Clara Hastings's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

Clara Hastings had been in the Festering Depths eleven days, and already three neighbors had stopped answering their doors. She stood on the corner outside the fish market with her green satchel open, notebook out, pen ready. She asked the woman behind the counter about the empty apartment above the bakery. The woman wiped her hands on her apron and turned her back. Clara wrote nothing down. There was nothing to write. She pushed her glasses up her nose and tried the cobbler next. He shut the top half of his door before she finished her sentence. Two men on the bench across the way watched her walk past and went quiet. Clara felt the heat crawl up her neck. She knew how she sounded. A stranger in a white shirt asking who was gone, without a single name to offer. Even to her own ears the questions came out wrong, like accusations dressed up as concern. She had come here to write a piece on the vanishings. Her editor wanted proof, not rumor. Without a list, she had nothing. Without nothing, she was next. That thought had kept her up three nights running. She stopped when she saw the chapel at the end of the lane. The wooden walls leaned a little. A tall board stood by the front steps, and the board was covered in paper. Clara crossed the street. Five flyers. Each one said MISSING above a printed face. She read every name. She copied every date. Her pen shook, but the list grew. A baker's son. A schoolteacher. A dockworker who'd left for a shift and never clocked in. She had names now. Real ones. "You're the new tenant." Clara turned. The old woman from the boarding house stood behind her in fuzzy pink slippers and a floral coat, arms folded tight against the cold. Mildred Kravitz, her landlady, the one who'd cataloged Clara's boxes on move-in day and asked what her father did for work. Clara had been avoiding her for a week. "I'm just reading," Clara said. "You're writing." Mildred's blue eyes went to the notebook. "That's six, if you count the fiddler nobody put up a flyer for. And seven if you count the girl from the laundry. Her mother won't say her name out loud." Clara's pen stopped. "You know all of them." "I know who paid rent and who didn't come back for their mail." Mildred tilted her head. "You've been asking the wrong people, dear. Loudly." "Will you tell me the rest?" Mildred looked at the flyers, then at Clara's shoes. "Come home. I'll put on tea. But once you write it down, you're on the list too. You understand that." Clara closed the notebook. She followed the old woman up the lane. She had her names. She also had a witness who knew hers.