My Guesthouse Landlady Gave Me One RULE. Never Take Anything From Its Hand.

Frau Moser asked if there was anyone she should ring in case of trouble, and I said no. She was holding my key on its wooden pear, and she looked at me a second longer than I liked.

"Nobody at home?" she said. Her English was careful, every word set down separately.

"Nobody," I said. "Just me."

It was the easiest lie I've ever told, and I'd had practice. Eighteen years behind the same espresso bar in Linz, and in all that time not one customer had asked who I was. They asked for a flat white, I made a flat white, and that was the whole conversation. My coworkers knew I lived alone in Urfahr and didn't like birthdays. They didn't know about Clara. I'd never decided to keep her quiet. It just got harder every year to start.

Clara was the reason I was in Hallstatt at all. She'd said four days, and she'd said it from the couch in her blanket, with the laptop balanced on her knees and the booking page already open. "You've never asked for anything," she told me. "So I'm asking for you." I said the bar couldn't spare me. She said the bar had survived worse than a Tuesday without Daniel. I booked the room that night while she watched me do it.

The room was on the ground floor at the back of the pension, and it smelled of pine polish and damp wool. Somebody had put a hot-water bottle in the bed, and it was already going cold. I hung my coat on the hook and set my boots by the radiator, which ticked but gave off almost nothing. There was a wardrobe, a little desk, and a window with heavy wooden shutters. On the stairs I'd passed a big cheerful Dutchman with a camera bag, who said "Good evening, neighbor!" as if we'd known each other for years. I said good evening back. That was the most anyone had said to me all day.

I opened the shutters, and the cold came in first.

The Hallstättersee was right there, black and flat, so still it showed the lights of the houses across the water upside down. Along the shore there was a skim of ice, thin and gray-white and crusted at the edges. A pair of swans sat on the far side of it, not moving. There was a door beside the window, and past its step a gravel lane ran down toward the water. I stood there in my socks longer than I meant to. Nobody was waiting on an order. I couldn't think when that had last been true.

I put my coat back on and took my phone out to the bench.

It was a green slatted bench on the Seestraße side, facing the lake, with frost already on the seat. I wiped a patch with my sleeve and sat. The last light was going off the Dachstein, the snow on top turning from pink to gray and then to nothing, and the whole shore went dark at once. Across the water the church bells started for the hour. They sounded wrong to me. They came a beat late and from the wrong direction, so I kept looking at the near shore when the church was on the far one. The ice takes sound and hands it back somewhere else, or maybe it was just the cold.

Clara picked up on the second ring. She always did.

"You're outside," she said. "I can hear it. You'll get a cold."

"I'm wearing my coat."

"Good. Is it pretty?"

"It's very quiet," I said. "There's a lake right outside my window, and it's frozen a bit at the edges. There are two swans."

"Two swans." I could hear her smiling. "Tell me about the swans."

So I did. I told her they sat close together and didn't do much, and one of them put its head under its wing while I watched. I told her the landlady was a short woman named Frau Moser with a gray bun and eyes that went right through you, and that she'd given me a key on a wooden pear. I told her the radiator was useless. I was tapping the bench slat while I talked, three quick raps with two fingers and then a pause, the way I do against the portafilter to knock the grounds level. I don't know when I started. My hand does it whenever it's got nothing else to hold.

"Daniel." She'd heard it too. "Stop worrying."

"I'm not worrying."

"You're tapping. You tap when you worry. Did you eat?"

"Not yet."

"Eat something hot. And leave the phone in your room tomorrow. Look at the mountains instead of at me."

"I like looking at you."

"That's the sad part," she said, gently, and then she coughed, and it went on a while. I waited it out and didn't say anything. She never wanted me to. When she came back on her voice was thinner, but she was still teasing. She told me to go inside before I froze to the bench, and that she'd call tomorrow, same time. I said I'd be here.

I stayed a minute after she hung up. The screen went dark and the lake got darker with it. That was when I looked down the lane and saw the boat shed for the first time.

I hadn't noticed it from the window, because the corner of the pension hid it. It was a low wooden building with a slate roof, half over the water on old posts, and the door faced up the lane toward me. I counted the distance without meaning to. It's a habit from work, counting steps between the machine and the pickup counter. Forty paces from my door to the shed, maybe a couple more with the slope. Nothing about it was strange. Every lake has a boat shed. The door was shut, and there was no light in it.

It bothered me anyway, a little, the way an unfamiliar sound in a quiet shop does. I stood and watched it for a while, and it stayed a shed.

