The Cinder Man

The Monday after the funeral, I called in sick. The doctor said it was stress, but I knew better. It was the face at the window—the pale, shimmering thing that had watched me from the upper deck of the old amphitheater, its mouth a wet black hole. I hadn’t slept properly since. My mother fussed over me, forbidding evening walks, so on Saturday, I told her I was going for a short stroll before dinner. Instead, my feet carried me toward the Birchwood Flats, a crumbling brick complex on the edge of town, where I knew my old friend Margo lived. She’d know something about the girl who had died—the one the papers called ‘The Accidental Drowning.’ The one I saw in the stands, alive and grinning, the night she was supposed to be in the morgue.

Margo’s apartment smelled of mothballs and old tea. She hugged me, surprised but pleased, and we sat in her cramped kitchen, her canary chirping in its cage. I didn’t tell her about the thing at the game; I just asked, casually, if she’d heard anything about the girl who passed away recently. Margo’s smile evaporated. She looked at her hands, twisted her wedding ring. ‘You mean the one in the Flats? Isha?’ she said, her voice hollow. I nodded, my heart drumming. ‘She was a sweet kid once,’ Margo began, ‘but after her mother left, her dad—he worked nights at the foundry—he was never home. She fell in with the wrong crowd. Smoked, drank, brought boys over when her dad was on shift. Then one night, her dad came home early. Maybe he forgot his keys, or his shift got cut. He found her with some boy in her bedroom. The shouting—I heard it through these very walls. He threw the boy out, then he dragged Isha by her hair down the hall, screaming about shame and sin. Everybody on the floor heard. She was crying, begging. He locked her in her room, and for a week, she didn’t come out. When she finally did, she was different. Quiet. Her eyes looked… empty. And then, two weeks later, they found her in the reservoir, tangled in the reeds. They said she slipped on the embankment, but everyone knew—she jumped.’

I shivered, despite the warm kitchen. Margo went on, ‘But here’s the thing, and you’ll think I’m crazy. The night before they found her body, I saw her at the laundromat on Ninth Street. She was standing by the dryers, just watching the clothes tumble. I called out to her, and she turned—but her face was all wrong. Like her features were smeared, like a painting left in the rain. She smiled, but it wasn’t her smile. It was too wide, and her teeth were black. I ran out of there, didn’t sleep for three days. The funeral was open casket, but I didn’t go. I couldn’t look at that face again.’

I left Margo’s place just as the streetlights flickered on. The sun was low, painting the Flats in orange gloom. Instead of heading home, I found myself walking toward the reservoir. I don’t know why. Maybe I needed proof that the girl in my vision was just a trick of the light, a hallucination from a fever I didn’t know I had. The path was overgrown, and the air turned cold despite the summer evening. The water was black, still as glass. And then I saw it—a figure sitting on the far bank, at the edge of the reeds. A girl, with long dark hair plastered to her face. She was hunched, rocking slightly. My legs turned to stone. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t. She slowly turned her head, and even from that distance, I saw her eyes—not white, but ash gray. She raised one hand, and in it, a small object gleamed. It caught a stray ray of light, and I felt my skin crawl. It was a photograph. Of me, at the stadium, the night I saw her. And then she smiled, and her mouth was a black hole, and I knew—I wasn’t just seeing a ghost. I was seeing something that had been waiting for me all along.

I broke free of my paralysis and ran. I didn’t stop until I burst through my front door, gasping, my mother shouting from the kitchen. I locked every window, every door, but I could still feel that smile, that emptiness. That night, I didn’t sleep. I sat in the corner of my room, clutching a kitchen knife, watching the shadows stretch and twist. At dawn, I heard a soft knock at the window. It was my window, on the second floor. I didn’t look. I squeezed my eyes shut, and I felt a cold breath on my neck, and a whisper that wasn’t a voice, but a feeling: ‘You came.’

I still live in that house, but I never look out of the window at night. I wear a scarf even in summer, to hide the marks on my throat. And sometimes, when I’m at the sink, I see a reflection in the dark glass—a girl with ash-gray eyes, standing behind me, holding a photograph of me, older, with a white-knuckled grip on a rope. And I know, she’s patient. She’ll wait until I’m alone, and then she’ll show me what else was in that stadium, what she’s been trying to show me all along. I only hope I can burn that photograph before she does.