The Midnight Tether

Cari had forty-one boxes and a dissertation defense in three months, and she had promised herself she would unpack in order of usefulness, which meant books last and coffee maker first, but of course she opened the box of books first anyway. She was thirty-four years old and had moved six times in her adult life and she knew perfectly well that nobody ever unpacked in order of usefulness, so she didn't feel bad about it, much.

The Pinewood Arms was a converted Victorian near campus with stairs that creaked like they were announcing her to the whole building, and her unit was the upstairs one, small and warm and smelling faintly of old varnish, which she liked, actually, she decided she liked it. The rent was cheaper than anywhere else within walking distance of the library and the landlady had seemed normal on the phone, which in her experience was the whole ballgame.

She spent the afternoon on the books, shelving them in a rough order she told herself she would fix later, folklore on the left, theory in the middle, the shameful shelf of novels she pretended were research on the right. By nine it was dark and she was surrounded by paper and empty tape rolls and she still hadn't found the box with her sheets in it, so she went to the closet to look, because the sheets were obviously in the closet, where else would they be, in the bathroom, come on.

The closet was one of those shallow reach-in ones with a folding door that didn't fold right, and inside she found the sheets immediately, folded on the top shelf like the previous tenant had left them as a welcome gift, which was a little weird, but also kind of nice. It was when she went to close the door that she saw the paper.

It was taped to the inside of the closet door, a single sheet, yellowed at the edges, and it was handwritten in small careful print, the kind of handwriting that belonged to someone who wrote slowly on purpose. She peeled it off and carried it to the kitchen and held it under the light and read it, and then read it again.

Never open the closet after midnight. Never leave a mirror uncovered. Never speak the name written on the third page. Never let the bed touch the wall. Never answer a knock after the clock chimes.

There was no third page. There was no explanation, no signature, no note saying good luck or sorry or this is a joke. Just the five lines, in that slow careful hand, taped where nobody would see them unless they were standing inside the closet with their head practically in the hanging rod, which, fine, was exactly where she had been standing.

"Okay," Cari said out loud, to nobody, because she lived alone now and talking to herself was going to be a thing she did. "Okay, that's a thing."

Her first thought, being a folklore grad student in her last year, was that this was someone's idea of a prank, or an art project, or the residue of some previous tenant's weird semester, and her second thought, being a folklore grad student, was that she had literally read hundreds of these things, written down in archives and field notes and bad self-published books, lists of household rules that were never quite jokes and never quite not jokes. The mirrored windows in the old stories. The doors that had to stay shut. She had a whole chapter draft about them sitting in a folder on her laptop called HOUSE RULES, DO NOT LOSE, which she had, in fact, lost twice.

She photographed the list anyway. She put it on the counter under the fruit bowl, because she didn't know where else to put it, and she went to bed with the bed pulled a careful six inches from the wall, because why not, it cost her nothing, and she left the closet door open, because it said never open it after midnight and it was currently eleven forty and open was not open, that was her professional opinion.

She did not sleep especially well. The radiator ticked and somewhere below her a door opened and closed twice, and at some point she woke with the unreasonable certainty that something was standing at the foot of the bed looking at her, which she dismissed, correctly or not, as the first night in a new place, everybody got that, it was practically documented in the literature.

In the morning she made coffee in the box she had sworn she'd open first and stood at the counter reading the list again, and it was while she was reading it that someone knocked on her door, a normal daytime knock, three raps, nothing about it strange at all.

It was a man from the unit across the hall, mid-thirties, tall, hair that looked like he had been arguing with it all morning, holding an empty wine bottle by the neck.

"Hi," he said. "Jared, across the landing. I'm out of corkscrew, which is an embarrassing sentence to open with, but I figured everybody owns one."

"Cari. I think I own one." She stepped back to let him in, because he was holding a bottle and it was eleven in the morning, which she chose not to comment on. "I just moved in, everything's in boxes."