I went in, ate the two rolls and the cheese I'd packed, and drank tap water from the glass on the desk. The Dutchman was laughing at something upstairs. I checked the shutters twice, which I never do, and pulled them closed with the latch hooked. Then I lay down in my clothes on top of the cold bed and listened to the radiator tick and the pension settle around me.

Nothing happened before I fell asleep. I slept better than I had in months, for a while.

I woke up and didn't know why. The radiator had gone quiet. My phone on the desk said two oh one, and the room was completely dark behind the shutters.

Then it came again. Three soft raps, and a pause.

They came from outside, from down the lane, and they were small and dry, wood or ceramic on wood. I lay there with my eyes open and my hands flat on the blanket. I knew it before I'd finished hearing it. Knock, knock, knock, and a stop, the way you knock the spent grounds out of a portafilter into the bin. Or the way I knock the handle on the counter before I lock it in. My hand has made that motion ten thousand times, probably more. I'd done it on the bench outside eight hours ago, with Clara on the phone.

Nothing else. I waited for the pause to end, for the next three, and they didn't come. The pension ticked. Somewhere above me a pipe knocked once, and I told myself that was what it was. Pipes, or the ice. Ice on a lake makes noises when the night gets colder, long groans and short cracks. I'd read that once. Hard frozen edges shifting against the posts of a boat shed would make a small, hollow rapping.

Three, and a pause, though. Exactly that.

I stayed on my back with my boots by the radiator and my coat still on, and I didn't get up to look. I want to be honest about that. I could have opened the shutter. I lay there and listened until the room started going gray at the edges, and somewhere in there I must have slept, because the next thing I knew there was a thin line of light in the slats.

It was ten to seven. I sat up with my neck stiff and my mouth dry. I told myself I'd go and look, and that once I'd looked it would be a shed again. I unhooked the latch, opened the door by the window, and stepped out onto the step.

I hadn't put my boots on. I noticed that halfway down the lane, when the cold came up through my socks. The gravel was white with frost and every stone had its own crust. I kept walking.

The footprints started at the water.

They came up out of the lake, across the frozen edge where the skim ice had been broken or melted through, then over the rocks and up the little slope to the shed door. Bare feet. You could see the ball of each foot and the five toes, long ones, and every print was dark and wet against the frost. They hadn't dried or frozen. In that cold, in that light, they should have. There was one set going up. I looked for a set going back and there wasn't one.

I stood at the end of the trail for a good while. I looked back up the lane at the pension, its shuttered windows and the wooden step at my door. From there it looked shorter than it had yesterday. I counted my paces back, since I was already counting. Thirty. I went through it again, slower, and got thirty again.

The shed door wasn't locked. It wasn't even latched, just pulled to, and it swung inward when I put two fingers on it. Inside it smelled of cold lake water and old rope and something else I knew right away and couldn't place for a second because it was so out of place. Coffee.

The place was one room. A rowboat upside down on trestles, two oars on the wall, a coil of gray line, a workbench along the back under a small window with the glass gone milky. And on the bench, by itself, one cup.

It was a small one, thick white china, the kind you'd use for a short espresso. It sat on a saucer that didn't match. It had steam coming off it, a thin line rising straight up in the still air. I didn't move. I just looked at it from the doorway.

Then I went in, because I couldn't help it, and looked down into it.

Black coffee, no milk, no sugar. It was filled to just under the rim, and on top was crema. Proper crema, dark hazelnut going to red at the edges, thick and tight, with a few pale streaks where it had settled. Not a foam of big bubbles that collapses when you breathe on it. It was the real thing. I bent over it enough to smell it, and it was fresh ground, sweet, a little bit of fruit underneath, not burnt. Somebody had dosed that properly, tamped it level, and pulled it at the right speed. I'd have put it out on my own counter without a second thought.

That was what got me. I'd been ready for something wrong. A cup of gray water, or mud, or nothing at all. I hadn't been ready for it to be good.

I looked at the machine I couldn't see. There wasn't one. No kettle, no stove, no cord anywhere along the bench. The wood around the cup was dry. The saucer didn't have one drop on it. Whoever made it hadn't spilled.

My hand was already halfway up, and I put it in my coat pocket. I want to say I decided to, but really it just went there, and I stood in the shed with my fist closed around my phone and the wooden pear key. The steam kept rising. It was, I think, the temperature I'd serve at, hot enough to hold but not hot enough to burn a tongue.

"No," I said. I said it quietly, in the empty shed, not to anybody. It sounded stupid.

I left it where it was. I backed out and pulled the door to the way I'd found it, not quite latched, and I didn't look at the water. On the way up I stepped around the footprints out of pure habit, the way you step around a wet floor sign. My socks were soaked through by then. The frost had melted into the wool and my feet had gone past hurting into a flat, numb ache.

