If You Find a Figure Hanging in a Tobacco Shed, DON'T Look at it.

The bus driver didn't get out to help me, so I handed the press down myself, wrapped in the brown blanket off our bed, and then climbed down after it. The doors folded shut and the bus pulled away, leaving a long cloud of dust hanging over the road.

I stood there with the thing in my arms. Cast iron frame, wooden crank, a bit over twenty kilos. Not much for a man who carried hods up scaffolding for forty years, but I was sixty-six now and my shoulder let me know it before I'd gone a hundred steps.

Nobody who mattered knew I was here. I hadn't told my neighbor, and I hadn't told my son, who hadn't picked up in fourteen months anyway. I'd stopped leaving messages around the spring. My wife had been dead two years in June. The house was quiet and the garage was where the press sat, and every time I went in for a screwdriver I saw it under its tarp.

Eleven years I'd had it. Lazaros lent it to me for one season, so I could roll tobacco for my brother-in-law's funeral wake, of all things. Then it just stayed.

Lazaros died in the winter. I hadn't gone to the funeral because of my knee. That was the excuse. So that was that. Bringing it back was the one useful thing left that I could think of, so I'd put it on a bus.

The road out of the village went between cotton fields, and all of it was dead. The stalks stood brown and brittle, the bolls split open and empty, and a breath of wind made the whole field rattle. The cicadas screamed from every direction. I breathed dust the whole way, hot and dry in my nose, and under it the old smell of tobacco that gets into the ground where it's been grown for generations.

It had been eleven years since I'd walked this road. I remembered it shorter.

I switched shoulders twice. The second time I put the press down in the dirt and just stood a minute with my hands on my knees. Then I picked it up again.

The cottage was where Lazaros said it would be, low and whitewashed, the paint gone chalky and flaking around the door. The shutters were closed. A dead geranium sat in a bucket by the step. I went round the side and the ditch was there behind it, the irrigation ditch he used to open every morning in July.

Nothing ran in it now. It was a ribbon of grey powder, dry down to the bottom, except for one pool in the low bend, green and flat and not moving. A few flies sat on it.

Ioannis had told me on the phone, three weeks back, that he'd be away. His cousin's daughter was getting married in Thessaloniki and he had to go, wedding or no wedding.

"Key's under the stone by the shed," he said.

"You'll know the stone."

I did. It was a flat white one, size of a loaf, by the corner post. I turned it over and the key was there, black with age, a bit of string tied through the loop. I held it a moment. It was warm from the ground.

A beetle ran out from under the stone and I left it alone.

The cottage door wasn't locked. Lazaros never locked it, and apparently Ioannis didn't either. I set the press on the kitchen table and took off my cap. The room was hot and smelled of shut-up wood. There was a bed in the back room with the mattress rolled up and a jug of water on the counter that I didn't trust.

I went out again and looked up the lane. A woman in a black cardigan was sitting on a kitchen chair in front of the next house, shelling something into a pan. I walked over and asked her when the next bus went back to Serres.

She looked at me a while. "Tomorrow, seven in the morning. Today's went at four."

"There's nothing after?"

"There's never anything after."

She went back to her pan.

I thanked her. I thought about walking to the main road and trying to flag something down, and then I thought about my shoulder and my knee, and I didn't. I'd sleep in the cottage. I'd said I would, on the phone, if it came to that, and Ioannis had said Sophia wouldn't mind. Sophia lived far off, with her daughter somewhere up north.

Nobody was going to mind. I think that was what struck me, standing in the lane. Nobody was going to mind anything I did.

Fine. I'd do the thing I came for, and sleep, and be on the seven o'clock bus.

I got the blanket off the press, folded it in thirds and laid it over the chair. The iron had gone dull and spotted with orange where I hadn't oiled it. I'd meant to. The crank still turned, but it ground a bit. I rubbed my thumb over the maker's stamp, a little eagle and some numbers worn nearly flat.

Lazaros used to say it was the only honest thing he ever bought.

I picked it up again and went back out to the shed.

It stood off the yard, a long low building with a tin roof and walls of grey boards where the whitewash had never reached. The door had a padlock the size of my fist. The sun was low now and the roof ticked in the heat. I put the key in and it went in stiff.

I had to work it, and then the shackle gave, and I pulled the lock off and hung it on the hasp.

I got the door open with my hip.

The air came out over me, hot and stale and thick, tobacco and dust and something under it that had been shut in a long time. It hit my face first and then the rest of me. I turned my head away and waited for it to thin out.

Then I turned back.

