What Nadia Found

Nadia found it in the local history section of the library, which she had gone to on Saturday while Callum was at football, not because she expected to find anything but because the alternative was sitting at home thinking about it and the library was full of people and felt safer than most places.

The library had its usual Saturday morning crowd. Families with small children at the picture book section. An elderly man at the large-print novels. Two teenagers at the computers who were definitely not doing homework. Nadia found a seat at one of the research tables and opened the archive on the library computer and began searching systematically, the way her dad had taught her, starting broad and getting specific.

She was not sure what she was looking for. She searched their street name and found nothing. She searched the area name and found a history of the local park. She searched, on a strange impulse she could not explain, the phrase figure at the end of the street, and found nothing useful.

Then she found the old newspaper archive, scanned copies of local papers going back sixty years, and she searched for unusual sightings and found a letter to the editor from 1987.

The letter was from a woman named Mrs. P. Aldridge and it said that she and her children had been followed home every day for two weeks by a figure that stood at the end of each street they turned onto and that she had reported this to the police who had told her it was likely a person and nothing to worry about but that she knew, she wrote, that it was not a person, because she had watched it disappear.

Nadia sat very still in the library chair.

She read the letter twice. Then she photographed it with her phone and texted it to Callum with no message attached.

His reply came in under a minute: where did you find this

She replied: library archive. 1987. Different family, same streets.

A pause. Then: does it say what happened

Nadia looked at the letter. Mrs. P. Aldridge had written that after two weeks it had simply stopped. She wrote that she did not know why. She wrote that she had moved house the following year, not because of the figure, she said, but that she had not been sorry to go.

Nadia typed: it stopped after two weeks. On its own.

Another pause. Then: how many days has it been for us

Nadia counted. Monday was the first day. Today was Saturday.

She typed: eleven days.

Callum's reply took longer this time.

Then: three more days