Back at the step I stopped and looked down the lane once more. Thirty paces. The shed sat there with its slate roof going pink at the edge, and it looked like nothing, like any boat shed on any lake. Behind me in the pension somebody ran a tap, and I heard cups being set out for breakfast.

I stood on the step until my feet hurt enough to make me go inside, then peeled off the wet socks and hung them over the radiator, which was giving off nothing. I changed into the other pair and told myself I'd say nothing to anybody.

That lasted until breakfast.

The dining room was at the front of the pension, six tables with checked cloths and a window onto Seestraße. Joost, the Dutchman, had the table by the stove and was working through three eggs with his camera bag on the chair next to him. He raised his fork at me and said the light this morning was "criminal," and he was going up the hill before it changed. I said good luck. He left with a roll in his fist.

That left me and the stove ticking. Frau Moser came through from the kitchen with the bread basket and a pot of filter coffee. I'd been rehearsing a version all through the second cup of nothing in my head, and I tried to sound easy.

"Funny thing," I said. "Somebody left a coffee in the boat shed. An espresso, actually. Still warm." I laughed a little. It came out thin. "Whoever it was knows what they're doing, I'll say that."

She set the basket down. Not gently, and she didn't take her hand off it right away. Her face, which was weathered and pink from the kitchen, went white, and it went all at once, all the way to her lips.

"You went to the shed," she said.

"Only to look. The door was open."

"You drank it?"

"No."

"You touched it? The cup?"

"No. Frau Moser, it's probably a fisherman or—"

"No." She said it flat, and she looked at the window, at the lake I couldn't see from where I sat. When she spoke again it was slow, and I could tell she was picking each English word before she used it. "The lake has done this before. It learns what a person does. Then it does it back."

I didn't say anything. The three raps went through my head, and the pause.

"There is a rule," she said. "It is simple. You never take anything from its hand. And you never give it anything. Not one thing." She held up a finger, and it wasn't quite steady. "It can only keep what is given."

"Given," I said.

"Yes."

I waited for more. There wasn't any. She looked at me the way she had at the desk on the first night, a second too long, except now I understood she wasn't checking whether anyone was at home. She was checking whether I'd understood. I nodded. I said, "All right." That was all I said.

She went back to the kitchen. I poured coffee out of her pot, and it was the thin brown kind that I'd normally have had opinions about. I wrapped both hands around the cup and held it. It was hot, I could see the steam, but my fingers stayed cold the whole time and I couldn't get them to warm up.

I spent the day in the village, and I took the long way up through the market square so I wouldn't have to go down the lane. I walked past the church and the little cemetery with the painted crosses. I ate a sausage standing up at a stall, and the man asked if I wanted mustard, and I said yes, please, which was nice, being asked. Mostly I kept my hands in my pockets. I noticed I was doing that and didn't stop.

By five it was dark. The cold came down off the Dachstein early and hard. I went to the bench on the Seestraße side, the green one, and wiped the frost off the slats with my sleeve. I could see the shed from there if I turned my head, so I didn't. I called Clara.

Second ring, like always.

"There he is," she said. "You sound like you're in a tunnel."

"I'm outside. I've got the coat on."

"Good. What did you do?"

I told her about the market square and the painted crosses, and the sausage with the mustard, which made her say I'd better be eating something hot, and I said I was. I told her the swans had come over to this side of the lake and were sitting near the shore, still close together. That was true. I could just make out the pale shapes in the dark.

"Did you sleep?"

"Fine," I said. "Better than at home."

"Liar. You slept like a man on the floor of a bus."

"Like a baby, Clara."

She laughed, and then she coughed, and I waited. I'd learned to wait quietly while she did it, because if I said anything she'd hurry it. It went on a while. I looked at the lake and the pale lights along the far shore. When she came back, her voice was rough.

"You're doing it again," she said.

"Doing what?"

"The tapping. I can hear it. Bench?"

I looked down. Two fingers on the slat, three quick raps, and my hand had already gone back up to start the next set. I stopped it and pressed my palm flat on the wood.

"It's cold," I said. "My hand needs something to do."

"You're worrying."

"I'm not."

"Danny." She only called me that when she wanted the truth. I could hear the blanket move, the small sounds of her settling on the couch, the lamp I knew was on beside her. I thought about telling her. I thought about the whole thing, the cup and the footprints and Frau Moser's finger going up. Then I thought of her lying there with nothing to do about it, three hundred kilometers from anything I could actually fix, running it over and over through the night, and I said, "I'm looking at the mountains. That's all."

She was quiet for a second. "Good," she said. "Keep doing that."