It took a minute for my eyes to sort the inside out. The light came in through the gaps between the boards in thin orange stripes and lay across the floor. The floor was dirt, with a skin of fine dust over it that had never been walked on much. My boots left prints the second I stepped in.

The bench ran along the left wall, same as always. Lazaros had built it out of door planks. There was a vise on one end, a coffee can of rusty nails, a bundle of twine, and in the middle, square to the edge, the tin. Biscuit tin, Danish, the lid gone soft with rust at the corners.

Eleven years and nobody had moved it an inch.

I picked it up and shook it. Dry little rattle. He'd kept my flies for me because Maritsa, my wife, said she'd throw them out if she found hooks in the sock drawer one more time. Lazaros said he'd hold them for the next trip. Then there wasn't a next trip, and then there was nobody to ask.

I held the tin against my chest with one hand and looked up, because something up there was blocking the stripes of light.

Tobacco hung from the rafters. That was ordinary. Every shed around here had it, leaf bundles strung on cords to dry. But these weren't hung in rows. They'd been tied one above another, bundle on bundle, down from the ridge beam almost to the floor, and all of it was done in a line.

Long neck at the top. Then a body. Then two arms hanging straight down at the sides, past where the hips would be. It was taller than me by a good head. The leaves had gone the color of old leather, and the whole thing turned very slightly in the air that came in through the door.

I looked at the floor under it, because that was where my eyes went next.

There was a gap in the dust. A narrow strip, about as wide as my two boots set together, and a bit longer than I was tall. The edges were clean and straight. Everywhere else the dust was thick and grey and soft. In that strip the packed dirt showed through, bare and a little shiny.

Something had been lying or sitting there a long time. The dust had piled up all around it and never settled on it. And it wasn't there now.

I didn't like it. I'll say that plainly. The back of my neck went tight and my mouth was dry, and I had a clear idea of walking out and shutting the door and sleeping on the cottage step.

But I still had the press under my other arm. I'd carried it a long way.

And there was a place for it. Down at the far end of the bench, against the wall, a space had been left. Nothing on it, nothing near it, and the wood there was paler than the rest, a long rectangle where something heavy had stood for years and kept the sun and the dirt off.

Exactly the size of the press. I'd have bet my pension on it. Lazaros had cleared that spot himself, the day he lent it to me, and nobody had put anything there since.

I walked down the bench, turning my shoulders so I wouldn't brush the hanging leaves, and set the press in the pale place. It went down with a thud. I turned it so the base sat flush with the wall and pushed it until the iron touched the boards at the back and both front corners lined up with the edge of the pale wood.

Then I stood back and looked. It was a little off, so I moved it a finger's width. That was right. The crank had picked up dust on the way. I wiped it with my sleeve, once along the wooden handle and once around the shaft.

It looked like it belonged there. It looked like it had never been gone. For about a second I felt good, the way I do when a course is laid true and I run the level over it and the bubble sits dead center. Forty years of that feeling. I hadn't had it since Maritsa.

Then I felt the leaves behind me. Nothing moved. I just knew where they were.

I went out and pulled the door shut with my hip and put the padlock back on the hasp and pressed it till it clicked. The sun was nearly on the hills now, and the yard had gone orange. The cicadas were louder than when I'd gone in. My boot prints went in and came out, and the key was still in my hand with the string through the loop.

I walked it back to the corner post, laid it in the hollow, and put the white stone over it, the way I'd found it. Ioannis would be back after the wedding and would look for it there.

A scarecrow, then. Farmers put them up in all kinds of ways, and some of them did it in the shape of a man, and some of them didn't. Or it was a local thing, one of those customs the old people did without ever saying why. Lazaros's mother had been from up in the mountains somewhere.

They had their ways. It was somebody else's business. I'd done what I came to do.

The cottage was hotter than outside. I put the tin on the kitchen table next to the folded blanket and opened my bag. There was half a loaf in there from the morning, wrapped in a bit of paper, and I tore off the end and ate it standing at the counter. It was dry and it stuck in my throat.

I didn't want the jug water, so I tried to wash it down with spit and gave up.

The kitchen window looked out the side of the house, across the yard to the shed. I knew exactly where it was without turning my head. I ate the bread and looked at the wall, at the calendar from a seed company that was stuck on the month Lazaros died, and I did not look at the window.

I lay on the rolled-out mattress in the back room with my shirt off and still sweated through the sheet. By midnight it was thirty degrees in there, and it didn't drop after. The shutters were shut tight, and I'd hooked them myself, though there was nothing out there to keep out. That's what I'd have said.

