I Moved Into an Apartment With a Wall That Isn't on the Plans. Something Answers When I Knock.

The train out of Tirana rocked along toward Durrës, and the drizzle ran sideways down the window in thin lines. I had one bag on my knees and both hands on top of it. Somewhere past the last of the apartment blocks I let out a breath I'd been holding for three days. The light-well window was boarded shut and the keys were still in Tirana, and I counted that as finished. Nobody on the train was looking at me. A woman across the aisle peeled a tangerine and the smell filled the carriage.

It started ordinary. That's the part I keep going back over.

I'd come at the end of January to spend a month in my aunt Drita's flat and decide whether to sell it. She'd lived in it alone for forty years, second floor of a concrete block on Rruga Kongresi i Manastirit, and when she died she left it to me. Not to my sister, not to anyone closer. I hadn't seen her in six years. I'd sent money at New Year and a card, and that was about the size of it.

The key stuck in the lock and I had to lift the door a little on its hinges to get it open. Inside, the smell hit first. Paraffin from the heater, damp plaster, and under that old coffee grounds, the kind that get into a cupboard and stay. Her slippers were still by the door, side by side, toes to the wall. I left them there.

The stairwell on the way up had been painted institutional green, the color of a school corridor or a clinic, and a crack ran the whole height of one wall, thin at the bottom and wider by the second landing. I put my thumb in it. Old plaster came off in a dry little crumb. I've seen worse cracks in newer buildings. I wasn't worried about it.

What I did notice, from the landing window, was the light-well. It ran down the middle of the block, a square shaft with all the kitchen and bathroom windows opening onto it, and half the neighbours had ropes hooked on their sills. Plastic buckets hung on the ropes or went down them slowly while I watched. Somebody on a lower floor was sending down a bucket of what looked like laundry, and somebody else was hauling one up with bread in it. It seemed a sensible way to run a building where the front door was four flights from the ground. Past the roof of the shaft the boulevard droned on in the drizzle, buses and horns, all of it flattened and far off.

Drita's kitchen window had a rope too. It was hooked over a rusted nail beside the frame, coiled neat, with a grey bucket on the end that sat on the sill. I didn't touch it.

I unpacked in the bedroom, which took ten minutes. Two shirts, work trousers, a razor, the laptop with the survey files I'd told myself I'd go through. The kitchen was cold enough that I could see my breath, so I lit the paraffin heater, and it caught after three tries and started ticking. I heated a tin of beans on the two-ring stove and ate them standing, then found her kettle and made instant coffee because I couldn't face the old grounds tin. There was a radio on the shelf. I turned it on, got a man reading football scores, and turned it off again. The quiet in the flat was thick but not unpleasant. I sat in her armchair with my coat on and read my sister's message from earlier. Going to bed, early shift. Eat something that isn't from a tin. Love you. I sent back a thumbs up. That was half past nine.

The power went out around ten thirty.

It wasn't a flicker. The lamp, the fridge hum and the heater's little orange window all went at once, and the dark was total. I sat still and waited for it to come back. In a building like that it's usually a transformer on the boulevard and it's back in twenty minutes. I'd have felt around for my phone, but I could hear the heater still ticking, cooling down. I could hear the drizzle on the light-well roof. Nothing else.

Then someone said, "Daniel."

Soft, from the kitchen. From the window. I didn't move.

"Daniel, are you there?" A pause. A small breath in it, the kind you take before you ask for something you feel bad asking for. "It's so cold down here. Can you bring the bucket down? Please. Just the bucket."

It was Marta.

I know my sister's voice. She's the only person who's ever said my name that way, with the stress a little high on the first half, like she's already worried about me before she gets to the end of it. It was her voice. It came up the shaft and in through the glass, and it wasn't shouting. She was being careful not to wake anyone.

I stood up. I don't remember deciding to. My knee hit the arm of the chair and I felt it and nothing else.

