The apartment smelled like someone else's life.
Silas noticed it before he even stepped through the door — standing in the hallway outside while his mother wrestled with the key, which was stiff in the lock the way keys are stiff in locks that haven't been turned in a while. The smell came through the gap when the door first cracked open: old wood and something faintly oily, the residue of cooking that had happened months ago and hadn't quite left. Underneath that, something else. Something he couldn't name. Not unpleasant exactly, just present in the specific, stubborn way of things that have been somewhere a long time and have decided to stay.
"There we go," his mother said, as the lock gave way.
She pushed the door open and stepped inside, and Silas followed, and the smell settled around him like a second skin.
The flat was on the fourth floor of a building on a street in East London that was in the process of deciding what it wanted to be. One end was all glass-fronted coffee shops and independent bookstores with carefully chosen window displays. The other end was chicken shops and off-licences with security shutters still half-down at noon. Their building sat somewhere in the middle, neither one thing nor the other — red brick, six floors, the kind of place that had been built in the seventies with no particular ambition beyond being structurally sound and remaining, forty-odd years later, exactly that.
The flat itself: a narrow hallway. A kitchen that opened directly off it on the left, small but functional, with a window above the sink that faced west. A bathroom. A living room with enough space for a sofa and a television, and not much else. Two bedrooms — one larger, at the front, facing the street; one smaller, at the end of the hall, facing the building next door.
His mother went straight to the kitchen window.
He watched her cross the room and put her hands on the edge of the sink and look out at the afternoon light coming through the glass, and he knew before she turned around what expression she'd have on her face. He'd seen it in three other kitchens in four years. The same expression every time: assessing, hopeful, already doing the work of making something feel like home.
"Look at that," she said. "West-facing. We'll get the afternoon sun all the way through to evening." She turned. "That's good light, Silas. You can't ask for more than good light."
"It's nice," he said.
She looked at him the way she did when she was checking whether he was okay without wanting to ask directly. He'd learned to read that look years ago. It meant: I know this is the third time. I know it doesn't get easier. I'm sorry, and I love you, and please don't make me say it out loud because if I say it out loud, I'll have to feel it properly, and right now I need to unpack.
"Fresh start," she said.
"Fresh start," he agreed.
She smiled — a real one, with the tiredness visible at the edges — and turned back to the window, and Silas picked up his backpack from where he'd dropped it in the hallway and went to find his room.
It was at the end of the hall, behind a door that stuck slightly at the bottom and needed to be lifted as you pushed. He figured this out on the second try. The room greeted him with the particular blankness of spaces that have been empty for a while — white walls that had gone faintly yellow at the corners, a patch near the window where the paint had bubbled from damp and then dried and never been dealt with, a single overhead light with a bare bulb. The window faced the brick wall of the building next door, maybe four feet away, close enough that he could see the mortar between the bricks, the small dark gaps where weather had worked its way in over the years.
There was a built-in shelf running the full length of the far wall at head height, and the shelf had been left full.
He stood in the doorway and looked at it.
Previous tenant. They'd either left in a hurry or made the decision that these things weren't worth the trouble of moving, that they belonged to the flat now and the flat could keep them. A water-stained atlas, the kind that had been comprehensive when it was printed and was now a document of a world that had partially reorganised itself. A cookbook with a broken spine, still in its original plastic wrapping — bought with intention, abandoned with guilt, he recognised the type. Three volumes of something in a script he couldn't identify at this distance, dark spines, no Latin characters anywhere on them. A ceramic mug is being used as a pen holder, with four dried-up ballpoints standing in it at angles, one of them with its cap missing. A small wooden box with no latch, about the size of a shoebox but shallower.
And at the very end of the shelf, pushed into the corner where the shelf met the wall, as far from the door as it was possible to be:
A thin book with no title on the spine.
He crossed the room and stood in front of the shelf. Up close, the book's cover was visible — a deep yellow, not bright, not the yellow of things that were meant to be yellow but the yellow of things that had become yellow over time. The yellow of old newspaper left in a window. Of grass in a dry August. Of the whites of eyes that had seen too much and rested too little. It was cloth-covered, the texture slightly rough, and it had the particular quality of age that good books accumulate — not deterioration exactly, more like density, as if the years had compressed themselves into the object and made it heavier than it should be for its size.