Empty village, dead cotton, one old woman shelling beans.

I thought about Maritsa, because that's what the dark is for now. She used to keep a wet cloth on the back of her neck in August and complain I ran hot as a stove. I thought about my son's phone and how it rang eight or nine times and then the woman's recording came on.

I thought about the bus at seven. I counted it on my fingers: five hours, then four.

I must have gone under at some point, because I woke up with my mouth dry and the shirt stuck to my ribs, and I didn't know what had woken me. Then I heard it again.

Steps. Slow ones, outside, down in the ditch behind the house. Each one was followed by a dry scrape, a heel or a toe dragged through something fine and loose. Step, then scrape. Step, then scrape.

A long pause between.

I thought dog. I thought a man drunk from the wedding, lost. I lay there and told myself both of those, and neither one had a scrape in it.

I got up. My knee cracked and I froze, but the steps didn't change. I went through to the main room in my bare feet, the boards warm, and found the kitchen drawer by feel. There was a bread knife with a wooden handle, the blade worn thin from sharpening. I took it.

It was a stupid thing to hold, and I held it anyway.

The shutter on the back wall had a slit between the boards, a finger wide where the wood had shrunk. I put my eye to it.

The ditch was grey in the dark, lighter than the field on either side, and the moon was enough to see by. Something was coming up it. It came slow, from the low bend where the green pool was. It was tall. I want to say a man, but a man doesn't stand that straight or have a neck that long.

It was thin all the way down, brown and dry-looking, the body all cords and sinew with the skin drawn tight over them like leather left on a fence post. Its arms hung straight at its sides. The hands were grey-brown and split all over, deep cracks, the same cracks that were in the clay out in the field.

Step. Scrape. Powder came up around its feet and settled.

I took my eye away. I put it back, because not looking was worse.

It came up out of the ditch onto the yard. It didn't hurry and it didn't look around. It went straight across to the shed like it was walking to work. I couldn't see the door from that slit, but I heard it. The hasp rattled.

Iron on iron, once, then again, and then the padlock knocking against the wood, a dull heavy sound. It tried it three times. Whoever was out there wanted in, and the lock was holding.

I'd put that lock back myself. I'd pressed it till it clicked.

The rattling stopped. Then there was nothing. No steps, no scrape, just the cicadas going on in the dark as if nothing was wrong. I breathed out through my nose very slowly and tried to hear which way it had gone.

The boards on the side of the house creaked. It was close. It was at the corner.

I backed into the middle of the room. That's all I did. I didn't think about the door, I only thought: where is it, where is it now. My hand had gone wet on the knife handle. I changed hands and wiped the right one on my trousers and changed back.

It started at the kitchen window, the one that looks across to the shed. A sound like paper being rubbed. Dry, slow, fingers going along the edge of the shutter, along the frame, down the boards. I heard it stop at the hook. Then it moved on.

The next shutter was the one on the side wall, and it did the same thing there. The fingers went along the wood, searching, patient. They didn't push. They felt.

It was going around the house. It was trying every shutter, one after another, and I could follow it by the sound, the rubbing, the pause, the rubbing. A man checking his own property for the one loose board.

It reached the back wall. The slit I'd been looking through was a hand's width from my face now, and the sound was right there on the other side of it. Rubbing, rubbing. I smelled it through the gap. Old tobacco, the sweet rotten smell of a leaf barn, and under that dust.

I didn't breathe. I mean I held it until my chest hurt, then let a little out through my teeth so thin it couldn't have made a sound, then held again. The knife was pointing at the shutter. I knew it wouldn't matter and I kept it pointed there anyway.

The fingers stopped on the hook. I saw the hook shift in its eye, one hair of movement. It sat there. The cheap hook I'd dropped in with my thumb, and one pull and it would be open. I thought of my mother, of all things, and the way she said the Lord's Prayer fast and flat, like counting change.

I couldn't get past the first line.

The fingers went on down the board and off the end of it.

The steps went back along the wall. Step, scrape. Around the corner, out across the yard, and down into the ditch. I listened to it go. They got fainter and then I wasn't sure I was hearing them at all, only the blood in my ears.

Then I wasn't hearing them.

I didn't move. If I lay down, it'd come back. That's what I thought, and it made no sense, but my legs wouldn't move anyway. So I stayed on my feet in the room with the knife and the stink of the leaf barn thinning out of the air. My knee started to ache.

Then the other one. A mosquito found my shoulder and I let it.

The slits in the shutters went from black to dark grey. Then grey to a thin white line. It was a long time coming, and I watched every bit of it.