We talked a little more. I said I'd call the same time tomorrow, and she said she knew I would. When she hung up I kept the phone against my ear anyway, for a moment, in case.

The church bells started across the water, the hour, and they rolled over the lake a beat late and out of the wrong direction, the way they had the first night. This time I didn't put it down to the cold. I sat there with my hand flat on the slat, and under my boots, down where the shore met the water, the ice ticked.

I didn't go straight in. I walked back along Seestraße with the phone still warm in my hand and turned down the lane, and I told myself I was only going to my own door. Halfway there I saw the shed had its door open.

Not wide. About the width of a person. There was no light in it, but something pale was moving inside, thin and steady, going straight up. Steam.

I counted from my step. I couldn't help it. Twenty paces, and it wasn't the slope. The night before it had been thirty, and I'd counted that one twice. I stood there with my key in my fist, the wooden pear digging into my palm, and I didn't count again.

I should have gone inside. I know that. But I turned the phone light on and walked down, keeping to the edge of the lane where the gravel was rough and there weren't any prints. The frost squeaked. At the doorway I stopped and held the light out at arm's length, like that would keep me out of it.

There were two cups on the bench now, side by side on their mismatched saucers. The one from the morning was still there, and it was hot again. The second was next to it, a little smaller, the same white china. Both had crema. I could see it from the door, that tight dark cap, and the second one was better. I don't say that to be proud. It was the way I'd have pulled it on a good day, when I wasn't rushing.

On the boards in front of the bench there was a wet patch, and it had a shape. Two round marks close together, low down, and two longer ones ahead of them, flat, with the fingers spread. Something had knelt there. Something had put its hands down and stayed a while, facing the cups, and the water hadn't run or soaked in. It just sat on the wood.

I backed out. The gravel didn't crunch as loudly going up. Or I was walking on the edges again, I don't know. I got to my step, got inside, shut the door, and stood with my back against it until my breathing sorted itself out.

I hooked the latch on the door and checked the shutter latch too, then checked the door again. I didn't take my coat off. I put the phone on the desk with the screen up and sat on the edge of the bed with my boots on, which I never do, and I looked at the slats.

I hadn't touched anything. That was the thing I kept going back to. I hadn't touched the cups, hadn't set anything down, hadn't so much as left a glove. Frau Moser had said not one thing, and I'd stood in that doorway with a light in my hand and my face out in front of me for a good half minute. Was a light something? Was standing there something? I didn't know how strict it was. She hadn't said, and I hadn't asked, because I'd wanted to be the kind of guest who didn't make a fuss.

I sat like that for hours while the pension went quiet around me. The radiator ticked, then stopped ticking. That's how I knew before the phone told me. Twelve forty-one.

Three raps, and a pause.

It was earlier than the night before by more than an hour. Nobody had told me it kept a schedule, but I'd assumed it did, and I'd been wrong about that too. The raps were the same, small and dry, wood on wood. Then another set. Then another, with a shorter pause between, and it was faster than I do it. It was how I do it at ten past eight on a Monday when there's a line to the door and the milk's running low.

I put my hand over my own wrist, which was stupid, since my hand wasn't the one doing it.

It stopped. The quiet after it was thick enough that I could hear the fridge in the pension kitchen two rooms away.

"Hi there."

I stopped breathing. It was coming from down the lane, not loud, and not a whisper either. It was pitched to carry across a counter over the grinder.

"Hi there. What can I get started for you?"

That was my voice. I'd like to say it was a bad copy. It wasn't. It had the little lift on started and the way I let you drop off at the end because by the fortieth time it's just air. I've said that sentence, I'd guess, seven hundred thousand times over eighteen years. I'd never once heard it from outside.

"What can I get started for you?"

I was up and at the shutter without deciding to be. I put my hand on the edge of it, on the cold wood, not to open it, just to have something to hold. The grain was rough under my fingers. My mouth was open. That was the worst part. My mouth had already got itself ready, and what it was going to say was Sorry, just give me a minute. Or A flat white, please, no, sorry, that's my line. Something helpful and apologetic. Something that gave a bit.

I shut my teeth on it. I bit the side of my tongue, actually, and tasted blood, and I held on to the shutter with both hands.

"Anything else with that?"

It waited. It had learned to wait, too. I'd been the one leaving the little gap for the customer to fill, and it left the same gap, exactly as long, and I could feel it stretching toward me across the forty paces, or the twenty. I pressed my forehead against the slats. Cold came through the wood and into my skull. I didn't say a word.

"What can I get started for you?"

Lower, this time. Softer. The way I say it to the ones who look like they've had a bad morning.

