I Went to Nazaré to Get My Mother's Ring. Don't Open the Door to a KNOCK from Below the Sill.

The pressure cooker rattled over every bend after Valado. It was on the passenger seat with the belt pulled across it, and the lid knocked against the pot each time I took a corner. By the third time I'd stopped hearing it as noise and started hearing it as somebody clearing their throat. I turned the radio up and that didn't help either.

It was a quarter to five and the light was already going. I'd left Lisbon at noon and told nobody where I was headed. The clients on my route got a text saying I had a cold. Seventeen years of walking the same dogs past the same doors, and I'd never once called in sick, so nobody questioned it. That was the part that bothered me most, how easy it was.

I was there for one thing. My mother's ring, a thin gold band with a chip of garnet, in a small enamel tin that used to hold cough sweets. I'd left it with Dona Amélia Vasconcelos in the spring, a few weeks after the funeral. I'd minded her dog for pay for a couple of summers, a fat old spaniel called Tejo who hated the stairs, and she was one of the few people who never asked how I was holding up. I couldn't keep the ring in my flat. I'd catch myself turning it over at the table at two in the morning. She said, "Leave it with me, Senhor Tomás. I'm not going anywhere." Then in the autumn her son put her in a home in Leiria.

I'd meant to collect it sooner. Then she phoned me.

It was the middle of the week, about nine at night, and I almost didn't pick up the unknown number. Her voice was smaller than I remembered, but the words were all there, very formal, as if she'd written them out first. A lamp must burn in the front window all night, if I stayed. And I must never open the door to a knock from below the sill.

"Below the sill?" I said. "Like a child? A cat?"

"You will know it," she said. "Do not open." Then she asked after the cooker, which she'd lent me two winters ago for a batch of my mother's bean stew, and she hung up.

I sat there with the phone in my hand. She was eighty-two and in a home. I figured she was confused, and I felt sorry for her, and the next morning I put the cooker in the car anyway because it was hers and I was going.

I parked at the top of town where the road flattens out and walked down. The alleys around Rua da Praia are narrow enough to touch both walls, and they smelled the way I remembered. Dried sardines on the racks, wet wool from someone's washing, diesel from the boats hauled up on the sand. Underneath all of it the swell was going off against the cliff below the Sítio. It wasn't a crash. It was a long low boom that I felt in my sternum before I heard it. I had the cooker against my hip, one hand through the handle, and I kept shifting it.

Nobody was out. Shutters were closed on most of the ground floors, and a few had a strip of yellow light under them. A gutter was running though it hadn't rained. I noticed that and let it go.

Number nineteen had a green door with the paint gone chalky. Before I could knock it opened, and a woman stood there looking up at me from a stoop. She was small and thin, in a black cardigan buttoned wrong by one button, with her grey hair in a tight bun. Her eyes were sharp and dark and went straight to my hands, then to the cooker, then over my shoulder to the alley behind me.

"Tomás," she said. Not a question.

"Dona Graça? Amélia said you'd have the key."

"I have the key." She stepped back. "Come in. Shut it behind you."

I did. She waited until I'd pushed it to and she'd heard the latch, and then she nodded once, like I'd passed something.

The flat was cold and smelled of camphor and old paraffin. A short hall with black and white tiles, a room to the left with a sofa under a crocheted cover, and at the end a kitchen with one bulb. Straight ahead, the front window looked onto the alley. There was a brass lamp on the sill, an old oil one with a glass chimney and a dented can beside it. I looked at it a moment. Graça was looking at it too, and when she saw me notice, she turned and walked to the kitchen without saying a word.

I put the pressure cooker on the table. The lid gave one more small knock against the pot and was still.

"She wanted that back," I said. "She asked about it on the phone. Hell of a thing to worry about from a care home."

"She worries about what she can do something about." Graça pulled a chair out, didn't sit in it, and put her hand on the back. Her knuckles were swollen. "Was that all she said to you?"