"Marta?" I said, and my mouth was so dry it came out cracked. Then I stopped myself, because I was already thinking. She was in Manchester. She was in bed with an alarm set for five. She'd had a week of doubles and she'd told me so. She could not be in the bottom of a light-well in Tirana at ten thirty at night in January, and if she somehow were, she wouldn't be asking me to send down a bucket like the neighbours did. She'd be buzzing the door. She'd be swearing at the stairs.

"Daniel," the voice said again, patient, close. "I'm so cold."

I got my phone out. My hands didn't work right and I dropped it once on the lino, and the torch came on when I picked it up and threw a white circle across the kitchen. The rope on the hook hadn't moved. The bucket sat on the sill exactly where it had been. Beyond it the window was black glass, and my own face was in it, and I couldn't see the bottom of the shaft at all.

I did not go to the window. I stood in the middle of Drita's kitchen with the phone in my fist and the light on the floor, and I listened to my sister ask me, very gently, to please hurry.

I didn't sleep much. The voice quit sometime after eleven, mid-word, and I sat in Drita's armchair in my coat with the torch on my knee until the fridge shuddered back on around two. I left every light in the flat burning after that and lay on top of the bedspread with my boots on.

At seven I went into the kitchen. The rope was swinging.

It wasn't swinging much, just a slow lean toward the sill and back, and the whole length of it was dark with wet. The drizzle had stopped in the night and the sill was dry. The bucket wasn't on it anymore. It hung somewhere below the window, and the rope was taut with its weight.

The bottom of the frame has a small hinged flap, the kind the neighbours use for buckets, with its own hook. It's not the window latch. I unhooked it and hauled hand over hand. The rope was cold enough to sting. The bucket came up scraping the wall and I got it onto the sill and dragged it in.

A stone sat in the bottom, flat and grey, the size of a hen's egg. Under it was a strip of ribbon, dark blue with a pulled thread along one edge.

Marta wears that ribbon. She had it on at Christmas, tying her hair back to wash up, and she'd done it with her teeth holding one end.

I called her. It rang out and went to her voicemail, which is her saying "leave it and I'll ring you back," in her work voice. It was ten to seven in Manchester and she'd be on shift, phone in a locker. I told her I was fine and to call when she could, and I made my voice ordinary. Then I stood there with the ribbon wrapped around my fingers.

It was the building. Somebody in the well had a grudge, or a sense of humour, and the shaft carries sound strangely. That was what I told myself, and it did not explain the ribbon, so I stopped and got out my tape measure.

I don't do well with a thing I can't put a number on. I had the block's floor plan in my bag, the copy from the notary, and I laid it on the table and started on the kitchen. The room was a hand's width short of what the plan said. Not the outer wall. The inner one, the wall between the kitchen and the stairwell side. I measured it twice from the door frame and once from the sink. Thirty centimetres more thickness than the drawing showed, and no reason for it. No pipe run, no chimney breast.

Then I looked at the window lintel from the inside and found a crack across the top of it, hairline at the corner and wide enough at the middle for my thumbnail. I'd seen the same crack in the green stairwell. I worked out that it was probably the same crack. It ran through the wall and out the other side into the well.

I knocked on the inner wall with my knuckles at shoulder height. It sounded hollow. I went up on the chair and knocked near the ceiling, and it was hollow there too. Hollow all the way up, and the sound went off sideways and kept going after I stopped.

I got down. I put the chair back where it had been.

The ledger was on the shelf above the sink, behind a row of jam jars of buttons and string. It was a school exercise book with a grey cover, and every page was ruled in pencil in Drita's small upright hand. I hadn't seen her handwriting since her cards.

Dates on the left, and beside each a line or two. Tuesday. Tea, hot. Bread, half loaf. Nothing spoken. Two. Friday. Tea, bread. Nothing spoken. Two. Page after page of it, sometimes three evenings in a week and then none for a month. It went back years, and the pencil changed to a different pencil, and the hand got shakier toward the end. She never wrote what came for the tea, or what took it. Just that she lowered it, and that she said nothing, and that she tapped twice on the sill.

