7 True Abandoned Places Horror Stories | Terrifying Encounters with Ghostly Presences 😱

Hello everyone and welcome back to horror stories. I know many of you use these episodes to fall asleep so before you drift off, I'd love it if you could leave a comment letting me know where you're listening from around the world. Also don't forget to like and subscribe if you're enjoying the episodes. Paper shoe covers dragging on bare concrete make a soft hush like somebody brushing crumbs off a table with the side of his hand. I've heard that sound at my own parking lot since. I was 39 the spring it started, six years a tire man at a shop in Debian, New Mexico, and two months out of work. Ruben is my name. By April I'd gotten good at answering my sister's morning calls from the truck like I was on my way to the shop. What I was really doing for money that April of 2021 was driving out at night to a dead plant on the east edge of town, off the interstate 10 frontage road, pulling copper wire out of the walls and selling it to the scrap yard by the pound. If I came up short on rent, I'd have to ask my sister for it and then she'd know everything. The plant had closed 20 years before. One long steel building with a lot gun back to weeds and I'd worked it alone on Tuesday and Wednesday. That Friday the wind had blown all day and quit its sundown. The asphalt was still giving off heat when I pulled in and the dust the wind had kicked up hung in Labura's headlights like the haze off a break drum when you hit it with the air hose. Labura was my 2004 Ford Ranger, named because she was stubborn and hauled more than any truck her size should and she and I were both overdue for an alignment. I wasn't alone that night and that was its own problem. Shankloss was a kid I'd met in line at the scrap yard the week before. A tall quiet guy who said he knew a building with wires still in it if I had a truck. He told me his name was Benny but he was standing in a scrap yard in flip flops so he was Shankloss and he never fought it. He was 64 and rode folded into Labura's passenger side with his knees on the dash and I couldn't tell if the knot-talking was shy or if he was waiting on my keys so I kept them in my front pocket. The weigh-in was a flap of chain link along the frontage road that somebody had cut years ago and I'd made wider with my own cutters. Shankloss had a cheap trail camera, the kind deer hunter strapped to a tree, zip tied to the post beside it. "Keeps the other guys honest," he said. We drove through and around back to the loading bay and when my headlights swung across the floor inside, they lit a stripe in the dust I didn't remember. Narrow and smooth running off toward the middle of the building. I put it down to the wind, parked Labura back in the dark where nobody on the interstate could see her and locked her. The kids who sneak into places like that with cameras call it urban exploring and their rules are daylight and never alone and I'd picked night and a guy from a scrapyard line which is the worst of both. April rent doesn't care what you know, nemoto. Inside everything wore a gray felt of dust, the air smelled like pigeons and hot tin and my boot prints from earlier in the weeks at their crisp as new tread, every lug showing. The copper was in the electrical room along the north wall, along walk across the main floor. In the middle of that floor stood a glassed in room by itself, where they'd built wiring harnesses, which is a fancy name for the bundle of wires behind your dashboard, tipped up by hand. The old sign still called it the clean room, which as far as I could tell meant a glass box where they made you wear paper booties. Its windows had gone cloudy and its door hung half open and I'd been walking wide of it on general principle. I was coming back from my first run with a coil over each shoulder when my headlamp caught that stripe up close and it wasn't wind. It was a path narrow and shuffled and the marks in it were flat and smooth with no tread at all, like somebody had skatered across the floor in socks. Six years of reading tread for a living and these were boulder than any tire I ever refused to mount. The path came out of that glass door and ran straight to the bay, went once around Lapura close enough to touch her, stopping at each door and went back the way it came. The roof dust that drifted down all day hadn't settled into it yet. My shoulders crept up toward my ears and stayed there. In my head I called it the Zamboni line because I'm the kind of man who names a thing instead of running from it, which tells you a lot about why I was broke. I got Sean Claus and walked him over with the flashlight. He's been around my trunk, I said. He looked at it longer than anybody needs to look at a line on a floor. Huh, he said soft, like I'd reminded him of something. Then he dragged his buckets and cutters over to the bay door where he could see Lapura, set his flashlight on a drum-pointed atter and worked facing her the rest of the night without one more word about it. I told myself it was some lonely old local who wandered in at night and Deming has a few. I sat back down in the electrical room on an upside-down bucket and stripped wire with a hook knife, peeling insulation until my hands were great to the wrist. And that's about where I was when the talking started. In a steel-building sound bounces around but a voice still comes from somewhere. And I turned my head until I had it. Out on the floor behind that cloudy glass. An old man, chatty, the kind who keeps the cashier going while the line backs up behind him. He's got a lot of good wire in there, huh? Hot one today. When like that, you can't keep nothing clean. I opened my mouth to ask who was there and shuddered again because my tongue felt too thick to do it right. He didn't need me anyway. He'd stop after every question just long enough and then answer it himself, polite, like he was saving me the trouble. You still take your lunch on the tailgate at 11.30 like at the shop. A pause, sure you do. How's the tire shop treating you? Another pause. Oh, that's right, they let you go. You tell your sister yet? No, you didn't. You like calabatsitas with the corn in the way my wife made him. Six years I ate lunch on Labura's tailgate behind that shop by the dumpsters, or nobody but the guys in the base could see. I hadn't told one person in Deming I'd been let go. Through the glass, a shoulder went by and pale blue, slow like every step had to be paid for up front. And under the voice I heard that paper hush on the concrete. It was a smock button to the throat. The kind they'd have worn in there when there was still a job in there. In a building where pigeons had been going on everything for 20 years, it didn't have a mark on it. I quit explaining things to myself right then. My glass room was no go from that minute, which is what the camera kids call a part of a building you just don't enter, and they say it like it came down off a mountain on a stone tablet. It's the only rule I've ever kept. I picked up my buckets and walked back to the bay with my legs feeling like I'd just given blood. I told Sean Claus there was a voice, left out the part about the shop, and if he'd heard any of it himself, his face didn't say. An hour or so later I started loading. I unlocked Labura's driver door to set my cutters on the floor, and the seat was shoved all the way forward against the stops, and the rear view mirror was tipped down toward the cab. I'm 5'10", the keys had been in my front pocket all night. I shoved the seat back and put the mirror where it goes, and my fingers kept slipping off the lever like it was greased. Then the voice started up across the floor. From the stair that climbs to the old office loft on the far side, 40 some yards off. The questions were about my life now. That swamp cooler in your apartment still dripped on the carpet. You get that ranger looked at? She still pulled left on you. She does pull left. I swung my hand held that way, and at the edge of the beam there was a pale blue shape on the stair, and a white shoe cover coming down one step, then the next. The way my grandma took the church steps on Sunday, testing each one before she trusted it. My stomach went light, like a floor jack letting down too fast. Chonclaw's a quit working. He stood in the bay door with his bolt cutters in both hands like a bat. I loaded the last coils anyway because that wire was most of the rent, and I'd already paid for it in nerves. Then we got in LaBora and sat in the dark to wait for the early truck traffic on the frontage road, so a little ranger coming out of a dead plant wouldn't stand out. Which meant sitting for over an hour where he'd sat, forty yards from his stairs. And if there's a dumber way to save on attention I haven't found it. Cheapest motel room I ever had, I told Chonclaw's. He didn't laugh, fair enough. Sometime in the second hour the voice moved off to the far east end of the building, out by the old docks, a couple hundred yards away and faint, still going about the corn. My feet had gone numb in my boots and I didn't move them. Then the voice stopped in the middle of a word. I counted in my head and I got to about twenty. Knuckles on the driver's window, three soft wraps right by my ear. The dash clock said 312. I didn't turn my head. At the edge of my eye there was nothing at the glass, but dark, and then a patch of fog bloomed on the outside of it, low about level with my own mouth. In air so dry my lips had been cracking all week. It shrank and came back. Shrank and came back, keeping time with the talking. You boys leaving. Long night. You get much. The fog came and went. Get her aligned, she pulls left. 1130 tailgate. I'll bring the Calabitsitas. 