The prints were in the yard when I opened the door. I'd waited until the light was full before I touched the hook on it.

They were pale grey, powder on packed dirt, long and narrow with a drag at the back of each one. They went around the shed door in a loop, three or four times over. Then they went around the cottage, and under every window there was a patch where it had stood and shuffled. The kitchen window had the most.

It had spent a long time there.

There was a broom behind the kitchen door, the straw worn down to a slant. I got it and swept. I did the step first, then the dirt in front of the shed, then along the wall under each window, long strokes, pushing the powder back toward the ditch where it came from. Lazaros's yard was always swept.

I didn't think about any of it. I was almost at the corner post when I looked down at my hands on the handle and saw what I was doing.

I'd just cleaned up after it.

I stood there holding the broom. Somewhere up on the road I heard the bus grind past in low gear, and I knew what time it was without looking at my watch. I didn't go. I stood in the yard and let it go by, and I couldn't have said that was a decision. My legs hadn't moved, so that was that.

The key was under the stone. I took the padlock off, opened the shed door with my hip and stayed in the doorway. The smell came out at me, hot, tobacco and dust. The leaf figure hung where it had hung, the long neck, the arms straight down. It turned a little in the air from the door.

Under it the clean strip in the floor was wider. Not by much. A hand's width on each side, the edges as sharp as before, the dirt in it that same shine.

The press sat on the bench in its pale rectangle. I didn't go in. I didn't touch it. I looked at the crank handle, still clean where I'd wiped it, and I shut the door and locked it and put the key back under the stone. Then I stood and looked at the stone for a while.

I tried Ioannis from the yard, where I could get one bar of signal if I stood by the corner post. It rang, and rang, and rang out. I tried again and counted the rings. Twelve. A man at a wedding in Thessaloniki, with the music going and his good shoes on, wasn't hearing a phone in his jacket.

I didn't leave a message. I didn't know what I'd say. The scarecrow in your shed has been walking about. I rang my son's number too, once, and let it ring until the woman's recording came on, and then I hung up before she finished.

The day was long. The heat came down at nine and stayed. I sat on the step in the strip of shade from the door, then in the kitchen with the shutters shut, then on the step again. The cicadas never let up, not for a breath. I finally drank from the jug, because my mouth was cracking, and the water tasted of the clay it had stood in but it stayed down.

I ate the last of the bread. Twice I walked to the end of the yard and looked at the ditch, the grey powder and the one green pool at the bend with the flies on it. Nothing in it. Nothing in the fields either, only the dead cotton rattling.

I thought about the woman in the black cardigan, shelling beans in her kitchen chair two houses down. I could've gone and told her. I got as far as the road and turned around. I had no idea how to say it so she'd hear it as anything but an old man in the sun too long.

And she'd have looked at me the way people do.

I moved the kitchen table across the front door, and it was too heavy and blocked the way to the stove, so I moved it back. I took one of the chairs instead, the one with the hard back, and set it by the door.

It came earlier that night. I hadn't lain down. I was on the floor against the wall with the bread knife next to my knee and the lamp off, and at midnight I heard it. Not in the ditch. The ditch had gone quiet and I'd been waiting for that, and then there was the scrape on the near side of the house, close, step and drag, along the wall.

It had come straight up from the yard. It didn't try the shed. It didn't try the shutters. It came along the front wall of the cottage, slowly, and I heard it all the way to the door.

Then it stopped.

I got up. I don't remember doing it. I was standing next to the door with the chair already in my hands, and I jammed the back of it under the handle, and the legs scraped on the stone and I winced at the noise. Nothing outside answered.

Then there was a weight on the wood. A flat pressure, the whole door taking it, the boards pushing in a hair against the frame. I could see the line of light from the yard shift, a dark patch crossing it. A palm. It had laid its palm flat on my door, and it just kept it there.

It didn't push. It leaned. I felt the door settle toward me and held the chair against it with both hands, my arms shaking, and I breathed through my mouth because I thought it'd be quieter, and I thought it was quieter. Then I breathed in, and the weight on the boards eased, just barely, and when I let the breath out it came back.

In. Out. It was following me. It was standing on the other side of an inch of pine, listening to me breathe.

I held my breath as long as I could. The leaning stopped. Then I couldn't, and I let it out, and the door took the weight again.

A while after that it lifted the hand away. I felt the boards come back to where they'd been. It stayed, though. I could tell it was there. I reached out with one hand, keeping the other on the chair, and laid my fingers flat on the wood where the dark patch had been.

It was warm. Warm all the way through the grain, a hand-shaped place with the fingers spread, and I took mine away.