He reached out and pulled it from the shelf.
Lighter than he'd expected. He turned it over. No title on the back either. No author name anywhere on the outside. The pages were thick and slightly rough under his thumb, the kind of paper that felt handmade, that had texture and weight, that was nothing like the smooth, thin pages of modern paperbacks.
He opened it to the first page.
Three words, centred, in a typeface that was ornate in the way of things printed a very long time ago:
The King in Yellow.
Silas stood in his new room in his new flat in his new city and read those three words twice. Then he read them a third time. Then he closed the book carefully, put it back in the corner of the shelf exactly where he'd found it, and went to help his mother with the boxes.
He did not think about it for the rest of the evening.
He thought about it constantly.
The dreams started that first night.
He wouldn't connect them to the book for several days — wouldn't let himself connect them, if he was being honest, which he tried to be, mostly. They were just dreams. Everyone had strange dreams in new places. The unfamiliar sounds of a different building settling, different traffic patterns outside, the particular quality of darkness in a room whose dimensions he hadn't yet memorised — all of it fed into the brain's nocturnal processing and produced strangeness. That was normal. That was just what happened.
The dream itself was simple, at first. He was standing somewhere that was all white — not a white room, not a white landscape, just white, as if the concept of location had been replaced with a colour. He was standing in it, and somewhere in the white, something very large was also standing, and it was aware of him.
That was all. No action. No words. Just the white and the largeness and the awareness, pressing in from all sides.
He woke at 4 AM with his heart going and the gold light of a passing car moving across the ceiling and the complete, immediate knowledge that he was somewhere new and didn't know where anything was. He lay still until his heartbeat settled. He catalogued the sounds of the building — a pipe somewhere doing something thermal, the faint bass of someone's television two floors down, the street outside carrying on with its night business. He matched these sounds to the shape of the flat as he'd walked through it that afternoon, built a map of the space around him in the dark.
Then he turned onto his side and looked at the shelf.
The book was a darker shape in the darkness, indistinguishable from the other objects on the shelf. Just a shape. Just a thing.
He closed his eyes.
It took a long time to go back to sleep.
His mother had enrolled him at Harlow Secondary before they'd moved — she was efficient about these things, had learned to be, knew that the school situation needed to be sorted before the boxes were even packed. He started on the Monday of their first full week in London, which gave him four days to learn the geography of their immediate neighbourhood, to find the nearest supermarket and the nearest park and the bus routes that mattered, to develop the functional familiarity with a new place that was different from knowing it but was at least enough to navigate by.
He was good at this. He'd had practice.
Four years ago, before Manchester, before Sheffield, before Coventry, they'd lived in a town in the Midlands where he'd spent eleven years, where he'd known every street and every shortcut and the names of everyone in his year at school. Then his mother's company had offered her a project in Manchester, and she'd taken it because the money was better and because, he understood now in ways he hadn't at thirteen, she'd needed something to move toward. And they'd moved, and he'd started over, and it had been hard in the specific way of being thirteen and knowing no one, and then it had gotten less hard, and then his mother's project had ended, and another one had started in Sheffield.
Then Coventry. Then here.
He'd stopped unpacking his posters after Manchester. It had seemed, by Sheffield, like a commitment he wasn't in a position to make.
He was good at starting. He was less good at the part that came after starting, the part where starting became staying, where provisional became permanent. He hadn't had enough practice at that.
He found Harlow Secondary without incident on the first Monday morning, arriving eight minutes before the bell because he'd left early to account for the possibility of getting lost and hadn't gotten lost. He collected his timetable from the office, a laminated card that smelled of the laminating machine, and stood in the main corridor with it and the school map, trying to work out the relationship between them.
The map was one of those maps that made perfect sense to someone who already knew the building and was essentially decorative for everyone else — corridors represented as lines that didn't convey actual distances, rooms numbered in a system that bore no obvious relationship to their physical location, a compass rose in the corner that he was fairly certain was pointing the wrong direction.
He was rotating it for the third time when a voice appeared beside him.
"You're reading it upside down."
He checked. He was not reading it upside down. He had been holding it at a slight angle, but upside down it was not. He looked at the person who'd said this.