"She told me about the lamp. And not opening the door." I tried a smile. It didn't take. "I'm only here for the tin, Dona Graça. I'll be out of your way in ten minutes. I've got a long drive back."

She looked at me for what felt like a while. Somewhere down the hall the flat ticked as the cold got into the walls. Outside the boom came again, and the window rattled faintly in its frame.

"Where is it?" I said. "The tin. She said a shelf, in her wardrobe, but I looked at the bedroom door on the way in and it's..."

"It's not in her wardrobe. I moved it." Her mouth barely moved. "It's in the loft. The shared one, up the back stairs."

The back stairs were narrow and steep, with a rope for a handrail, and Graça didn't follow me. She stood at the bottom with a torch and pointed it up until I found the switch. One bare bulb came on somewhere above.

The loft ran the whole length of the building under a tin roof. Rain would have been deafening up there, but the sea was louder. The boom came through the wall and the tin hummed with it. Along the rafters, on rows of wooden pegs, hung black shawls. Dozens of them, heavy wool, every one stiff as a board and turned a little toward the wall. They smelled of salt and camphor. I had to turn sideways to get between the rows, and my sleeve brushed one and it didn't move. It just scraped.

The shelf was at the far end, above a stack of fish crates. The tin sat by itself between a jar of buttons and a pair of shears. Blue enamel, chipped at the corners, a picture of a boy sucking a sweet on the lid. I knew it before I touched it. I opened it right there, thumb under the lip, and the ring was inside on a folded scrap of tissue. Thin gold, the chip of garnet. I put it on my little finger and it went as far as the knuckle. Then I put it back in the tin and the tin in my jacket, and I zipped it up to the chin.

On the way out I noticed the pegs by the stairs. The last row didn't have shawls. Seven pegs, all bare, the wood around them darker than the rest from being handled. Somebody had scratched a year under each one with a nail, running up to last winter. Seven bare pegs and then, next to them, an eighth with nothing scratched under it yet.

I didn't ask about it. I went down.

Graça was in the kitchen with the kettle on. "Got it," I said, and patted my chest. She nodded and looked at the kettle. I said thank you, and that I'd leave the key with her, and she said nothing to that either. The door latch was stiff. I pulled it twice.

The car was a fifteen-minute walk uphill and I did it in ten. The wind had turned. Below the town, past the last streetlamp, the sea was throwing itself against the base of the cliff and the spray came up white over the wall and blew across the road. At the edge of town, where the road bends down toward the north, there were two orange barriers and a GNR car with its blue light going round. A young officer in a rain jacket walked out with his hand up.

"Where are you going?"

"Lisbon."

"Not tonight." He pointed his torch at the bend. Water was running across the tarmac in a sheet, and every few seconds a wave came over the wall and doubled it. "It's been coming over since five. There's a rock on it too, the size of a fridge. They won't clear it in the dark."

"Tomorrow?"

"Maybe. Noon, they're saying." He looked at my plates. "You've got somewhere to stay?"

I said I did. That was the part I liked least, saying it.

I walked back down with my collar up. The alleys were emptier than before, and every shutter was closed now, no strips of yellow. My boots sounded very loud. When I reached number nineteen the green door opened before I got to it, and Graça stood there with her arms folded in the black cardigan.

"Road's shut," I said.

"I know." She stepped aside. "There's a bed in the little room on the back stairs. I'll bring a blanket."

She didn't say anything about the lamp. She didn't have to. I went to the front window, took the chimney off, and turned the wick up with my thumbnail. The can was dented on one side and heavy. I filled the lamp from it, and when I lit it the flame stood up small and yellow and steady, and the alley outside went orange at the edges. I put the chimney back. The oil sat about five fingers deep in the glass. I remember counting them, and thinking that was plenty for one night.

Amélia had said all night. Fine. I'd sit up.

I didn't. About midnight I went to the little room, which was hardly more than a landing with a bed in it, and I lay on top of the blanket in my jacket with my boots on and the tin against my ribs. The door had a hook and eye. I hooked it. The bulb in the stairwell I left off, because I couldn't sleep with it on.