"I saw the truck yesterday. Welcome to the building." He came in and looked around at the cardboard landscape with the nod of a man who had moved often himself. "You're the folklore person, right? The landlady mentioned. I'm in ecology, postdoc, which means I know a lot about things that are dying."

"Cheerful," Cari said, and went digging through a box marked KITCHEN, MORE OR LESS, and found the corkscrew at the bottom, under a colander she had no memory of owning. "Here."

"Thanks." He took it and then his eyes caught on the counter, on the yellowed paper sticking out from under the fruit bowl, and he leaned over and read it, because of course he did, she would have done the same. "Huh. What's this?"

"Oh, it was taped inside my closet door." She said it lightly, because out loud, in daylight, it sounded like nothing. "Previous tenant left it, I guess. Some kind of joke."

Jared read the whole thing, top to bottom, and she watched his eyebrows do a slow climb. "Never open the closet after midnight," he read back. "Never leave a mirror uncovered. Never speak the name written on the third page. There's no third page."

"That's the part I like best," Cari said. "It's a rule about a page that doesn't exist. So either the page is lost and I have to find it, or the rule exists to make me look for the page, which is honestly a very good bit."

"Never let the bed touch the wall," he went on, tapping the paper. "Never answer a knock after the clock chimes. Do you even have a clock that chimes?"

"I don't, which is either very reassuring or means the clock hasn't arrived yet."

Jared laughed, a real laugh, head tipped back, and it was a nice sound in the half-empty apartment. "Okay, I have to ask the obvious question. Is this a folklore thing? Because you're the folklore person, this must be your whole field wandering around taped to your closet."

"It is my whole field, sort of." She leaned against the counter. "People used to write these down for real. Little domestic rules, don't sweep after dark, don't whistle at night, cover the mirrors when somebody dies. Half of it is just tidiness dressed up as magic and the other half is magic dressed up as tidiness, and nobody can agree which half is which, which is the fun part."

"And the closet thing?"

"The closet thing is a classic. Enclosed spaces, thresholds, what comes through when you open a door you shouldn't. Every culture has a version." She shrugged. "Usually it's a story, not a list. A list is more modern. A list feels like somebody was actually keeping track."

Jared turned the paper over, found nothing on the back, and set it down. "So what happens if you break one?"

"Nothing happens, because it's paper in a closet."

"Right, obviously." He grinned. "But what if we tested it? Scientifically. I'm a scientist, this is basically my job, except my actual job is counting beetles in a creek, so honestly this would be more interesting." He was already warming up, she could tell, the way he'd shifted his weight toward her. "One rule. Tonight. We break one together and write down what happens, if anything, and either we get a funny story or we get a dissertation footnote. Either way, wine."

Cari looked at the list, and then at the closet door standing open down the hall, and felt a small cold finger of something walk up her spine, not fear exactly, more like the moment in a story where the reader knows more than the character and starts yelling at the page.

"You want to open my closet after midnight," she said slowly.

"I want to open your closet after midnight, with a witness, with documentation, and with wine. It's perfect. Nobody's ever had a control group for a curse before."

"That's not remotely how curses work."

"Then it'll be easy to prove wrong," Jared said, and raised the bottle. "Nine o'clock. I'll bring the corkscrew back and a notebook. Deal?"

"It's not a deal," Cari said, "it's an experiment," which was her way of saying yes, and he knew it, and he grinned all the way back across the hall.

At nine Jared knocked, which was fine, because there was no clock in the apartment that chimed and it wasn't midnight anyway, and Cari let him in and tried not to notice that her heart did something stupid about it. He had the corkscrew, a spiral notebook, and a second bottle of wine, which struck her as either optimism or contingency planning.

"In case the experiment runs long," he said, holding it up.

"You've thought about this too much."

"I've thought about it a normal amount." He sat down at the counter and wrote EXPERIMENT ONE across the top of the first page in careful block letters. "Date, time, subjects, hypothesis. See, this is real science now. There's a notebook."