She was approximately his age. Dark hair pulled back from her face with the practiced carelessness of someone who did it the same way every morning without thinking about it. Dark brown eyes that were doing several things simultaneously — there was amusement in them, but also something more considered underneath the amusement, something that was actually paying attention. A school uniform worn with the ease of long familiarity. A pen tucked behind her left ear that she had clearly put there at some point this morning and completely forgotten about.
"I'm not," he said.
"I know." No embarrassment. No walking it back. Just the acknowledgment, delivered with the same composure as the original statement. "I wanted to see what you'd do."
He considered this. "And?"
"You checked the map before you looked at me. That's interesting." She nodded at the laminated card in his hand. "Where are you trying to get to?"
"Room 14."
"English with Mr. Cassidy." She turned and started walking toward the stairs at the far end of the corridor, with the confident economy of movement of someone who knew exactly where everything was. "Come on, I'm going that way."
He fell into step beside her. The corridor was filling up around them, the noise level rising as more students arrived, and she navigated through it without appearing to think about it, finding gaps before they existed, moving at a pace that was fast without being rushed. He matched it.
"Nora Calloway," she said, as they reached the foot of the stairs.
"Silas Crane."
"Just moved?"
"Last week."
"From where?"
He did the calculation he always did at this point — how much to say, in what order, to a person he'd known for forty-five seconds. "Coventry, most recently," he said. "Before that, Sheffield. Before that, Manchester."
She glanced at him sideways as they started up the stairs. Not pityingly — just recalibrating, adding information to whatever model she was building. "That's a lot of starting over."
"Yeah."
She didn't say anything else about it. He noticed this. Most people, given the same information, immediately asked why, which was natural, which he understood, but which led to a longer conversation than he usually wanted to have at eight forty in the morning with someone he'd just met. She didn't ask. She just absorbed it and moved on, which suggested either that she wasn't curious or that she was curious but understood that not everything needed to be immediately excavated.
He suspected the latter.
"Harlow's not bad," she said, as they reached the top of the stairs. "The building is confusing for about two weeks, and then it becomes obvious. Cassidy's actually good, which makes the first period bearable. The lunch from the main counter is fine. The stuff from the side counter is better but runs out by quarter past twelve, so you have to be early." She paused at the top of the staircase, orienting. "Left here, all the way to the end, last door on the right."
"Thank you," he said.
"Don't thank me yet. Wait and see if I've sent you to the wrong room." The corner of her mouth moved. "I haven't. But the principle stands."
They had English together, as it turned out. And Maths. And, he discovered over the course of the day, a free period on Thursday afternoons that they both, independently, spent in the library — or rather that she spent in the library and that he also spent in the library once she pointed him toward the table in the far corner with the best wifi signal and the most natural light, which he used for the remainder of the term and beyond.
He walked home at the end of his first day with his hands in his pockets and the cold October air in his lungs and the slightly dazed quality of someone who has processed a large amount of new information in a short time. The street was doing its late-afternoon thing — school children in clusters, people coming home from work, the off-licence doing brisk early business. He walked through it, mapping it as he went, adding detail to the rough sketch he'd built over the previous four days.
He was nearly at the building when he noticed his shadow.
It was stretched long behind him in the low afternoon sun, reaching back down the pavement in the way shadows do at that hour. Except it was reaching slightly further than it should. He slowed, watching it, and the shadow slowed with him but not quite at the same time — a fraction late, a barely perceptible lag, as if it was responding to a slightly delayed signal.
He stopped completely.
The shadow stopped.
He lifted his right hand, slowly.
The shadow's hand lifted with it — but there was something wrong with the angle. The shadow's arm was longer than his arm, or bent at a slightly different joint, or moving in a way that wasn't quite a mirror of his movement but an interpretation of it. Like a translation that had gotten most of the words right but had missed something essential.
He lowered his hand.
The shadow lowered its hand.
He stood on the pavement for a long moment, staring at the ground. A woman walked past him with a pushchair and didn't look at him. A bus went by. The normal afternoon continued with complete indifference to whatever was happening with his shadow.
He looked away. He walked the remaining thirty metres to the building's door and let himself in, and took the stairs to the fourth floor. He did not look back at his shadow again.
That night, in the dream, the white was closer.
Three weeks passed.
