Chapter Ten: The Ledger of Dust

The office smelled like dust and lemon polish, like paper that had given up trying to be new. I told myself it was grounding, that the fluorescent lights and the clatter of keyboards would press me back into something like normal. But normal had been rewritten in blood and rooftop shadows, and everything here felt flimsy in comparison—like pretending silence was just silence, not a weight waiting to crush you.

I slid into my desk, dropped my bag by my chair, and stared at the stack of work orders piled in my inbox. Old houses. Dead names. Basements full of boxes nobody had opened since the last heir died or forgot they existed. I should have felt comfort in the routine: cataloguing sheet music, photographing heirlooms, tagging ledgers and clothing for donation or sale. Instead, my pulse had already started its restless climb.

“Nyssa.”

I looked up. Carl, my supervisor, leaned against the partition with his usual sardonic grin, holding a manila folder fat with papers. “Got another job for you.”

“Of course you do,” I said. My voice sounded like mine. That was progress.

He handed me the folder. “Brownstone on Willow Street. Big place. Family’s been gone for a decade, and the city finally got the deed sorted. Should be the usual—boxes, trunks, maybe a piano if you’re lucky.”

I flipped it open. The address glared up at me, another forgotten house, another basement waiting to be emptied. My throat tightened. Basements. Always basements.

I heard myself say it before I could stop: “Can I get someone to come with me on this one?”

The silence that followed was almost comical. Carl raised his eyebrows. From the next desk over, Marianne actually turned in her chair. “Wait,” she said, grinning. “The great Nyssa Damaris is asking for backup?”

Carl chuckled. “What’s the matter, finally found a rat bigger than you? Or did something in the last basement actually jump out and bite you?”

Laughter bubbled up around the office. Not cruel, just incredulous. I forced a smile, tried to laugh with them. It came out thin, tinny. “Something like that,” I said. “Mold, mostly. Rats. You know how it is.”

“If I know anything about you,” Marianne said, “it’s that rats and mold don’t scare you. You’re the one who volunteered for that estate with the collapsed cellar. You’re the one who dragged out that trunk by yourself when the floorboards gave.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Guess I’m getting soft.”

Carl shook his head, still amused. “All right, Nyssa. I’ll see if one of the interns is free. But you’re sure you’re okay? You’ve been looking… tired.”

“Just long nights.” I closed the folder a little too quickly. “I’m fine.”

If only they knew. If only they could see the bandage hidden under my scarf, or hear the way my heart stuttered when someone joked about being bitten. If only they knew what I had dragged out of stone and silence. They would stop laughing then. They would stop looking at me like I was still theirs.

The rest of the day went through the motions. I typed up reports, labeled photographs, answered emails about donation valuations. My fingers worked, my mouth formed words, but my mind kept straying back to the coffin. To the weight of his body pinning me against the roof, the scrape of fang against skin, the crimson of his eyes. The more I tried to box it away, the more it bled through.

____

The city washed itself gray overnight. Morning came in the color of old paper. I put on my work boots, tied my hair back, and tried to make my hands believe in ordinary. The Willow Street folder rode in my bag like a second spine.

Carl’s email pinged before I reached the corner: Intern assigned: Jamie. Meet on-site at 9. Keys in the packet. A follow-up: And Nyssa—don’t let the house eat the kid. A line of laughing emoji. I turned the phone face down against my thigh and kept walking.

Willow Street crouched between a half-restored church and a strip of businesses with metal grilles pulled like eyelids. The brownstone’s face was a study in neglect: boards over the parlor windows, ivy knitting itself into the mortar, a stoop that had sagged under too many seasons of snow. The lock on the gate had orange fur blooming around the keyway.

Jamie was already there, perched on the bottom step, a thermos in one hand and a grin that belonged to someone who hadn’t yet learned to be afraid of their own curiosity. Early twenties, maybe. Hair curled in on itself like it was protecting secrets. “Nyssa Damaris?” He said, popping up and offering a gloved hand. “I’m Jamie. They warned me you’d make me wear real gloves and not the see-through kind.”

“Warned you right,” I said, shaking. His palm was warm through latex. “Masks too. This house looks like it breeds its own weather.”

He laughed and waggled a box of N95s like a prize. “I’m ready. Last estate I did was basically a museum of expired spices. This one looks more Victorian flu.”

“Flu with better molding,” I said, and Jamie groaned at the pun, which helped. I took the keys from the packet and worked them into the gate lock until the rust relented with a sound like a cough. Metal scraped, hinges protested. As the gate swung inward, a prickle went up the back of my neck.