20 seconds before that voice had been at the other end of the building. I looked down past the side mirror instead of at the glass. Two shoe covers stood beside my front tire. White as printer paper. Not one speck of dust on them in a building that had me grayed at the elbows. And while I watched one of them slid half a step on the concrete with that same soft brushing hush. He'd been in my seat. He'd set it for himself. Now he was breathing on my window, and LaBora was the only way out of that place, and the only thing I owned that nobody had taken yet. Shang Klaus was folded into the passenger side. He's jammed on the dash. Eyes wide open. One hand pressed flat over his door lock. I didn't answer. I turned the key. LaBora caught. And I backed out of the bay with no headlights, because lights would have shown the whole frontage road a truck crawling out of a dead plant, and because I didn't want to see what was standing in them. The voice kept on behind us. I knew the dirt track inside the chain link from driving at three nights that week, so I took it slow by the glow of the truck stop lights off the interstate. At the cut I didn't stop, and with no lights I hit it crooked, and the wires shrieked down both doors and let go, and we were out on the road. On the way past, Shang Klaus reached out his window and ripped his trail camera off its zip tie. I didn't call the sheriff. Calling meant explaining a truck bed full of copper that wasn't mine. I pulled into the truck stop by the east exit and sat there. Shang Klaus set the trail camera in my lap, unfolded himself out the door, and walked off across the lot in his flip flops, and he didn't answer another text from me. I've thought a lot about that long hove his, and his camera out there for weeks, and I think he'd seen those smooth tracks before, and went looking for a man with a truck anyway. At home I sat at the kitchen table, pulled the memory card and put it in my laptop. Weeks of nothing. Wind, a jackrabbit, weeds. Shang Klaus a few times in daylight walking the line. Labura coming through on Tuesday on Wednesday, and again that night. Then one more frame gray in the night setting with 312 in the corner, a hem of pale blue smock and one white shoe cover, stepping through the flap from the roadside coming in. At that minute his breath had been on my window a quarter mile inside. The only frame after it was a blur of Labura's passenger door going by, with Shang Klaus's long arm reaching out. I sold the wire Monday at the yard, paid the rent, and never set foot in that plant again. It didn't stay there. Every few weeks I come out in the morning and Labura's seat is shoved all the way forward and the mirror is tipped down, with the keys still on my nightstand where I left them. That summer I got honored a warehouse in Las Cruces, dark work and a forklift, and I still leave the house at the old shop-hour, and when my sister asks, I still tell her the tire shop's fine. Last Tuesday I walked out to the employee lot at 1130 with my lunch. Before I got around the truck I heard it, a soft brushing on the asphalt on the far side of her, and when I came around there was nobody. Just the tailgate already down and through the back glass the seat jam forward. On the left side of the gate, my spot, where I've eaten every lunch since before I lost that job, a white paper shoe cover they folded once in half, the way you'd fold a napkin beside a plate, clean in a lot that blows dust all afternoon. I sat down next to it and unwrapped my burrito, and I ate the whole thing with the folded paper six inches from my hand. Story two. My bike lock is probably still cabled through the push bar of a steel door behind a dead mall in Casper, Wyoming. I was 35 that fall. I did the billing for an oilfield trucking outfit in town, and I'd spent four years of days off photographing abandoned buildings. My name is Julie. That Tuesday in November 1999 was my 10th wedding anniversary. My husband Dale was home cooking lunch, and I'd promised him one good print from the day to hang in our hall. The mall sat on the north edge of town, empty since 1995. It was 28 degrees with a west wind that rocked my ranger on its springs and peeled the night's dusting off the asphalt and sheets. Gary, who shot with me, insults stereos at the radio shack in the new mall across town, got called in to work that morning. Our rule was nobody goes in alone, and I bent it into something I could live with. I'd leave our second radio at the conoco facing the mall's front wall, where I always parked instead of leaving my plate in a lot for somebody to write down. And I'd check in with whoever was on the register. It was a thin rule, and I knew it was thin while I was setting it up. The girl on the register had amber on her tag, a pen behind her ear and a cup of cocoa going. I set the radio next to the cup. It was one of our pair of cheap walkie-talkies, the box said two miles, with masking tape on the back marked five for our channel. I'll call in every half hour, I told her. Miss Juan called my house. She slid it behind the gum rack like she was hiding it from her manager. From her window you could see the top of the ramp that ran down to the loading docks at the east end and the fire door at the west end. I crossed a bent into the wind with the tripod on my shoulder and my eyes running, and halfway down the ramp the conoco dropped out of sight behind the retaining wall. The big overhead dock doors were chained from inside, but the steel walk-in door beside them had a bent latch and a gap I could turn sideways through. Inside I ran my bike cable through its push bar and a pipe rail on the wall and snapped the lock, so nobody could come in behind me without cutting it. I was maybe 20 minutes into the main hallway when the radio clicked on my belt. Julie, your buddy was just in here asking was the lady with the camera over there. Amber's voice came thin through the hiss. Didn't say much, smelled like a mall food court fryer and cinnamon. I pointed him at the ramp, figured he was with you, or he's the guy who watches the building. Nobody watched it. In October I'd called the management company for permission, and the woman told me no. There was nobody on sight and nobody held a key. I didn't line that up right then. I keed the radio. Gary, the channel hissed long enough that I turned the radio over and checked the knob. It was on five. Here, one word, flat. No hello on it. Gary owned radios from the store and knew we ran five. His work clothes always came home smelling of the pretzel stand next to his store, and he did a dead flat voice on the radio when he thought he was being funny. It got on my nerves every time he did it. I figured he'd gotten off early to scare me, and when he found my cable on that door he'd gripe, and I'd walk back and let him in. The hallway was gray under the skylights, with ceiling tile lying in wet clumps and black mold climbing the walls from the baseboards. I tied orange flagging tape the plastic ribbon surveyors use to the panic bar on the inside of the west fire door so I could find my way out fast. Over the food court one skylight panel was broken out, and the wind had laid about a quarter inch of powder across the tile with no tracks in it, and built a little drift against a concrete planner with a crest as sharp as a folded invoice. I walked straight across the middle of it, then crouched with my knees aching on the cold floor and shot back over my own line. Frame 14 had my boot prints running through the center, and I already knew that was the one for the hall. At 1110 I told Amber I was fine. At the dry fountain I set the tripod legs down in the basin and shot the dead escalator with the light coming down on it. The shutter sets low, open a long count to soak up what light there was. My fingers went stiff on the release, and I warmed them in my armpit between frames. When the next half hour came around I called Amber. It's Julie all good. Okay, a pause. Hey, your friend Gary called here on the store phone. You told him you'd be checking in with us so he looked us up. He wanted to know did you need double a's for the radios. He could get them on his discount, and he had to set me down twice for some guy wanting a price on a car stereo. He stuck there till close. I stood in that fountain with my thumb on the button and didn't press it. My breath was coming short and loud and I made it slow down. Amber, the guy who came in, where did he go? Down the ramp like I said, he never came back up. The man at the counter wasn't Gary. I keep five. Who is this? I watched the second half. and on my watch go all the way around and then some. The wind worked at the broken skylight and nothing else in the building made a sound. Counter, Amber came on right after. Was that him? You want me to call somebody? No, don't call anybody. I'm the one who's not supposed to be in here. I folded the tripod with my jaw clamp so my teeth wouldn't knock. Then I went back toward the steel door because the way in is the first thing you check when anything changes. And if he'd come through it, I needed to know which side of me he was on before I picked a way out. The service hall was black and I took it slow behind my flashlight. The beam jumping because I couldn't hold it still. My cable was still through the push bar and the rail, pulled tight, the lock shut, and the key was in my coat pocket. I took it out and held it in my fist anyway. The wind had pushed the little fans of powder in under the steel door and they held the one scuff, mine, where I turned sideways through and nothing else. I swung the light along the overhead doors and the chains were still on them and nothing had come in under those either. I stood there longer than I needed to and didn't touch the lock. I gave Amber the next check-in from that hall, nothing to report, and it came out of me horse. "Okay," she answered. "I'm still watching that ramp. Nobody's come up." I keed five again. "Where?" The hiss ran on and on and nobody answered. Then Amber came back, puzzled. "Where, what, hun? Who are you asking?" My stomach had a knot in it like I'd swallowed a hose clamp off one of our trucks. I left the cable on. The door you came in by stays shut until you leave by it and I wasn't going out a door somebody had just walked down to. The marked exit was the west fire door with the orange tape, which meant going back past the fountain and the tables under the skylight. So I turned around and went. It took longer than it should have, pieces of ceiling grid hung down at face height, and I stopped at everyone and moved it with a tripod leg instead of my hand. At 1240 I told Amber I was still okay and didn't believe it. The square of tables opened up on my left, gray under the broken skylight. Two steps in I smelled it, hot fryer oil and cinnamon sugar. Warm in the nose, the smell of a counter opened for lunch with a line in front of it. In 28 degrees, in a building with no power where nothing had been cooked in four years, the air under that skylight was warm and greasy against my face. My boot prints were gone. An hour and more before they had crossed the middle of that floor from the planter nearly to the far counters and now the powder lay even from edge to edge. The drift against the planter still had its sharp crust, the same line it had when I shot it. There were no other tracks, no drag marks, nothing softened at the edges. Nobody had walked on it and my prints weren't there anymore. I pressed the button, my thumb slipped off at once before it held. Each door, a long quiet, both. I brought the camera up and took frame 19 of the empty floor fast, handheld, no light reading, but the shutter still set slow from the escalator. I didn't step onto it. I backed out the way I came and two steps passed the drinking fountains, the lunch smell quit all at once, and it was cold mold and wet ceiling tile again. I turned into the west corridor, the orange tape was