Oracle

The Visitation

The full moon before the eclipse, George Pickingill walks.

There is no sound to his walking. The mud outside her house is wet from the day's rain, deep enough to take a footprint, but where he steps there is nothing. No impression. No mark. As if he doesn't quite touch the ground.

The crows follow him — a perimeter at rooftop height, circling, their wings making no sound. Below, the dogs move in the shadows between houses, their bodies low and purposeful. Nothing flies in this place. Nothing crawls. The animals have made a circle, and inside that circle is only George Pickingill and the house where she sleeps.

He reaches the door.

He doesn't knock with his hand. He knocks with something else — three strikes, a pattern, a rhythm that only she would recognize because he taught it to her seven years ago in a place she has tried not to remember.

The door opens by itself.

There is no hand on the latch. No sound of locks turning. The door simply swings inward, as if it has been waiting for this knock, as if it has always been waiting.

She stands in the doorway in her nightgown, half-asleep and suddenly, completely awake. She sees him and the terror is instant.

He is as he was. Unchanged. As if seven years have not passed. As if time does not touch him the way the mud does not hold his footprint.

He shows her the note — the date, the place, the hour. Then he walks to her fireplace and drops the paper into the flames.

The fire doesn't burn orange. It burns white-hot, sudden, violent. The flames leap up the chimney like something alive and reaching. She watches, transfixed.

In the fire, she sees a face.

A face from seven years ago. Dead. Gone. But burning in the fire, moving, calling.

The hand reaches out from the flames. Made of fire. Burning. Reaching for her across the grate, reaching toward her face, reaching—

She screams and stumbles backward.

The door slams shut behind her.

When she turns back to the house, she is alone. The fireplace burns with normal orange flames. The note is ash.

The door is closed.

George Pickingill is gone. He was never inside. He stands on the other side of the door now, and she can feel him there — not touching the ground, not making sound, waiting to see if she will open it again.

She doesn't.

But on the day before the eclipse, at the hour written on paper that burned to nothing, she will walk to the Three Harpies. She will walk through the perimeter of crows and dogs, and they will not stop her. She will arrive at the time he wrote, and George Pickingill will be waiting.

Because he is always waiting.