I don't know when I dropped off. I know when I woke, because I looked at my phone. Three oh two.

Something was on the stairs below me. Wet boots. It came up from the yard, and I heard each step separately, the sole going down flat, the water in it. Then a long wait. Then the next one.

I didn't breathe right. I lay on my back with the phone still lit on my chest and I put my thumb on the button until the screen went dark, because the light was under the door.

Another step. Another. It took its time. When it got to the landing the boards under the bed shifted, and the smell came through the gap, salt and rot, low tide at the bottom of a boat. The boots stopped outside my door.

Nothing knocked. Nothing tried the hook. It stood there, and water dripped off it onto the floor in slow drops that I could count. I counted them. I got to sixty and started again.

I don't know when I stopped hearing them. The window in the door turned from black to grey, and only then did I lift my hand off my chest. My fingers had cramped around the tin.

I unhooked the door and it was just a landing, wet and empty. Puddle by the threshold, brown-green, with a strand of something in it. I stepped over it.

Up in the loft the bulb was still on. I hadn't switched it on. The shawls hung in their rows, and at the end, on the eighth peg, the one with nothing scratched under it, there was a new one. Black wool, stiff with salt, still dark at the hem where it was wet. I put my hand up flat against it without meaning to, and the shoulders came to exactly where mine would.

It was cut for me.

I came down and didn't tell Graça about the shawl. She was in the kitchen with her back to me, doing something to a pot of soup that didn't need doing, and she didn't turn around. I ate what she gave me. Then I put my jacket on and went out to check the road.

It was still shut. A different GNR officer, older, with a flask, said the swell had brought down another piece of the wall overnight and tomorrow was the best anyone could promise. I nodded like that was reasonable and walked back down through the alleys.

It was the first time I'd seen them in daylight. Gray light, no rain, the racks of sardines gone stiff and silver along the walls. Washing hung from the upper windows and didn't move. There were three dogs working the alley ahead of me, the way street dogs do in a fishing town, nose down, going door to door for whatever got dropped. A yellow bitch with a torn ear, a black-and-white one with a limp, and a young brown thing that was mostly legs.

They didn't go door to door. That was what I noticed. They went along the middle of the alley, right down where the gutter ran, and when they got to a doorway they swung wide, bellies almost against the opposite wall. The yellow one's ears were flat to her skull. The young one had his tail clamped under him and he was leaning away from the doors, all his weight on the far side. At number seventeen the black-and-white one stopped dead, front paw up, and then backed all the way out and went round by some other lane.

Seventeen years I've walked dogs. I know what that is. It isn't a cat or a bad smell or somebody's angry Alsatian behind a gate. They weren't looking at the doors. They were looking at what was in front of the doors, on the step, and they had all decided the same thing about it.

I crouched down and clicked my tongue at the brown one. He looked at me, looked past me at the green door, and went.

Graça was on her step when I got back, arms folded in the black cardigan, watching the alley the way other people watch weather. I said, "The dogs won't walk past the doors."

"No."

"Any of them?"

"Not since I was a girl." She said it flat. "The cats too. The cats go over the roofs."

I asked her what it was. She looked at me for a bit, and I thought she was deciding whether I was worth the words.

"Amélia told you the rule."

"Lamp in the window all night. Don't open the door if it knocks low." I heard how it sounded out loud, in the daylight. "The pegs upstairs, the empty ones. Is that—"

"Those are the men who let it in." She didn't lower her voice. "One a winter, some winters. Some winters none."

"Let it in how?"

"They opened the door."

"Graça, I'm not—"

"Ah, she's got you with the pegs." That was from up the alley, a man's voice, cheerful. He was leaning in the doorway of number twenty-one, two doors up, a long lanky kid in a fisherman's jacket and a cap pushed back off untidy black hair. He had a mug in his hand. "She does that to visitors. Duarte," he said, and lifted the mug at me. "My uncle's boat. I'm in the back room, I pay her cousin."