snapping at the far end in the draft that came under the fire door, about 40 feet away. The radio clicked. Fountain. The fountain was a hundred feet behind me, out in the main hallway where I'd stood with the tripod. I didn't turn around. The exit was in my light, and once you've got a marked exit in your light, you keep it there until your hands on the bar. Upper keyed right on top of it, fast and high. Julie, he's at the top of the dock ramp, just standing there, I'm looking at him. I ran the count the way I'd reconcile a billing sheet, me in the west corridor, 40 feet from the taped door. Amber behind the register at the conaco, Gary at his store across town pricing car stereos, the man by Amber's eyes standing outside at the top of the dock ramp. The voice on channel 5 saying the fountain, and down at the bottom of that ramp, a steel door with my cable through it, one scuff under it, and the key in my pocket. The quarter smelt of the fryer. It hadn't when I turned into it. There were no footsteps behind me, only the wind leaning on the sky lights. Next, I switched the radio off. A marked exit is an exit, and you use it. I walked the 40 feet without speeding up, because running on wet tile with the ceiling down is how you end up lying on it. And I hit the taped bar with my hip and the door swung out into the wind. I kept my eyes on the conaco sign all the way over the lot, with powder blowing sideways at my knees. Amber was standing behind the counter holding the radio out in both hands when I came in. Her cocoa had tipped over by the register, and she hadn't wiped it up. As she handed the radio over, she didn't let go of it right away. He held it for you. She told me. The door. When you came out, he was standing there holding it open, and you walked past close enough to touch him. She swallowed. Then when you got halfway over here, he stepped back inside and pulled it shut behind him. Slow. Like he was closing up for the night. I asked what he looked like. She set a striped shirt, red and yellow, maybe some blue, and a tall, flat-topped hat like a marching bands, which she knew sounded stupid, and a name tag she couldn't read from the window. Not old, not young. She tried three ways and it never got clearer, and I couldn't put it to any store I knew. She'd been watching the ramp, and then he was at the west door, and she couldn't tell me when he'd moved. When I went out to the truck, she was mopping the cocoa with a wad of napkins and keeping her back to the window. Out in the ranger, I pulled the batteries from both radios and threw them in the glove box. When I turned my head to back out, my co-collar was against my cheek, and it smelled like hot grease and sugar. I had the roll develop that week. Frame 14 is my boot prints and a line across the floor under the skylight, sharp enough to count the lugs on the soles. Frame 19 is the same floor from nearly the same spot, washed out pale gray from the slow shutter. The drift still crested against the planter and not one print anywhere. Gary looked at both on his kitchen table and said the wind filled them in, and I blew the exposure. Nothing on either negative would make anybody else see it different. I was half an hour late for lunch. I'd changed into my other coat in the driveway because the one I'd worn in the mall still smelled of the fryer, and it hung by itself in the garage until spring. When I went up in the hall that year, both negatives are in a sleeve in the drawer with the radios. Frame 19 with a pale streak across the top where the broken skylight burned in, and the rest of it just floor. Story 3. My dad had a kid who every door in that school, and I still went in through a broken window. Dad still called me Jesse. I was 22 that January in 2004, a junior at the University in Fairbanks. I'd moved home from Seattle that fall because Dad's memory was going, and he couldn't be left alone at night anymore. That Saturday he was mind to watch. Dad was Gary 74, widowed six years. For 22 years he'd been head custodian, the man who ran the cleaning in the boiler. Atternold elementary school on a side road at the edge of North Pole. The district shut it down in the '90s, but he still wore his hearing clip to his belt. Some mornings he couldn't tell me the day of the week. He could still walk me through that building room by room, office to gym, without missing a door. Ryan, a guy from my chemistry class, was big on her backs, sneaking into abandoned buildings. His floor in the dorms put up $40 if I'd go into Dad's old school and bring back the gym teacher's whistle. Ryan's brother had gone there and swore it still hung on a nail by the stage. $40 was a week of groceries for Dad and me. It was 38 below with no wind, and ice fog sat around every streetlight back along the Richardson Highway. I parked behind the school, left the engine running and called Ryan, since he was supposed to be my check-in. He laughed and told me not to check it out. As one real rule was never going alone, and I was counting a man in a parked car as my partner. "Keep your door locked," I told Dad, and found him the oldie's station. I shut him in with the heater and the spare flashlight from the glove box, because his bad hip would never have been through that window. The plywood on the boiler room window had been pried loose years ago. I squeezed through onto bare concrete, and my breath frozen my scarf before I'd even stood up. My light showed me a long haul with drinking fountains down at my knees, and a thin skin of frost on the floor. Every classroom had a little window in its door in a dead PA speaker, the loudspeaker for announcements, mounted above. the far end of high winds. lead in the orange glow from the street light on the side road, and the gym doors stood under it. I pushed one door open and put my light in. The whole gym floor was white with whorfrost, ice grown out of the air onto the old varnished maple. My Surrell boots left every lug sharp and clean in it. I took two steps backward just to look at my own tread, then went straight across. The center circle showed through the frost a dark ring under the white. The whistle was right where Ryan said, hanging on a nail by the stage stairs. Its cord gone stiff as wire. I put it in my coat pocket. The stage door had a chain frozen through both handles, so the hall doors were the only way in or out of that gym. I turned around. My tread ran back to the hall doors, one clean line. Next to it ran a second line of prints that came in from the doors, and went out to center court. And there it stopped. Those prints were flat on the bottom, no tread at all, and a size bigger than mine. Somebody had walked into that gym while my back was turned. Ryan I figured, he had a car, he'd been laughing on the phone, and North Pole was a short drive for a guy who liked it joke. If the line stopped at center court, he must have hopped over onto my tracks from there. My face went hot under the scarf. I said a word my mother would have slapped me for. I wanted to catch a mat at it. I walked back to the doors on my own tread, setting each boot down in my own marks. And just inside I dragged my heel through the frost in one long line from a wall to wall. Anybody coming in or going out would have to cross it. Then I went along the wall on a strip of rubber mat where no frost had grown, out to the end of the folded bleachers, and crouched there. Dad had the heater and a full tank, and I wandered my $40. I switched my light off. The only thing I could see was the orange from the hall window coming dimly through the wire glass in the doors. I took my phone out of my coat and dialed Ryan, holding the screen against my chest to hide the glow. If he was in that gym, his pocket was about to ring. It rang. It kept ringing, and then it was his voicemail. Ryan saying something stupid about the beep. Nothing rang anywhere in the gym. I shoved the phone back in my coat. My knees ached from the cold coming up off the boards. Then the PA speaker over the scoreboard clicked. One sharp click, the noise those speakers used to make right before the morning announcements. That building had no power. I put my light on the floor. My heel line across the doorway was smooth. Nobody had stepped on it, or over it. My own tread still went out to the stage and back, and the flat print still came in from the doors and stopped at center court. Now another set of flat prints started in the middle of the floor and came toward the bleachers, toward me, and stopped a few yards short of my boots. Nothing had come in through those doors. Whatever made those prints had started out in the middle of the gym. My fingers had gone stiff in my mittens, and I could barely keep my grip on my light. When I stood, my leg shook so hard I had to put a hand on the bleachers. I went for the doors on my own tread with the light in front of my feet. The flat prints crowded my line now, running right alongside it, and I had to look hard at every step to find my logs. Halfway there, a flashlight came bobbing down the hall toward the gym. Then I heard keys. It was dad. He'd gotten tired of the car, walked to the back door beside the window I'd gone through, and opened its padlock with a key off his old ring that still fit. Before I reached him, he swung both gym doors back and hooked them on their floor catches. Two quick moves, the way he used to every night to air out the floor. I swung my light back across center court to show him the prints. With the doors open, I could see straight across the hall into the trophy case. Its sturdy glass caught my beam lying on the floor out there, and two dark shapes were standing in it. In the reflection, the top of the door frame cut them both off at the neck. I looked back over my shoulder. Under my light, center court was empty, just frost and prints. I walked the rest of my line and took hold of dad's mitten. He had turned around in the doorway and was staring across the hall at the glass, his flashlight hanging at his side. "Two of them at center court," he said, "too tall for my doors." Then he went quiet, the quiet he used to bring home some winter mornings off night shift. After the crew had been talking about the gym, he wouldn't look at the floor. He kept his eyes on the trophy case. I'd pulled his hand toward the hall. He pulled it back, turned and stepped past me into the gym, out across clean frost toward center court. I'll tell them were closed. It was the same tone he'd use on two parents wandering in after a game. He was walking on clean white frost off every line on that floor. I went after him but couldn't run, because the barnish under the frost was slick. And if he fell, I'd never get him up. My breath came so fast and loud in my scarf that it fogged up my own light. I caught his coat sleeve at the free-throw line. The whistle jerked out of my pocket and skatered