The Depot Girl

Moira Tomlinson stood at the entrance of the old bus depot and asked herself, for the third time, what exactly she thought she was doing.

Forty-two. That was the number. Forty-two years old as of six that morning, and she had celebrated by eating cold birthday cake over the sink at eleven at night like some kind of animal. Her sister had called. Her coworkers at the gallery had thrown her a sad little office party with a plastic tablecloth. And somewhere around the second slice of cake she had looked at her own reflection in the kitchen window and thought, well, this can't be it, can it?

The depot sat on the edge of town like something waiting to be torn down. It wasn't, though, not anymore. Some arts collective had gotten the lease and turned the whole place into an installation space, which was a fancy way of saying they hung weird paintings between the rows of dead benches and called it a venue. The glass ceiling was still mostly intact, and the moon came through it in these long silver panels that lay across the floor like fallen doors.

She was the curator, technically. She had booked the space for a private "after hours appointment" which was a lie she'd told the collective's board with a completely straight face. What she had actually done was dare her next door neighbor to meet her here at midnight.

The ticket booth still stood in the corner, glass and all. Somebody had left a paper schedule taped to it from years ago, fares and routes for towns that probably didn't have bus service anymore. Moira read it twice while she waited. She checked her phone. No signal, or one bar that flickered. She checked it again, which was silly, because she'd already checked it.

"Come on, Moira," she said out loud, and her voice bounced around the big empty room and came back at her sounding strange, thinner, like someone else had said it. "You're forty-two, not dead."

Because that was the entire issue, wasn't it? Not the age itself. Ages were just numbers, she'd said that to herself a hundred times. It was the sameness. Wake up, coffee, gallery, e-mails about insurance certificates, drive home past the same hardware store, dinner, television, sleep. Four years since Burton, the artist, the affair that had burned so hot it left her fingerprints scorched on everything for a year afterward. Four years of sensible dating after that, men she met through friends who talked about their lawnmowers.

She wanted one night that wasn't on a schedule.

And Burt. Burt Ingram, who lived two houses down and painted bridges for a living, which was possibly the most dangerous ordinary job in the world if you thought about it too long. He was forty-four, divorced years back, kept his yard neat, borrowed her ladder, returned it. They'd been having wine on her porch maybe twice a month for a year and a half, and somewhere in there the conversations had stopped being about the weather.

Last night, on her porch, on her birthday-eve, he'd said something like, you know what you need, Tomlinson? And she'd said, don't say a vacation. And he'd said, no, you need one night you can't predict.

So she'd dared him. Midnight, the depot, bring nothing but yourself. And he'd laughed and said fine, but he was bringing coffee, because he wasn't standing around a freezing building being unpredictable with nothing warm to drink.

Now she bounced on her heels and watched the doorway.

* * *

He was late. Of course he was late. He came in at twenty past twelve with a camping stove under one arm and a bottle of red wine clenched by the neck in his other fist, and he was grinning like this was all a tremendous joke that she had somehow lost.

"Traffic," he said, before she could open her mouth.

"There's no traffic at midnight, Burt!"

"There was a raccoon on Delancey Street. Big one. It had opinions about my car and I had to negotiate." He set the stove down on one of the old benches and held up the bottle. "Also I brought wine, because coffee without wine is just a sad thermos."

"You said coffee!"

"And I brought the equipment for coffee. The wine is a separate initiative." He was already unscrewing the little propane canister into the stove base, hands steady, as if he had cooked on a hundred cold rooftops. "Happy birthday, by the way. Officially. Barely late, but it counts."

"It stopped counting at midnight, thank you."

"Forty-two, right? You told me that Tuesday."

"Forty-two." She said it and heard it land in the big room and echo. The depot did that. Every word came back at you about half a second later, softened, like the building was repeating it to itself. She'd noticed it the first time she'd walked the space back in the spring and thought it would be a problem for any sound installation. Now, alone at midnight, it was something else. It was like the room was listening.

Burt looked up at the glass ceiling. "Okay, this is actually good. This is a good dare. I'm giving you points for the dare."

"You haven't done anything yet."

"Neither have you! You're standing by the ticket booth looking like you're about to sell me a fare to Harrisburg." He snapped his fingers at her. "Come sit down. There's wine. There will be coffee in about four minutes if this thing lights, which it will."

It didn't light.

He clicked the igniter and nothing happened. He clicked it again. Nothing. He tried a match from a box in his jacket pocket, and the match lit, and the burner hissed a little, and then the flame just laid down flat and died like it had been told to.

"That's not right," he said.

"Is there enough gas?"

"It's a fresh canister. I bought it today." He shook it. Something sloshed. "Full."

"Try the match again."

He tried the match again. The flame crawled along the burner for a second and then bent sideways, toward the empty room, and went out. There wasn't any wind. Moira looked around. The doors were shut. The old vents were painted shut. But she could have sworn the air had moved, just then, toward the benches at the far end.

"Well," Burt said, "that's the stove broken. Guess we drink the wine at cellar temperature like animals and I eat my granola bar cold."

"Do you have a granola bar?"