I read it through, and then I read it again from the start, and the second time I saw she had written nothing spoken every single time. She hadn't left it out once.

I put the ledger back behind the jars. I washed the coffee cup I'd left in the sink. I did things like that for the rest of the day, small ones, and I didn't go near the window.

The power went at ten past ten.

I was ready this time. I had the torch on the table and the ledger beside it and I was sitting at the kitchen table with my back to the wall, the hollow wall, which I hadn't thought about until I sat down. The heater ticked and cooled. The room went completely dark. I waited.

"Daniel."

I put my hand flat on the table.

It was Elira. Not the Elira who'd stopped answering my calls, the last year. This was the Elira from the door of our old flat, when I came in late and she'd been waiting up and wasn't angry yet. She said my name with the second half dropping, warm, almost a laugh in it. Nobody else ever said it that way.

"Daniel, I know you're there. Please." A breath. "I'm so frightened. I need you to pass out the bread knife. Just for a minute. Just for a minute and I'll give it right back."

I was at the window. I hadn't felt myself cross the room. My hands were on the sill and I had it gripped hard, and my knuckles hit the wood twice as I shifted my hold, a small dry sound, tock-tock.

From inside the wall, two slow taps answered.

They weren't from the window or from the well. They came from the plaster behind my left shoulder, a hand's breadth from my ear, unhurried. I stayed where I was, with my mouth shut. The drawer with the bread knife in it was two steps behind me and I did not look at it.

"Daniel," Elira said. "Please."

I lifted my right hand off the sill and tapped twice with two fingers, the way the ledger said. Then I put the hand back and gripped again until the ache went up to my elbow.

She sighed. It was a long, tired sound, the one she used to make when I'd said the wrong thing and she'd decided not to argue. Then nothing. The well was quiet, and the wall was quiet, and the heater went on ticking in the dark.

I paced the rest of the night. Kitchen, hall, bedroom, kitchen. I couldn't sit, and when I did sit my leg went on without me. A little before seven there was a knock, three flat raps, and I stood in the hall a while before I went to the door.

Zana Leka was on the landing in her black cardigan and apron, a headscarf over her grey hair. She was short enough that I was looking at the parting in it. She didn't come in.

"You walk all night," she said. "It's in my ceiling."

"Sorry. I didn't sleep."

"No." She looked past me, down the hall toward the kitchen, then back. "Listen to me once. Whatever it says, you don't answer. Not one word. You tap on the sill, two times, and that's all you give it. And the latch on that window stays shut. Always."

"The bucket flap—"

"The flap is fine. The latch." She held my eye. "Your aunt did it forty years."

I asked her what it was. She said, "Two taps," and nothing else.

I watched her face. I'm not good at faces, but I gave it a proper try, looking for something, a flinch, a look at the floor. Nothing. Lined brown skin, sharp dark eyes, a mouth that had finished talking. She might have known everything or nothing. She might have heard a sound through a ceiling for forty years and decided the sensible thing was to follow the rule and not ask. That was what I would have done in her place, and I'm not sure that's a comfort.

"Thank you," I said.

She nodded once and went down. I listened to her slippers on the stairs all the way to the first floor.

Then I stood in the kitchen with the daylight coming grey down the well, and what I felt was good. I'm embarrassed by that now. I'd been up all night, my hands still ached from the sill, and I felt light. It was a rule. Two taps, no talking, don't open the latch. Somebody had been living inside a rule for forty years, and a rule has edges. Things with edges you can put a lid on.

If the only way in was the window, I'd close the window. Board it, screw it, done. I wouldn't need to know what it was. I'd never once had to know what a thing was to stop it dropping on people. I remember thinking that, and it sounded sensible.

I went down to the first floor and knocked on the door with the brown mat. Skender opened it in his vest with a mug in his hand. Stocky, thinning white hair, a broad ruddy face that hadn't been told why I was there yet.