off across the frost, well away from any of our prints. I got both hands in his coat and sat back on my heels with all my weight. He stopped and looked at me, and something came back into his face all at once, the way it does sometimes. For the first time he looked down at the floor. You walk out on your own tracks, never anybody else's. That was the night cruise rule, and he'd never once set it at our table. He turned and stepped back into the prints he'd just made, and walked them to my line. The whistle stayed where it lay. I put Dad on his own prints back to the doors with my mitten flat on his back. Found my sorrel tread among the flat ones beside him, and we went. Dad was under my hand, and behind us were two things I had no name for. Out in the hall my lugs and his from coming in were still in the thin frost, two lines side by side running back toward the window in the door he'd opened, and I steered Dad along his own one step at a time while I kept my boots in mind right beside him. Some of the flat prints on the hall floor were new. They pointed the same way we were walking. The orange glow from the window at the gym and lit the hall behind us, and every classroom door window beside my face caught it. In the first one two dark shapes stood back by the gym doors against that glow. In the next they were nearer and their arms hung down well past where their knees should have been. I put my eyes on the floor and kept them there. The PA speaker over the office door clicked once as we passed under it. My phone was back in my coat pocket. I didn't call the troopers because we'd come in through a broken window, and the man with the keys couldn't have told them what year it was. At the back door, Dad wouldn't go another step until he'd chained it behind us, the way he'd locked up every night for all those years. I wanted to leave it hanging open and run, but arguing would have taken longer, so I held my light on his hands while he ran the chain through the handle and snapped the padlock shot. His fingers were slow and clumsy in the cold. It took him three tries. I walked him across the lot to the car with the exhaust hanging low and wide and not moving at all. I buckled him into the passenger seat, then got in and locked both doors. The heater hit my face and my eyes ran, and I sat on my hands until the burning and my fingers eased off. My phone rang. It was Ryan. Sorry, missed you. Ryan told me. We're all down in the lounge. I asked him who'd driven out to North Pole, nobody according to him. The whole floor had been in the lounge all night with a movie on. Then he laughed and asked if I'd gotten the whistle. "No," I said, and hung up. I backed out and swung around the front of the school, and the headlights went straight through the door glass and lit the front hall all the way back to the trophy case. Two dark shapes stood just inside the chain front doors, and none of that light landed on them. Nothing had been standing there when I'd crossed that end of the hall to the gym. Dad watched the doors the whole time I was backing. He didn't look at me, and he didn't ask what I'd seen. Home was only a few minutes away on the North Pole side, and I kept it under forty the whole way, because the fog had swallowed the road, and I wasn't going to put us in a ditch at thirty-eight below. About halfway, Dad spoke up in his old voice, the one he still had for the years he remembered. They tore that gym floor out the summer before they closed it. I hauled the boards myself. I kept driving. He didn't say anything else. At home, I sat him down at the kitchen table, unclip the key ring from his belt, and set it on the counter. He watched me do it. He let me. Then I pulled his boots off his feet, and mine off mine. The frost had packed down into hard white ice in the lugs of both pairs. I carried them out onto the step and knocked his together, then mine until the treads came clean. Story 4. Fifty-four years had gone by since anybody called me "peaches." I'm Nancy. I was 71 that June of 2024 when my friend Gail talked me into an afternoon inside the old hospital on the hill above Raymond, the one that shut down in the '90s and still has the beds in it. In 1970, I'd been a candy striper there, which is what they called the Teenage Girls, who volunteered in red and white striped pinniforce, pushing a cart of water pictures and magazines from door to door. Gail's my age, a retired school bus driver, and for two years she'd been dragging me through abandoned buildings with a flashlight and a granola bar in her coat. That spring, I'd finally come off a two-year waiting list for a unit in the senior apartments in town, and I'd read every line of that lease, including the one that says a single police citation and you're out. We parked behind the old laundry building after lunch in the 58-degree drizzle we get here all through June. Trucks hissing along US 101 below us and the tide smelled drifting up off the Willapa River. I texted the office at my building, up the hill with Gail, home by five, because Gail won't turn the key until somebody knows where we're headed. My new gray walking shoes had a little star stamped in each heel, and Gail said I looked at dress for the mall. We went in through the ambulance stores where the plywood dangled by two screws. Gail tied pink yarn to the handle so we'd find our way back. And I told her that was very handsel and gretel-over. Inside, it smelled like wet ceiling tile in mushrooms. Admitting was right where I'd left it, the long front desk and the row of plastic chairs, except the ceiling hung down in soft brown flaps and water ticked through onto the floor. Mold had furred that whole room-grade green, the chairs, the walls, a calendar from 1996. Everything but a clipboard lying dead center on the desk. It held a clean sheet of lined paper with a ballpoint tied to the clip by a string, and on the top line in small neat block prints somebody had written, "Peaches 213 West." The paper was white and crisp, like it had come out of the package that morning, and the time on it was within a minute or two of Gail's watch. I left out loud and pointed the penitor on its string. Gail knew all about peaches. The charge nurse on three west, meaning the nurse who ran the whole ward for her shift, was a tiny starched woman who called every striper peaches because she couldn't be bothered with our names. And at the end of each shift, she'd clap once and say, "Shoot on, chins up, and shoot us to the elevator." Three west was the west wing of the third floor, and I'd told Gail that story a dozen times, usually in her car, usually while she was trying to hear the radio. So I played along. I picked up the pen and Gail said, "Don't. That paper's too clean." She was right. It was the only clean thing in that room, but I signed under the top line anyway. Nancy, 216 visiting. With the big curly tail I put on my Y. The one my third grade teacher used to circle in red. Then I made her print peaches on her palm so I could compare, because I wanted to watch her squirm. Her letters came out fat and loopy, and the ones on the sheet were small and square and leaned ahead of the left. She swore on her grandkids she'd never touch that clipboard. Fine, I figured. Then she'd put one of those young people from the ghost hunting channel she watches up to it, and I told her so, grinning. I left the clipboard where it was and started up the main stairs, ripping her the whole way like, "Tell your little friend the props are great, honey, while Gail stayed close enough to step on my heels and didn't laugh near as much as she should have." I put that down to good acting. The second floor was brighter, because half the windows were broken out, and the white sky came right in. Rain had been blowing through those holes for years, and the long haul was an inch of wet black monk that sucked at my new shoes. We stopped at a window over the courtyard and looked down at the covered walkway that crosses to the old clinic wing. Part of its roof had fallen in near the middle, so from up there had a slant. You could see right down onto the walk. Somebody was walking along it, a nurse in a white uniform in the old kind of white cap. The skirt starts so stiff it stood out from her knees. Her head bent over a clipboard like she was reading her rounds. She was no taller than the fourth grader's Gail used to drive, and her cap was tip so far forward I never got a face. Everything else in that building was black and soft with rot, and her uniform was bright and pressed, not a smudge on it, the way they looked in 1970 and never since. A pen on a string swung off the side of her clipboard as she went, same as the one downstairs. Gail got her phone up and took picture after picture. Her thumb going like a sewing machine needle. I quit talking about anybody's young friends. My knees went loose on me, like somebody had yanked the pins out of a card table. The stairs kept going and I went up instead of down, because I'd spent every Saturday of 1970 on three west, and I wanted to see it with my own eyes one time before I ran from it. The door onto the ward had a window of wired glass and Gail and I put our faces to it together. Every other floor in that place was muck and that hall was mopped, the linoleum dark and shining wet, not a leaf or a paint chip on it. The old key lock was turned and on the far side, somebody had slid a mop handle straight through the two pole handles, so those doors wouldn't have opened if we'd had the key in our hands. Nobody does that from out here, I whispered. Gail looked at her at a long time, so somebody's in there. We went back down to the second floor as fast as two women our age go, which isn't fast, holding the rail and each other. We'd just stepped off the landing into the long hall when a voice carried down it from the far end. Visiting hours or over peaches, shoes on, chins up. One clap after it. I turned around. Way down at the end, 60 yards off in the gray light from the broken windows, stood the little white figure with the clipboard against her chest and her chin tucked so the cap hit her face. Gail's fingers dug into my arm, hard enough to bruise, and some dumb part of my brain was waiting for Rod's sirling to step out from behind a pillar and start talking. Look at you, the nurse called chatty, like we'd had coffee every week since Nixon. You always did fold a fine hospital corner. That's how we made beds back then. The sheet tucked tight at the foot, and the corner folded into a knee triangle, and she'd made me redo mine until my fingertips were raw. Bed six is all made up for you. I blinked. When my eyes opened, she was halfway down the hall, 30 yards closer, and in all that sucking wet, I hadn't heard one. Step. You'll stay this time, peaches. Her voice never got louder and never came anywhere near angry. It sat on the