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The Thirteenth Stop
An elevator stops on a floor that does not exist — and the narrator's wife has been setting an extra place at the table, every single night, for forty-three nights.
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The Machine Still Takes Messages
Her mother's answering machine is still taking messages. The newest one is from the narrator — left the night before she died, in her voice, using her name like a stranger's.
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The Boy Who Knew the Dark
I opened my door at 2 a.m. to the boy who used to live in my closet, and he was exactly the age he was when I last saw him — twenty-nine years ago.
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Room 214
The clerk handed me the key to Room 214, and I knew before I turned it that I was in trouble. 214 is the number of the room I grew up in — and I grew up in a house that had no room numbers.
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The Man Behind the Glass
I bought the mirror at a yard sale for seven dollars. The man in it is three seconds behind me — which is how I know it isn't a mirror at all.
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3:13 A.M.
The radio in my father's workshop picks up a voice that sounds exactly like mine, reading tomorrow's news. Last night it read my obituary — and got my age wrong by a year.
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Three Knocks, Then Three More
The knocking started three nights ago — three knocks, a pause, three knocks — and it has not once come from the door, which would have been easy.
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The Box
An archivist finds a gray box on a shelf that was never there — and her missing memories start coming back, one by one, some of them not hers.
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The Painted Bride
The first time I saw Adrian Cross, my hand was already on the frame of a painting I had no business touching — and the woman in it wore a look of patient attention, as if she had been waiting for me.
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The Sinkhole Inventory
The basement stairs still had the same creak, fourth one down, that they'd had the day we moved in. I counted them without meaning to — nineteen steps, a landing, and the sump pump's black basin.
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