They were three weeks of the ordinary work of becoming part of a new place — learning the rhythms of the school, the unwritten geography of where different groups of people stood and sat and moved, the teachers' individual expectations, and the most efficient ways to meet them. He was good at this, too. He'd had practice at this, too.
Nora, it turned out, had a way of appearing wherever he happened to be.
At the library table on Thursday afternoons. In the lunch queue on the days he arrived at the right time. At the bus stop twice in the second week, which couldn't have been a coincidence but which she didn't comment on and which he didn't raise, because he found, to his mild surprise, that he didn't mind. She had introduced him to her friends with the easy efficiency of someone performing a social task she did well: Priya, who was loud in the best possible way, who made the canteen feel like somewhere you actually wanted to be; Marcus, who was quiet in a different register than Silas, a quietness that felt mathematical, like he was always running calculations; Jess, who said things that were very funny in a tone that suggested she didn't know they were funny, which made them funnier.
They were easy people. They didn't ask too many questions. They included him without making an occasion of it, without the slightly exhausting performance of welcoming that some groups did, where the new person is the subject of enthusiastic attention that always has a slight edge of audition to it. They just moved over and made room, and he sat down, and that was that.
He was aware, over the three weeks, that things were better than they'd been in Manchester or Sheffield. That the starting over was going more smoothly. He held this awareness carefully, the way you hold something fragile — not gripping it, not squeezing, just keeping it in your hands and trying not to think about the fact that fragile things break.
The dreams came every few nights. Always the white. Always the largeness. Occasionally, in the later ones, something that might have been a shape — a smear of yellow in the white, a suggestion of outline, a quality of attention directed at him that had weight to it, physical weight, the kind that pressed on your chest from the inside.
He never told anyone about the dreams.
He didn't tell anyone about the shadow either, though he'd noticed it again twice — once in the school corridor, stretched wrong across the floor while everyone else's shadows behaved normally, and once in his room, very late at night, when he'd been sitting at his desk and had looked down and seen it pooled at his feet in the wrong shape, too large, angled in a direction that didn't correspond to the lamp.
He looked away both times. He'd become efficient at looking away from things he didn't have an explanation for.
The book sat at the end of his shelf and said nothing.
He looked it up in the second week. He'd known he would eventually — the not-looking-it-up had been a choice, a deliberate maintenance of ignorance, and he'd been aware of it as a choice, which meant it was only ever temporary.
The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers. Published 1895. A collection of loosely connected short stories, the first four of which revolved around a fictional play of the same name — a play so beautiful and so terrible that everyone who read it was driven to madness. The play existed within the stories as a kind of infectious text, spreading from person to person, city to city, impossible to resist and impossible to survive intact. Chambers had never written the play itself, had only described its effects, which was, most critics agreed, the right decision, the only decision, because the horror of it was precisely the suggestion, the implication, the reader's imagination doing the work that explicit description would have ruined.
The book had influenced Lovecraft. Had influenced a century of weird fiction. Had been referenced, borrowed from, and nodded to in more places than he could easily count. It was a real thing, a significant thing, a piece of literary history sitting unassumingly on his shelf between a cookbook and three volumes in an unidentified script.
He found no edition that matched the copy on his shelf. He searched by cover, by dimensions, by the specific quality of the paper as he'd felt it — every search brought back results that were close but wrong, slightly off in ways he couldn't always precisely articulate. Different yellows. Different cloth textures. Different title page typography.
He closed the browser.
He went and stood in front of the shelf and looked at the book for a long time.
Then he went to bed.
The twenty-second day, which was a Tuesday, was the day Nora said, "You look tired."
They were at the library table, the two of them, Thursday's free period having evolved by the third week into a daily habit neither of them had formally agreed to. He'd sat across from her, and she'd looked up from her book and assessed him with the direct, unhurried attention she brought to most things and said those three words.
"I'm fine," he said.
"You've been fine for three weeks." She set her pen down. "You say it the same way every time. Same inflection. Like you've practised it."
He looked at her. "I haven't practised it."
"Then why does it sound like you have?"
He didn't have a good answer for this. "I sleep badly in new places," he said, which was true as far as it went, which wasn't far enough but was as far as he was going.
She studied him for a moment. Her eyes were very dark and very direct and had the quality of eyes that were good at seeing things accurately — not reading into, not projecting, just seeing what was actually there. He found this simultaneously comfortable and slightly unnerving.
