Jonah caught the door before it could bang three in the morning was no hour for a loud entrance and let the hydraulic wheeze sigh itself shut behind him.
Griddy’s Donuts: the same fluorescent hum and burnt-coffee smell as every graveyard-shift counter he’d ever worked, right down to the sign outside that had flickered twice on his walk over, like it was warning him off in code only it understood.
Jonah counted exits.
Front door.
Kitchen door behind the counter.
Emergency exit rear left, the bar across it rusted enough to scream if pushed.
Uno, dos, tres.
His hands were cold.
The rain had stopped twenty minutes ago, but the cold had settled into his jacket and stayed.
Six stools were occupied.
An old woman near the window.
A man in coveralls with plaster dust on his shoulders.
And Klaus Hargreeves, six stools down from the door, talking to a man who was not on the stool next to him.
Jonah sat three stools from the door.
Far enough not to crowd.
Close enough to see.
The counterman the same actor, the same mustache, the same everything poured coffee without asking.
The mug was chipped at the rim.
The coffee smelled like every Walgreens break room Jonah had ever sat in, which meant it smelled like burnt oil and a machine that had not been descaled since the Clinton administration.
He drank.
It tasted exactly right.
Klaus was talking.
The voice was the voice theatrical, loud enough to fill the space, pitched like a man who’d learned to perform before he’d learned to just talk.
“and I told him, I said, darling, you cannot wear that to a funeral, this is a Hargreeves funeral, there are standards, there is an aesthetic, you simply cannot”
The dead man on stool five said nothing.
The dead man on stool five was translucent in the way glass was translucent there, but not all the way.
Older.
Fifties, maybe, in a coat that had been out of style before Jonah was born.
The dead man’s mouth was moving.
Klaus was not looking at him.
Jonah looked at his coffee.
His hands were shaking.
The Séance was not a thing he had done.
It was a thing that had happened the same way the Rumor had happened, the same way the gun had jammed and the sister’s name had burned out of his head.
No blue screen.
No notification.
Just a man on a stool who was dead, and Jonah could see him, and the dead man was turning now, slowly, the way a man turns when he feels eyes on him.
The dead man met Jonah’s eyes.
The dead man’s mouth stopped moving.
Jonah looked down.
Hands on the mug.
Counting to five in Spanish under his breath.
Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco.
When he looked up again the dead man was still staring.
Klaus had stopped talking.
Jonah did not look at Klaus.
He looked at the coffee.
He drank.
The coffee was bad in the exact way bad diner coffee was bad, which meant the world was holding, which meant the flannel jacket and the planted apartment and the funeral in three days were all real, which meant the dead man on stool five was real, which meant
Klaus laughed.
A loud, bright, performative laugh that filled the diner the way stage lights filled a stage.
“and that’s why I don’t go to Brooklyn anymore, the bagels are a lie, they are all lies”
The man in coveralls two stools over gave Klaus a look and went back to his eggs.
The dead man on stool five was still staring at Jonah.
Jonah finished the coffee.
He put a five-dollar bill on the counter the counterman took it without comment and stood.
Three steps to the door.
He did not look at Klaus.
He did not look at the dead man.
He looked at the door, and the door was three steps, and the hydraulic wheeze was exactly the sound it had been on the way in.
Outside, the rain had started again.
Light.
A mist that was not quite rain and not quite air.
Jonah walked.
Behind him, through the diner window, Klaus’s voice cut off mid-sentence.
Jonah did not look back.
He walked two blocks.
The rain thickened.
At the third block he stopped under an awning a pawn shop, closed, bars across the window and checked his hands.
Still shaking.
A sister erased.
A dead man seen.
The flannel jacket was not warm enough for October rain.
Marisol had taught him, when he was fourteen and could not sleep, to name five things he could see.
Grounding.
A teacher trick.
He tried it now.
One: the pawn shop sign, letters missing, reading AWN HOP.
Two: a car across the street, blue sedan, plates too far to read.
Three: his own hands, pale in the streetlight, shaking.
Four: the notebook in his back pocket, a weight he could feel through the jacket.
Five: a man in a janitor’s coat, walking out of Griddy’s, pulling a radio from his belt.
Jonah went still.
The man in the janitor’s coat did not look at him.
The man in the janitor’s coat looked at the radio, pressed a button, and spoke into it too far to hear, but the cadence was report-cadence, the same cadence a loss-prevention officer used when calling in a shoplifter to the manager.
Three sentences.
The man in the janitor’s coat put the radio away, turned, and walked in the opposite direction.
Gone.
Jonah stood under the awning and watched the rain come down and tried to remember whether a janitor had been in the diner in the show.
He could not.
The show had cut from Klaus at Griddy’s to the Hargreeves mansion, to Allison’s daughter on a phone call, to Luther on the moon.
No janitor.
But the show had not shown every customer.
The show had been a show.
This was not a show.
Jonah pulled the notebook from his pocket.
The pages were dry.
He wrote, standing under the pawn-shop awning in the rain, one line on page three:
Griddy’s 3am.
Klaus + dead man on stool 5.
Janitor w/ radio.
He closed the notebook.
The rain kept coming.
Somewhere two streets over, a siren started and stopped.
Three days to the funeral, and Klaus Hargreeves had just clocked a stranger who could see what Klaus saw.
And a man in a janitor’s coat had called someone, about something, nine hours before Cha-Cha and Hazel were supposed to shoot up a donut shop looking for Number Five.
Jonah walked home through the rain, counting doors in Spanish, and did not let himself think about the dead man’s eyes until he was back in the apartment with the door locked and the notebook open on the table.
The dead man had looked surprised.
Jonah wrote that down too.