same flat note the whole time, like the call chime at a nurse's station. She was closing faster than two-old women can take a flight of stairs. And I was scared that if I blinked again, she'd be close enough to touch. Right beside us was a door marked X-ray reading, a little room where doctors used to sit with the films clipped up on light boxes. And I pulled Gail in with me. The door opened inward, and the latch was shot, so it drifted right back off the frame. What do you even do with a door like that? I asked the room out loud, and my voice came out thin as thread. There was a skinny window in the door, and I put my eye to it. In the mock, I could see our own scuff tracks coming from the landing. My stars and Gail's flat sneaker souls, and coming from the far end toward us were more of my stars, single prints. Each one a long way past the last, like somebody had set a foot down and then simply been farther along. One, two, three, four, I counted out loud, because counting is what my mouth does when I'm scared. I counted pictures on that cart for a whole year of Saturdays. Four prints of my own shoe covered that whole hall where I had never walked, and the fourth set right outside our door with the toe pointing in. The next one would be on our side. A steel office chair was rusting in the corner. I dragged it over so fast it screeched, jammed the top of the backrest up under the door lever, and kicked the back legs until they bit into the floor. So anybody pushing that door would be pushing the whole chair. Then somebody outside pushed down on the lever. The lever stayed put because the chair back had it pinned, so the somebody leaned on the door itself, and the rusted chair legs creaked and skittered a quarter inch across the floor. I pressed my lips together so hard my partial plate clicked, and the weight stayed on that door while Gail and I stared at each other. Then it let up. I'll put you down for later then, came through the door on that same flat note. Gail was breathing in little gasps. The mold in there was terrible, so I shoved the window up, and she hung her head out into the rain until she could pull in a full breath. We waited a long time, longer than I'd like to say. When I looked through the door window again, the hall was empty both ways, so I pulled the chair away. We went the opposite direction from the main stairs to the service stair the orderlies used three doors down. I didn't look at the floor. I kept my eyes on the exit sign and Gail kept her hand on my shoulder all the way down. At the bottom of Firedoor led us into the ground floor hall. Every outside door we passed was boarded tight, so the only way out was the pink yarn and the only way to the yarn when passed admitting. The clipboard lay where we'd left it. Under my Nancy 216 visiting was a new line and it was in my handwriting, my looped N in that curly tail on the Y. It said Nancy, admitted, "Three west, bed six, back soon." I had not written it. Gail read it over my shoulder and made a small sound in her throat and I kept my hands balled in my jacket pockets and walked past that pen like it was a hot burner. Outside Gail called 9-1-1 before I could open my mouth. She told the dispatcher there was a child size somebody in a nurse costume inside the old hospital and she was not driving off and leaving a kid in that building. I let her. I stood in the drizzle by the laundry with my hood up, picturing myself taping a whole kitchen into boxes again at 71. In the car, heater running, Gail scrolled through her pictures. The courtyard, the walkway, the caved-in stretch of roof with the rain coming through. Nobody on the walk in any of them. The deputy was a young Pacific County fellow with a mustache he was still working on. He listened without smiling, radioed it in and went through the ambulance doors alone with his flashlight. And for the twenty minutes he was inside, I chewed my cheek until it bled. Because whatever that boy wrote down was going to decide where I lived. He came out, walked around and checked the clinic wing too, and radioed again, low with his back to us. When I asked about the clipboard, he told me the front desk had nothing on it but mold. He opened his little book and wrote maybe four words and I watched every stroke. He looked at my text to the apartment office and said at least we told somebody. Then eyes on his book instead of on us. He mentioned he hadn't seen our car up here and I understood he was leaving the two of us out of whatever he filed and my whole chest let go at once. He sent us home and promised to come back in daylight with the property manager. Nobody from my building's office ever brought up the text. Weeks later in the cereal aisle at the grocery store in Raymond, he stopped beside my cart. Your two sets of tracks came down from the stairs on the second floor, he said. Then four more with a star in the heel, way too far apart for anybody's legs quitting right at that x-ray door. I looked down at my feet at the gray shoes and my ankles went cold inside my socks. Manager and I went up to three west next morning. Lock was turned and he had no key so nobody's had one to that floor in years. So we knocked out the glass, reached through to turn the lock from inside and worked the mop handle loose. Bed six was made, hospital corners. Then he picked up his milk and walked off and I stood there holding a box of brand flakes until a stock boy asked if I was feeling all right. I still live in that apartment. The renewal came around this spring and I sat at my own kitchen table and read every line before I signed it with a plain pen from the bank that has no string on it. The gray shoes went in the goodwill bin the week after the grocery store stars and all. I signed that sheet as a joke after Gail told me the paper was too clean and from then on the rest of it got written in my hand. So I've got one rule now and I came to it on my own. When a closed down place leaves a pen out for you, you don't write a thing. Not your name, not a joke and not the word visiting. Story five. The fob for my trucks remote start was zipped in the jacket under my head when the engine turned over. Everybody calls me Rick except my cousin Marv. In September of 2015 I was 57 and divorced with my kids every other weekend and I took them to camp one night at an old copper mine location outside Rockland. Up here a location is a little company town the mine threw up for its workers and that one's gone back to the maples now but my dad was born in it. Dad was in a nursing home in Howton by then and I'd promised him a cutting off something from his mother's place. Marv wrote along with Noah my boy 16 and Jessam my girl 11 in my 2004 Silverado which had a remote start and a tick in the exhaust I kept meaning to fix. We turned off US 45 onto a two track just dirt ruts with grass up the middle. When past a county chain somebody had cut years after the last families left and he's down into a hollow. Three company houses were still standing plus a boarding house with no roof. I'd heard about that place my whole life and never once stood in it and my throat closed up so bad I went and kicked a tire for a while like the truck had done something to me. Then I backed in facing out because you leave a place like that nose first and set the rules. Nobody goes in a building nobody walks off alone. Noah wandered his camera in the boarding house anyway and I told him the floors were more holden board and he salted like somebody was paying him by the hour. Marv had printed an old plant the company's drawing of what it meant to build and he held it up against the trees like he was matching paint. It showed a whole row of houses and the woods had kept three. At noon we stood around in the yard eating sandwiches out of our hands and played guests the yard. I asked Marv who had the end house and he guessed the lottees. Noah wanted to know when the last family pulled out and I asked which one was grandma's and nobody could say because the one man who knew was calling his nurses by his sister's names. The third house had a lilac gone wild wider than my truck and I meant to cut from it in the morning light and call it close enough. Rain came in sideways by late afternoon and by six the tent was seeping at the corners. A little after six I ran the Silverado with the heater cranked and the sleeping bag spread over the vents to dry and sat in the cab alone playing solitaire on my phone while the others kept the fire going under the tarp. I'm lousy at it which is most of the appeal. Two knuckle taps hit the passenger glass. The cangases had the end house, a woman's voice said, flat as a card table. It was older and low right up against the window and it was answering what I'd asked Marv at noon like she'd been standing in the yard with us. I figured it for Noah doing a voice to get a rise out of his old man since his still cracked when he got wound up and he'd want credit for keeping it steady so I didn't give him the satisfaction of turning my head. I kept dragging cards around the screen until the tapping quit. When I climbed out to give him grief, all three of them were under the tarp with their hoods up facing the truck and Noah had a hot dog on a stick. Marv said nobody had walked past and he'd been watching the cab the whole time. My face lit up by the phone in that gray rain light. I stood there with rain running down my collar and nothing smart to say, which doesn't happen to me much. Twenty minutes later, Jessica tugged my sleeve. Dad, who's the lady talking by the truck? The radio's off. Spring of '68, honey, a woman said, unhurried like she was filling in a crossword. That was Noah's question from noon when the last family pulled out, answered for him. I listened the way you'd listen for anybody in an empty yard and the voice sat right at the passenger side of my truck with all four of us standing under the tarp. Jess, I had her fist knotted in my coat and the skin of my scalp went tight under my hood. Then I noticed myself. There was a dull ache behind my eyes. My stomach was sour and I'd been fumbling a tarp line like it was my first knot. I got my knife out of the driver's door pocket, cut the snarl and put the knife back and thotted through. The tick in the exhaust, windows shut, rain pressing the air down into that hollow, and me the only one who'd sat in that cab for an hour. Carbon monoxide, the gas and engine gives off with no smell to it, hands you exactly that headache in those clumsy fingers, engine off, both doors open and nobody sleeps in that truck tonight. Rain's rain I told Marv, headaches the exhaust, those voices I got nothing. He laughed at me, which was fair. I thought about calling that and argued it with myself while I coiled the line. There was one bar of signal and only up on the rise behind camp and I'd be telling a deputy I was camped