I kept the chair there. My arms went numb and then went on without me. At some point I slid down until I was sitting against the door with my back to it, boots braced on the floor and the chair over my head, and I kept it there. Under the sill the dust started coming through, fine grey, a little at a time, a small fan of it spreading on the floor stones in the dark.

I watched it grow until there was enough light in the room to see that it was grey.

The dust stopped when the light got full. I put the chair down, and my arms came down with it and wouldn't close. I waited until I could feel my fingers, then opened the door.

Nothing on the step. Prints all over the yard again, and a wide scuffed patch in front of the door where it had stood. I left them. I'd already learned what sweeping them did for me.

The bus went by at seven, low gear, the same grind as yesterday. I listened to it all the way out. I could say I was too tired to walk to the road, but that's not it. I'd put a press back on a bench, and I didn't want to leave the place with it half finished.

That's as much sense as I can make of it.

So I did what I could think of. In the cupboard under the sink there was a paper bag of coarse salt, the grey kind for pickling, folded over at the top and gone hard in the damp. I broke it up in my fist. My mother used to lay a line of it across every doorstep on the first of the month, and when I asked her why she said, "Because."

I laid a thick line across the sill of the front door, edge to edge. Then I did the window sills one at a time, with the shutters shut, reaching out and pouring it along the wood. It took most of the bag.

After that I found a newspaper in the drawer by the stove, three weeks old, a whole stack under the knives. I tore the pages in half and rolled them tight, twelve of them, and stood them in a coffee can by the back window. There was a second chair in the bedroom with a loose leg.

I got my boot on the seat and twisted the leg until it came free, a good length of beech, heavy at one end. I put it by my knee. Then I sat on the step in the strip of shade and waited for the day to burn down.

It came a little after eleven. I'd lit the lamp and then blown it out again, because I couldn't stand the smell of the oil. I sat on the floor in the main room with my back to the wall under the back window, the chair leg across my lap. The steps came up the ditch.

Step, scrape. I was almost glad to hear them, because the waiting was over.

It went to the front first. I heard it stop. A long time went by, and nothing leaned on the door. I crawled to the kitchen window, put my eye to the slit, and looked out across the yard.

The salt was swept. It wasn't scattered. Somebody had drawn a clean half circle through it with the side of a foot, a neat grey arc, and the white grains were pushed into a ridge at the end. The thing stood just past the ridge. It was close enough that I could have hit it with a thrown shoe.

Its arms hung down. The long neck was bent forward a little, toward the house.

I lit a roll of newspaper with my lighter and held it to the slit. The flame stood up and the yard went orange. I could see the whole length of it, the cords in its legs, the cracked brown hide stretched over the hip bones. It looked at the fire. It didn't flinch or step back.

It watched the flame the way a man watches a pot he isn't going to take off. I kept the paper there until the heat got to my knuckles, and then I dropped it and shook my hand, and the thing took one step toward the house. One. Its foot came down in the powder with that dry drag after it.

I lit another and held it up. It took another step. I stopped lighting them.

I went back to the other window, the one on the back wall over the stove, and sat under it with the chair leg. I could hear it come around the side of the house. It was in no hurry. The fingers started on the frame, the paper sound, edge to edge. I knew where they were going.

I'd watched them go there the night before, and the night before that. They stopped at the hook.

There was a small noise, a click of iron, and the hook came up out of its eye. It had gone in through the slit with one finger and lifted it. Plain as that. The shutter swung in and hot air came with it, thick with old tobacco and the dry-barn smell, and the whole gap was full of a face.

It was long. It had no eyes, only creases in the brown hide where eyes would be, folded shut, and a seam where the mouth was. It was close enough that I could see the grain of the skin. It didn't breathe. It put its face to the gap and turned it slowly, and I understood it was finding me by the sound of me.

I swung the chair leg at its wrist, as hard as I could swing sitting down. The wrist broke. It didn't crack like bone. It went to powder, a puff of grey, and the hand dropped onto the sill.

The hand kept coming. It slid in over the wood on its own, fingers spread, cracked grey palm down, and it started feeling along the sill. It went along the boards and scraped, and went along and scraped. I got up and backed away until I was in the corner by the table with the leg held up in both hands.

I didn't hit it again. I couldn't see what that would do except make more hands.

It reached the stove. The fingers walked up the cold iron, along the lid, and found the pot on top, and turned it over, and kept going toward the edge nearest me. I could hear my own breathing and I couldn't stop it.