"Hoxha's boy," he said.

"Daniel. Zana came up this morning. I wondered if you'd help me with the kitchen window. I want to board it over. Plywood. You were a joiner, she said."

He looked at me a while. Then he set the mug on a shelf inside the door. "Forty-one years," he said. "Let me get my things."

He came up ten minutes later in a wool jacket with a hammer through his belt, a cordless drill in one hand, and a folding rule sticking out of his breast pocket. Under his arm was a sheet of twelve-millimetre ply he'd cut down in the cellar, still with sawdust on it. He didn't ask where the kitchen was. He walked straight in and put the ply against the wall by the table.

He measured the frame twice, top and sides, holding the rule flat with his thumb. His hands were big and scarred and steady. He grunted at the numbers. "Won't be square," he said. "Nothing here is."

"There's something you should know," I said. "Before we start."

He kept his eyes on the rule.

I told him. Not well. I said there'd been voices at the window two nights running, that they sounded like people I knew, that they asked for something small to be passed out, a bucket, a knife. I told him about the ribbon and the stone. I told him what Zana had said, and the ledger, and the two taps, and that the second night something in the wall had tapped back.

Skender folded the rule and put it away. He looked at the window for what felt like a long time. His jaw worked once.

"Zana said," he said. That was all he said about it. He picked up the drill and checked the bit.

"I want to do the frame first," I said. "Fix the ply along three sides. Leave the latch side until last."

"Why?"

"I want to check the rope before it's covered. It came up wet yesterday, and heavy, and it was swinging when there's no wind in there. If there's something snagging it up top I'd rather find out now." I was making it up as I went, and it sounded fine to me. "The pulley's at the top of the well. There's a hatch on the roof, the last flight of stairs past the fourth floor. Could you go up and look at it? See if it runs free."

He shrugged. Practical, gruff, a man who'd been sent up ladders all his life and never minded. "Ten minutes," he said. He put the drill on the table, and the hammer beside it.

"Thanks, Skender."

"Keep the latch shut," he said, at the door.

"I will."

His boots went out along the landing and up. I stood in the kitchen and listened. The stairs were concrete and every step rang, a heavy, even tread getting thinner. A door on the top landing scraped, and then the sound turned hollow and quick on the roof stairs.

I looked at the window. The latch was shut. The rope hung slack on its nail and the bucket sat where it belonged. I put my hand on the ply, and it was cold and smelled of fresh sawdust.

I should have gone up with him. That's all I'll say about it now.

I stood there and listened to the boots go up.

The voice came up the well about a minute after his boots had stopped.

It was a young man's voice, and it wasn't loud. It came up the shaft the way the neighbours' voices did in the mornings, with the broad flat vowels of somebody raised in the Kombinat district. I'd never heard it before. I still knew straight away whose it was.

"Baba. Baba, catch me."

It sounded pleased, like a kid about to do something he'd been told not to. Then there was a scrape, metal on concrete, and a short cry. Not a scream. A man's surprise, cut off.

Then a long silence. It's a narrow shaft, so you hear everything in it, and you hear when a body reaches the bottom. Then you hear nothing at all.

I don't remember crossing the kitchen. I had my hands flat on the glass and my face against it, and the latch was still shut, I checked that with my eyes even then. Five floors down, on the concrete, in the grey light that came through the roof grating, Skender lay on his side with one arm under him. His wool jacket was bunched up at the shoulder. The rope from the pulley hung down beside him, a loop of it on the ground, and it moved a little. Back and forth. Slowly, though there was no wind.

He didn't move at all.

From inside the wall, behind my left shoulder, came three taps. They were slow and even and unhurried, and I knew from the ledger that it was not the number you use for me.

I ran.

I got the door open on the second try because my hands wouldn't do what I told them. They were shaking so hard I hit the frame with the key. I left the drill on the table and the ply against the wall. The stairs rang under my boots the way his had, only faster, and I remember counting the steps to the landing and losing count.

