It was a Sunday.
Jane remembered this clearly, afterward — the particular quality of a Sunday afternoon, grey and quiet, her flat smelling of the soup she'd made for lunch. She'd been expecting Luke at three. It was half past two when someone knocked at her door.
She wasn't expecting anyone. Maya had a family thing. Her downstairs neighbour, Mr. Chen, knocked like a small determined woodpecker, and this knock was nothing like that — three slow, deliberate raps, like a metronome.
She looked through the peephole.
A man. Tall. Dark coat. She couldn't see his face clearly.
"Who is it?" she called.
No answer.
She should not have opened the door. Every horror movie, every true crime podcast, every piece of common sense she possessed told her not to open the door to a silent stranger.
She opened the door.
Later, she would blame the soup fumes for impairing her judgement.
The man in the doorway was not, she registered in the single second before her world went sideways, the man she'd half-expected and half-feared. He was middle-aged, thin, with nondescript features and colourless eyes and the particular blankness of someone doing a job.
She had time to open her mouth.
She had time to draw breath.
And then something pressed against her face — fabric, a smell she couldn't identify, sharp and chemical and immediately disorienting — and the grey Sunday afternoon folded up like a piece of paper, and the last thing she saw, blurring at the edges, was a pair of eyes watching from further back in the corridor.
Storm-grey. Cold. Certain.
She knew those eyes. She had only seen them once, across a crowded room, and she had not forgotten them.
Then there was nothing.