Then something else was out there, over the top of it. I almost didn't hear it because I was so busy not answering. Gravel. Slow steps, and not careful ones. Somebody walking straight down the middle of the lane without caring who heard. And a tune, badly whistled, a couple of bars over and over.

I put my eye to the slats.

The frost had turned the whole lane silver under the one lamp on the pension wall, and a tall man was walking down the middle of it, shoulders loose, with a camera bag on his strap bumping against his hip. Padded jacket, tousled hair. He had no shoes on. No socks either, I could see the bare heels going pale and dark, pale and dark, with every step he took. He wasn't hurrying. He looked like a man on his way to the bakery.

"Joost," I said, and it came out as nothing, just air.

Down at the shed the voice said, warm and patient and mine, "What can I get started for you?"

Joost's whistling stopped, and he said "Ja," in the friendliest way, as if he'd been asked something ordinary.

I got the latch up with the wrong hand. I got the door open and the cold hit my face, and I shouted, and I've never shouted like that, not at anyone, not once in my life. "Joost! Joost, stop! Don't go down there! Joost!"

Joost turned around. He was smiling, and his face had gone slack and pleasant, the way people look when they've just been handed something they didn't know they wanted.

"Daniel?" he said, up the lane at me. "Hey, neighbor. Somebody's got coffee on."

"Joost, come back here. Come here. Now."

He lifted a hand to me, friendly, and turned back toward the shed. I was still shouting. I don't know what. His name, mostly.

The shed door opened from the inside. There was no wind and nobody pushed it. It swung wide on the dark, and a hand came out of the dark holding a cup. It was white, whiter than the frost, and too long, the reach of it wrong for any arm I've seen. Water ran off the fingers and dripped from the knuckles onto the boards. The cup sat steady in the palm on its mismatched saucer, and I could see the steam from where I stood.

Joost took it. He said thanks, I think. He put it to his mouth and drank, and I heard him make a small pleased noise, the noise I've heard a thousand times across the counter when the first sip is right.

"Oh, that's good," he said.

Down at the shore the skim ice sighed. It was a long, low sound, the whole edge of the lake settling at once, like a sheet being pulled flat. The door closed.

I ran.

I'd had my boots on, but I hadn't laced them, and I lost the first one in about ten paces and the second one a few after that. I left them in the gravel. The stones went through my socks and I didn't feel them. Twenty paces, and I counted every one, and nothing moved the whole way. The shed was quiet. The lake was quiet. I put my shoulder to the door because my hands wouldn't work the latch, and it gave.

Empty.

The trestles, the rowboat, the oars on the wall. The workbench under the milky window. Three cups stood on it now, one more than I'd left, all of them steaming, and the newest was on a saucer that didn't match the others either. Joost's camera bag lay on the boards in front of the bench, on its side, soaked through, the strap still shaped to a shoulder. I crouched down. The zip was closed all the way. Whoever zipped it had been careful.

There was water on the floor, and no footprints in it. Not his and not the other set.

I went out the back, where the shed sits over the water on its posts. There's a little landing there, three planks and a rusted ring. The lake was flat and black and had ice on it all the way out. It was whole, no hole, no crack, nothing. I said his name over it, once, and then again quieter. A swan lifted its head far off across the water and put it back down.

I didn't go back up to the pension. I don't have a good reason. I sat down on the landing with my wet socks against the planks and stayed, because leaving felt like agreeing that he was gone, and I wasn't ready to sign for it. My phone was on the desk in my room. I couldn't have called anyone anyway. I couldn't think of a single person to call who wouldn't ask me what I'd seen, and I didn't know how to say it.

The light came up gray, then thin white, then the Dachstein turned pink at the top the way it does. My feet had stopped hurting some time ago, which I knew was bad and did nothing about.

I heard her before I saw her, the heavy walk of someone in house shoes on gravel. Frau Moser came around the corner of the shed with her cardigan buttoned wrong and a coat pulled over it. She had her hair pinned but not properly. She stopped at the doorway and looked in, at the bench and the three cups and the bag on the boards. Then she crossed herself, forehead, chest, one shoulder, the other, quick and practiced. She'd done it before.

"He went down," I said. "He drank it. I saw him. We have to ring somebody. The police, or the, the water rescue, somebody with a boat."

"No."

"Frau Moser, he's in the—"

"No." She said it gently. She walked out onto the landing and looked at the ice, all of it, out to the middle. "Who comes? They look at the lake, it is closed. They look at his room, his shoes are there, or not there. They ask me. I say, he walked to the water." She shook her head. "Nobody comes for a man who walks into water, Herr Aigner. They write it and they go home."