I didn’t look up. I didn’t need to. The air had shifted—thinner, sharper, as if a winter had put its hand on the street. Behind me, where the sidewalk leaked into shadow, the world felt occupied. My skin recognized a gaze before my eyes agreed to find it.

“Cold front,” Jamie said, blowing on his fingers out of habit even with gloves on. “Let’s get inside before it decides to rain.”

The front door was swollen in its frame. It took both of us braced shoulder to wood to bully it open. Dust plumed. The smell hit: damp plaster, mouse nests, paper that had been swallowing its own history for years. We stepped in together, the threshold a small rise under my boot that felt like a question.

Inside, the house held its breath.

Even the city sound changed in here. The street’s hiss went muffled, as if we had ducked under a bell jar. The hallway ran long and narrow, a runner curled in the middle like a tongue. To the left, a parlor swaddled in drop cloths. To the right, a dining room where a long table waited under a veil of dust. My heart did its fast math anyway—windows, exits, weight overhead—as if the roof above belonged to me in ways I didn’t want to consider.

“Wow,” Jamie whispered, voice respectful in spite of himself. “This place is gorgeous under the grime. Look at that ceiling medallion.”

“Photograph everything before we touch anything,” I said, grateful for the ritual. “We start with the ground floor, room by room. Labels, boxes, triage pile by the door.”

Jamie nodded, already pulling on a mask, already stepping where I stepped. He had good instincts. He also had the attention span of a fox. His flashlight skated over a sheeted shape in the parlor and found a curve. “Is that—”

“Piano,” I said. The word lived in my mouth like a small prayer. We would uncover it later. Not yet. “Let’s get air moving.”

I propped the front door wider with a brick that had fallen from the stoop. A little wind moved down the hall, not enough to stir the dust, just enough to let the house know it wasn’t sealed anymore. The prickle at my neck sharpened. The air past the threshold felt like a hand pressing against glass.

He was out there. I didn’t need to see him. The house felt him the way a room feels thunder—pressure first, then sound.

Jamie craned his head toward the open doorway, curiosity magnetized. “Creepy,” he said, trying for lightness and overshooting. “You’ve got company.”

“Don’t,” I said, too fast.

“Don’t what?” Jamie turned, grinning, performing courage for the empty street. “Hey, man,” he called into the gray, friendly as a labrador. “If you’re here for the city, come on in. We’ll take all the help we can get.”

The words were nothing. They were everything.

The threshold shivered.

It wasn’t visible. It was felt—the way your ear knows when pressure drops before a storm. A snap, like a string pulled too tight suddenly let go. Cold moved past my ankles and under the hem of my coat in a crawling ribbon. The house exhaled around us, the kind of sigh an old thing makes when something it has been holding finally breaks.

“Jamie,” I said, sharp. “Don’t—”

Too late.

Footfall. Not sound, not at first—weight. The peculiar alertness of space rearranging around an arrival. Then the hinge gave a tired bark and the air tasted briefly of metal and rain as he crossed.

He did not announce himself. He did not need to. Shadows doubled and then remembered their original shapes around him. The brim of the dropped cloth over the piano stirred as if a hand had passed. He stepped just inside the door and let the dim light find him. Crimson banked low in his eyes like coals under ash. He wore the night like it had been tailored to him and then ruined in all the right places.

Jamie startled, taking half a step back with a nervous laugh that earned its adjective. “Oh—uh. Sorry, didn’t see you there. You with the city?”

He looked at Jamie the way a cathedral looks at a sparrow. Not unkind. Simply ancient. “No.” His voice rasped in the air and made dust shift. Then, to me, softer: “You should not be inside without a binding.”

“I have masks and gloves,” I said, because I needed to say a thing my mouth knew how to shape.

“That is not the binding I mean.” His gaze flicked to the threshold and back, understanding written on his face as clean as fury. “He invited me.” Not a question. A verdict.

Jamie, oblivious, lifted the clipboard. “We’re cataloguing. If you’re here to—help?” He glanced between us, reading a tension he didn’t have a name for. “I mean, the more hands the faster it goes. Right?”

“Jamie,” I said again, quieter. “Maybe go open windows down the hall. Start in the dining room. Photograph first.”

Some instinct, deeper than training, heard me. He bobbed a little nod and vanished into the dining room with relief thin as paper, the sound of his footsteps moving away like a reminder that mortals always underestimate houses.

He didn’t move closer. He stayed just inside the line where outside ends and inside begins, as if even invited, some part of him respected thresholds more than the mouths that broke them. The iron smell of him—rain and rust and something cleaner under it—threaded through the house and rewrote the air I had been pretending to breathe.

“You couldn’t come in before,” I said. It came out half statement, half accusation.