Then the room went grey. I hadn't seen it start, only the slit in the front shutter going pale. The hand stopped on the lid. It lay there, and I watched the fingers draw in, slow, and pull back along the iron and over the sill, trailing a line of powder behind it. The face went out of the gap.

The shutter hung open and the hot air kept coming in.

I heard the steps go along the wall, across the yard and down into the ditch. Step, scrape. Then I couldn't hear them.

I didn't wait for Ioannis. I'd made up my mind before the dust on the sill stopped moving, and I didn't argue with myself about it.

First I stood the pot upright on the stove and pushed the shutter shut. The hook wouldn't catch anymore, so I wedged a spoon in the eye. Then I took the dustpan to the line of powder on the sill, which was stupid. I knew it was stupid with the brush in my hand and did it anyway.

My hands needed something to do.

The tin was on the kitchen table next to the folded blanket. I left the blanket. I put the tin under my arm, shut the cottage door behind me, and went to the corner post. The white stone came up easier than it had the first day. I laid the key in the hollow with the string trailing out, so Ioannis would see it, and put the stone back on top.

I didn't look at the shed. I could hear the roof ticking in the early sun and that was enough.

The yard was one big smear of prints, going every direction. I walked through them. My legs were shaking, both of them, the bad knee worst, and I had to go slow on the track to the road or I'd have gone down. It was nowhere near warm yet, and I was already sweating through my shirt.

Two houses down, the woman in the black cardigan was on her kitchen chair with the pan in her lap. She watched me come. I nodded, and she nodded. That was all of it. I had nothing I could have told her that she'd have believed, and she had nothing to tell me that I wanted to hear.

At the road I looked back once. The cottage sat there with its shutters closed, and behind it the ditch ran off grey and plain with the green pool at the bend. Nothing stood in it. It was a ditch that wanted rain.

The bus came at seven, in low gear, grinding the way I'd heard it grind two mornings running. I put my arm out and it stopped. The driver was a heavy man with a wet towel around his neck, and he looked at the tin and at my face and didn't say anything. I paid him two euros fifty and he tore me a ticket.

There were five people on it, all of them asleep or pretending. I took a seat halfway down on the shady side and put the tin on my knees with both hands flat on the lid. Then the bus pulled out, the cottage went behind the dust, and I faced front.

For a while I didn't think anything. The fields went by, brown on both sides, the cotton standing dead in rows nobody was ever going to pick. A tractor sat in one of them with its hood up. A man in a cap walked a fence line with a stick. I watched all of it.

It was plain and ordinary and in daylight, and every kilometre it got further behind me.

Somewhere past the second village, I opened the tin. I don't know what I expected. They were all there, my flies, the grey hackles and the little dark ones with the red thread at the tail. I tied them at the kitchen table the winters Maritsa still had me to talk to. A few had gone rusty at the hook.

I closed it again.

That was when it came loose. It was in my chest, a hard thing that had been sitting under the breastbone for two years, since June, since the hospital car park. It didn't go away. It just shifted and let go enough that I could pull a full breath through my nose. I let it out slow.

My eyes were wet, and I let them be. The man across the aisle was asleep with his mouth open, so there was nobody to mind.

I thought, well, that's done. I thought the press was back where it belonged and I'd done what I came to do. I'd stayed as long as a man could be expected to stay, and nobody could say I hadn't. The rest was somebody else's trouble, Ioannis's or Sophia's, whoever lived with that shed now.

I'd put it right. I'd gone a bit further than right, even. I'd walked off.

I thought about my son, too, which I hadn't expected. I thought I might call him from Thessaloniki and tell him I'd been to see Lazaros's place, and that was all, nothing else. He'd let it ring, probably. I decided I'd call anyway.

Serres came up out of the flat country in pieces, first a grain silo, then apartment blocks with their awnings pulled out against the sun, then the traffic. The bus let us off at the station at ten past eight. The northbound coach to Thessaloniki didn't leave until nine thirty, the board said, from the petrol station on the ring road.

I didn't have a way to get there except my feet, so I walked it with the tin under my arm and my shoulder starting up again.

The petrol station had a canopy, six pumps, and a shop with a fridge of cold drinks humming by the door. I bought nothing. I went round the side to the toilet, a one-man room with a bolt on the door and a smell of bleach and old cigarettes.

The mirror was a sheet of scratched steel. I put the tin on the cistern and looked at myself, grey in the face, three days of white stubble, the eyes of someone who hadn't lain down in two nights. I ran the cold tap and waited for it to run properly cold. It took a while.

Then I put both hands under it and put my face in my hands.