I hadn't told her my last name in two days. I noticed that and let it go.

She turned and looked at me, at my socks, at the frost on my coat sleeves, and it wasn't a long look. Her blue eyes were very clear.

"You took nothing from it."

"No."

"You gave nothing."

"I shouted at it to stop. That's all."

"That is not giving." She nodded slowly. "Good. The rule is the same as before. It does not change because of him."

"He took the cup," I said. It came out small. "He was smiling."

"Yes. They do." She crouched, stiffly, one hand on the post, and took the strap of the camera bag between two fingers and lifted it a few inches off the boards. Water ran out of the bottom seam. She set it down again as if it might still be someone's. "It is not finished," she said. "It has one, and it wants you. It waits, and it comes for you last, because it wants you most."

I didn't ask her how she knew. She stood up with her hand on the ring, and we both looked at the water, which didn't do anything at all.

The third cup was on the step when I opened the door at dusk, right up against the mat, on a saucer that didn't match either of the others. It was steaming. I stood there with my hand on the latch and looked at the crema, and I'll admit it was a good one. Then I counted the lane, because I couldn't help it. Ten paces to the shed. It had been forty when I got here.

I didn't step over it. I shut the door, went out the front of the pension, and walked around the long way to Seestraße, just to have something to do with my legs. When I came back I used the front door again and went down the hall in my socks. Someone had brought my boots up from the gravel and set them by the radiator. I never found out who. I didn't ask.

I didn't sleep at all that evening. I put my coat on, then my boots, and laced them properly this time, double knots. I packed the bag. It took four minutes, because I'd hardly unpacked. The wooden pear I put in my coat pocket, and I left the shutters closed.

At eleven I called Clara. I didn't go out to the bench. I sat on the bed with my back against the wall and the phone against my ear, and she answered on the second ring, same as always.

"You're inside," she said. "It's not echoing."

"Yeah."

"Danny."

So I told her. I hadn't planned how. I started with the raps and the portafilter and the cup on the first morning, and after that it came out in whatever order it wanted. The footprints. Frau Moser going white over the bread basket. The rule about giving and taking. Joost walking barefoot down the lane with his camera bag, and the hand, and the ice sighing shut. The voice, which was mine. I said it was mine twice, because the first time it came out wrong. I didn't leave anything out. It was maybe six minutes. I heard her blanket move once and that was all.

Then nothing. No cough. I waited, the way she likes me to, except this time it was me who needed it.

"Come home," she said.

Her voice was very level. It wasn't the teasing one or the bossy one.

"I will."

"Not in the morning. Not when it's light out and you feel better. Come home."

"I'm dressed," I said. "I've got my boots on. My bag's packed."

She made a sound that was almost a laugh and didn't finish. "Of course you are."

"The first train's at ten to six. I looked it up this afternoon."

"Then be on it." A breath. "Is the door locked?"

"Yes."

"Stay away from the window."

"I will."

"Don't tap anything," she said. "Danny, I mean it. Sit on your hands if you have to."

I looked down. Two fingers were on the mattress edge, and they'd been going for a while. I put them under my thigh. She stayed on the line and neither of us said much. She asked if the radiator was working and I said no. She told me about a show she'd watched, a whole plot, and I didn't take in any of it. But I liked hearing it. At half past midnight she said she was going to hold the phone until she fell asleep and I should hang up when I heard her breathing change. I did, about one. She'd been out for a while by then. I listened a little longer than I needed to before I pressed the button.

After that it was just the room. The desk, the shutter slats, my bag by the door. I sat on the bed with my hands flat on my knees. I heard the pension settle. I heard the fridge in the kitchen kick on and off. At one thirty I looked at the phone and thought about the ten to six train, four hours and twenty minutes away, and I did the arithmetic. Four hours is a long time to be waited on.

Two o'clock. I was looking at the screen when it turned over.

Three raps, and a pause.

It was the same as the first night, dry and small and exact, but it wasn't shy anymore. It didn't wait for me to wake up. It knew I was awake. Someone had trained it to know that, and I was fairly sure who.

I didn't move for a while. I was thinking about the train, and Linz, and Clara asleep on the couch with the phone by her hand. And I was thinking that I could go. I could take the bag, go out the front, and be at the station by three. Sit in the waiting room under the lights. I'd probably even make it.

And it would come and sit across from me. Not that night, maybe. It didn't hurry. It had learned that from me too. I'd walk into the flat and put the kettle on, and there'd be three raps on the counter. Or on the bench at the bus stop, or on the bar at work at ten past eight on a Monday. Anywhere I stood still long enough to be found. It could wait for me forever. That was the one thing I had never seen it fail at.