Zana was there. She'd come up from the first floor, one hand on the rail, her headscarf pushed back. She must have heard it through her own kitchen window, because she'd heard everything else in that building for forty years. She had a dishcloth in her other hand and she was holding it tight.

I said, "He fell. Zana, he fell, the roof, I sent him to check the—"

She didn't shout. I've gone over that a lot. I'd have taken shouting. I'd have taken her hitting me with the dishcloth. She stood on the landing under the cracked green wall and looked at me for a long time, at my face, and then at my hands. I couldn't tell you what was in her face. It was very still.

"Drita never sent anyone else to look," she said.

That was all. She turned and went down the stairs, one step at a time, holding the rail, a short stooped woman in a black cardigan going down to find her husband. I stood there. I should have gone with her, or ahead of her, and I know that. I followed her at a distance and it was like following a stranger.

By the time I got to the ground floor there were people. A man from the third floor, in slippers, and his son. Somebody's wife with a hand over her mouth. The door to the cellar passage was open, the one that leads out to the bottom of the well, and I could smell cold concrete and wet from it. Somebody had brought a blanket. Two men and the son came out of that passage carrying Skender between them, the blanket pulled up around him, one of his work boots hanging loose on the foot. They didn't hurry. Nobody said anything except the one in slippers, who said, "Mind his head," very quietly, at the turn.

I stood against the wall with my back on the green paint. They went past me close enough that I could have touched the blanket. Zana walked behind them with her hand not quite on it.

They took him out through the front door, and I heard a car engine start in the street. I didn't hear a door shut. I don't know where they took him. I couldn't tell you if he was breathing under that blanket, and I didn't ask. That's the thing I'd have to say if anyone made me answer for it. I stood in the hall with the son of a neighbour whose name I never got, and he looked at the floor. The wife looked at the floor. The man in slippers took a long time wiping his hands on his trousers and went back up the stairs past me without lifting his head.

I waited for someone to say something. Anybody. What I wanted, I think, was to be told it wasn't my fault, and nobody was going to do that, because it was.

I'd made up a reason. That's what I kept hearing as I climbed. I want to check the rope. I'd said it in a good clear voice, and Skender had taken me at my word, because I was the man with the plan and the tape measure, and he was seventy-five and had been sent up ladders all his life and never minded. He'd told me to keep the latch shut. I had kept it shut. I'd been very careful about the latch.

The stairs had never felt so long. On the first-floor landing the door with the brown mat was standing open and the hall behind it was lit, a mug on the shelf just inside where he'd set it down. I went past it fast.

Upstairs my door was as I'd left it, open on the dark hall. I went in and shut it behind me and turned the key, and stood with my hand still on the wood.

The flat was quiet. The heater ticked. Nothing tapped and nobody called. It was the quiet you get when something has had what it came for.

I didn't go in the kitchen.

I spent the rest of that day in the bedroom with the door open, where I could see down the hall. I didn't touch the kitchen. I didn't eat either. The tin of beans I'd meant for supper sat on the dresser, and every time I thought about opening it I thought about the two-ring stove and the window beside it, and I let it go.

I called Marta twice. Both times it rang out to her work voicemail. I left nothing the second time. Anything I said would have sounded like a man who'd done something.

The power went at a quarter to eight. Earlier than the other nights, and I noticed that the way you notice a bill coming in higher than it should be. The lamp died and the heater's orange window went out, and I was in the hall with my hand on the wall, in the dark, before I'd decided to be there. I think I wanted the door between me and the kitchen. Not the window this time, I told myself. That was the whole plan. Keep away from the window.

I stood by the coat hooks. Drita's slippers were by my feet, toes to the wall, where I'd left them the first day. The hall smelled of cold paraffin. I heard the drizzle start again on the light-well roof, faint, and nothing else.

Then someone breathed on the other side of the front door.