past a cut chain on land that wasn't mine because a voice in the rain knew who used to live in a house. The deputy lost that one. Staying I could defend better. The two track was red clay soup by then. With a wash out at the culvert I'd crept across in daylight. And you don't drive a grade like that with a carbon monoxide headache in your kids in the cab. Jessa had finally quit shivering and was dozing against my arm. And I'd promised dad and you don't hack at a lilac in the dark by headlamp and hand a man in a nursing home a broken stick. "It's the gas in your head and the girl's imagination, Ricky," Marv said. "Oh sure. Noah wanted to take his headlamp and walk the houses and I told him no before he finished and he gave me the look a 16-year-old gives a man scared of nothing he can name. Then Justice said something half asleep. You were talking a back to her when you were in the trunk. I hadn't said one word in that cap that I knew of, and I had nothing to add that would help an 11-year-old sleep, so I kept my mouth shut. But my tongue felt thick, and I kept running back over that hour of phone solitaire in my head, trying to hear myself. I shut the truck doors and cracked the windows so the seats wouldn't soak. We betted down in the tent, me by the door with my jacket folded under my head. Keys and fobs zipped in the chest pocket. I meant to stay awake in the rain drumming on the fly. The waterproof sheet stretched over the tent, put me under anyway. I woke at 115 to a sound I know better than my own cough. The belt squeal the silverado makes when it turns over cold, settling down into an idle and under it that tick in the exhaust. Through the tent mesh the parking lights were glowing orange in the rain, the way they do when the remote starts it. My jacket was still under my head. The chest pocket was still zipped and the fob was inside it, a heart little lump against my ear. My legs had gone loose and cold from the knees down, and I lay there long enough to hear a marvel snore twice. I didn't want to go out there, but that truck was our only way down the hill. We had maybe a quarter tank, and every minute it idle date into that. And if one of the kids woke up cold, the first thing they do was crawl into a warm cab. Full of whatever had already put her naked in my head. My fingers missed the tent zipper twice before they closed on it. I went out in socks and unlaced boots. I opened the driver's door wide, and the dome light came on. I kept my head out in the air and leaned in from the waist with the key in my fingers. There was a woman bent down at the passenger window, looking in at me across the cab. Close enough I could have reached over and touched the glass in front of her. I didn't turn my face to her. I took her in off the edge of my eye. The way you watch a dog you don't trust while you're reaching past it for the dish. Nothing was sheeding down that glass between us, and her hair was dry, gray, and fluffed up like she'd just come out from under the dryer at the beauty shop. She wore reading glasses on a beaded chain, not one drop on the lenses, and her bare palm lay flat on the outside of the window with the water running around her fingers. "It's the one with the lilac," she said, like we were across a kitchen table. That was your grandma's. That was my question from noon, and my mouth was already coming open to ask her which grandma she meant. I heard Jess telling me I'd talked back to her, and I shut my teeth so hard my jaw clicked. I kept my eyes on the ignition, got the key in my feel and turned the truck off, then put the keys in my pants pocket, backed out of the doorway and shut the door. When I looked over the roof, the passenger side was dark and empty. I didn't walk around to check because the kids were in a tent maybe 30 feet off, and I wasn't putting the truck between me and them. I started my little run down under my breath, had a exhaust truck maybe me, and I got as far as a woman with dry hair in that rain and had nothing to put after. Then I made the call. That meant walking off alone against my own rule, and I knew Noah would throw it back at me the first chance he got, but I couldn't help anybody down there with a dead phone and I guess, and I kept the tent in sight the whole way up the rise. My thumb was so numb it hit the eight instead of the nine, and I had to clear it and start over with the rain beating on the screen. The dispatcher was calm. I gave her the cut chain, the two-track off 45, and the old location passed Rockland, and she said a deputy would come out for Montenegon, but it'd be a while and wouldn't put a number on it. I stood there with rain working down my back, and figured a while sounds a lot shorter from a heated building. The voice came across the clearing while I was still up there clear through the rain. Seven of us in four rooms. At supper, Jessah had asked Marv how many people could fit in a house that small, and now somebody had told her. I placed it the way I'd place anybody calling across a field, and it wasn't near the tent or the truck. It was out past the lilac where Marv's flat through the end house and the woods had nothing but maples. The tent zipper went, and Noah came out with his headlamp on. Thought nobody walks off alone. I'll go look real quick. I'll just look. I came off that rise faster than my knees liked, put my hand flat on his chest and told him no. In the voice I hadn't used since he was six and ran for the road after a ball. He stopped. I also was crying inside, and Marv was sitting up insisting he hadn't heard anything but rain. My head had cleared in the cold, and clay or no clay. I wanted us gone. We left the tent standing with the bag still in it, because I wasn't folding wet nylon in the dark with my back to that end house, and a tent is $40 at the hardware store. I started the truck with the key and ran every window down, rain blowing across all four of us. I crept over the wash out in low range, the gear that lets the truck crawl at a walk without stalling, and Jess quit crying when the tires hit blacktop. I called dispatch back to turn her deputy around, and she read my name back to me and said she'd make a note of it. At the pumps in on Tanag and I lay on the wet concrete with my headlamp and found the front flex pipe. The bendy joint in the exhaust under the cab cracked through. That covered the headache and the fumbling. When I opened my door, the dome light came on over a lilac sprig on the dash. Cut on a slant, leaves still wet. Noah said it wasn't him, Marv just shook his head, and Jessah had been asleep against her door since the blacktop. My knife was folded in the door pocket where I'd put it. That Wednesday I drove the sprig to Houghton until data came off his mother's lilac, and I never said who cut it. He kept it in a jelly jar on the sill by his bed until the last leaf dropped. Story 6 The man who opened the gate for us had on a yellow rain slicker, and it hadn't rained in Blaine County since October. The farmers who haul weed to our co-op call me Nightcourtney. I was 26 that winter, and I'd been their night guard going on two years, which mostly meant driving slow loops around the grain elevators with a spotlight and a thermos. Since after my husband died I wasn't sleeping nights regardless. On my days off I poked around abandoned buildings with a little group out of the city. That February of 2018 a realter named Patrice paid me cash to walk the closed diamond back prison in Watanga for a buyer and fill out his checklist. Nobody had ever handed me the keys to a whole building and said it was mine until dark. I pulled in at 115 on a Saturday. The key ring sat in my cup holder, a dozen brass keys on a paper tag that said, "All gates in Patrice's marker, and I'd promised her it would be back on her desk Monday." I patted the dash of my old corolla and told it out loud to behave because home was an hour and a half off. The fence was two runs of 12 foot chain link with razor wire on top, and more coiled in the gap between them. So a man who beats the first one is only standing in a trap. And at the co-op we've got four strands of barbed wire and a padlock older than me. Anyway, my cousin gauge pulled in behind me with two battery work lights I'd asked him to bring, and I dug the key ring out of the cup holder and zipped it into my coat. A north wind was dragging red dirt off somebody's wheat ground, 31 degrees on my dash. The grit ticking against the razor wire. The front entrance was a Sally port, two gates with a cage between. So anybody coming in gets shut in the middle before the second gate opens. Patrice's first key turned the outer lock fine. The second went into the inner lock and quit like it had hit a rock. I leaned my whole shoulder into it, with my glove-braced on the steel ledge beside the lock, and nothing gave. So I knelt in the cage and laid down my first arrow, a strip of blue painter's tape pointing back toward the parking lot. Because I mark every turn I take that way. And my hands like a job when my head stuck. Gage said I was the only woman alive who decorated jail. Then his grin went away. "Hey, there's a guy." The inner bolt clacked back, one flat bang of steel. Gage hollered. Thanks man, and shoved through and jogged up the concrete walk that runs from the Sally port to the front building, rec yards fenced off on both sides of it. The grass in them dead and mashed flat. I stayed down on one knee tearing tape which in that wind takes both hands and your teeth. Up ahead Gage was talking to somebody. Whoever it was, I never caught an answer. When he came jogging back, I stood and looked up the walk. A man was waiting at the far end by the front building door, maybe two hundred feet off, and a long yellow slicker zipped to the chin and shining like it had just come out of a car wash. Dust was blowing sideways across that whole walk and none of it stuck to him. He had a grown man's build, brought through the shoulders. The face was coals. I knew it by its long narrow shape and by the cowl-licks. standing straight up on the left. The way calls did no matter how much water he slicked on it. Call sat in front of me in 10th grade at Geary. He had a chipped front tooth. He was so ashamed of that he smiled with his lip shut that entire school year and his family moved off that summer. And I hadn't laid eyes on him since we were both 16. The face at that door looked 16. My knees went soft and I grabbed the cage wire. Gage was out of breath. He says he keeps the place, says stay on the spine, the yards are bad, and be out before they count. I started telling Gage how a prism counts its men four and five times a day. Everybody standing at his cell door. And how if the number comes up one short nothing moves until they find him, and I could hear myself rattling on about it while that slickers stood up there watching