The footprints were the thing he couldn't explain.
He tried, afterward. He went through every rational version of it — Isla sleepwalking, Isla getting up for water and not remembering, Isla playing some game she hadn't told him about, some other explanation that lived in the ordinary world and didn't require him to sit at his kitchen table at three in the morning with every light in the house on, hands flat on the table, not quite able to make himself move.
He tried all of them.
None of them worked.
It had been four days since he'd followed Jackson home. Four days since he'd sat outside that house on Renner Street with its closed curtains and its overgrown garden and the door that had opened before the boy reached it. He hadn't told the group about it yet. He'd typed it out twice and deleted it twice and he wasn't entirely sure why — something about saying it out loud felt like a commitment to a version of events he wasn't ready to commit to. Jessica and Kate were already investigating. Grace had found her scepticism slightly harder to maintain since Mr Ben had confirmed the MM connection but was doing her best. There was a kind of forward momentum in the group that Gerald was part of in theory and slightly behind in practice, always arriving a step late, always processing things at a different speed to the others.
He was still processing the house on Renner Street.
He was still processing the door.
The week had been fine, mostly. Isla had gone back to school on Monday, the business with Jackson handled as well as it could be given that Jackson's guardian had still not called the school back and Mr Ben was apparently writing letters now in addition to phoning, both going unanswered. Gerald had sent a follow-up email to Mr Ben on Tuesday. Mr Ben had replied the same day, professional and measured, saying the matter remained open and he was pursuing all available avenues, which was the kind of sentence that meant he was doing what he could with what he had and what he had wasn't much.
Jackson had been quiet at school. Not suspended, not sanctioned in any visible way, just — present and separate in that way he always was, the invisible membrane, the slight distance. Gerald found himself watching the boy on the school run with a different quality of attention than before. Not suspicion exactly. More like the feeling you got when you were trying to remember whether you'd left the oven on — a low, persistent, slightly unreasonable alertness.
Isla still looked tired.
She was fine, she said. She was always fine. She ate well, she did her homework, she chatted in the bath about her friends and her teacher and the elaborate social dynamics of year three with an energy that seemed genuine. But there was something under it, some shadow behind the eyes when she wasn't performing — and he was aware that performing was a strange word to use about an eight year old, but it was the right one, the one that fit. Like she was doing the ordinary things slightly harder than they should have required.
He'd mentioned it to the doctor on Tuesday. She'd been reassuring in the way that wasn't quite dismissive but wasn't quite concerned either, the careful middle lane of medical reassurance. Nosebleeds in children, she said, were more common than most parents realised. Fatigue during the school term was completely normal. She'd run a quick iron check — Isla had sat on the exam table eating the sticker she'd been given and watching the nurse take her blood with great scientific interest — and they were waiting on results.
Probably fine.
Probably.
The night it happened was a Tuesday.
He'd done everything normally. Dinner, homework, bath, Isla's elaborate extended bedtime routine that involved at least two requests for water and one more chapter and a renegotiation of what time her light had to go off. Gerald had held the line at eight thirty, lights out, and she'd accepted it with less argument than usual, which he noticed but put down to her being tired, which she was, which the doctor had said was normal.
He'd watched television for an hour without taking any of it in. He'd checked his phone — nothing new in the group chat, Kate had sent a long message earlier that afternoon about a Facebook group she'd found from another town, something about a cluster of childhood illnesses two years ago, Gerald had read it three times and wasn't sure what to do with it. He'd typed three different responses and sent none of them.
He went to bed at ten. He read for twenty minutes. He turned his light off.
He was asleep by ten thirty, which was earlier than usual, his body apparently deciding it was done for the day whether he was or not.
He woke at 2:47am.
He knew the time because he looked at his phone immediately, the way he always did when he woke in the night — a reflex, a way of orienting himself. 2:47. The house was completely silent. Not the comfortable silence of a house at rest but the specific, pressurised silence of something having just stopped. Like he'd been woken by a sound that had ended the moment he opened his eyes.
He lay still for a moment and listened.
Nothing.
He got up because his bladder made a reasonable case for it and he went to the bathroom and used it and washed his hands and caught his own reflection in the mirror over the sink — grey-faced, hair flattened on one side, the particular expression of a person awake at a time they shouldn't be. He looked at himself for a moment and then looked away.
He was on his way back to his room when he stopped.
Isla's door was open.
He was certain he'd pulled it almost closed. He always did — not fully shut because she didn't like it fully shut, but definitely not open. He stood in the hallway and looked at the open door and the dark room beyond it and felt the first cold touch of something he didn't have a name for yet.
