Blood and Stone

The bet happened because of a water stain, if you can believe that.

We were halfway through unloading a one-bedroom on the fifth floor of a walk-up in Ridgewood, and Liz had just come down with the last box of the owner's books when she stopped on the landing and squinted at the ceiling. There was a stain up there shaped like nothing in particular, brown at the edges, and she said, "You're not gonna last an hour."

"Last an hour doing what?" I asked. I was holding a love seat, by the way, which is not the thing you want to be holding during a serious conversation. It weighs like ninety pounds and it's wider than a doorway, which is the whole problem with love seats.

"The apartment. The one you're standing in. Guy swears it's haunted. Super told him, super told the landlord, the story goes around the neighborhood every few years. Nobody stays past a couple months." She shrugged. "Anyway. You're not lasting an hour up here alone tonight, is my point."

"Why would I be up here alone tonight?"

"Because you're gonna say you could be, and then I'm gonna dare you, and then you're gonna do it, because you're twenty-three and you have no sense."

She had me there. I'm twenty-three and I have basically no sense. My car has 190,000 miles on it and I still drive it to Queens every morning like it's fine. (It is not fine. It makes a noise on left turns that I've decided to live with.)

"Okay," I said, and set my end of the love seat down on the kitchen floor, which earned me a look. "What are we actually betting?"

Liz set her end down too. She's twenty-seven, crew lead, been doing this six years longer than me, and she has this way of looking at you like she's already read the ending of your story and it's not good. "A week's pay. You stay in this apartment from now until dawn, alone, no phone calls out, no leaving, and you win a week of my pay."

"And if I tap out at two in the morning and go sit in the truck?"

"Then you owe me a week of yours, and I buy a real mattress."

Noah, the building super, had come up behind us with a roll of packing tape and was listening to all of this with his arms crossed. He's the super, fifty-something, lives in the basement unit, been there twelve years. "You don't want to do this," he said. Not mean. Just flat, like he was reading off a list.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because it's a bad idea."

"Is the place actually haunted or not?"

Noah looked at the water stain for a while. Then he looked at the window, which I thought was weird, because the window just has a fire escape outside of it and the orange glow of the city, nothing special. "It's not haunted," he said. "It's occupied. Different thing. But nobody's bothered anybody in this building in decades, so if you keep to yourself, you'll probably be fine."

That is possibly the least reassuring thing a super has ever said to anyone, and I want you to know I heard how weird it was. I just didn't care, because a week of Liz's pay was on the table and my left turn noise was getting worse.

"Deal," I said.

"Idiot," said Liz, but she was already pulling out her phone to set an alarm for 5:40, sunrise-ish, and she wrote the bet on a sticky note and stuck it to the fridge like we were closing a real estate deal.

The last of the furniture went where it was supposed to go. The owner, some guy moving to Chicago for a job, had us leave the couch and the bed because he was flying out and shipping the rest later, so the apartment had a half-lived look to it. A mattress with no frame. A couch facing a wall with no TV. Boxes stacked in the corner. The kitchen light was one bare bulb that buzzed a little, and every couple minutes the el went by two blocks over and the whole floor did this low rumble you could feel in your shoes.

Liz stood in the doorway at the end, truck keys in her hand, doing the math out loud. "So that's eight hours of you alone in a haunted apartment for a week of my pay. And I'm coming back at dawn to collect."

"Unless I'm collecting," I said.

"You won't be."

Noah shook my hand at the door, which I also thought was weird. "If you hear anything," he said, "don't yell. Just knock on the wall. Basement. I'll hear it."

"Knock on the wall," I repeated.

"Two knocks if it's nothing. Three if it's bad."

"What's three knocks going to do, Noah? You're fifty-two and I'm on the fifth floor."

"Three knocks," he said, and left it at that.

Then the door clicked shut and it was just me and the buzzy bulb and the mattress.

A quiet apartment in Queens is never actually quiet. The fridge hums. The radiator ticks even when the heat's off. The el comes through every eleven minutes or so and you can hear it coming before you feel it, this wash of noise like a wave rolling in, and then the wave hits, and then the building settles again. I timed it. Eleven minutes, give or take. I got to nine minutes between trains at one point and that bothered me more than anything else that had happened, which at that point was nothing.

I sat on the couch. I ate half a bag of pretzels I found in a box labeled KITCHEN, MISC. I looked at my phone, which was allowed, I just couldn't call out. I watched a video about a guy restoring a rusted machete. Time passed. Liz had been gone about two hours when I heard the first scrape.

It came from outside the window. Fire escape side.

A scrape is a bad sound to hear on a fifth-floor fire escape at ten at night. Scrapes mean rats, or worse, some guy climbing up to look for stuff to steal. I sat very still on the couch with a pretzel halfway to my mouth like an idiot. The scrape came again, longer this time, like something heavy dragging itself along the grating. Then a pause. Then the metallic clank of the little ladder-gate at the far end swinging, which should not happen, because that gate has a latch on it.

I got up. Not going to lie, my first instinct was the wall, two knocks, but I'd already done the math on how stupid it would look to knock on a wall over a raccoon. So I walked across the apartment on my toes like that does anything, and I got to the window, and I was reaching to pull the shade down when something knocked.