us. Gage I know that face. I went to school with that boy. Gage shrunked. And he of guys looked like plenty of guys. I called Patrice right there in the cage. She said there hadn't been a caretaker on that property since the last guard contract ran out. Nobody had keys but her and me, and she'd sure like to know who that was. Gage listening on speaker figured this was Blaine County, and some neighbor had probably held a key since the Clinton years. I looked back up the walk. The doorway was empty. We went in anyway because the buyer only paid Patrice, and Patrice only paid me. Once that checklist was done. And because whoever it was had done nothing yet but open a gate. I made Gage swear out loud we'd keep each other in sight. And if we got split up, we'd meet back here in the cage. The front building let us on to the spine, which is the long and closed hallway every part of the prism hangs off. So staff can walk from the front clear to the back without stepping out doors. It ran south. Gray cinder block under a skin of grit. So long our work lights died out before the far end. High along the west wall was a row of wire glass windows. The kind with chicken wires set in the pain, and the afternoon sun came through them on my right as we walked in. Off both sides hung the housing pods, each one a two story box of cells around an open room, and the gym sat way down at the far end. In the first pod I checked for a squat, meaning signed somebody was living rough, a mattress dragged into a corner, cans, a scorch mark from a little fire. There was dust, a dead pigeon, and a plastic chair tipped over. Down the hall the gym door banged against its closer every time the wind leaned on the building. The gauge took to calling out, come in, at each knock until I told him that wasn't funny in a prism, and he did it once more just to make me say it again. We did the kitchen and the medical unit, and it was around three when we started back up the spine. Every blue arrow I'd laid down was right where I'd laid it. Beside everyone drawn on the bare concrete was a black grease pencil arrow aimed the opposite way, down toward the gym. Which went, huh. I crouched and peeled one blue strip up by the corner. Under it, on concrete I'd pressed that tape onto with my own thumb not two hours earlier. Somebody had drawn another black arrow pointing in. It was fat and waxy and fresh. The same kind of mark we put on scale tickets at the co-op. I scrub my coat sleeve hard across it and it didn't smear, and the sleeve came away clean. My thumbs had gone so stiff I could barely stick the tape back down. Gauge-figured kids, some back door we'd missed, somebody being cute. I let them have it. I was done figuring. It was broad daylight through that west glass my blue arrow still pointed true, and three pods were maybe an hour's work, so I said we'd shoot them fast and leave. Calling the law over a drawing on a floor would have had me sitting in the lot waiting on a cruiser while the light went. So I kept my phone in my pocket, instead I pulled up the picture I'd snapped at the spine on our first pass, bare floor and blue tape and nothing else, and carried it like a compass. It took longer than it should have. The buyer wandered every tear, meaning both the upper and lower walkways of cells, and the dust kept the camera hunting for focus, and by the time we reached pod D, the light in the west windows had gone orange. The D was the last line on the checklist. The buyer wanted shots inside the cells, which meant one of us went in, and the other held the pod door open from the spine, since those doors swing shut on their own, and I had no interest in learning whether they still latched. Gauge went in. That broke our promise, and I let it break, because those cell pictures were the whole reason anybody was paying. And Gauge was right there through the door glass until he went around the stair. I stood with that steel door propped on my hip and listened, when fluting through the razor wire high and thin. The roof deck popping as it cooled, pigeons scrabbling in the dead gun tower, the ductwork ticking like a stove after you shut the burner off. My jaw ached from clenching and wouldn't let go, and my hip had gone numb against the cold steel. Now and then the gym door thumped on its closure, then the gym door stopped. I waited for the next thump, and it never came. What came instead from the far end of the spine was a soft crackle. The noise a plastic slicker makes when whoever's wearing it lifts his arms. Gauge came out of the pod frowning at the camera screen. Guy was in there. Grindrite at me, busted front tooth. Says tell the girl with the tape she missed one. I looked down the spine. At the very end, through the wire glass in the gym door, I could make out the yellow slicker shining wet, and a pale face turned up the hall at me. The mouth hung open wide in what had to be a grin, a dark gap I could see even from that far. In that whole year, Cole never once smiled with his mouth open. "Walk," I told Gauge. My voice came out thin and high, ahead of me so I can keep my eyes on you. It was getting on toward a quarter to six. The spine had gone dim from the floor up, and the only real light left was that orange smear in the high glass. At the crossing by the old control station, where a side hall cuts across, I stopped. On the way in, we'd walked straight through it with no turn to make so I'd never taped it. There was a blue arrow on that floor now. My tape torn the way I tear it. Pointing down the side hall toward the gym, beside it a black arrow pointed dead into the center block wall. I'd missed one, and somebody had filled it in for me. I knelt to get a better look. Behind me the slicker crackled. It was close. Close enough that I heard it drip, one drop, and then another. On to concrete that hadn't seen water since fall. I kept my face to the floor on my own strip of blue telling me to go deeper. Gauge was ten steps ahead with his work light aimed at his boots, his back to me, and whatever was dripping stood right at my shoulder. If I'd gone where that arrow said we'd have walked down the side hall into the gym and, away from the only way out, with dark coming on. So I quit reading the floor, coming in the sun had been on my right. Going out it had to be on my left. Out I said, back the way we came, eyes front. We walked. We didn't run. The orange state on my left the whole length of the spine. The drip followed us away, and then it quit. We came out of the front building onto the walk, and the Sally Port's inner bolts stood open again when we got there. I pushed Gauge through first, dragged the inner gate shut, and heard it catch. Then I looked back up the walk. It was empty clear to the door, and the concrete behind us was dry and gray with grit. Not a drop anywhere. Inside the fence I called the Watanga police, because somebody was living in that prison and the buyer's people deserved to know it. Officer Bledso showed up maybe 20 minutes later, an older man in a heavy coat, and he heard me out without a smirk. I told him someone in a yellow slicker, wearing the face of a boy from my 10th grade class, had opened the gate for us and drawn on my floor. Gauge leaned on his truck, fist jammed in his jacket, and kept his mouth shut. Bledso carried his big flashlight up to the inner gate, and the bolt was back open when he put his hand on it, so he went through and walked the spine by himself while we waited at the outer gate. He was gone a good while. When he came back, he set every strip of blue was gone, and the black arrows were still there where my tape had been, pointing in. At the crossing by the control station, he'd found water standing on the concrete, a puddle about the size of a man's two boots. On the rest of that hall was dry as flower. Then he reached over to the steel ledge by the inner lock, right where I'd fought Patrice's key, and picked up a fat grease pencil wrapped in black paper. He waited in his bare palm and said it was warm, and he held it out away from his coat for a while before he laid it back down where he'd found it. "I'll sit out here tonight," he said. I took the key ring from my pocket and set it in his hand. Patrice wandered at Monday. He could be the one to tell her. Gage pulled out first. I got in the Corolla. and started it and sat there with it running, and noticed I hadn't said one word to it. The cup holder was empty. In my mirror, the dome light glowed yellow inside the cruiser. I backed out past him, his headlights dark and his nose aimed at the gate, and turned onto US 270 without once looking at the fence. 37. The dinner bucket cost eight dollars, and I paid for it in quarters out of the laundry jar at the bunkhouse. I was 17 that July. A kid from San Angelo working my first summer at a rafting outfit in Fayette County, hauling boats off trailers and hosing river func out of wet suits. Jessie's my name. My brother Cole was 20 and guiding rafts on the new river, and that Sunday in 2008 was the first day the two of us had spent together, since he walked out of Dad's house three years before. The bucket sat on a junk table under a blue tarp on US 19 outside Fayetteville. It was round aluminum and old miners lunchpale with water in the bottom half and food in the top, and the somebody had scratched WP into the lid with a nail. The old man selling it said it came out of the company store at a dead coal camp up a county road, and he pointed the way with his chin. At the exon I fumbled it getting out of the truck and it hit the concrete lid first, and when I picked it up, there was a bright silver crescent dented into the metal. Cole laughed. It was only half a smile, but it was the first one he'd given me in three years, so I said we ought to go see where the thing came from, mostly so the day wouldn't be over yet. I told nobody at the bunkhouse where we were headed because then I'd have had to say who with, and they'd all heard me cuss Cole since June. The county road got skinny or every mile until it quittered a pipe gate with a posted sign wired to it. On the far side Cole gave his rules the way he'd give the safety talk before a rapid. Never alone, daylight only. Touch nothing in no mind holes. Ever because the air in an old mine can kill you before you know it's bad. Then he tore his red bandana into strips and tied one on every poor trail we passed, so we'd have a trail back to the trunk. The camp was one row of company houses swayed back in the middle, a store with its whole front fallen out, and up the slope, a rusted tipple, which is the tall shed where they loaded Cole onto the train cars. Above that the mine entrance was sealed with concrete block, a ragged gap knocked out near the top. It was 88 degrees and wet in that hollow with no wind at all. And the deer flies bit straight through my shirt while gnats hung in a