"Tomás."

"Superstition, Tomás." He grinned. "Every house on this street has a rule. Don't whistle on the beach, don't turn the bread over. My aunt won't let me bring an onion on the boat. Somebody's grandfather drowned and they had to make it mean something." He looked at Graça, not unkindly. "I've been here since August. Nothing knocks, Dona Graça."

"You sleep with earplugs," Graça said.

"I sleep like a baby." He laughed, drank his coffee, and went back inside.

Graça didn't look at me and I didn't ask her anything else. She went in and left the door open, and I stood a while in the hall with my hands in my jacket.

What I do with a frightened animal is not complicated. You get small. You don't reach. You talk low, and it doesn't matter what you say, it's the sound that carries. I've done it on stairwells with a terrier that bit the vet and in a car park with a greyhound that had bolted off a ferry. So in the afternoon, when the light started going and Graça was upstairs, I went and sat on the bottom step of the back stairs with the door open to the dark of the yard, and I talked. I said it was all right. I said nobody was going to hurt anybody. I said I was only here for the night, and I felt stupid saying it and kept saying it anyway, quietly, in the voice I use at six in the morning on the Avenida with a dog that's been left out too long.

Nothing answered. The yard dripped. After a while I felt better, which was the part I should have paid attention to.

At six I went to fill the lamp. The can was heavy and the dented side caught my knuckle. I unscrewed the chimney, tipped it, watched the oil come up the glass. Six o'clock, and the flame held steady on the wick and the alley went orange at the edges the way it had the night before.

When I straightened up I saw the tiles.

The hallway floor was black and white, the kind you can't get clean. A track of salt was drying down the middle of it, a broad wet stripe already gone pale and crusting at the edges, running from the kitchen end down past the front room and stopping at the foot of the back stairs. At my door. There was a puddle's worth of it right there, thick, where the salt had dried in rings.

I stood with the can in my hand. I'd been in that hall four times since noon and it hadn't been there. Graça was upstairs. The lamp was lit.

I got a cloth from under the kitchen sink and went down on my knees and wiped it. It smelled the way the bedroom landing had smelled. It came up gray on the cloth and there was a strand of something dark stuck to the grout, and I rinsed the cloth twice in the yard and wrung it out and wiped again.

High tide, I thought. Storm surge. The yard's below the street, it must come up under the door. Graça said the sea took the road, so why not the floor.

The yard was dry. I knew that, because I'd been sitting in it an hour. I told myself again anyway, aloud, low, and my voice came out steady and reasonable, the voice I use on dogs. And I stood there in the hall with the cloth in my fist and I wanted somebody to say it back to me, that's all it is, go and sit down, it's only the tide. I wanted it badly enough that my face went hot.

Nobody said it. I put the cloth on the radiator and went and checked the lamp again.

It was close to midnight when someone tapped on the front window, right beside the lamp.

I'd been sitting on the sofa under the crocheted cover with my jacket zipped and my boots on. I nearly went through the ceiling. Then the shape came clear behind the glass, a cap pushed back, a long grin, two fingers held up to his mouth. Duarte. He mimed a cigarette and patted his pockets.

I went to the window but didn't touch the latch. "Matches?" I said through the glass.

He shrugged, big and exaggerated, and said something I couldn't hear. His breath came out white and hung in front of his face. It hadn't dropped that cold. The wind had gone, the washing on the lines up the alley hung straight, and behind him there was nothing at all, no cat, no dog, no one. Only his breath, smoking in the lamplight, and the alley gone still.

I should have pointed him at the kitchen at number twenty-one and gone back to the sofa. But I'd spent the whole day listening to my own voice in that hall, and it was nearly midnight, and here was somebody who laughed.

"Not this door," I said. I pointed toward the side passage, the narrow gap between nineteen and seventeen that ran back to the yard. He gave me a thumbs up and went.