"I have two granola bars. It's a whole kit, Moira. I'm a professional." He poured wine into the two enamel cups he'd brought, which, she noticed, he'd bought new, both of them, because the rims were still stickered with price tags. She decided not to mention it. It was a birthday gift, sort of, in the same way that showing up at midnight to a haunted bus depot was a birthday gift.

She sat down next to him on the bench, and the bench was cold through her coat, and the wine was actually not bad, and for a minute it was just the two of them and the moon panels sliding around on the floor as clouds went by.

Then, from the far end of the depot, past the benches, something whispered.

It wasn't a voice. That was the thought she kept repeating to herself over the next several minutes. It was the acoustics. Big empty buildings made noises, she knew that, she'd sat through enough building inspections to know it. Pipes ticked. Glass settled. But it had a shape to it, that sound. It had a rhythm, almost like breathing, and it came again, longer this time, and Burt stopped with his cup halfway to his mouth.

"Tell me you heard that," he said.

"I heard that."

"Okay. Because for a second I thought, don't say it, Tomlinson, she'll think you're scared."

"Are you scared?"

"I'm a bridge painter. I hang off the Harlan Street span with a harness and a bucket of paint while trucks go under me. I don't get scared." He took a drink. "I get... attentive."

The whisper came a third time, and this time it was almost words. Almost. Like a conversation happening one floor down in a house, every syllable flattened out. Moira felt the hair on her arms stand up, and she also felt, to her own surprise, awake. More awake than she'd felt on her birthday, or any day of that whole gray year.

"Well," she said, setting down her cup. "You wanted one night you can't predict."

Burt looked at the dark end of the depot, then at her, then back at the dark end. "I want it on record that you said that."

"It's on record. The whole building heard it."

Burt picked up the stove and turned it over in his hands like he could fix it with stubbornness. "Maybe it's the igniter. Maybe the altitude. There's no altitude here. This is the flattest building in the county."

"You said the flame bent."

"I said that, didn't I." He set the stove down on the bench between them. "Flames bend toward drafts. That's just physics. There could be a draft."

"From where? The vents are painted shut. You saw the doors."

"Then physics is embarrassed and I don't want to talk about it anymore." He drank some wine. "So. Forty-two. How's it sitting on you?"

"It's sitting on me like a wet coat, thank you for asking."

"Give it a week, you'll barely notice it."

"You're forty-four. Does forty-four sit well?"

"Forty-four's fine. Forty-four doesn't think about itself all day. Forty-three was the one with opinions." He paused. "Wait, no, that was me. Never mind. Drink your wine."

The whisper came again, and this time Moira turned toward it instead of away from it, which surprised her. The far end of the depot was the loading apron, where three dead buses used to idle, and past that the old maintenance corridor, dark as a well. The sound came from there. Not exactly from there. From near there.

"Do you want to leave?" Burt asked.

"Do you?"

"I asked first."

"I asked second, which means I get your answer for free."

"That's not how questions work." He looked down the length of the room. "No. I don't want to leave. Which is stupid, because this building has a glass roof, no heat, a broken stove, and now a sound, and I brought two granola bars like that fixes any of it."

"Nothing fixes anything. That's sort of my whole year."

"Well, happy birthday." He clinked his cup against hers. "To the whole gray year. May it be over soon."

"Is that a toast or an insult?"

"Yes."

She laughed, and the depot laughed back at her, a half second late, softer, and for a second the laugh came back wrong. Not wrong like scary. Wrong like a recording of her laugh played at the wrong speed, a little lower, a little slower, so that it was almost her laugh but not quite. Burt didn't seem to notice. He'd gone quiet, listening to the dark end.

"Moira," he said.

"Yes?"

"There's somebody down there."

"You saw somebody?"

"No. I felt somebody. You hang off bridges for a living, you develop a sense for when there's a person in a space where there shouldn't be a person. It's like weather. You can't prove it but your back knows."

She looked. The dark end of the depot was a flat black block in her vision, benches rowed up in front of it like a congregation. And then, as she watched, something moved. A flicker, low, at the level of the benches, over by the corner where the maintenance corridor met the wall. There and gone. Like a coat swinging. Like someone had turned a page.

"Did you see that," she said. It wasn't a question.

"See what? Where?"

"By the corridor. Low. It was... it moved like a person moves when they're trying not to be seen."

Burt stood up. He picked up one of the enamel cups and held it like a weapon, which Moira would have laughed at, under other circumstances, and possibly still did a little.

"Hello?" he called.

The depot said hello back to him, delayed, flattened, and then, after that echo died, there was nothing. No whisper. No flicker. The building sat there being a building.

"There's nobody there," Moira said. "There's nobody here. I booked the whole space, the board signed off, well, the board thinks this is a site visit, but the point is, nobody has keys tonight but me."

"So who moved?"

"A coat. A rat. A rat dragging a coat."

"That's a specific animal."

"I'm a curator. I deal in specifics." But she was standing now too, and she had her cup in her hand, and she realized she'd put the bench between herself and the dark end of the room without deciding to. "Burt, did the stove really bend its flame sideways?"

"You saw it."

"I know. I'm asking anyway."

"Then I guess we're both asking." He stepped out from behind the bench, which she thought was brave and also unnecessary, and took four steps toward the corridor