The raps came again. Three, and the pause. It wasn't calling me. It was holding a place.

I stood up. My knees were fine, which surprised me. I left the bag by the door and took the pear out of my pocket and put it on the desk, where it wouldn't dig into anything. I picked up the phone, looked at it, and set it back down too. Then I unhooked the latch.

The cup was on the step. I stepped over it this time, not around. It was still hot. I felt it on my shin through the cloth.

The frost had come down harder. The lane was white and the one lamp on the pension wall gave just enough light to see the ruts, and I could see my breath. There was no wind. Down at the end of the lane the shed door was open all the way, pushed flat against the wall, and the dark inside it was a different black from the lake behind it. Thin steam went straight up from the sill.

Three raps. A pause. I started walking.

I didn't count the paces. I knew what the number was.

I stepped through the doorway and the smell hit me first. Cold water, old rope, and coffee, fresh-ground and sweet, with the fruit underneath.

Three cups stood in a row on the workbench, all steaming, all on saucers. The first two were the small white china I'd seen the first morning, the crema on them dark and tight. The third sat on a saucer that didn't match anything. I knew whose that was. At the end of the row stood a fourth cup, empty and clean, with nothing in the saucer.

The rowboat was still up on its trestles. The oars were on the wall. The window over the bench was milky and black. There was nobody in there, and I had about one second to feel stupid for that.

Then something rose up from behind the bench.

It came up slowly, the way I stand up from restocking the low fridge. It was pale and it streamed. Water ran off it and pattered on the boards, and it didn't seem to notice. It was wearing an apron. Mine, the black canvas one with the burn near the pocket from a steam wand in 2011. It was soaked and hung wrong, and the strings were tied in front, the way I tie them. Its weight was on the left hip. Its head was tilted a little to the right.

That was what got me. Not the face, which was mostly smooth and unfinished. The tilt. It was how I stand when I'm waiting for somebody to decide.

It held out the empty cup. The hand was white, with no color in it anywhere, and the fingers were too long. Water ran down them and off the rim of the saucer.

Its mouth opened. It took a moment to find the shape.

"Hi there. What can I get started for you?"

My voice. Every rise and every trailing-off, right down to the little apologetic dip at the end. I'd said it something like seven hundred thousand times, and I had never once heard it from the outside.

And the terrible part is that my body answered. Before I had a thought in my head, my shoulders dropped and my face went soft and pleasant, the counter face. My right hand came up off my side toward the cup. Palm open, fingers already curling to take it. Somebody was waiting, and I was the one who was supposed to help.

I watched my hand rise. It was very slow and very ordinary.

I closed it. I shut the fingers into a fist so hard the knuckles cracked, and I held it against my chest.

"We're closed," I said.

It came out low and rough. Not my counter voice. I didn't know I had another one.

The thing stared at me. It didn't blink, and I don't think it had lids. Then the face started to go. The forehead ran down into the brows and the brows into the cheeks, and the mouth slid to one side and pulled itself back. It was working at being me and couldn't hold the shape. It ran, and it started over, and it ran again.

"What can I get started for you?"

"We're closed."

It leaned in. It came across the bench without seeming to move its feet, and then it was very close. The cold came off it in a flat wave. My eyelashes burned. The water in my eyes went stiff and I couldn't feel my nose. The cup was right under my chin now, the rim an inch from my mouth, and the steam from the other three was still going up behind it.

"Anything else with that?"

The pause after it was exactly the length I leave for customers. Long enough to be polite. Long enough that a person says something.

I knew what I'd normally say. I'd say sorry. I'd say oh, no, that's fine, and I'd take it, because a cup held out to you is a small thing to refuse. Eighteen years of nobody ever needing me to refuse.

I didn't take it. I didn't open my hand either, or put it out flat the way you do for change. I didn't say what I do at ten past eight, or say thank you. I didn't say my name, and it never asked. I think that was the closest thing I had to luck. It had learned every word I said to strangers, and I had never once said my name to a stranger.

So I stood there with my fist against my ribs and my mouth shut, and it offered. The cup came up, and back, and up again. The voice asked me over and over and it never got tired. I could feel the cold in my teeth. My breath came out in short white pieces. There was nothing else I could do but keep standing there, so I did.

I don't know how long. Long enough that my calves started to quiver, and then my knees. I locked them and they shook anyway. My fist hurt. I didn't loosen it.

"We're closed," I said again, quieter. It wasn't really for the thing anymore.

The cup trembled in its hand. I saw it go, a small rattle of china on china. Then the long white fingers opened, all at once, and the cup fell.

It hit the boards and broke. The pieces skidded, and one of them turned over twice before it stopped against my boot. The saucer went a moment after.

