Page 3 of Atlas of Unknowable Things

Meanwhile, I was walking on eggshells around Paloma.

Her behavior was just so off. It was only little things at first—superstitious attachments, an uncharacteristic focus on the macabre.

She seemed consumed by a pervasive, endless sense of dread.

And then there were her eyes. It was like a film had been removed from them, rendering them clearer, yes, but almost violently so.

A manic aura began to surround her, and without any indication as to her motives, she started adhering to increasingly bizarre rituals—taking the screens off windows and hanging strange things out of them like Coke bottles and compact mirrors.

Removing screens from windows was especially upsetting: I am allergic to bee venom and was pretty sure some neighbor was operating a rooftop apiary because I kept finding dead bees inside.

But when I tried to talk to Paloma about this, she denied having done anything.

And then there was the night she spread coffee grounds all over the kitchen counter and used them to draw what looked like a map.

I should have done something, but I just ignored the situation.

Paloma kept to herself, and I spent my days immersed in research.

One afternoon when Paloma was out, I went into her room to see if she had any safety pins in her drawer.

That’s when I noticed her computer open with an email drafted, but not addressed to anyone in particular.

I know I shouldn’t have snooped, but it wasn’t so much snooping as seeing.

It was hard to miss: Help! the missive began.

And from there, it got increasingly deranged.

She wrote about being kidnapped. She wrote about what sounded like monsters—she called them Terrible Ones—and was convinced that people were following her and stealing her memories.

That was the day I decided to get her some medical attention.

I set up an appointment with a psychiatrist in Midtown for the following week, but as it turned out, we wouldn’t make it that long.

The next morning she was gone. There was a note sitting on the kitchen counter.

Went to California.

That was all it said. I tried to text her, but I got no reply.

When a day passed and I didn’t hear from her, I thought about calling and reporting it, but who the hell would I call?

She hadn’t actually done anything except act a little batty and go to California without a plan.

That had to describe at least 50 percent of the people currently in California.

I decided to be chill about it and wait for her to return.

The days that followed—my time alone in the apartment—were to serve as my introduction to one of the strangest, most unsettling episodes in my life.

Time alone shouldn’t have bothered me, but there was something about the way the wind seemed to moan as it swept through the balcony railings that set my nerves on end.

That first night without Paloma, I was plagued all evening by a sense of a presence.

Now, what do I mean when I say “a presence”?

In woo-woo new age circles, we mean a ghost or a spirit, but I am neither woo-woo nor new age.

I am persnickety, contrarian, and old beyond my years.

When I say I felt a presence, I mean that I felt like someone was watching me, or like there was an actual person inside the apartment with me, something I knew to be impossible.

And yet that eerie, creeping sensation of being watched persisted.

When I went to bed that night, I fell asleep easily enough, but was tormented by nightmares.

The next day I still couldn’t shake that horrible feeling that I wasn’t alone.

And then just before bed, I was working at the desk in the living room when I began, yet again, to feel uneasy.

I had a bunch of papers spread out before me and was sipping orange juice to keep myself awake—I wasn’t to the point of drafting, where I would drink coffee all night, but I was getting close.

I was reading about a werewolf sighting in Bavaria that took place in the summer of 1816.

I won’t bore you with an exhaustive account of my research, but in this instance, it’s worth unpacking a little. You will understand why later.

So, Bavaria, 1816, we have a peasant who swore she saw a creature attacking her lambs.

Terrified, she locked herself and her children in her home and didn’t dare come out until morning, at which point, she discovered that the poor lambs had been drained of blood.

She didn’t call it a vampire, although that’s what most superstitious people would call it today.

Instead, she called it a werewolf. I was tempted to categorize it as a vampire for the purposes of my research; after all, our current conception of the vampire wasn’t as much in the public consciousness back then.

Although the idea of the vampire was an old one, it didn’t take on a life of its own until John William Polidori published his short story “The Vampyre” in 1819.

Famously, in 1816—the same year the lambs in question were exsanguinated in a far-flung Bavarian province—Polidori and his much more famous friends Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron were holed up in a villa on Lake Geneva writing their ghost stories, one of which would become the “The Vampyre,” and one of which would become Frankenstein.

Eighteen-sixteen was known as the Year Without Summer because of the aberrant, dreadfully cold weather, with dark skies and black rain all caused, it would seem, by the eruption of a volcano in Indonesia disrupting weather patterns.

Without that eruption, we might never have had the modern incarnation of vampires or Frankenstein’s monster, or …

or … whatever Byron and Percy Shelley wrote during that fateful trip.

I found it curious that this case of the Bavarian lamb-slaughtering vampire occurred in the same year that the weather patterns had been so disrupted, and I wondered if this might have anything to do with a change in the hunting habits of predator populations in the region.

I was making a note of it when suddenly—I swear to you—I heard someone whispering right behind me.

With a jolt, I turned my head, but the hall was empty.

“Hello?” I called.

I turned back around and picked up my pen, but my hand was shaking so badly that I couldn’t even pretend to write.

All at once, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end again.

Please excuse the reuse of this cliché, but it’s a genuine response to fear called piloerection, and there’s just no other way to describe what happened to me.

Once again, I distinctly heard someone say:

This isn’t real.

It was so loud and clear that I jumped up from my desk, knocking over my glass of orange juice, which was lapped up by the eager piles of the shag carpet. I was so terrified, though, that I didn’t care. I just stared in horror.

The hallway was empty. And then I heard someone whisper:

Hell …

I’m embarrassed to say I screamed. I picked up my pen as if to use it as a weapon, like a girl walking alone at night.

“Who’s there?” I demanded, my voice reaching octaves I didn’t know were within my power.

But there was no reply. I mean … obviously there was no reply. The hallway was always empty.

When I looked back down at my desk, I saw that there were four symbols now in my notes—symbols I had no memory of drawing.

The next morning, I received an email from Hildegard College. I’d been accepted for their library residency. They said they could welcome me as early as the following week. That message couldn’t have come a moment too soon.