Cari laughed and got two glasses out of a box, washing dust off one with her thumb, and they drank a little and talked about nothing while the clock on her phone crawled, her committee's latest round of revisions, his beetles, the landlady's habit of watering plants at seven in the morning with the volume of a fire drill, and it was easy, sitting on her kitchen floor because she had exactly four chairs and one was holding boxes, easier than it had any right to be with a man she'd met ten hours ago.

At 11:55 Jared stood up and offered her a hand up, and they walked down the hall together and stood in front of the open closet like a couple of idiots, which Cari said out loud.

"Speak for yourself," Jared said. "I'm a scientist standing in front of a threshold with a witness. That's dignity." He checked his phone. "Two minutes. You want to do the honors or should I?"

"I moved in here. It's my closet." She reached for the door, then pulled her hand back. "Okay, wait. Ground rule. If anything actually happens, we close the door. Immediately. No bravado, no documentation first. We close it."

"Agreed. If anything happens, we close it and we drink a lot."

"One minute."

They stood there, shoulder to shoulder, and Cari found she was counting under her breath, and at midnight she pulled the door open the rest of the way, the old hinges grinding a little.

Nothing happened.

Then the air went cold, genuinely cold, a drop of ten degrees in the space of a breath, and inside the wall behind the closet, faint and deliberate, something scratched. Three scratches, a pause, three more. Cari stood absolutely still with her hand on the door and did not scream, which she counted later as her finest professional achievement.

"Okay," Jared said quietly. "Okay, that's in the wall. That sound is coming from inside the wall."

"Yes!"

"That's not rats. I've worked around enough old buildings, that is not the sound of rats."

"Rats don't do threes," Cari said, and her voice came out steadier than she expected. "Scratch, scratch, scratch, pause. Rats are erratic."

"How do you know that?"

"Two hundred years of folklore about things in walls, and most of them knock in patterns." The scratching stopped. The cold stopped a moment later, like a faucet turned off. She looked at Jared and he looked back at her and neither of them moved for a second, a charge in the look, fear and thrill all mixed up together, and then they both exhaled at once and it came out almost as a laugh.

"Close the door," he said.

She closed the door. They went back to the kitchen and sat down on the floor and Jared wrote for a solid minute, narration, temperature, sound description, and then he looked up at her with his hair in his eyes and said, "One rule a night. Every night. We break them all, in order, and we write everything down."

"You're insane."

"Probably, yes. But think about it. Nothing visible happened. No thing came out. The air got cold and something scratched, which is interesting, which is data, which means the rules are connected to something real and we have four more chances to map it." He tapped the notebook. "Or it's a drafty Victorian and a mouse, and we drink wine every night for a week. Either way I win."

Cari looked at him for a while. He was grinning and a little pale at the same time, and she recognized the expression because she was almost certainly wearing it too.

"Fine," she said. "Tomorrow, the mirror."

"The mirror," Jared said, and wrote it down.

The mirror came on the second night, and it was worse, and Cari would think about it for a long time afterward. She had one mirror, a tall oval one propped against the bedroom wall, still wrapped in a bedsheet from the move, and at midnight they unwrapped it and stood it bare against the wall and turned off the overhead light so only the lamp was on.

For a while, nothing. They stood side by side in front of it like a couple checking their outfits, and Cari was about to say something about how this was the stupidest experiment yet when she saw it.

Behind her reflection. Not beside it, behind it, in the glass the way depth works in a mirror, a shadow that moved when she didn't move. She shifted her weight and the shadow stayed. She lifted her right hand and her reflection lifted its right hand and the shadow, low and behind her reflected shoulder, slid left.

"Jared," she said, and her voice cracked on it.

"I see it." His voice was very quiet. "I see it, don't move."

It didn't do anything else. It just stood there behind her reflection, a smear of dark that didn't match any shape in the room, and Cari's whole body went rigid and her breath came shallow, and then Jared's hand came down on her shoulder, steadying, and she realized how close he was standing, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him through his shirt, which was absurd because the room had not gone cold this time, the room was warm and the thing in the mirror was the only cold thing in it.