I let him in through the yard door, keeping my body in the gap, and shut it behind him and shot the bolt. He smelled of cold air and diesel. He held up the cigarette as if he'd won it.

"My cousin's lighter is dead and my uncle's asleep," he said. "I saw your lamp. Very romantic."

"There are matches in the kitchen drawer."

"Ah, you're a lifesaver."

I gave him the box. He lit up right there in the kitchen doorway, shook the match out and put it in his jacket pocket, and looked at me over the flame of the cigarette. "You look terrible, Lisbon."

"Thanks."

"I mean it kindly. You've got the face of a man who's been told a ghost story."

"I've been told a lot of them."

He laughed at that, and it went through me warm. I'm not proud of how warm.

When we came back into the hall, the front door was in front of us, green paint on the inside too, the bolt shot, and past it the step and the alley. And Graça was on the step. I hadn't heard her go out. Through the little pane beside the door I could see the back of her black cardigan and the pale knot of her hair. She wasn't sweeping or shaking anything out. She was just standing there.

I opened the door the width of my face. Not the width of a body.

"Shut it," she said, without turning. "Both of you. Keep it shut."

"Dona Graça, it's midnight, go to bed," Duarte said cheerfully, over my shoulder.

"I'm not the one who sleeps with plugs in my ears." She turned then and looked at him, only at him, a long look. Then at me. Her mouth moved as if she might say something else. She didn't. She went in at number seventeen, or maybe her own door. I shut the door and shot the bolt, and I heard my own hand doing it.

"She loves me," Duarte said.

We sat in the front room. He took the armchair and put his boots on the edge of the low table until I looked at them, and then took them off again with a grin. He smoked with the window in his eye line. I sat on the sofa where I could see the lamp. The flame stood up thin and yellow in the chimney, and the oil in the glass was down to four fingers, which I'd counted at eleven, and counted again at half past.

He talked. His uncle's boat, the season that hadn't been, a girl in Peniche who had a brother with a truck. I answered where it was needed. I liked the noise of him. He put the cigarette out in a saucer and lit another, and I let him, because it was something to watch other than the wick.

"You don't believe her," I said, at some point.

"About what?"

"The door."

He blew smoke at the ceiling. "I believe she believes it. That's different. My grandmother wouldn't let us count boats leaving harbor. You just do the small thing and it costs nothing. You keep the lamp lit. Fine. I'd keep it lit for a good story." He glanced at me. "You believe her?"

"I don't know yet," I said. That was true then.

At a quarter to three, or near it, he stopped in the middle of a sentence about the brother's truck. It wasn't me who'd stopped him. I hadn't heard anything yet. He was looking at the hall.

Then I heard it. Boots, wet, on the back stairs. One step. A long wait. The next.

The night before there had been the stairs and the landing and the door, and it had stopped there. I'd counted. This time I counted again and it went past the landing, past where the bed was, and up. And then it came down again, and there were two more steps than there had been. Two more, and I heard them come onto the hall tiles, the sole landing flat with water in it.

Duarte put the cigarette down slowly on the saucer. "Someone's in the yard," he said, very quietly. "That's the yard door."

"It's bolted."

"I know it's bolted."

Something scraped along the wall of the hall. It was long and slow and made of iron, a hard drawn sound, on the plaster, at about the height of a man's hip, and it went on for the whole length of the passage. It stopped just short of the front room. The lamp flame leaned toward the door and back.

Duarte's face went a color I'd only seen on people in hospital corridors. His cap was in his hand. I don't remember him taking it off.

Neither of us said anything. The air in the room was cold and smelled of low tide at the bottom of a boat.

Then it knocked.

Soft. Patient. Three taps, and from low down, from below the sill of the front door, where a child would knock if it was very small, or a dog with a paw.

I knew it. Amélia had said, you will know it, and I did, all the way down.

"Don't touch the latch," I said.

It came out low and flat. My dog voice was gone. Duarte looked at me and then at the hall, and his mouth tried a grin that didn't hold.

"Tomás."

"Stay in the chair."

