The Stranger’s Due

Nana had rules. This one kept her alive.

This story is based on a prompt provide by Original Worlds (Ira Robinson) .

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My Nana had rules my mother rolled her eyes at and called Nana being Nana.

Salt at the windowsill in a storm. Never answer if you hear your name outside after midnight. And if somebody comes to the door asking for help, look at their feet first.

“Faces lie,” she told me when I was eight, pushing a chipped mug of tea across her kitchen table. “Voices lie. A clean shirt and a sad story can lie their heads off. But the old things always get lazy by the feet.”

I thought it belonged with the rest of her warnings, right between swallowing gum takes seven years and funeral flowers should never come into the house.

Then I was fourteen, and somebody came to our back door during an ice storm asking to use the phone.

Nana looked through the glass pane. Not at his face. Down.

She turned off the porch light and told me not to make a sound.

The man stayed on the step for almost an hour.

That was twenty years ago. Nana’s dead now, and I live on the eleventh floor of a building with lobby cameras, key-fob access, and a management company that sends emails called YOUR SAFETY IS OUR PRIORITY.

Nobody gets up here unless the building lets them.

That’s what I was paying for, anyway.

At 1:13 AM, my phone buzzed hard enough to rattle the glass on my nightstand.

RESIDENT ALERT
THERE IS SOMEONE AT YOUR FRONT DOOR.

I sat up, grabbed my phone and started down the hall.

Before I got to the front door, the intercom crackled.

“Hello?” a woman said. Thin with static.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m in 4B. I took my trash down and my door locked behind me. Front desk isn’t answering.”

“Why are you on eleven?” I asked.

A pause.

Then a little embarrassed laugh. “I hit the wrong floor trying to get back up. I thought maybe somebody could call downstairs.”

Her voice sounded tired and embarrassed.

I almost opened the door.

Instead I pulled up the hallway camera.

The feed came up in gray-black night mode. My doormat. The brass 11B. The sprinkler shadow overhead.

And a woman standing just outside the peephole range.

Barefoot.

I went cold.

The hallway carpet was dark industrial stuff meant to hide stains. In November it usually held salt, rain and the usual city grit.

Her feet should have been filthy.

They weren’t.

The skin looked too smooth, stretched tight over bones that didn’t sit correctly. She had too many joints. They bent in soft extra places, folded slightly inward, more like fingers than toes. The arch was wrong. Too high and too narrow. The heel barely touched the carpet.

I moved the phone closer to my face.

They weren’t human feet.

And just like that I was back in Nana’s kitchen. Winter light on the linoleum. Nana scraping ash into a Folgers can.

If they ask nice, that’s worse.

Why?

Because they already know what works on you.

I stepped closer to the door and stopped with my hand an inch from the deadbolt. My bare feet on my side of the threshold. Her bare feet on the other.

The camera feed flickered.

For one frame I saw more of her. A flowered house dress. One hand hanging loose. The bottom of a face tilted toward the door, smiling so hard the skin pulled white around the mouth.

Then the image snapped back.

My phone slipped in my hand.

I thought of the man in the ice storm. How he stood on Nana’s step for an hour without knocking again. How in the morning there were no footprints on the porch, though sleet had crusted over everything else.

Another buzz shook my phone.

Not from the building.

From Lizzy in 11A across the hall.

what the fuck is wrong with her feet?