very far away, I heard a voice.

It was a thin voice, high and small and exhausted. It was whispering the same sentence, over and over, in a voice that I did not at first recognize, because it had no business being in a place so dark. It said, I did it again. It said, I did it again, I did it again, I did it again, I'm sorry, I did it again. It was my voice, and I could not make it stop.

The screen went black.

…

Cedar Terrace, 8:14 a.m.

Detective Sergeant Frank Dunleavy stood in the doorway of apartment 1704 with a toothpick in the corner of his mouth and his hands in the pockets of a gray trench coat that he had been wearing for eleven years.

He was fifty-two, a long, narrow, thick-wristed man with a face like a hatchet and a gray crew cut that stood up straight from his head, and he had not slept. It had been a rough night all over the east side. At a quarter to three, every circuit in eleven square blocks had gone dark, a total failure that the utility's night supervisor had called, with bureaucratic delicacy, "unprecedented." At 3:20 the first 911 call had come in from the parking lot of Cedar Terrace, a man in a bathrobe who had seen smoke from the seventeenth floor. By four, three engine companies were on the scene. By six, the fire in the electrical room on the ground floor was out. By seven, the paramedics had pulled eleven residents of the upper floors out of their apartments on stretchers, unconscious but breathing, with their lungs full of black smoke and a strange, cold residue in their bloodwork that the hospital's toxicologist was still trying to name.

Nobody on seventeen had woken up. Nobody had heard the alarm, because nobody had pulled one. The sprinklers were dead. The exit lights were dead.

Somebody had gone to a great deal of trouble to see to that.

"Sergeant." Officer Devon Tran came down the hall behind him, a lean young man in a rumpled uniform, with the pinched brightness of someone who had been awake twenty hours and was still too new to feel it. "The fire marshal says the door on this one was kicked in. Twice. Two separate impacts, you can see the plate. And the chain's torn out of the wall."

"I see it."

"And—" Tran swallowed. "The bathroom."

"I see that, too."

It was a small room. The firemen had been in and out of it all night, and their boots had tracked black footprints all across the tile. The door hung from one hinge. The slide-bolt dangled from a strip of splintered wood. The tub was dry. There was a streak of soot along one side of it, in the shape of a small hand, and a smaller smear lower down, as if somebody had sat in the bottom with her knees drawn up and her back against the porcelain. Dunleavy crouched. His knees cracked. He looked at the floor.

There was a green accordion folder lying on its side by the toilet. It was empty. Beside it, half under the sink, there was a battered blue tea tin with the Union Jack on the lid, and from the tin the edge of a bill showed, a crumpled five, damp with soot.

And there was a pair of scissors.

They lay a foot from the tub, small and blue-handled, with rounded tips, the kind a child uses for crafts. One blade was black with smoke. The other was clean. He picked them up with a gloved hand and turned them over. Somebody had scratched a name into the plastic handle with a compass point, in tiny, careful letters: J. OSTRANDER.

He set them in an evidence bag.

"Sarge." Tran had crouched beside him. He was holding out another bag. In it lay a little spiral notebook with a blue cover, scorched at one corner and covered in sparkly stickers, a rainbow, a cat in a spacesuit, a cartoon avocado. A pencil stub was jammed in the wire. "It was in the tub. Looks like a kid's vocab book. There's about three hundred words in it."

Dunleavy took it.

He flipped through it with a thick thumb. It was a neat, orderly, almost severe little book. Each page was dated in the upper right-hand corner. Each held a single word in the center, boxed in colored pen, and beneath it a definition, and beneath that a sentence. Tenacious: holding fast. The tenacious girl would not let go of her mother's hand. Vigil: a period of keeping awake to watch. Lacuna: a gap where something should be. They went back for months, a word every night, the date on each page the same, give or take a few seconds. The time was always written in the corner, in tiny numerals. 3:07. 3:07. 3:07.

He turned to the last page.

It was not a vocabulary word. It was a message, scrawled across the whole sheet in big shaky capitals, and the pencil had been pressed so hard it had torn the paper in two places. He read it in the gray daylight that leaked through the shattered bathroom window.

3:07 — DON'T TURN ON THE LIGHT. DON'T KNOCK ON ANYONE'S DOOR.

He read it again.

He stood there for what felt like a very long time with the notebook open in his hand. Outside, a fire engine's diesel idled in the street, and somebody was shouting directions down in the lot, and the radio on Tran's shoulder muttered about a gurney. A cold November wind blew in through the broken window and riffled the pages.

"Kid's handwriting," said Tran, uncertainly. "Right? Thirteen, the super said."

"Yeah."

"What does it mean?"

Dunleavy did not answer. He was thinking about the last six hours: the dark, the silent building, the eleven people on seventeen who had not woken up, the knock he'd heard that no one had answered. He was thinking about a thirteen-year-old girl in a bathtub with a stub of pencil, in the dark, with a fire in the next room, who had used what might have been her last few minutes on earth to write a set of instructions. Not a goodbye. Not a prayer. An instruction.

Don't turn on the light. Don't knock on anyone's door.

It was a guide, he thought. A rule for surviving a night that nobody had yet had a chance to live through. It had been written by someone who knew exactly how it was going to go, and who had known it too late.

He closed the notebook and put it in the bag with the scissors, and for a long time after that he stood in the ruined doorway, working the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other, and he could not, for the life of him, understand why a child would write a manual for the night that killed her.

…

THE END — Ending 1 of 5: Lights On

Doing the most normal thing in the world is also the thing that someone was waiting for. You did not choose wrongly. You chose the night wrongly.

There are four other endings. Go back to Chapter 5 and choose again.