He pushed the door open fully.
Isla was in bed. She was asleep — he could hear her breathing, slow and even, one arm off the mattress, duvet kicked down. He stood there and looked at her chest rising and falling and told his heart to slow down. She'd got up in the night. She'd gone to the bathroom or gotten water and come back and left the door open. That was all.
He looked down.
There was something on the floor.
He thought at first it was a shadow — the light from the hallway coming in at an angle, making shapes on the carpet. He reached in and turned on her bedside lamp.
Footprints.
Small ones. Isla's size. Leading from her bed to the door. That was fine. That was her getting up. He followed them with his eyes from the bed to the door and out into the hallway, and then he turned to follow them back and that was when he saw it.
The footprints were dark.
He crouched down.
Red. Rust-brown at the edges where it had dried into the carpet, darker and still slightly wet in the centre of each small print. He touched the edge of one — just the tip of his finger, just enough — and looked at his fingertip.
Blood.
He was on his feet and at Isla's side in two steps, pulling back her duvet, turning her over gently, looking at her feet, her legs, her hands, her face. She stirred and made a sound of complaint and he ignored it, checking her over with his hands, looking for a cut, a wound, anything. She woke up properly and stared at him.
"Dad. What are you—"
"Are you hurt? Isla, look at me. Are you hurt anywhere?"
She blinked at him. "No." She looked down at herself. "Why would I be hurt?"
"Your feet. Let me see your feet."
She let him look. Nothing. Both feet perfectly fine, no cuts, no marks, the soles clean and unbroken. She looked at him with Karen's eyes and then looked around her room with the dawning awareness of someone realising something was wrong in a way that didn't involve them.
She looked at the footprints on the floor.
Gerald watched her face.
She stared at them for a long moment. Something crossed her expression that he hadn't seen on her before — not fear exactly, more like recognition, which was so much worse than fear because fear meant something was new and recognition meant something wasn't.
"Isla," he said carefully. "Did you get up tonight?"
A pause that went a beat too long. "I don't think so."
"You don't think so."
"I don't remember getting up." She pulled her duvet back over her legs and looked at the footprints again and then looked away, as though she'd decided something. "It's probably nothing, Dad."
She was eight years old and she said it's probably nothing in the exact tone he used when he was trying to talk himself out of something.
He looked at the prints again. From the bed to the door. He stepped back into the hallway and crouched down and followed them. Out of her room, left down the hallway, down the stairs — he could see them on the pale carpet of the stairs, each step marked, leading him down — through the hall.
To the front door.
And back.
He stood at the front door and looked at the line of small bloody footprints going out from the bottom stair and stopping at the door and then turning and going back. There and back. Like something that had gone to the door and stood there and then returned.
He put his hand on the door handle.
It was unlocked.
He stood there.
He was certain he had locked it. He locked it every night, it was the last thing he did, it was part of the system — back door, front door, kitchen window above the sink. Every night without fail for six years in this house.
He locked it now, both locks, the handle and the deadbolt, and stood there with his back to the door and looked at the hallway and the stairs and the small dark prints on the carpet and felt something move through him that the system had no category for.
He turned every light in the house on.
He went back upstairs. He sat on the edge of Isla's bed. She was already most of the way back to sleep, or doing a good impression of it. He pulled the duvet up and sat there and watched her breathe and did not think about what kind of small child walked to a front door in the middle of the night and came back without waking, without remembering, without leaving any mark on her own feet.
He sat there until it got light.
At six thirty he went downstairs and cleaned the footprints off the carpet with cold water and a cloth, working methodically, blotting each one until it was gone. He told himself he was doing it before Isla saw them and got frightened. He told himself that was the only reason.
He put the cloth in the bin.
He made coffee.
He stood at the kitchen bench and drank it and looked out at the grey morning garden and thought about the house on Renner Street and the door that had opened before the boy reached it, and the light behind the curtains, and November 14th.
He picked up his phone.
He opened the group chat.
He typed: Something happened last night. I need to tell you all something. Can we meet?
This time he didn't delete it.
He pressed send and put the phone down and waited for the others to wake up.
Outside the garden sat in the early morning quiet. The grass needed cutting. The sky was the same grey it always was. Everything looked exactly the way it always looked.
Gerald stood at the bench and drank his coffee and did not look at the bin where he'd put the cloth.
He already knew the stain on it was the shape of a small hand.
He hadn't let himself look properly. He'd folded it inward as he walked to the bin, cloth against cloth, and dropped it in without opening it again.
He knew anyway.
He'd known from the moment he'd picked it up.