One
I arrived in Caligo Harbor on a Friday afternoon, windswept and half-damp from the cramped boat ride over, my wool jacket suctioned to my skin. The trees bled orange and yellow with rot, and the wind carried the scent of their decay across the chopping Atlantic, its gradual fade from autumn into winter imminent. Cool, crisp air cut at my skin—but not enough to ossify through marrow.
All I brought was a single suitcase and my cat. A week, I told myself. A week to clear the house of her things, to get her affairs in order, and I would return to the sacred life I’d managed to carve out for myself and pretend the island and that decomposing house buried in the trees never existed. I’d sell it off to the highest bidder, or let the ocean take it back, whichever happened first.
The lock on the front door was broken, not that anyone besides the sheep would bother to come in. In the years since I’d left, the house had only fallen into more disrepair. The taste of the salt sea lingered on my tongue from a childhood spent in a wuthering cedar shake home, three stories of creaking floorboards and an attic bedroom the wind howled into each night.
Nestled halfway between Boston, Massachusetts, and Portland, Maine, the island sank deeper into the ocean each year in a slow, torturous death. Once a vibrant tourist venue in decades past, it lost its luster as buildings eroded from salt wind. Tides crept in, flooding the main road with swirling murky water, and as it retreated, devoured more of the island for itself. Homes fell into the sea, and soon, there wasn’t much left. The daily ferries from the mainland came less frequently, until they didn’t come at all.
As I entered the home I hadn’t seen in half a decade, the ground below me shifted, tilting slightly beneath my feet. It seemed Caligo Harbor had sensed me before I even approached.
Like it knew I was returning home—if such a thing existed for me. I’d searched for it in men and women, in lofty attempts at love and forced kinship, but no other siren song hummed for my blood and bone quite like Caligo. The island’s isolation left me yearning for something I hadn’t yet found. But she always unfurled herself, beckoning me back to the house along the rocks, surrounded by trees that kissed the shore.
A mouse scuttled across the floor as the wind clicked the door shut behind me. Mud and wet sand stuck to my boots, and I heard the echoing memory of Mom tutting at the mess in her entryway. Sunwashed wallpaper lined the walls, faded in the traces of sun that burst through windows, dulled and peeling at the edges where it met years of repainted crown moulding. Dust accumulated on the collection of tchotchkes collected during trips to the Cape and New York. Grandma’s old Toby jugs lined the shelves on the hutch along the wall.
Traces of grief waited with cruel patience while the home I grew up in drew in its last pathetic breath—readying it for a death of its own. It manifested as a plague that settled into the crumbling stone foundation. It leaked from the ceilings and drenched the moisture-stained walls. It curled the wallpaper and warped the floorboards and hailed me a cab back to its front fucking door.
With Mom gone, the house felt even more hollow. The wind seeped through every gap in the lath boards, whistling, whispering. It pressed against my ears, the evidence of her goneness a reminder that I was now truly alone with no other family to claim.
Regret is funny—not in a haha kind of way. It burrows itself into guilt the way woodworms take a decade to eat away at a house’s foundation, and one Saturday morning, you’ve collapsed through the kitchen floor.
Poe, my smoosh-faced, tortoiseshell-patterned cat, meeped from her crate, pawing at the metal bars.
“Oh, sorry, girl,” I muttered, reaching down to unhinge the latch.
She scurried out, quick to disappear behind a piece of furniture in the front parlor. I theorized that I wouldn’t see her for another few hours, or at least until she heard the crack of her wet food can.
I dragged my feet up two flights of stairs to the attic, settling into my old bedroom, the walls now a bleached shade of neon green and far from the bright, putrid color they were when I slept here as an adolescent. Wispy sheer curtains billowed with the chill through the cracked-open window. It took most of my strength to push the rail closed, the sash lock fastening with a groan. I wondered how long it had been since anyone had been up here.
I ran my fingers over the bubbling paint on the warped window framing. Nothing seemed out of place—my high school diploma still hung collecting dust on the wall, surrounded by old Polaroids and photobooth strips of the friends who had all moved on from me, some of their names long forgotten in yearbooks and old letters. The bed was neatly made, with the floral duvet pulled tight across the mattress so tautly a quarter could bounce from it. I could smell the musty, damp unwashedness of it from where I stood. Black mold sprouted from the corner of the ceiling where rain had collected during storms.
The room felt like a mausoleum—cold, hollow, barren—despite being full of everything I’d left behind. It felt less like a museum of myself and more like a shrine of what I had spent a childhood trying to convince everyone I was.
Normal, sane, kind, obedient.
Posters covered up the holes I’d punched through walls. The box with a half dozen blades pried from shaving razors, remained wedged in the hidden spot between my mattress and headboard. All of the hidden relics of my youth masked behind that grotesque shade of green.
