Chapter 1: Poems Under the Door
The poem arrived on a Tuesday, slipped under her door like a secret or a threat. Lila found it at three in the afternoon, a single sheet of cheap, lined notebook paper, damp at one corner from the hall’s perpetual grime. The words were typed in a stark, common font.
He dreams in crude oil, thick and black.
The surface shivers, then pulls him back.
No moon reflects, no bubbles rise,
Just the closing hymn of his own surprised eyes.
You watched him sink. You know the spot.
The canvas waits. Forget him not.
Her coffee went cold in her hand. The air left the room. Last night’s dream had been this, precisely this: the viscous lake, the man’s shape contorting beneath a iridescent sheen, his silent scream as the sludge filled his mouth. She’d woken gasping, the taste of petroleum and despair coating her tongue. She’d told no one. She never did.
The apartment seemed to shrink around her. Canvases leaned against every wall, their forgotten faces staring blankly past her. The fairy lights strung over the window buzzed, a weak defense against the gloom of the alley below. That alley, where the trash bags festered and the flickering streetlight cast long, dancing shadows. Had someone stood out there, watching her window, waiting to deliver this?
“No,” she whispered to the empty room. It was a coincidence. A sick, fucking coincidence.
But her hands were trembling. She crushed the paper into a ball, then smoothed it out again, her fingers leaving smudges of burnt umber and phthalo blue near the edges. The paints were still under her nails from yesterday’s session. You watched him sink.
A sound from the hallway—the familiar, dragging step of Mrs. Gable from 3B. Lila was at her door in a second, yanking it open. The hallway was empty save for the retreating back of her neighbor and the smell of boiled cabbage. But down the stairwell, she caught a glimpse of silver-streaked hair.
“Mira!”
Lila took the stairs two at a time, her socks slipping on the chipped linoleum. She caught the older woman just as she was fitting her key into her own apartment door.
Mira Solis turned slowly, her eyes like polished river stones. She took in Lila’s wild hair, her frantic eyes, the crumpled paper clutched in her fist. A knowing smile touched her lips, a mere crack in the parchment of her face. “Lila. The cards were restless last night. I drew The Moon. Illusion. Hidden enemies. A subconscious stirred.”
“Did you put this under my door?” Lila thrust the paper forward, her voice sharper than she intended.
Mira didn’t take it. She glanced at the typed lines, her expression unreadable. “I work with images, child. Not… word processors.” She said the last two words with gentle distaste. “The message found you. As I knew it would.”
“What does that mean? Who wrote it?”
“The building has memories. It breathes them out sometimes.” Mira turned her key, the lock clicking with finality. “The cards warned you. The watcher is already inside.” She paused, her hand on the doorknob, and her tone softened, becoming almost motherly. “Lock your door, mi cielo. And maybe, stop painting the faces you see in your sleep. You might be inviting them in.”
The door closed, leaving Lila alone in the dim, buzzing fluorescence of the hall. The watcher is already inside.
Her apartment felt different when she returned. The faces on the canvases no longer seemed passive. They felt expectant. She went to the window, looked down at the alley. A puddle from last night’s rain glittered under the broken light, a tiny, dark mirror. You know the spot.
Driven by a compulsion she couldn’t name, she dragged a fresh, medium-sized canvas to her easel. She didn’t sketch. She just started laying down color, great, frantic swathes of black and midnight blue, mixing in a touch of green to make it sickly. Her brushes were extensions of her panic, stabbing and swirling. The smell of turpentine and linseed oil rose around her, a familiar cocoon that usually meant safety. Tonight, it smelled like a laboratory, like something being dissected.
A shape emerged from the darkness. Not the drowning man. A figure on the shore, suggested by just a few strokes of Paynes Grey and a hint of flesh tone. A silhouette, watching. The perspective made the watcher loom, large and intrusive. Lila’s breath came in short gasps. She was painting the watcher. She was giving it form.
Her hand slipped, a slash of crimson cutting across the watcher’s chest. Or was it a neck? She stepped back, her heart hammering against her ribs. The painting was a mess of aggressive energy and fear. It was the best thing she’d done in months.
The floorboard behind her creaked.
She froze. It was the old board near the kitchenette, the one that groaned when you stepped on its left side. She hadn’t stepped on it. She was standing perfectly still, brush dripping vermilion onto the drop cloth.
Silence stretched, thick and heavy. Then, a slow, deliberate exhalation. Not hers. The sound of someone sighing smoke.
The smell reached her a moment later—unfiltered cigarettes, a brand cheap and harsh, cut with something cloyingly sweet. It seeped under her door, a tendril of scent that had no business in her turpentine-and-coffee world.
She didn’t move. She couldn’t. Her eyes were locked on the narrow strip of space between her worn floorboards and the bottom of the door. The hallway light was out, a permanent state. But something shifted there. A darkness within the darkness, pausing, then sliding away with a soft, almost inaudible scrape of leather on wood.
The scent lingered long after the shadow was gone.