I heard it before any words. A slow, wet, effortful breath, in and a pause and out. I knew that breath. I'd sat next to it for eleven weeks in a room with a plastic chair that squeaked, and a cup with a bendy straw, and a window that didn't open.

"Danieli."

That's what she called me. Nobody else did. Small and hoarse, right up against the wood, and patient, the way she was at the end when it took her half a minute to get out a sentence and she wouldn't let anyone finish it for her.

"It's cold out here, my heart. The landing's cold."

I didn't move. My hand was flat on the wall and I could feel my pulse in it.

"Open the door for me. Just let me in a little. I won't come far."

She hadn't asked for a thing to be passed out. That was the difference, and I saw it even then, standing there, and it didn't help at all. The window voices wanted a bucket, a knife. This one wanted the door. She wanted in, and there was no smaller thing to hand her.

"How are you? Are you keeping well?"

I crossed the hall. I don't remember the steps. I remember the wood against my forehead, cold and slightly damp, and the smell of the old varnish.

"Have you been eating?"

That did it. She asked me that every day in the hospice, on the days she couldn't eat anything herself. She'd lie there with her mouth cracked and her eyes gone back in her head and ask me if I'd had something, a proper meal, not from the machine in the corridor. I'd say yes. I never had. She knew, and she asked again the next day anyway. Nobody has asked me since, not like that, not waiting for the answer. I hadn't eaten since the morning before. The tin was on the dresser.

"Daniel. Talk to me. Just say you're all right."

I was crying by then. It ran down into my collar and I couldn't wipe it because both hands were on the door. My mouth came open. I felt the word get all the way up into it, Mama, and I clamped my teeth down on my tongue as hard as I could and kept going until the taste of copper filled my mouth and the pain was the only thing in my head.

Nothing came out. I want that clear. Not a sound.

"There's my good boy," she said, very softly. "Only me."

The wall knocked.

Not the two slow taps from the second night. This was small and soft and everywhere, dozens of knocks running down the corridor behind the plaster, from the bedroom end toward me, quick and light like knuckles testing every foot of wall. I'd measured that wall. I'd stood on a chair and knocked on it and heard it go hollow all the way up. Now the hollow was answering. The knocks came along the hall past the coat hooks, past the slippers, and stopped by my left ear.

I held still. Blood ran off my tongue and I swallowed it.

The door handle turned.

I felt it through the wood, in my forehead, the latch drawing back with a small dry sound. The key was in the lock, turned, and the door didn't give. It had never been going to give. But the handle went all the way down and held there. I could hear her breathing on the other side of it, patient, in and out.

Then it turned back. Slowly. The latch eased home.

"Daniel," she said, and the voice was thinner now, stretched. It kept her hoarseness but there was less in it, as though someone had taken the middle out. "Daniel. Daniel, Daniel."

Then it started to laugh.

It began low and I thought for a second it was coughing, her cough, the one from the last month. But it climbed. It went up through a range I'd never heard a person use, and it had too many parts in it, a low one and a high one moving separately, and no breath in between. It went on and on. My mother never laughed like that in her life. It came through the door and into my skull and I felt my knees begin to go.

I lifted my right hand off the wood. Two fingers. My hand was shaking so hard I nearly hit it wrong.

I tapped twice on the door.

The laugh stopped. Not faded. Cut off mid-breath, and the silence where it had been was so complete I heard my own blood in my ears.

The knocking in the wall drew back. I listened to it go, soft and quick, down the corridor past the hooks and the slippers, toward the kitchen end, thinning out until there was one last knock somewhere behind the bedroom, and then not even that.

I stayed where I was with my forehead on the door and my mouth full of blood.

The boulevard came back before the light did. First a lorry changing down a gear, then the wet slap of a tram going through the puddle at the corner, and after that the ordinary noise of a city with nowhere it needed me to be. I sat down on the floor of the hall with my back against the door and listened to it. My tongue had swollen up thick. I sat there until the crack of daylight under the door went from black to a dull grey.