The knock came again. Three taps, spaced out, no hurry in them. Then something that might have been a scratch, small and dry, at the bottom of the wood.

Duarte got up. I heard the chair leg catch on the rug. He still had the cap in his hand and he turned it around once by the peak.

"Listen to it," he said. "That's a kid. Or a dog. Somebody's dog got shut out and it's freezing." He said it fast, the way you say something you need to be true. "It's the middle of the night, man."

"It isn't a dog."

"You don't know that."

I did. I'd known it since the third tap. But I understood him too, and that was the worst of it. Some part of me wanted to go and crouch by the door and say it's all right, come on, nobody's angry. I had my hands flat on my knees to keep them there.

He went out into the hall. I went after him.

The tiles were wet. Not a puddle, just a dark sheen from the kitchen end, and the cold coming off it was the cold of the sea. The lamp threw my shadow ahead of me and it shook on the wall. Duarte stood at the green door with his head tilted, listening, and I saw his shoulders drop. Pity does that to a person. I've seen it happen in a park to a man twice his size, over a puppy that was only pretending to be hurt.

"Duarte. Look at me. Graça said—"

"Graça sleeps with a rosary in her teeth." His hand went to the bolt.

I grabbed his sleeve. Waxed cotton, cold and slick, and I got a fistful of it at the elbow and pulled. He turned his whole body away from me, quick, a man shaking off a dog, and the sleeve went through my fingers.

The bolt drew back with a clean dry sound.

The door came in. He hadn't even pulled it. It swung inward on its own weight, or something's weight, and the cold hit my face, and the smell with it, rot and salt and the inside of a fish crate.

It filled the frame. It had to bend its head under the lintel and it was still too tall for the door. Kelp hung off it in long flat ropes, off the shoulders and the arms and the belt of whatever it wore, and water ran out of the kelp and off the whole length of it in sheets, straight down onto the step and over the sill and in across our tiles. Its face was grey. I say face because there was nowhere else to put the word. It was wet and wrong and ruined, and I couldn't find eyes in it and didn't try for long.

In its right hand, hanging low, was a gutting hook. Long, black, the point worn bright.

Duarte said, "Oh."

That was all. He stepped back and his heel found the wet and slid, and he put a hand out toward the wall.

The thing didn't rush. That's what I keep going back to. It took its time. It came over the sill one foot at a time, the boot flat, the water sloshing out of it, and it lifted the hook the way you'd lift a ladle. I heard myself say his name. I don't think I moved.

The hook went in under his ribs.

He made a small noise, almost polite. Then the arm came up and Duarte came up with it, his boots leaving the tiles, his cap dropping, his hands closing on the iron and the wrist above it as though he could take the weight off himself. His legs kicked once, twice, and then the scream started, and it was a real one, high and cracked, and it went on and on until it stopped being a scream. Water came out of his mouth. It ran over his chin and down his neck and off the hook, and it was seawater, I could smell it, and he was still trying to shout through it.

The thing turned. It carried him out the way it had come, one long step over the sill and another onto the alley stones. Duarte's boot caught the doorframe and scraped down it. Then they were out there, and I saw the back of the kelp, and the streetlamp making the wet on it shine, and the two of them going up the lane toward the sea.

The door swung shut.

The bolt was still back. It didn't bang. It closed gently and the latch dropped, and the hall was quiet except for water running off the tiles into the grout.

I didn't move. I stood in the middle of the hall with my hands out in front of me, the left one still curled around nothing, waxed cotton I could still feel in my fingers. His cap lay by the mat, upside down, and a thin clear tongue of water was creeping into it.

Behind me in the front room the lamp flame had gone flat. It lay over sideways in the chimney and burned blue.

I don't know how long I stood in the hall before my legs decided for me. I got as far as the front room and sat down on the floor under the window with my back against the wall, and I pulled the dented can between my knees and held on to it with both hands. It was a bit over half full. I looked at the lamp instead of the door. The flame was lying sideways in the chimney, and while I watched it stood back up, slowly, yellow again, thin.