It was cold. Really cold, well water cold, and it ran down my neck and under my collar, and I stayed bent over the basin with it running over my wrists. It was the first kind thing that had happened to me in days. I stood there and let it.

I wiped my face on my sleeve because the roll of paper towel was empty, picked up the tin, and drew the bolt. The light outside hit like a slap. I stood at the corner of the building with my hand over my eyes until the pumps came back.

The coach was already there, parked along the far edge of the forecourt with its engine ticking over and the luggage hold open. A man was halfway up the ladder on the back of it, a bald, thick-armed man in a short-sleeved shirt, and he was laughing. He had one hand on the rung and the other pointing at the roof.

"Look at this," he called to the driver.

"Look, you've got a passenger up here. Free ride."

The driver, a thin young fellow with a clipboard, didn't look up. "Kids," he said.

"Kids, my arse. What kid?"

The bald man twisted round and saw me standing there with the tin. He grinned like I'd been in on it.

"Giorgos," he said, and thumped his chest.

"I've got the taxi. Come and look, grandad, this is the best thing I've seen all week."

I should have gone to the shop for a coffee. I went over. He came down and made room for me, and I climbed three rungs and put my head above the edge.

The roof was white with dust, the same dust that was on everything between here and the village. Across it ran a line of prints, hands, flat and wide, five fingers each and the fingers too long. They went from the back edge toward the front, one and then the other, with a drag between them.

Whoever made them had crawled, or walked bent over with its hands down. In the nearest print, stuck by one edge, was a dry brown leaf.

My hands went cold on the rung. The rest of me followed. It was thirty-one degrees in the shade and I was cold to the shoulders.

"Eh?"

Giorgos said below me. "Somebody had a good night. Probably climbed up there in the car park drunk, fell asleep, got a fright when the driver started up."

He laughed some more. "I'd pay to see his face."

I came down. My knee told me about every rung. I didn't say anything to him, and he didn't notice, because he'd already turned to the driver to tell it again, bigger.

I stood on the concrete with the tin against my stomach and looked at the road. The ring road, trucks going by, a bus stop sign, a field of stubble beyond it. There was a taxi rank, Giorgos's own cab, and a bench in the shop doorway. I had eleven euros in my pocket and a shoulder that wouldn't carry anything else.

The last bus to Kato Kamila had gone at four the afternoon before, and I wasn't going back there anyway. It came to this. If I stayed in Serres it would find me in Serres. If I went north it would find me north. Either way I'd rather be where there were people.

I gave the driver my money and he tore me a ticket without looking at me.

"Left side, sit anywhere," he said.

The coach was cold inside, the air conditioning going hard, and it smelled of plastic seat covers and somebody's peeled orange. About half full. A woman with a toddler, two soldiers asleep against each other, a priest with a briefcase on his lap. I went down the aisle looking for the emptiest pair. There wasn't one, only a girl in a window seat about a third of the way back, a backpack at her feet and white earbuds in, her forehead against the glass.

I stopped at the row. She moved her feet an inch and didn't look round.

"Is this taken?"

I said.

She shrugged one shoulder. I sat down in the aisle seat with the tin on my knees, both hands flat on the lid, the way I'd held it on the village bus.

That was when I saw the back seat. I wasn't looking for it. The long bench at the very back, five places, was empty, and across it, spread out evenly like somebody had sat there and shaken out a bag, was a scatter of dry brown leaves. Big ones, as long as my forearm, curled at the edges.

The same colour as the ones in the shed. Nobody was going near them. The toddler's mother had steered round the back rows, and the soldiers had chosen the front.

I looked at them for as long as I could, then turned my face to the front and kept it there.

The driver came up the steps and counted heads with the clipboard and pulled the doors shut. The brakes let go. We rolled off the forecourt, past Giorgos, who raised a hand to the driver without looking, and out onto the ring road, and then we were going north.

The girl hadn't moved. She had a dark ponytail and a green thread bracelet and she was a little younger than my son's wife was when I first met her. Maria, the driver had called, checking a name against a list as she climbed on ahead of me. I hadn't heard the rest.

Outside, Serres ran out quickly. A tyre place, a furniture warehouse with plastic chairs stacked in the yard, a last roundabout, and then the fields. They were as brown as the ditch had been. Cotton, mostly, dead on the stalk and nobody bothering to pick it, and between the fields low fences, a pump house, rows of poplars gone grey with dust.

The sun came flat through the glass on my side and I could feel the heat of it through the cold air.

I watched out of the window because there wasn't anything else to do. We'd gone maybe five minutes when I saw it.

