The Front Step

The walk up Cordwood Lane was the worst part. That's what Danny kept telling himself. Once he was inside the house, once he was just sitting somewhere, it would be fine. It was the walking that was bad. The walking was where your brain had room to work. The lane was steeper than it looked from the bottom. The streetlights stopped about a hundred feet up — there were poles after that, old ones, but no lights in them, just the empty metal cups where lights used to be. After the last working light the dark came down on the lane all at once, like a lid. Danny had his phone flashlight on. It made a small white circle that bounced around in front of his shoes and somehow made everything past the circle darker than if he'd had no light at all. He could hear the others somewhere behind and below him, Marcus laughing too loud the way you laugh when you're glad it's not you, and then a turn in the lane took the sound away and he was just alone with his shoes and the circle of light. The Vesper house came up on him faster than he expected. One second the trees were on both sides of the lane and the next they pulled back and there it was, sitting in its own clearing like it had been waiting all along for him to round the corner. It was a big house, bigger than houses got in Hartley, two and a half stories of dark wood with a porch that ran the whole front and windows that his flashlight didn't reach into. It wasn't falling down. That surprised him. He'd pictured a wreck, holes in the roof, that kind of thing. The Vesper house just stood there, solid and patient and whole, the way a house stands when somebody's been keeping it. But nobody had been keeping it. That was the other part of the rule, the part nobody explained. Nobody had lived in the Vesper house for longer than anyone could remember, and nobody mowed the clearing, and nobody fixed the gutters, and the house should have been a ruin by now. It wasn't a ruin. It was just empty. Those, Danny was starting to understand, were not the same thing. He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps. There were five of them. He counted them with his flashlight, one two three four five, and at the top the front door stood very slightly open — not wide, just open the width of a hand, a black gap down one side of the frame. His phone buzzed. He nearly dropped it. It was Marcus. *u in yet?? text every hour remember* Danny typed back *at the door. going in.* His thumbs were not as steady as he wanted them to be. He looked at the time at the top of the screen. 8:11. Sunup was 6:40-something. He did the math without wanting to. Almost eleven hours. He put the phone in his pocket and put his foot on the first step. That was when he noticed the marks. The porch railing, where it met the top of the steps, was carved up — not graffiti, not initials, just lines. Little vertical scratches in the old wood, cut deep, the way you'd keep score of something. They ran in groups of five, four lines and a slash, the way Danny had been taught to count things in third grade. Groups and groups of them, marching along the railing, dozens, maybe more, going back further than his flashlight wanted to follow. Somebody had been counting something on that railing for a long, long time. Counting and counting and never quite finishing, because the last group wasn't a group of five at all. The last group was four lines. Four lines, and a gap where the fifth one would go, the slash that closes the set, the mark that finishes the count. Danny stood on the bottom step of the Vesper house with his small white circle of light shaking on a railing full of tally marks, and he understood, in a cold quiet way that started in his stomach and climbed, that the house had been keeping count of something. And that whatever it counted, it was one short. The door at the top of the steps, very slowly and without any sound at all, opened the rest of the way.