Then the boots started on the back stairs.

Not the way they had come before. They weren't coming up from the yard. They were already inside, and they went up, one step, a long wait, another step. The landing, the bedroom, the loft stairs. I heard the loft boards take the weight right above my head, and dust came down out of the ceiling and landed on the can.

It was walking where I had walked. Up to the shawls, down again. Every step I'd taken in that house, it was taking now, in order, and I sat there and counted them and I couldn't stop.

The next thing was worse, and I'm not proud of it. Somewhere around three, or a little after, my mouth opened. I felt it happen. It was the voice I use at six in the morning on the Avenida, the low easy one that says it's all right, nobody's going to hurt you, come on. I had used it in the yard that afternoon and felt better for it, and now it was right there behind my teeth. Something up there was slow and cold and wet and alone, and some part of me wanted to tell it that was fine. That it could stop.

I saw Duarte's face at the green door, his shoulders dropping. It's a child. It's a dog.

That was all it was. He hadn't been stupid. He'd been kind, and the door was right there, and kind was the way through it. I shut my mouth so hard my jaw clicked. I put my tongue against the back of my teeth and kept it there.

After that I didn't say anything. Not a word, not under my breath, not to the lamp. When the boards creaked overhead and something long dragged across the floor up there, I pressed the tin flat against my ribs through my jacket and thought about my mother's hands instead. How she used to tap the ring on the edge of a pot lid when she was thinking. I made myself hold that, and not the other thing.

The oil was down to two fingers, and then it was one and a bit. I checked every few minutes. It doesn't go slowly when you watch it.

Toward morning, the sky in the window wasn't black anymore, just dark, and the boots came down. All the way down. They crossed the hall tiles and I heard the water in them. They stopped at the front door.

The hook came next. It went along the wood from one side to the other, slow, and I heard it bite. The scrape went right through the floor into my back. It left a groove in the green paint, I saw it later, deep enough to lay a finger in.

Then the knock. Low down, below the sill, three taps, spaced out. Gentle. It sounded reasonable. It sounded like someone who had waited a long time and didn't mind waiting a bit more, and who only wanted you to know that.

I looked at the lamp. Barely a finger of oil, gone brown at the bottom, and the flame had shrunk to the size of a thumbnail. I got up on my knees and lifted it off the sill. It was hot through the glass. I clamped it against my chest, in against the jacket, to keep the draught off it, because there was a draught now, and it was coming from under the front door and along the floor and I could feel it on my ankles.

The can was hard to tip. My hands wouldn't hold still. I unscrewed the chimney with two fingers and set it on the rug, and the little flame stood bare and shivering while I poured. Half of it went down my sleeve. I felt it go cold and heavy on my wrist and I smelled the paraffin and kept pouring. The level came up in the glass, a finger, a little over. Not enough. It was what there was.

Something touched the tiles in the hall.

I looked round. A curl of kelp was coming through the gap under the door. It was dark green, glossy, and it came in slowly, pushed from the other side, and it kept coming. It spread out on the tiles, the frond split into five ends, and it lay there palm down with the water spreading out around it.

The flame went small. It sank down into the wick until it was a bead, blue at the base, hardly any yellow at all. The draught leaned on it.

I put my hand round it.

I cupped it, the whole palm, my fingers curled over the top, and the heat went into the skin at once. It hurt more than I thought it would. I heard myself make a noise through my nose. I didn't say anything. I didn't open my hand.

The window went from black to dark grey, and then to a grey I could see the alley wall in. I didn't notice it happen. I noticed that the boots had stopped.

The flame went out while my hand was still round it. It didn't get pushed out. It got smaller, thinned to a thread of smoke against my palm, and that was it. The chimney was still off, sitting on the rug. I stayed on my knees with my hand shut for a good while, because I didn't trust it.

Out in the alley, the steps went away. Wet boots on the stones, unhurried, getting fainter, and under them the sea booming against the cliff like every other morning. Then only the sea.

