The first thing I noticed was the smell cold, damp, and wrong in a way I couldn’t explain. It hit me the moment I shoved aside the last moving box and pressed my palm against the back wall of my closet. The wall moved. Not like a wall should. It swung inward like a door, slowly,…

The first time it happened, I told myself it was the wind. I told myself the old house was settling, that the hinges were loose, that I had simply forgotten to close it all the way. I told myself a lot of things in those early nights because the alternative was something I was not…

The first time it happened, I told myself it was the building settling. Old apartments do that. They creak and groan at 2 a.m. like something enormous is turning in its sleep. I lived on the fourth floor of a six-story brick building in Chicago, and I’d been there exactly three weeks when I started…