There is no number 13 in Nether Oak Close.
Not even officially. The council plans jump neatly from 12 to 14, as if the omission were an act of clerical tidiness rather than fear. But everyone on the Close knows better, because between them tucked into the bend of the road where the streetlight flickers twice before settling, stands number 12a.
It used to be 13.
Silas McNaughton was having none of that , his Triskaidekaphobia saw to that.
It took him three years of letters, appeals, counter-appeals and one memorably detailed diagram involving ley lines, Celtic burial customs, and a photocopied page from The Big Book of Household Omens to persuade the council to change the number. In the end, they did it not because they believed him, but because they would have done anything to make him shut the **** up.
Still, the post never quite got the message.
Once or twice a week, an envelope would arrive addressed, carelessly, maliciously, to Number 13, Nether Oak Close. The local postman, Charlie, would sigh, take out his black marker, strike through the offending number and write 12a in a careful, respectful hand. He never mentioned it. Charlie had learned that some things were better ignored.
Silas appreciated this.
Silas appreciated order.
He was a small man with a soft voice and a mind like a cupboard full of carefully labelled jars. His superstitions were not random; they were curated. Black cats were good fortune, so every morning he left a saucer of milk and a little plate of fish by his back door. Freya, the neighbour’s black cat, came unfailingly, brushed past his ankles, and sat with her tail wrapped neatly around her paws while Silas murmured thanks.
Spiders were money-bringers. Each one was caught gently in a glass jar and released into the hedge at the edge of the Close, accompanied by a whispered apology for the inconvenience.
Guests, few though there were, were always guided out through the same door they had entered. Silas was very firm on that point. He did not explain why.
There were no mirrors in the house. None at all. Not even in the bathroom. Reflections, Silas believed, encouraged lingering and breakages where not even thought about.
He did not own a ladder.
And the driveway, once neatly paved, had been torn up and replaced with smooth black tarmacadam, flawless and unbroken. No cracks. No gaps.
“Can’t be too careful,” Silas had told the contractors, when they laughed and asked why. “Ginny Green Teeth is clever. She likes edges.”
Most people smiled indulgently at Silas McNaughton. Nether Oak Close was tolerant that way. Everyone had their quirks.
It was 23:17 on New Year’s eve when the knocking started.
Not loud. Not urgent. Just three slow taps on the front door of number 12a.
Silas froze, champagne flute untouched on the sideboard. He had not invited anyone. He never did on New Year’s Eve, thresholds were dangerous enough without the year turning over at the same time.
The knocking came again.
Three taps.
Silas’s heart thudded. He checked the hallway instinctively. No mirrors. Good. The cat dish was empty, Freya had been. The spiders were all accounted for.
He approached the door and, crucially, did not open it.
“Who is it?” he asked, softly.
There was a pause. Then a voice, faint and oddly flat, as if spoken through a letterbox that wasn’t there.
“Number thirteen.”
Silas’s breath caught.
“There is no number thirteen,” he said, firmly.
Another pause. Then: “There was.”
The temperature in the hall dropped. Silas could feel it in his bones, the way you feel damp before you see it.
“You changed the sign,” the voice continued. “You changed the post. You changed the maps. But you didn’t change me.”
Silas stepped back. His heel struck something solid.
A crack.
Impossible. The driveway ….
But this was inside.
The floor beneath his feet, smooth for decades, had split. A thin dark line ran from the skirting board to the centre of the hall, widening, breathing.
From it rose the smell of wet stone and river weed.
“New Year’s is a crossing,” the voice said gently. “Doors matter. Numbers matter. You can’t just paint over them.”
The crack widened.
Silas did the only thing he could think of.
He opened the door.
The hall light flickered. Cold air rushed past him, carrying laughter, fireworks, the distant cheer of the Close welcoming the year in.
And then, nothing.
The crack was gone. The floor was whole.
Outside, Nether Oak Close was unchanged, the children from number 16 were charging around their garden, Michael was walking past towards with a tray of cookies towards Oisin who lived in number 2, he waved and Michael smiled and wished him a “Happy New Year”
Silas waved back and closed the door.
Not carefully. Not properly. It drifted shut behind him of its own accord with the soft, domestic sound of a latch settling into place.
The house was warm again.
Too warm.
The living room light was on.
Silas stood in the hallway for a long moment, listening. There was no movement, no footsteps, no sound of breathing, but there was the faint, unmistakable scent of smoke. Not cigarettes as he knew them, but something sweeter, darker, faintly floral.
Sobranie.
He had not smelled one of those since he had tried to impress Sally, the girl he wished he had managed to persuade to go on a date when he was sixteen.
Silas straightened his cardigan, an absurd reflex, and stepped into the living room.
Maura Eddington was sitting on his sofa.
She had arranged herself comfortably, one leg tucked beneath her, the other draped over the arm as if she had always sat that way. The piu piu grass skirt whispered softly when she moved. Around her shoulders lay the pink feather boa, faded but defiant. Beneath it all, utterly incongruous and yet somehow perfect, was a leopard-print lycra bodysuit that caught the light when she shifted.