The sun was setting by the time I finished unpacking—oranges swirling to a red in the sky. Too bright for a normal sunset. I peered out the window as the sun tucked itself behind the horizon of the Atlantic’s edge. Of every sunset I’d ever seen in Caligo Harbor, I’d never seen one quite that shade before. It appeared plucked from the depths of Hell, spun by Lucifer himself—deep, maddening.
I stretched into a yawn. A day of travel and unwanted memories strung me out, worn my mind, body and soul to fragmented bits desperate for respite. I pulled back the mothball-scented covers on my bed and crawled onto my stiff mattress. Sleep welcomed me with shadowed embrace.
Thunder tolled outside, deep and furious. Flurrying paws bound up the stairs, and Poe appeared on the bed, tail puffed and back arched—eyes wide in panic. Her hysteria seemed out of character for a cat who regularly attacked the vacuum cleaner like it was her greatest mortal enemy, but when the soft click of a door shutting downstairs reached my ears, I understood her frenzy.
I froze, my breath hitching—listening.
Crawling from the bed, I grabbed the tennis racket I used for approximately half a season during my sophomore year of high school, and padded down the stairs slowly, careful to miss the creak on the second-to-last step. A low voice huffed in the glow of the sconce, their long shadow stretching up the hallway. I twisted the grip of the racket in my hand, winding up its aluminum edge behind my head. As I reached the last step, the figure moved toward the staircase.
“Oh, good, you’re here. I was beginning to think I’d missed you.” He muttered, a sense of relief in his tone as fingers cast through dark hair.
Racket still wound over my shoulder, fists white-knuckling the grip, I narrowed my gaze. “Of course I’m here, this is my goddamn house.”
He smiled, his teeth bright—he could’ve been a star of a shiny toothpaste commercial. He placed a hand over his chest and tipped slightly at the waist. “My apologies, Seph—”
“How do you know my name?” I demanded, swiping the racket in his direction.
The man stepped out of the way with barely an inch to spare.
I took another leap towards him. “Why are you in my house?” I pressed.
He looked down at me, a faint scar across his left brow catching in the dimming light.
Pale eyes gleamed sharply against the tan of his skin, the icy grey hue of his irises tipped my pulse. If I had spotted him anywhere other than trespassing in my home, I probably even would have found him attractive.
“How rude of me,” he began, unfastening the bottom button of his suit jacket casually, as if to make himself more comfortable, and crossing back to the parlor. “I’m Death.”
I snorted, letting the racket fall to the floor with a clang! Clearly, the man was some Caligo wanderer. Perhaps a local Boo Radley escaped from a locked basement—there were rumors, you know. He appeared too well-tailored to want to burglarize me in his well pressed black suit.
“If you’re trying to rob me, you’d be doing me a favor. I have to get rid of all this shit anyway. So go ahead. I might even help you box it up.”
The man played with the thin silver chain against his skin, letting it rest above where his shirt was undone one button too low, eyeing me curiously. “I don’t want your junk.”
I huffed. “It’s nice junk,” I defended. “Why are you here?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed lowly. “I’d hang myself if I wasn’t already dead.”
“You’re…dead?”
“Yeah, and so are—”
I ran in the direction of Mom’s bedroom. Tucked into the backside of the house, it took up the entire south side of the home, windows facing out over the thick trees that separated the property from the rest of town. Above her bed, as it had hung since the day Pastor St. Perran saved her through the power of Jesus Christ, was a small wooden cross. Leaping onto the four-poster bedframe, I ripped it from the wall just as the man claiming to be Death stepped through the doorway.
Hurling it across the room with all my strength, it hit him square in the forehead with a thwap.
“OW! What the Hell?” He groaned, rubbing at the blooming red spot.
“The power of Christ compels you!” I yelled, trying to remember any modicum of religion that Mrs. Elwood’s Sunday school had attempted to instill in me.
He rolled his eyes. “Oh my God.”
I jumped off the edge of the bed, nicking an old bible off the nightstand, and reached for the bottle of holy water Mom always swore was Pope-blessed—or so claimed the cashier from a souvenir shop at the Rome airport.
“Don’t make me use these!” I threatened, gesturing both the weathered book and the plastic bottle toward him.
The man looked amused as he stepped forward, his hands buried in the pockets of his trousers. “I mean you no harm, Seph. Not that I could harm you.”
Uncapping the bottle, I splashed him with its contents. To my dismay, he did not immediately begin to sizzle and burn. But instead, laughed.
In return, I threw at him whatever came in my path—an old copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul, a pair of slippers, lacy toss pillows, a framed autographed portrait of Julie Andrews.
He growled, his amusement diminishing as quickly as it had come on. “Stop—enough.”
The man’s gaze grew dark, droplets of holy water dripping from the frame of his curls onto the sharp lines of his face. For extra protection, I slipped the rosary beads from the bedpost around my neck.