The thing didn't look at the mess. It was still looking at me, with my face mostly gone from it, and the apron hanging heavy. Then it went down. It didn't fall. It lowered itself through the floor, feet first, then the knees and the apron and the streaming arms, and the boards took it. There was no splash. The last part to go was the hand, still held out, empty.

The water on the boards ran into the cracks and was gone.

I stood there breathing. My eyelashes were thawing and dripping, and my knees kept shaking. Behind me the lane was quiet, and in front of me three cups were still steaming in a row.

I don't know when I moved. The window over the bench went from black to gray while I was standing there, and I saw that the cups were gone. All three, the saucers, the pieces of the fourth. I hadn't heard anything or seen anything go.

The boards were dry. I crouched and put my hand flat on the spot where it had gone through the floor. Dry, and only a little cold. Nothing on them but old grit and one dark ring where something had stood a long time ago.

I went out the back to the landing. The lake was sealed under fresh ice, clean and white, thicker than the skim from the night before. No hole, no crack, no line where anything had come up or gone down. I walked back around the front and looked at the lane. There were no footprints, no wet ones, and no frost broken by anybody's boots but mine. The swans were on the far shore, and one of them was asleep.

I was still holding my fist closed. I had to open it with the other hand. The fingers didn't want to go, and there were four red half-moons in my palm.

Back at the pension the third cup wasn't on the step either. The mat was just a mat. My bag stood by the door where I'd left it, and on the desk were the wooden pear and my phone. The screen showed seven missed calls, all from Clara. Seven was a lot, for her. I put the pear in my coat pocket and the phone in the other one.

Frau Moser was standing at the stove with her back to me and a pot of filter coffee going. She didn't turn around. She didn't ask about my hands or my eyelashes. She poured one cup, looked at it, and put it down on the counter without offering it. Then she poured it back into the pot.

"Bag," she said. "Please."

I carried it out. She had her car running in the lane, a little gray Fiat with a scraper on the dash, and I put the bag in the back and got in the front. She drove the way she talked, slow, and both hands on the wheel. She didn't say a word the whole way, and neither did I. Somewhere past the market square I noticed I'd been holding my breath for the length of the church, and I let it out.

At the station she parked and kept the engine on. There was nobody on the platform except a man in an orange vest scraping the bench.

She got out. She opened the back door and lifted Joost's camera bag out with both arms, the way you'd carry a sleeping child. It was still soaked. Water ran out of the bottom seam and onto her shoes and she didn't move them. The zip was still closed all the way.

"For the family," she said. "His wife. His mother. I have the address in the book. I will give it to you."

"Frau Moser, I can't—"

"You saw," she said. She put the bag against my chest, and I had to take it or let it fall. It was heavier than it looked. The strap was cold. "I cannot say it to them. You can say something."

I didn't know what. I said I would.

She nodded once. She looked at me for a second longer than I liked, the same look she'd given me at the desk on the first night, when she asked if there was anyone at home. This time I understood it, and I think she saw that I did.

"There is someone," I said. "At home."

"Good," said Frau Moser. She got back in the car and drove up the hill, and I stood on the platform with the bag until the man in the orange vest asked me if I was all right. I told him I was. He asked if I wanted the bench and I said yes, please.

The train came in at ten fifty. There were four people in my carriage and none of them looked at me, which is a thing I'm good at. I put Joost's bag on the seat beside me, upright, with my hand on the strap so it wouldn't tip. I watched the lake go by through the window for as long as it stayed there. It was flat and white and it didn't do anything.

Then it was gone behind the rock and the tunnel, and there were only fields and a road and a sky that had come out blue. My reflection sat in the glass. It had my coat on and it looked tired, and when I moved my head it moved too.

I thought about what I'd tell his wife. Nothing I came up with was any good. He was friendly. He said good evening. He called me neighbor. I would say that.

The phone buzzed in my pocket. I took it out and Clara's face was on the screen, with the blanket up around her chin and the lamp behind her, the picture I'd taken two Christmases ago when she was pretending not to like being photographed. It was eleven thirty in the morning. She never called in the morning.

I looked at it for one buzz. Then I answered.

"Hi," I said.

"You're on it," Clara said. Her voice was rough and awake and very close. "Tell me you're on it."

"I'm on it."

"Good. Okay. Good." She breathed. "Where are you?"

I looked out the window. "Fields," I said. "Some cows. A man with a tractor."

"Tell me about the cows."

So I did. My left hand lay on the armrest, then on my knee, then on Joost's bag. It stayed where I put it. I talked to my sister all the way down the valley, and nothing on that train got tapped, not once.