"What keeps you awake?" she said.
"Dreams, mostly."
"Bad ones?"
He thought about the white. The largeness. The pressure. "Strange ones," he said. "Not bad exactly. Just— not restful."
She nodded slowly, adding this to whatever file she was building. "Have you unpacked properly? Sometimes it helps. Making the room feel like yours."
"Mostly." He paused. "There's some stuff on the shelf from the previous tenant. I haven't moved it."
"Why not?"
Good question. He'd thought about it. The honest answer was that moving it would mean touching the book, and he was maintaining a policy of not touching the book, and if he moved everything else on the shelf and left the book, it would look strange, more noticeable in its isolation than it was surrounded by the other objects. He'd decided, without quite articulating this decision, that the best approach was to leave everything exactly where it was.
"Haven't gotten around to it," he said.
Nora picked up her pen. "Put your own things there," she said. "Even if it's just a few books. It makes a difference." She went back to her work. "Trust me."
He thought about her advice that evening, standing in his room looking at the shelf. She was right, probably. He knew she was right. He had books in his bag, in his boxes — he could put some on the shelf, could shift the atlas and the cookbook and the wooden box to one side and fill the rest of the space with things that belonged to him.
He would have to move the yellow book to do it.
He stood in his room for a long time, looking at the shelf.
Then he turned off the light and went to bed without touching anything.
The twenty-eighth night was a Tuesday.
He'd been in the flat for exactly four weeks. His mother had put a plant on the kitchen windowsill — a small succulent in a terracotta pot, chosen from the market on the corner. The flat smelled less like someone else's life and more like theirs, or was beginning to. He'd learned the sound the fourth-floor pipe made when the heating came on and no longer woke to it. He'd learned the exact pressure required to open the bathroom door, the exact lift needed for his bedroom door, and the frequency of the bus he could hear from his window, and approximately what time the off-licence closed, based on the change in the street noise.
He was starting to know the place. He was not yet sure if the place was starting to know him.
He lay in bed at half ten with his book open and his lamp on and the city outside doing its night business. He read two pages and retained nothing. He read them again. He put the book face-down on the duvet and stared at the ceiling.
The restlessness was a particular kind — not the ordinary restlessness of being tired but not sleepy, not the specific restlessness of a mind with unfinished business. This was something else. A pull, almost. A low-frequency insistence in the chest that was directional in a way he didn't want to examine.
He looked at the shelf.
The book sat in its corner. In the lamplight, it was more yellow than it looked in daylight — the light brought out the warmth in the colour, made it glow very faintly, made it look less like the yellow of dying things and more like the yellow of deep water with light coming through it from above.
It's a book, he thought. It's paper and ink and a cloth cover, and it has been sitting on that shelf for however long it sat there before you arrived, and nothing has happened to it, and nothing will happen to you if you pick it up.
He thought about what Nora had said. Put your own things there. It makes a difference.
He thought about the dreams, which had been getting clearer. The white space is sharper each time. The shape in the white is more defined. The quality of attention directed at him was more focused, more specific, more like something that knew him rather than something that was merely aware of him.
He thought about his shadow in the school corridor, stretched long in the wrong direction.
He thought: if you're going to do it, do it now, while you can still claim you're making a reasonable decision, before it starts to feel like something else.
He got out of bed.
His feet were cold on the floor. He crossed the room in three steps and stood in front of the shelf. Up close, the book was just a book — cloth cover, no title on the spine, slightly worn at the corners where the cloth had separated from the board beneath. An old book. Probably valuable to someone, probably not to him.
He reached out and picked it up.
The weight of it settled into his palm. He stood holding it, and nothing happened — no sound, no light, no change in the temperature of the room. The city outside continued. The pipe in the wall did its thermal thing. Everything was exactly as it had been.
He turned the book over.
He opened the cover.
The King in Yellow.
Three words on the first page, exactly as he remembered. He stood holding the book and looked at them and felt, for the first time since he'd found it, that the decision to read it was no longer a question he was asking himself.
He went back to bed.
He sat on top of the covers with his back against the headboard and the lamp on and the book in his lap.
He turned to the first page of the text.
He began to read.
***
End of Chapter One.
***
Etched Oblivion — Chapter One: An original concept by Salaar Irfan