The Lights on 998 · Chapter one
The Letter
The first letter from 998 wasn’t addressed to anyone. It found me anyway.
It was on the mat when I came home, face-down and wet at the corners, as if it had been waiting in the rain for someone else and given up.
No stamp. No postmark. Just four words across the front in brown ink that had run a little: To whoever finds this.
The seal was red wax, pressed with a number I didn’t recognise yet. 998.
I remember thinking it was a mistake, that it belonged next door, or to the people before me. I remember turning it over to check.
And I remember the feeling, the one I didn’t have a word for until later: warm windows, cold air, the sense that someone had only just left.
I didn’t open it that night.
It opened anyway.
In the morning the wax was in two pieces on the mat and the flap was up, though I’d left it on the table.
Inside: a key, iron, heavier than it looked, and a card the colour of old teeth. One line on it. 998. After dark. Bring nothing.
I looked for the street. Maps, the council site, the man at the kiosk who has lived here forty years. There is no 998. There has never been a 998.
The key was warm. That’s the part I kept coming back to. It sat on the table all day in a cold kitchen and when I picked it up it was warm, the way a stone is warm after a day in the sun.
I put it in my coat pocket, to stop thinking about it.
It didn’t work.
I went out at ten. I told myself it was for milk.
My road ends at a wall, the way it always has. Except there was a gap in the wall, and a sign on it, iron, the paint mostly gone, three numbers left where the paint had held.
I have walked past that wall every day for six years.
Fog on the other side, thick enough to lean on. Gas lamps, real ones, hissing. Cobbles. Houses leaning in over the lane like people listening.
And every window lit. Every one, in every house, up and down the street, warm and yellow and steady.
Not a sound. No music, no plates, no voices. Just light.
I walked. I don’t know how long. The lane bent, and climbed, and the fog let go of a spire, then a tower, then took them back.
Every window lit.
Except one.
Three floors up, at the end, in a house narrower than the ones beside it: one black window, like a missing tooth.
I stood under it for a long time. The key in my pocket was hot now.
I want to be exact about this, because it matters. The window did not light up. Nothing moved in the street. The lamps did not flicker.
Something in the dark window lifted a hand, slowly, the way you do to someone you have been expecting.
End of chapter one.
This is chapter one of The Lights on 998. You can also read it as a book, a page at a time.