From the outside. On the glass. Three times, evenly spaced, like a person asking to come in.

I want to tell you I backed away in the way a normal person would. I did not. I stood there frozen with a pretzel still in my hand, and through the glass, in the orange glow of the street two floors of light below, I saw her.

She was crouched on the fire escape grating as if it were ordinary, and she was not a raccoon. She looked like a woman, mostly. Late twenties, maybe, dark hair cut short, a tank top and work pants in this weather, which was its own question. But her left arm was grey. Not grey like pale. Grey like stone, with a grain to it, and the elbow of that arm bent wrong, backwards, and ended in claws resting on the railing. Half her face was grey too, one side, the jaw and cheekbone, and one eye was dark and the other eye was the color of river rock.

She knocked again. Then she said, through the glass, in a completely normal New York voice, "Are you going to stand there all night or are you going to let me in? It's cold out here."

I looked at the window latch. I looked at my phone, which was across the room. I looked back at her, and she raised her regular, non-stone eyebrow at me.

"You're the thing," I said. "The thing Noah said was occupied."

"Well, I'm not a raccoon," she said. "Are you going to open it or not? My knees are getting cold and I've been up here listening to you crunch pretzels for the last hour."

I opened the window, because what else was I going to do? She came over the sill the way you'd step off a curb. No effort at all, even with one arm made of rock. Then she stood in the living room of an apartment she clearly lived in, shaking cold off her shoulders like a dog, and looked around at all the stacked furniture.

"So this is the bet," she said. "One week's pay, right? I heard Liz and Noah talking about it in the hall when you got here."

"You were listening the whole time?"

"I was on the fire escape the whole time. It's not listening, it's just being outside." She pointed a claw at the couch. "You sat there for forty minutes before you even took your shoes off. Who does that?"

"I was being careful!"

"You ate pretzels and watched a video about a machete. Riveting stuff." She sat down on the couch arm, which creaked, and I took a step back because my brain was still arguing with my eyes about the arm. The grey part went all the way up past the shoulder of the tank top. The grain in it looked like the stone on old churches, the kind that's gone soft from rain.

"So," I said. "You're the ghost."

Her whole face changed. The stone half of it somehow changed too, which I didn't know stone could do. "The ghost?"

"Well, yeah. That's what the building says. Noah said the apartment was occupied. Liz says there's a thing on this floor. Everyone talks about you like you're a ghost."

"I have been on this roof for two hundred and seventy-eight years," she said, "and you people are calling me a ghost." She said the word like it had a bad smell. "I'm a gargoyle. There's a difference. Ghosts are dead. I just don't get invited places."

"Okay, okay. Sorry. What do I call you?"

"Jeri." She crossed her arms, the regular one and the claw one, and looked at me sideways. "And you're the kid who hauled my furniture around all afternoon and then said, out loud, on my fire escape, that you'd stay the night with the ghost."

Wait. "You were watching me during the day?"

"Two hours up there tonight, and the whole afternoon before that. You guys came up those stairs eleven times. I counted. You carried the dresser on your own, which was stupid, you could barely see over it, but I'll admit it was a little impressive." She tilted her head. "You said the ghost thing at about four o'clock. You were standing right there by the window, eating a sandwich, telling Liz you'd bet your whole paycheck the ghost couldn't scare you out."

I remembered saying that. I remembered it very clearly now, with her sitting three feet away from me.

"That wasn't an insult at you personally," I said. "I didn't know there was a you."

"Then what was it an insult at?"

"At... ghosts. Generally. The concept." I rubbed my hands on my jeans. "Look, I didn't mean anything by it. I just wanted to win a dumb bet."

Jeri was quiet for a second. Downstairs a car alarm went off and quit. The el came through, right on schedule, and the window rattled in its frame and she didn't even flinch, so I guess you get used to that after a couple hundred years.

"You want to know why it bothered me?" she said. "Nobody has talked to me in years. Decades. The last human who looked me in the eye was a soldier in 1943 and he ran. And then you show up with your pretzels and your machete video and your dumb bet, and you look right at me, all of me, the arm and the face, and you open the window." She pointed at me again. "That was the first good day I've had in a long time. And then you had to go and call me a ghost."

I opened my mouth to apologize again and she held up the claw hand.

"Stop. Don't grovel. Groveling is worse." She stood up off the couch arm and stepped closer, and I'll admit I leaned back a little, and she noticed, and her mouth went flat. "You leaned away. See, that's the thing. Everyone leans away."

"I'm sorry. It's just, your arm."

"It's just my arm. You want to know what it feels like?"

"I hadn't really planned on..."

"Go on." She held the grey arm out, flat, like she was offering me a ham sandwich. "Touch it. If you're going to win your bet by spending a night with me, you should at least know what I am. Or are you all talk? Because that's what I've been thinking since four o'clock. All talk."

That was a trap and I knew it was a trap and I put my hand on her arm anyway.

It felt like stone. Cool, because of the night air, but underneath the cool there was warmth, like a rock that had been sitting in