I opened my hand. The palm was red and white in patches and already tight, and there was a blister across the base of the fingers. My sleeve stank of paraffin. I sat back against the wall and shook. It took a while to finish.

When the window was properly light I went into the hall. The kelp was gone from under the door. There was only the wet on the tiles and a thin dark strand in the grout by the mat. The bolt was still drawn back where Duarte had left it. I shot it, then drew it again, because it was daylight and I wanted the door open. I did not think about that choice much.

The alley was empty. On the step, upside down, was Duarte's cap. I turned it over and it was full to the peak with water, clear and very cold, and when I tipped it into the gutter a small crab ran out over my boot. Not a real crab, a little shore one, the kind you'd see in a rock pool. It went off along the wall and I let it. I put the cap on the step, then picked it up again and held it, because I couldn't leave it and I couldn't take it. In the end I hung it on the door handle of number twenty-one. Nobody answered when I knocked.

The green paint on the front door was scored deep across the middle. I laid a finger in the groove. It went in to the knuckle.

Graça was on her step, cardigan buttoned right this time. She looked at my hand and then at the cap on the neighbour's door. She didn't ask. I'd have had nothing to tell her that she didn't already know.

"The road," she said.

"They said noon."

She nodded. She went inside and came back with the brass lamp from the window, wiped out and wrapped in a tea towel, and the dented can with her thumb hooked through the handle. She put them against my chest. I said I couldn't take Amélia's things. She said Amélia had sent word, a long time before I ever phoned. She said it flatly, looking at the alley, and I understood she'd been given the same job I now had, and had watched what it cost other people.

"Eight pegs," I said.

"Nine now," Graça said. "Go on."

I carried the lamp and the can uphill with my burned hand held out from my body. The GNR car was gone from the bend. A digger had pushed the rock off the road and the tarmac was covered in wet sand and pieces of the wall. It was a few minutes before noon when I drove over it.

The tin was in my inside pocket, zipped up. I could feel the ring through the lid against my breastbone every time I breathed. I drove north with the window cracked and the heater off so I'd stay awake. I did not stop for petrol until I had to, and I didn't get out to stretch. I didn't stop at Óbidos or at the services past Torres Vedras, where I'd usually buy a coffee. Near Loures the sun came out for the first time in three days and I hated it. The pressure cooker was gone from the passenger seat. I kept looking at where the belt hung empty.

It was dark when I parked outside my building. Fifth of January, a Friday, the bins out. I sat with the engine off for a while, then carried the lamp and the can up the two steps, my keys in my left hand.

The hall of my flat is small, cream walls and grey tiles that my mother always said were too cold for feet. I put the can down and reached for the light.

The tiles were wet. Not wet like a mopped floor. There was a pale crust drying at the edges, salt, and it ran in one wide track from the back of the flat, where the kitchen window sticks and never quite shuts, all the way to the front door. It stopped there. I was standing on the mat, and it ended at my feet.

I stood and looked at it and I could smell it. Low tide, the bottom of a boat.

Down the half-flight, where Rui Andrade keeps his door and his old brown dog, the dog was whining. It was a thin, steady sound, going up at the end of each breath. Rui's voice came after it, easy and puzzled: "What is it, Pico? What's the matter with you? Come on, it's only the landing." The dog wouldn't come. I heard his claws skid on the tiles as he backed off.

I thought about going down and telling Rui to bring him in and bolt the door. I thought of how I'd say it. I found I was already using the voice, the low one, and I shut my mouth.

I did what Graça had put in my hands. I took the lamp out of the tea towel and set it on the sill of the front window, where the streetlight comes in. I unscrewed the can and tipped it, and the oil rose in the glass, brown and slow, and I watched it climb. I lit it. The flame stood up, small and yellow and steady.

I looked at the level. Then I looked at the can. There was less in it than I'd hoped, and no shop within a mile of me would be selling this kind of paraffin. It would not last until spring.