Rain had been plastering the dead leaves against the kitchen window for three straight days, turning the soil in the yard into something that smelled like old iron and wet wool. My brother, Leo, came through the back door around nine at night. He did not knock, though he almost always did, and he brought a cold draft with him that made the yellow flame in the stove flicker. Behind him stood a man I had never seen before.
At first glance, there was nothing particularly remarkable about the stranger. He was tall, thin in a way that made his wool coat hang straight down like a curtain, and he kept his head tilted down so the brim of his cap cast a shadow over his forehead. But the floorboards beneath his feet immediately caught my attention. They were dry. While Leo was dripping mud across the linoleum, the stranger left no trace at all. No water, no grit.
And he was entirely barefoot.
We lived twelve miles out from the nearest paved road, surrounded by flint hills and sharp briars that could tear through heavy boot leather by November. Nobody walked out there without protection. Yet when I looked down past the hem of his gray trousers, I saw ankles coated in a fine, dry powder resembling slate dust, and toenails clipped so short they looked like white chips of bone.
“This is Arthur,” Leo said. His voice sounded thin, scraped out at the edges, like he had been shouting against a high wind for hours. “He needs to dry off.”
I told Leo that we had no spare rooms and that the sofa in the den had a broken spring, but Arthur was already stepping past me into the narrow hallway. He moved without sound. His heels did not click against the pine floorboards. He simply flowed forward, his shoulders slightly rounded, as if he were trying to make himself narrow enough to fit between two walls that were closing in.
In towns around our county, people have traded versions of that night for years. If you ask old man Miller down by the creek, he will tell you the stranger was carrying a leather satchel full of dried herbs. If you talk to the girl who works the late shift at the gas station off Route 9, she swears Arthur had no face until he stepped under the porch light. But I was there in the hallway, and I remember the exact smell that followed him inside: the sweet, sickening odor of crushed boxwood and stagnant well water.
We sat him at the kitchen table because there was nowhere else. I put a mug of black coffee in front of him. He did not touch it. His hands remained flat on the oilcloth table cover, palms down, the long fingers spread apart like the roots of a weed trying to find a purchase in shallow soil. His skin had a peculiar blue-gray tint under our weak overhead bulb, the color of skim milk left too long in the back of an icebox.
“Where are you from, Arthur?” I asked, standing by the sink with a dish towel in my hands, twisting it until my knuckles turned white.
He did not look up at me. His gaze stayed fixed on the salt shaker between us. “The lower pasture,” he said.
The answer made no sense. Our lower pasture was just fifty acres of wiregrass and thistle, bordered by a dry creek bed where nothing grew except stubborn scrub oak. There was no house down there, no shelter, nothing except an old stone foundation left over from a barn that burned down back in the thirties.
Leo was sitting across from him, staring with a wide, glassy intensity that I did not like. My brother had always been stubborn, the kind of boy who would chase a stray dog into a briar patch just to prove he could catch it, but this was different. His jaw was slack, and a thin line of saliva glistened at the corner of his mouth. It was the look of someone listening to a distant radio station that was mostly static, trying hard to make out a song he used to know.
“He showed me where the well goes,” Leo whispered. His eyes never left Arthur’s cap.
“What well?” I asked.
“The deep one. Behind the root cellar.”
That well had been capped with thick oak timbers and buried under three feet of red clay before our grandfather was even born. Everyone in the township knew it was there, but nobody talked about it. It was dry, my father had always said. Just an empty shaft going down into the dark where the limestone cracked.
Arthur shifted his weight then. For the first time, I heard a sound from him: a dry, rustling scrape, like parchment rubbing against parchment. He lifted his right hand from the table. Where his palm had rested, the oilcloth was damp and gray, indented with five shallow hollows that looked less like fingerprints and more like the impressions left by round pebbles.
“The shoes are heavy,” Arthur said. His voice was lower now, barely carrying over the sound of the rain beating against the tin roof.
“What shoes?”
“The ones by the door.”
I turned my head toward the entryway. The coat rack stood in the corner, holding our heavy winter jackets and my father’s old mackinaw. Directly beneath it sat a pair of lace-up work boots caked in wet red mud. They were Leo’s boots. He had worn them out that afternoon to check the fence line.
Except they weren’t just sitting there. They were turned upside down, the laces trailing out across the floor like dead snakes, and inside both toes were packed tight with gray dust and dry, withered leaves that smelled of old graves.
When I looked back at the table, Arthur was standing.
He hadn’t made a sound getting up. He was taller than I realized, his head nearly brushing the low ceiling beams where strings of dried peppers hung. His gray trousers ended high above his ankles, revealing skin that seemed to have no veins or pulse beneath it—just smooth, matte pigment that absorbed the light rather than reflecting it.
“Leo,” I said, my voice dropping an octave, turning sharp. “Get up.”
Leo did not move. He was still staring at the empty place where Arthur had been sitting. His fingers were twitching against his knees, curling and uncurling in rhythm with the dripping of the rain outside.
I reached out to grab my brother’s shoulder, to yank him back from the table, but as my fingers touched his wool shirt, the kitchen window blew inward.
There was no sound of shattering glass. The pane didn’t break; it simply fell away in one solid sheet, dissolving into gray sand as it hit the floorboards. The wind rushed in, carrying the smell of the lower pasture—that heavy, rotting odor of wet earth and stagnant water—and with it came a cold so sudden my breath turned to frost in the middle of the room.
When the dust cleared from the air a second later, Arthur was gone.
The back door was still bolted from the inside. The windows in the parlor were latched. There was no way out through the ceiling or the walls, yet the room was empty except for Leo and me and the two muddy boots sitting by the coat rack.
We searched the house until dawn. We carried kerosene lanterns into every corner of the attic, poked behind the flour bins in the pantry, and lifted the heavy trapdoor that led down to the stone cellar. The air down there was stale and cold, smelling of rotting potatoes and damp masonry. We found nothing.
Except for the well.
By morning, the rain had stopped, leaving the hills under a heavy, bruised sky that refused to brighten. Leo and I walked out past the root cellar, our boots sinking deep into the thawed clay. The spot where our grandfather had buried the old well shaft—the spot covered by thick oak timbers and three feet of packed earth—was gone.
The earth had settled into a wide, funnel-shaped depression. At the bottom of the sinkhole, right where the center of the timbers should have been, lay a pair of gray socks and two small piles of slate-colored dust.
Leo never spoke about Arthur again. He went about his chores with the same mechanical precision as before, but he never wore boots after that day. Even in the dead of January, when the frost bit into the grass and the ruts in the lane froze hard as iron, he walked barefoot across the yard.
Sometimes, when the wind comes up from the south and rattles the kitchen window, I look down at the floor near the back door. The linoleum is clean. But every now and then, I find a faint circle of gray dust by the baseboard—just large enough for a heel, and completely dry.