“No.” He lifted his hand and set it, palm out, against the frame, as if feeling for a heat that had gone out. “Old law.” The words didn’t need explaining. He had already explained them on my roof in the language of refusal. Thresholds have their rites.

The realization lodged in my throat and made my next breath skip. “So anyone can—”

“Any mouth that believes it has the right to welcome,” he said. “A host, even if the home is not theirs. A fool, even if the house disagrees.” His mouth twisted—not quite a smile, not quite pain. “He is a child. He does not know what doors he opens.”

“He’s my coworker,” I said, which was both too little and too much.

“He is alive,” he answered, and the crimson in his eyes darkened to something that remembered ethics. “Let us keep him that way.”

I should have told him to leave. I had told him to leave in a hundred ways. My body forgot them now. The house remembered for me: the hair lifting along my arms, the fine-tuned quiet that had entered the parlor when he did, the way the drop cloths seemed to breathe. I stepped back because I needed the space, because if I didn’t I would step forward and make a mistake on purpose.

He watched me like a contrition he did not trust, then bent to the work without crossing farther: he picked up a fallen ledger with two fingers, set it on the hall table as if handling a fragile creature. He did not cough when dust rose, did not blink when a moth startled from a curtain and smacked itself against a lampshade. He existed in the house the way gravity does—an agreement everything else makes without voting.

Jamie’s voice drifted from the dining room, cheerful in the way of someone who had not yet learned to read the weather. “There’s a trunk in here with stickers—Paris, Vienna, someplace with too many umlauts. Oh, and—whoa—sheet music in a leather case? Nyssa, you’re going to squeal.”

“Don’t make promises on my behalf,” I called back, trying for light, failing. My eyes stayed on the man in the doorway. “You can’t come to my house.”

“I know,” he said, and the words had the weight of a rule set in stone. “Your mouth has not given me leave.”

“And this place—”

“This place was a dwelling,” he said. “It remembers being one. That would have been enough to keep me out. But the invitation was made.” His gaze slid toward the dining room where Jamie shuffled, oblivious. When he looked at me again the crimson had banked lower, a coal refusing to die. “Do you want me gone?”

I opened my mouth. The answer should have been easy and pure. It got tangled in a net of other truths. I wanted him gone because every room got smaller when he was in it. I wanted him here because the rooms felt less like tombs when measured against him. I wanted him gone because of what the word mine began to mean in my mouth. I wanted him here because the word safe had become dishonest without his shape against the edge of it.

“No,” I said, and hated the noise my voice made around it. “But stay by the door.”

“Done.” He folded himself against the jamb with the patience of something that has waited longer than this and will again. The house recalibrated around where he leaned, as if remembering an old geometry whose proof had been lost.

We worked. Or pretended to. I photographed the parlor from four corners, labeled the boxes under the windows, found my fingers steadying on the familiar tasks. Jamie called out finds like a child at a tidepool: “Postcards. A fan with real feathers. Ticket stubs from a theater that doesn’t exist anymore.” His delight was a kind of blessing the house tolerated and then began, grudgingly, to accept.

Behind me, the doorway held. He watched, not hovering so much as witnessing. When a cracked frame slid off the mantel and fell, he was there before it hit the floor, catching it by the wire, setting it gently down. When a stack of hymnals slouched and threatened to pitch, he braced the shelf with one hand and waited until I had them boxed.

“Thank you,” I said once, too quietly to carry to Jamie. It was obscene to tell him gratitude in a house like this. It felt like the first step onto a slope I kept pretending was level.

He dipped his head a fraction, an acknowledgement, not a victory. “Do not invite me farther,” he said. “Make the house keep some of its teeth.”

“I didn’t invite you at all,” I said, and the words tasted like a truth that had found a thorn.

“No,” he agreed. “But now you know how thin a door can be.”

Jamie reappeared in the hall, arms full of bundled letters. “You two look like you’re having an existential crisis. Should I come back?”

“You should open the kitchen window if it will open,” I said. “Then take a break. Air.”

Jamie saluted with the letters like a flag and disappeared again, humming something tuneless and stubbornly alive.

I watched him go and felt, for one unwelcome breath, the smallest wash of relief that another beating heart existed in the same house as the one leaning indolent against my threshold.

Outside, the sky decided to spit. Rain ticked against the boards over the parlor window, a soft percussion. He tipped his head as if listening to it for meaning and then looked back to me. “When you leave,” he said, “say the words out loud.”

“What words?”

“Not an invitation.” The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. “A dismissal. Tell the house to close again.”

“You believe houses listen.”

“I know they do,” he said. “You woke one.”