Far out, a long way from the road, past two fields and a ditch, something stood in the cotton. Tall. Darker than the stalks, and thin. It was too far to see its face, or if it had one. It stood straight with its arms down, and it didn't sway the way a post would in the wind that was moving the stalks around it.

I told myself it was a pole. An electrician's pole, a scarecrow, somebody's tank. The coach went on and the field slid back and it went with it.

A kilometre later there was another one. A bit closer, I thought. I looked for the first, and it wasn't where it had been. Then I counted the poplars to be sure and looked again, and the shape stood in a different place, by a gap in a fence, nearer the road. The next kilometre it was nearer again.

The same one. I knew that without anybody telling me, the same as I'd known it on the step the night it laid its hand on the door.

Never in the same place twice. Never farther off than the last time.

Beside me, Maria turned a page on her phone with her thumb. The coach hummed. I kept both hands flat on the tin and I didn't breathe loud.

It came to me somewhere around the fourth poplar, and it wasn't a big thought. It was more like a sum coming out.

That strip in the shed floor. Clean edges, a little shiny, about my length. Something had sat there eleven years, or lain there, with an empty place on the bench above it and the press in my garage under a tarp. And all that time it hadn't gone anywhere. I came along with my blanket and my sleeve and wiped the crank and squared the thing to the wall, and that night it was up and walking.

I'd done it right. That was the worst of it. Lazaros himself couldn't have set it better.

And I'd sat on that bus with the tin and felt my chest let go. I'd thought walking out was the same as putting it right. A man puts a thing back and it's done. But it had been breathing at my door for three nights, listening to me, and a thing that does that learns you.

It didn't need the shed anymore. It had me.

The shape in the cotton was by a irrigation pipe now. Near enough that I could see it was brown.

I turned in my seat. "Excuse me."

She didn't hear, so I touched the sleeve of her jacket, just the cloth. She looked at my hand and then at me and took out one earbud. Her eyes were brown and not unfriendly. Careful, though. Girls her age learn that early with old men on buses.

"Something's after me," I said.

"I'm not drunk and I'm not sick. It's real, and it's going to come on this coach."

She didn't say anything.

"At the next stop, get off. Take your bag. Don't sit near me after that, wherever you sit."

My voice came out flat, the way I'd talk to a laborer about a wall that had to come down. It was the only way I could say it.

"I'm sorry. I should have said it before we left. I didn't know it would be this fast."

"Who's after you?" she said.

Quiet. Not mocking.

"I can't tell you what it is. You wouldn't want it described."

I thought of the face in the shutter gap, the creases where eyes should be. "It's tall. It walks. It doesn't talk. It's been behind me since Kato Kamila."

She looked at my hands. They were on the tin, and they'd gone white across the knuckles, and the left one was shaking against the lid in a small steady rattle I couldn't stop. They're old hands. Forty years of mortar and the skin on them looks like the field out there. I watched her look at them, the nicks, the thumb that never healed straight, the shaking.

I think she was deciding what kind of old man I was.

Then she lifted her backpack off the floor and set it on her knees and put both arms around it. She didn't get up. She didn't move toward the aisle. She just drew in, small, against the window.

"Okay," she said.

It wasn't okay, and it wasn't yes. It was what you say to a man at a bus stop so he'll go on being quiet. She put the earbud back in. I saw her thumb find the screen.

I could have said more. I could have told her about the prints under every window, or the hand that walked on its own along the sill, or the warm place on my door afterward. But I heard how it would sound, and I'd heard it already in my own head in the yard, two houses from the woman with the beans.

An old man who'd been too long in the sun. And she wasn't wrong to think it. If somebody had told me this on a bus I'd have thought the same and moved my bag too.

So that was that. I couldn't make her believe it. Nothing I knew how to say would do it. I'd told nobody anything for two years, and the one time I said it plain to a person, it was to a stranger with a green thread on her wrist who was being polite.

The priest at the front hadn't looked round. The soldiers slept. The toddler was telling its mother something about a dog.

I turned back to the window, because I couldn't help it. The field was empty where it had been. The cotton stood and the wind moved it. I looked along the fence and the road verge and the pump house. Nothing.

Then I understood I'd been looking in the wrong direction the whole time, and I stopped breathing quietly and stopped breathing at all.

Behind us, at the back of the coach, in the long row where nobody sat, there was a sound.

Dry. Small. A rustling, the way a leaf barn sounds in an evening draft, when the bundles shift on their strings. One leaf and then another, and then a lot of them, all moving together on the seat.

Maria's thumb stopped on her phone.

I kept my hands flat on the tin, and I didn't turn around.