I turned the key and opened it. The landing was empty. The green walls looked cheap and tired, and the crack ran up the plaster where it always had. Nothing on the stairs. Somebody's radio was going two floors down.

The kitchen was the last place I wanted to go, so I went straight there and didn't stop. The drill and the hammer were on the table where Skender had put them. The ply was still against the wall, and it still smelled of sawdust. The latch was shut. The rope hung slack on its nail and the bucket sat on the sill, and the window showed nothing but a wet grey shaft with one lit kitchen across the way. I didn't look down.

I lifted the sheet into the frame. Twelve millimetres is thin for what I was asking of it, but it was what Skender had cut, and I wasn't going to argue with him. I held it with my shoulder and started nails along the top edge. The hammer was heavier than mine. Every blow went into the wall and I waited for the wall to say something back. It didn't. I put in a nail every hand's width down all four sides, more than it needed, and by the end my palm had a blister across it. I left the latch alone. I never touched it. The rope and the bucket went behind the board with everything else.

Packing took two minutes. I put the razor and the laptop in the bag with the shirts. I left the ledger behind the jam jars where it belonged and I left Drita's slippers by the door, toes to the wall. The ribbon I took, wound around two fingers, and then couldn't decide what to do with it, so I put it in my coat pocket. The stone I left on the table.

I locked the flat and heard the bolt go over. Then I went down one flight, holding the rail, and stood on the brown mat. The door was already open a hand's width. I don't know if she'd heard me on the stairs or had been standing behind it the whole time.

Zana was in the black cardigan. Her face looked the same as it had the first morning, only with less in it. Behind her the hall light was on and the shelf inside the door was empty. Someone had taken the mug.

"I'm going," I said. "I've boarded it. Here."

I held the keys out. She looked at them, then at me, and took them out of my hand with her fingers barely touching my palm. She put them in her apron pocket. She didn't say a word. I waited, because I thought there had to be something, either the rule again or the other thing, the one that would have been fair. Then she closed the door. Not hard. I heard the chain go across.

I walked out through the front, past the cellar passage, which was shut, and into the drizzle. I bought a ticket at the station from a man who didn't look up.

That's how I ended up in the carriage, on the seat by the window with the bag on my knees, watching the last blocks go by. I'd let out my breath by then. I remember thinking that was the end of it, and I remember it felt earned. I'd nailed it shut and walked away, and Drita had done a lot worse for forty years and never got out at all.

Somewhere past the edge of the city the phone buzzed against my leg. I'd put it on silent the second night and forgotten. When I turned it over there was a small number on the voice mail icon. One message. From Marta, six twelve that morning.

I hadn't called her back since the second day. I'd thought of it, over and over, in the bedroom with the door open. I pressed the phone to my ear, and the woman across the aisle went on peeling her tangerine.

"Dani." It was her, warm, a little out of breath, and the first half of my name came out heavy the way she always says it. "Don't be cross. You weren't picking up and I got worried, so I just got on the first flight last night. I've been travelling all night." She laughed, small, the way she does when she's done something silly and knows I'll let her. "I'm at the flat now. On the second floor. The door was open, it wasn't even locked, honestly, anyone could just walk in."

A pause. Something moved behind her voice, close, a dry soft scrape along a wall.

"I can hear you," she said. She sounded pleased. She sounded relieved. "You're in the wall, aren't you? I can hear you in there. Daniel, come home. Please. I'm so cold."

The message ended. The phone showed the time it had been sent and how long it had run, twenty-two seconds, and then went dark in my hand.

I didn't play it again. I held it against my ear anyway, with the screen off, while the grey fields went past the window, flat and wet, with a line of poplars and a man on a tractor and, further off, the sea somewhere I couldn't see. The woman finished her tangerine. The carriage rocked. I could feel the ribbon through my coat pocket against my leg.

I never found out what it was. I never found out why it had eaten what Drita gave it for forty years, tea and half a loaf, or why after all that time it had picked me.