He groaned, rubbing his temples. “That’s not even how you use a rosary—”
“I don’t care,” I snapped. Mom had warned me about demons. I didn’t think they were real; I just thought it was her way of keeping me from dating. “What are you?”
Wiping the water from his face with exaggerated care, he inched closer, moving languidly like a cat stalking its prey—calculated yet stagy. I couldn’t tell if he was genuinely concerned about my next move or if he was just mocking me.
“I’ve already told you—I’m Death.”
A lump caught in my throat. “Why are you here?”
His face molded into something unsettlingly tender as silence stretched to tension between us. I recognized the look—the same unsettled calm, the same way the waves look just as they’re about to break at the shore.
“I’m here because you’re dead, Seph.”
I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek until it broke skin. “No.”
The man sighed and leaned against the corner of the bedpost. He had the audacity to appear annoyed with me, as if he hadn’t just told me I was dead.
“Can you just give me your coin so we can hurry up this process. You’re frying the last nerve I have for the day,” He fussed, holding out his hand.
“My what?”
“Your death coin. Usually it’s in your mouth. Sometimes it’s in your pockets. If you die in a more unfortunate situation, sometimes it ends up in your nose—”
“Are you mad?” Despite my disbelief, I still found myself digging through my cardigan pockets—my fingertips grazing pebbles and sand.
“I will be if you don’t come with me right now.”
I scoffed. “You have a lot of nerve.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Don’t make me take you by force.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “Get out of my house.”
He mimicked my stance, his body inching closer to mine. He was annoyingly good-looking, and it made it difficult to remain stern with him. His grey eyes watched each of my microexpressions, waiting for me to make my next move. As if to say your turn.
“I have a job to do,” he said, his voice low. “I came here for you. I don’t have time to stand here and argue about your mortality.”
“That’s rude. You’ve just told me I’m ‘dead’. Don’t you think I’m deserving of a little questioning?”
He narrowed his gaze, folding his arms across his chest. “You really don’t have any memory of dying?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m calling the police.”
I turned to move away from him, but he caught me by the arm. “This island hasn’t had its own police force in three decades. It’ll be hours before anyone gets here. You’ll be spit-roasting in the Ninth Circle by then. Answer me.”
I furrowed my brow. “No. My mom died a couple of weeks ago. This is her house. I came to tie up her affairs. I arrived this afternoon, unpacked, took a nap, woke up, and you were in my parlor.”
He pursed his lips, bowing his head slightly. “I’m sorry for your loss—and I was in your hallway.”
“Whatever.”
He cocked his eyebrow. “How did you arrive here?”
“On a magic fucking carpet.”
The man clicked his tongue and ticked his jaw.
Conceding, I sighed. “How everyone arrives to Caligo Harbor—boat.”
He unfolded his arms and put them on his hips. Turning away, I took the moment to grasp the shiny brass letter opener on the desk behind me, tucking it into my sleeve.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” he muttered to himself, leaning against the bedpost.
“What?”
He turned back to face me. “I was sent to collect you. Your name, date of death, and location came up on the death toll this morning. Here I am.” He opened his arms out wide. “Here you are, no coin—”
“What’s this death coin?”
“When you die, you’re given a coin. That coin is your soul’s currency in the Underworld. It’s your only guarantee that you’re able to move on. Without it—”
“You’re stuck?”
He nodded.
This guy was so full of shit. “So then I’m alive! No coin, no passage. Not dead!”
The man closed the space between us. I didn’t like the look on his face. It was pensive, honest, maybe even tender. The mask of his bravado had melted away and left behind a rawness that made my skin crawl.
It was empathy.
“You can remove the weapon from your sleeve.” He opened his palm to me.
Just as he did, I plunged the sharp end of the opener through his skin. Horror trickled through me when the man did not bleed. He just stood there, looking mildly annoyed as he inspected the instrument now wedged through the center of his palm. Our eyes met, and I must have looked like a fish out of water because he tittered as he pulled it out, the faint squelching sound making me gag as it glided through the bloodless wound.
“Would you like this back?” He offered.
Slightly embarrassed, I reached back out for it. “Yes, please.”
Just before I could touch the cool metal, he wrapped his arms around me, pulling my back tight against his muscled chest, placing the tip of the opener against my clavicle. The sharp of it was cold and warning against my bare skin.
I stomped on his foot, kicked his shin. “You dead piece of shit!”
When I shifted to try and bite his arm, he plunged the opener into my chest. Funnily enough, it tickled. A featherlight brush against my insides. Not a single drop of blood collected at the wound. He released me, and I shimmied as the hilt glinted in the moonlight. I pulled it out, trying not to retch at the combined visage of the blade being pulled from my chest, and the gurgling sound it made when wrenched free.
“Fuck,” I whined, staring down at the hole in my chest cavity.
“Fuck, indeed.”