The Figure

Reina Street

You get off the night shift at a quarter to twelve. The hospital admin office closes late on Thursdays, and the bus you were supposed to catch passed eighteen minutes ago without you being able to make it. This isn't the first time you've walked alone down Reina Street at this hour, and you've always thought it was a reasonably safe street: yellow sodium streetlights, storefronts, the occasional bar still open on the side streets. Two blocks. Four minutes at a brisk pace.

You have your earbuds in, listening to a podcast about medieval history that's just boring enough to help you unwind after eight hours of screens and paperwork. Your keys are already in your hand, a years-old habit, the keychain clenched between your fingers. The pavement glistens a bit from the earlier rain. A taxi goes by without stopping. The air smells like wet stone and the oil from a fry shop that's already closed but still permeates the sidewalk.

You see it in the window of a shoe store. The glass acts as an imperfect mirror, reflecting the street behind you in muted colors and slightly distorted geometry. At first you interpret it as a pole, something architectural. But poles don't move. You take out one earbud.

You turn, just a little, just enough to look over your left shoulder. Sixty meters away, maybe less, there's a figure. Tall in a way that doesn't fit any person you've ever seen: nearly eight feet tall, impossibly thin, as if someone had stretched a human silhouette upward without adding any width. A long black cloak falls from its shoulders and drags along the wet pavement, but it makes no sound doing so. A tall top hat, Victorian, silhouetted against the yellow halo of the nearest streetlamp.

It doesn't run. It walks. Measured steps, steady, unhurried. And yet it seems to cover distance with an efficiency that doesn't match the pace you're observing. As if the space between you is compressing independently of its strides. The face is in shadow. Not because the light doesn't reach there, but because the shadow seems permanently installed in that space, resistant to any light source.

Your building is two blocks away. 14 Reina Street. You know the code by heart: 2547. The keys are already in your hand. The only sound on the street is the distant traffic from the main avenue and, if you listen closely enough, nothing else. The cloak drags across the pavement in silence. You wonder how long it's been following you.

The Building Entrance

You walk fast, not quite running, because something inside you knows that running would change something. You don't know what, but you feel it with the same certainty that you know not to look back. The sidewalk seems longer than usual. The storefronts reflect back your own hurried image, your eyes too wide, your breath visible in the cold March air.

You reach 14 Reina Street. The gray stone facade, the metal security panel with its numeric keypad and the small green light indicating the system is working. Your building. Your two hundred ninety square feet on the fourth floor. The distance between this keypad and your bed is exactly what separates you from feeling safe.

You allow yourself a fraction of a second to look over your shoulder. The figure has covered half the distance. It's still not running. Still with that steady pace, no variation, no apparent effort. The hat sways slightly, just a little, as if the figure were compensating for a breeze that doesn't exist.

To your left, barely six feet away, is El Tranquilo bar. A 24-hour joint with warm yellow light filtering through the fogged-up glass of its storefront. You can see the silhouette of the bartender behind the counter and that of a couple sitting at the back table. Ordinary life. Light. People. It's two steps away.

Your fingers are already on the entrance keypad. The code is 2547. You've punched it in hundreds of times. The green light blinks, waiting. If you go in, the metal door is heavy and the lock is automatic; it'll take maybe three seconds to secure itself after you pass. If you duck into the bar, there are people, witnesses, phones.

The Lobby

You punch in the code. The lock gives with a satisfying metallic click. You push the door, go in, and let it close behind you with a dull, definitive thud that echoes through the empty lobby. The silence inside is immediate, different from the silence of the street: here the city noise is muffled by eight inches of stone and metal.

You turn and look through the glass of the door. The figure has stopped at the corner. It didn't speed up. It didn't try to reach the entrance before it closed. It's there, motionless, about forty meters away, silhouetted against the empty street like something painted onto the night background. Watching you. Or whatever it does with that face you can't see.

Your building's lobby smells like buzzing fluorescent lights, green-painted mailboxes that no one has touched since the nineties, and someone's stew from the third floor who always cooks late. It's a space you know well: a hundred square feet, old marble floor, stairs to the right and the elevator in the center.

The elevator. The metal grate cage with its accordion door that's been working for forty years and sounds like it. The floor indicator above the door shows a lit number. You look at it. Fourth floor. The elevator is upstairs, on the fourth floor, your floor. Someone called it from upstairs, or went up there. Or something called it. Through the slots of the metal grate you can't see anything, only the shaft's pit of shadow.

The stairs to the right: six flights of worn marble with a wrought-iron railing. It always creaks a little on the second landing, but it's quiet if you know where to step. Through the entrance glass, the figure still isn't moving. It's not going anywhere. It has all the time in the world.

Fourth Floor

You go up hugging the wall, counting the steps in silence to avoid the ones that creak. First. The fluorescent light on the landing flickers once and stabilizes. Second floor: the stew smell is stronger here, coming from the Martin apartment, who always have their TV on late. Through the door you can hear the muffled murmur of the news.

Third floor. The fluorescent on this landing is burnt out, has been for weeks, you've sent three emails to the building management with no response. You climb the last steps in near-total darkness, your left hand on the cold iron handrail, the fingers of your right hand squeezing the keys until the metal digs into your palm.

Fourth floor. The light works here. Six apartment doors along a hallway about fifty feet long. Yours is the fourth on the left: 4D. You know it like you know your own face. You see the peephole, the coir doormat, the slightly crooked gold number you've been meaning to straighten for two years.

You're less than thirty feet from your door when your phone buzzes in your pocket. You take it out and look at the screen. Mark. A picture of the two of you at a festival three years ago, him with a beer, you with a string of plastic flags on your head that you found on the ground. It's the contact photo he chose himself. You haven't spoken in a week. Mark never calls at this hour. It's twelve-twenty in the morning.

The phone buzzes. Your door is thirty feet away. You can go in, lock yourself inside, and call him from there. Or you can answer now, here, in the hallway, with your back to the landing and six closed doors around you.