The Seventh Landing

Since he was nine years old there has been something in his photographs.

In the corner of his room: two points of light where eyes should be. On the stairwell above his front door: a shape in a good coat, waiting. He named them both. He has spent twenty-one years trying to get one other human being to see them, and not one ever has.

Tonight is his thirtieth birthday. He has been walked out of his own party. It is two in the morning and he is climbing seven flights in the dark, and there is something on the third landing, and it is getting closer every flight.

He is about to find out he named them wrong.