little cloud in front of my eyes. Inside the store was hotter than outside in the stack of mouse and rotted pine. Dust on the back counter lay as thick as Caliche on a ranch truck stash. A bucket sat in it, round aluminum, the same two-part pale, with the same letter scratched in the lid by what looked like the same hand. "Cole," I said, "look at this." I set mine down beside it. Same dance along the bottom rim, same lean to the pea. The only difference was my crescent from the axon. The counter lid was dull and smooth under its dust, right where mine was dinged. Cole bent over them with his hands on his knees. Company sold those by the thousand right out of the store he told me. Man named WP by three and twenty years. He's going to scratch his letters on everyone so nobody down in the mine walks off with his dinner. I wanted that to be the answer because my brother was talking to me like a brother. A man came in behind us with a metal detector on his shoulder, laughing like we'd told a joke. Gary, he said his name was forties, sunburned at the elbows, with a little S-10 pick up part below the gate next to the deacon, and he talked to us like we'd been fishing buddies for years while his eyes stayed on my bucket. Cole told him not to touch the other one. Gary picked it up anyway with both thumbs pressed flat on the lid, looked it over, and set it down a few inches off from where it had been. Where it had been there was a clean square of counter, no dust at all, like the bucket had sat there forever and kept that spot clean underneath itself. The lid now had too smudge dovels from Gary's thumbs. "Give you twenty for the pair," he offered. "They're not for sale." The way he'd held it, like he'd already paid, made my stomach turn. I wasn't leaving mine where he could walk off with it, so I carried it down the row past the red strips and locked it in the cab on the passenger floorboard, and Cole came with me. Because never alone was his rule, and he meant it. We were gone a good fifteen minutes there and back, slapping at our next the whole way. Me thinking about nothing but a cold doctor pepper. When we came back into the store, the counter bucket had a crescent in its lid. It was bright clean metal, not a grain of dust down in it. While the rest of that lid still had its gray coat except for Gary's two thumb smudges. Same curve as mine, same size, same little tail at one end, in the exact same spot. That dent hadn't been there when I set the two buckets side by side. It showed up while we were down at the truck. My knees went loose. I put a hand on the counter to steady myself and jerked it back out of the dust like I touched a stovetop. I took Cole by the arm without a word and walked him down to the truck and he let me. Which tells you what my face looked like. The truck was locked both doors. I cupped my hands against the passenger window and my bucket was on the floor board where I'd left it. Lid up. It's crescent shining in the sun like a new dime. Two buckets with one fresh dent each and I dropped exactly one of them on the concrete outside a gas station that afternoon. Cole quit talking. I watched it happen. He'd been explaining things to me all day the way he used to when we were little and his mouth just went flat. Gary had followed us down. He bent and peered in the window and laughed. Junk man took you son, sold you one off a pallet of fakes. Neither of us gave him an answer. I want to go I told Cole. He looked up the slope at the tipl. Ten minutes. I always wanted to see one up close. It was the first thing he'd asked me for in three years so I went. Ten minutes turned into better than an hour because once we were sitting up on the tipl with our boots hanging over the edge, Cole started talking and didn't stop. I didn't leave on account of you. He started out. You know that, right? I hadn't known that and I told him so. He told me about the night with dad and the truck keys and about flipping a raft his first week and swimming a whole rapid with his shins banging off every rock in it. I wrote you about a hundred letters, he said. Never mailed a one. I'd have sat up there till Christmas. By the time we climbed down, Gary was still poking around the row with his detector. The light had gone orange and the sun was sliding into a gap in the ridge right behind the last company house and the thunderheads that had been stacking up all afternoon still hadn't dropped a single drop. Somebody was standing in the doorway of that last house. The sun came straight through the empty back window and out the front door at us. So all I got was the shape. A heavy coat button clear to the throat. A cap with the ear flaps sticking out on either side. The kind old men back home pull on when a blue norther comes through and drops at forty degrees by supper. In July in that wet heat, it was dressed for January. Cole and I stood there slapping deer flies off our arms and necks and I kept my elbow pressed against his because feeling him right there was the only thing keeping my legs under me. We were swatting every few seconds and that shape never once lifted an arm toward its face or its neck. Then a voice came up the row even in slow, no hurry in it like a man reading off a feed bill. You've brought it back down already. He's been hungry since tomorrow. It was going to get cold in there. "Oh, for crying out loud," Gary said and he walked down there with a detector on his shoulder. It's a long row and I watched him the whole way down. Watched him stand at the bottom of those steps talking and nodding along while and watched him walk all the way back. And the sun went behind the ridge while he did it. Gary nodded and shifted and scratched his neck the whole time and the shape above him never nodded back. From the time we first saw it until Gary was back beside us was the better part of an hour and in all that time it hadn't so much as shifted its weight. Old boy in a t-shirt and a ball cap, Gary told us grinning. Little short fella, waiting on his ride. He looked at us like a couple of town kids spooked by a heifer in the dark, said he was losing his light and headed off for the gate. What I was looking at stood tall enough that the cap nearly brushed the top of the doorframe and it was wearing a winter coat. "We're going," I told Cole now. I started down the road toward the first red strip. I was three porches along before I looked back because I had my eyes on the rails hunting those strips in the grey light and Cole wasn't behind me. I ran back up to the store first because the last thing I'd seen Cole look at like it mattered was that counter. The clean square was empty. The the bucket with Gary's thumb prints was gone. ran the whole row, hollering my brother's name and found him up at the mine entrance. Cold was pouring out of it, real cold, the kind that hits a sweaty shirt like opening the walk in at a dairy queen, and it smelled like rust and spent matches. That gap in the top of the block seal was a whole big enough to climb through, and cold was standing in it with one boot up on the broken edge, breathing that air. The exact thing he'd worn me off of at the gate. He had the counter-bucket in his hand, way back inside that hill where there hadn't been power in 50 years, a yellow light was burning steady. The color of an old carbide lamp between us and that light in the black of the openings to the code in the ear flap cap with no more motion in it than a stock tank in August. He wants me to bring it into him, Cole said. It was his mouth, but it wasn't his voice. He's brought my dinner, the voice answered slow as before. He was always going in, it's already gone cold. I remember the lamp not flickering, not once, I remember the gnats had quit. I reached past my brother and pulled the handle out of his fingers, and it was cold like a can out of an ice chest, and it ground grit into my poem. For a second I was lifting it, actually holding it out toward that yellow light like I was the one who had been sent up the hill to carry it, until something in me caught and I set it down hard on the broken edge of the block instead. The shape in the opening didn't reach for it. I took Cole by the front of his shirt and walked him backward, and he stumbled along like he just woke up. Down below, dust from Gary's S10 was already hanging over the county road. Nothing followed us out of that hole while we backed down past the tipple. When I turned the call around and we went down the road in the near dark, and I slapped every rail that had a red strip on it as we passed, so my hand would know we were still on the trail until the gate showed up gray in front of us. We climbed over. The truck was locked both doors the way I'd left it. The bucket I'd put on the passenger floor board was sitting on the driver's seat with its lid open and nothing in it. Set out square like somebody had packed a lunch for whoever was about to drive. There was no calling anybody. We'd climbed a posted gate. I was 17 and standing in somebody's call camp after dark, and there wasn't a bar of signal in that hollow anyhow. I unlocked the door and picked the bucket up by its rim, because I wasn't driving my brother home with that thing in the cab, and I slung it back over the gate as hard as I could onto the campsite where it came from. I heard it hit somewhere in the dark and rolled a long way. I put coal in the passenger seat and drove him back to Fiatville. He didn't speak once the whole ride. When I let him out, he laid his hand flat on the roof of the truck for a second, then went inside. At the bunkhouse I washed up under the spigot out back, and the water ran off my right hand gray. Fine black grit was ground deep into the lines of my palm and packed under every nail, and it was still cold. It took me a week of scrubbing with a fingernail brush before my palm came clean. Nobody's heard this from me until now, and the reason is that one second at the block when I was holding it out toward the light. Last month going on 20 years later, coal asked me to help him pick out a lunch box for his daughter's first day of school. I stood in that aisle in front of all those plastic boxes with cartoon dogs on them, and couldn't make my hand close on one. Back in 2008, the rest of that summer went back to normal more or less. I hauled wraps, hosed out wet suits, ate cold cereal in the bunkhouse at night. The next Saturday, coal was riding with me again with his arm out the window, and by August, that was just what we did on Saturdays. One of those Saturdays we came up U.S. 19 passed the junk table under its blue tarp, and I slowed down without meaning to. In a jar of railroad spikes and a stack of hub caps sat an aluminum dinner bucket with a bright silver crescent in the lid and an eight dollar tag. There was dust on that lid, and two ovals pressed into it where a man's thumbs had been.