Serena took her finger off the button and did her patented shrug-and-smirk combo. “That should take care of that. Now, can we please go finish the—”
A sudden burst of strobing light flashed in the windows, filling the apartment with searing brightness; a roaring crash of thunder followed quickly after, seeming to shake the whole building. They all yelped in surprise, then yelped again when the lights cut out and the apartment was plunged into darkness.
“Well, crap,” said Serena.
“I can’t see!” said Emrys. The dazzling flash of lightning had set his vision buzzing. He flailed about, accidentally smacking Hazel in the face.
“None of us can,” Hazel said, batting away his hand. “Give it a minute.”
There was a moment of absolute silence as they waited for their eyes to adjust. Emrys checked his pockets for his phone, then realized he’d left it on the couch.
And then the door buzzer, right beside them, shrilled loudly.
This time, Hazel didn’t scream. Or maybe she did, and Emrys simply couldn’t hear it. This close, the buzzer was so loud—he clapped his hands to his ears, desperate for the sound to stop, but it kept going in a long, uninterrupted shriek.
Suddenly, a light cut through the void. Hazel found her phone and activated her flashlight app, and now the entryway was lit in a harsh blue-white light. The shadows moved at severe angles as she swung the phone around to illuminate their surroundings. Emrys saw Serena pounding her fist against the intercom in a vain attempt to make it stop. When it became clear that wasn’t working, Serena gripped it with both hands—and ripped it off the wall.
The noise stopped immediately.
“Dang,” Emrys said, and his voice sounded weirdly faint in his ringing ears. “What was that about?”
“These stupid things are older than my parents,” Serena said brightly. “Now we’ll get a new one. I did us a favor!”
Hazel was quiet. She peered at the space where the intercom had been. Emrys followed her gaze and saw a few small wires sticking out from a hole in the wall.
“I’ll get some candles,” Serena said, already walking across the room. Peering out a window, she said, “It looks like the neighbors still have power. Was our building struck by lightning?”
Emrys undid the dead bolt and opened the door. He could make out Serena’s welcome mat, and beyond it, the very edge of the stairwell. Past the boundary of Hazel’s light, however, all was pitch black. “The whole building’s dark,” Emrys said. He turned to Hazel, whose brows were screwed up in worry. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just … the buzzer went off after the power went out. But don’t the intercoms use electricity?”
Before Emrys had a chance to process her question, he heard something out there in the dark.
It was the sound of the door downstairs—the entrance to the building, on the ground floor. There was no jangle of keys; no grinding of the ancient, stubborn lock.
Just the click of the opening door, and the clack as it fell back into place.
And then, the sound of someone whistling.
Hazel locked eyes with Emrys. Her hand shook, and the light shook with it, making the shadows on her face twist and bend. Neither of them said anything; they both held their breath and listened.
Click, click came the sound of footfalls in the stairwell.
Click, click. The cheerful whistling continued, the notes bright and clear.
Click, click. The melody was familiar—wasn’t it? Yet Emrys couldn’t quite place it.
Click, click. Whoever it was, they had made it to the second-floor landing.
Maybe they’d stop there. Maybe—
Click, click. No. No, they were still coming.
Click, click. Pretty soon Emrys would be able to see them. Whoever was whistling, they’d be coming around the bend in the staircase in just another moment. He peered into the darkness beyond Hazel’s light, which bobbed unsteadily, casting writhing, distorted shadows beyond the threshold. He gripped her wrist to steady the light; he squinted to get a better look …
Hazel quickly but quietly closed the door.
“What was that?” Serena edged back toward them, but Hazel shushed her, and slowly slid the dead bolt into place as silently as she could. Then she turned off her light, plunging them back into darkness.
Emrys couldn’t see anything, but his hearing seemed to sharpen with fear.
He could hear his heart pounding in his chest.
He could hear Hazel, breathing raggedly beside him.
And he could hear that whistling—that pretty, melodic, cheerful whistling—as the whistler walked past Serena’s door and up, up, up the winding staircase.
The Nightingale Box
From the New Rotterdam Wiki Project
The earliest record of the Nightingale Box comes from the journal of Liu Feng Chao, a young fishing trawler whose family relocated to New Rotterdam from Santa Barbara in the 1880s. An amateur poet and meticulous diarist, Liu Feng wrote of finding a strange puzzle box amidst his catch one morning, describing it as “a sealed cell of bronze, wood, and glass.” He noted that he would occasionally hear musical trills from within, as if a songbird were trapped inside.
The next several entries of Liu Feng’s diaries catalog his frustrated attempts at opening the box. The aspiring poet was sure that cracking the lock mechanism would free the “pure inspiration” captured within. Each time he solved one of the puzzle’s components, Liu Feng claimed he was rewarded with bursts of creative insight. Indeed, of his collected poems, the ones written during this period are widely considered his best. “Drowned Nightingale,” written just a day before his death, has been described by the New Rotterdam Cultural Institute as “the poetic masterpiece of its time.”