She was smoking.
The black Sobranie cigarette was held in a long, dark wooden holder, angled just so, as if she had never learned another way. Smoke curled lazily toward the ceiling and did not set off the alarm. Which of course it didn’t.
Silas noticed this and filed it away.
She looked… well… that is for being 10 years dead.
Not young, exactly, but not dead either. Her hair was swept back in the same careless style Silas remembered from the old photographs: laughing at a street party, arms thrown around people whose names no one now recalled. Her eyes were sharp. Assessing.
Amused.
Silas swallowed.
“Hello,” he said.
It came out thinner than he intended.
Maura turned her head slowly and looked at him properly for the first time. Her gaze travelled from his shoes, sensible, polished, to the careful line of his trousers, the buttoned cardigan, the absence of mirrors reflected nowhere.
“Well,” she said, exhaling smoke. “You’ve redecorated.”
Silas nodded, once.
He hesitated, then tried again. “Maura?”
Her smile widened.
“Oh, good,” she said. “You do know who I am. I’d hate to think I’d been forgotten in my own sitting room.”
Silas flinched.
“This is, this is number twelve-A,” he said, automatically. “Number thirteen doesn’t—”
Maura lifted a finger.
“No,” she said gently. “Don’t.”
She patted the cushion beside her. It dipped, just a fraction, as if inviting the idea of weight.
Silas did not sit.
“You’re very tidy,” she continued, glancing around. “Very careful. No cracks. No reflections. No way out but the way you came in.”
Her eyes flicked to the hallway.
“Clever,” she said. “But exhausting.”
Silas clasped his hands together to stop them shaking. “You’re dead,” he said, not accusingly. Merely stating a fact.
“So I am,” Maura replied cheerfully. “Have been for years. New Year’s Eve, if you want to be precise. I always did like a bit of classical good timing.”
She leaned forward, ash falling neatly into a saucer Silas did not own.
“I came home,” she went on. “Music, drinks, ridiculous clothes. My sister said I looked like a lunatic. I told her lunatics have more fun.”
Her eyes softened, just for a moment.
“And I did.”
Silas felt something shift inside him, unease, certainly, but also the faintest ripple of… envy.
“You died,” he said again, quieter now.
Maura nodded. “Heart gave out. Or maybe I’d simply had enough. Depends on who you asked.”
She looked at him sharply. “You are asking, aren’t you?”
Silas did not answer.
She smiled.
“That’s why I’m here,” she said. “Not to haunt. Not to rattle chains. I hate all that. I came because you tried to erase me.”
The room seemed to tilt, ever so slightly.
“You took my number,” she continued. “My threshold. My place in the order of things. And numbers matter, Silas. You of all people know that.”
He did know, he counted the stairs ever time he went up and down, the number of steps from the bathroom to the bedroom wardrobe in the morning, the number of times his toothbrush went up and down, it had to be an even number NEVER odd, it was as you would expect always the same number every time.
“And,” she added lightly, tapping ash again, “because it’s New Year’s Eve. And this house remembers me.”
The lights flickered.
Silas thought of the crack in the floor that was no longer there.
“I don’t want trouble,” he said.
Maura laughed, bright, sudden sound that belonged utterly to the living.
“Oh, love,” she said. “Neither did I.”
She stood.
The grass skirt whispered.
“Sit down,” she said kindly. “We have the whole night. And you and I need to talk about what happens to a house when you pretend part of it never existed.”
Maura sat back down, crossing her legs.
“You heard the knock,” she said, not asking.
Silas nodded.
“Because you listen,” she continued. “Everyone else on this Close barrels through the world as if nothing is watching them back. You catalogue it. You account for it. You leave space.”
She tilted her head.
“You’re the fly in my ointment, Silas McNaughton. The one loose thread. If anyone could still hear number thirteen knock, it was always going to be you.”
Silas absorbed this slowly.
“What do you want?” he asked at last.
Maura’s expression changed then, not sad, exactly, but thinner, more careful.
“I left something behind,” she said. “On purpose, at first. Later… I couldn’t get back to it.”
She gestured upward, toward the ceiling.
“The attic.”
Silas went very still.
“I don’t go up there,” he said.
“I know.”
“I don’t own a ladder.”
“I also know.”
She smiled faintly. “It’s a photograph. Small. Silver frame. Two girls sitting on a wall above a beach in Greystones. Wicklow. Wind in our hair. Salt on our lips.”
Her voice softened.
“My sister has forgotten that day,” Maura said. “She remembers the stories about me. The wildness. The rumours. I want her to remember the girl who laughed so hard she nearly fell off a wall.”
She looked directly at him.
“You erased my number,” she said gently. “Help me put that back.”
Michael answered the door with a tray of half-eaten cookies and a puzzled expression.
“A ladder?” he repeated. “At your place?”
Silas nodded, mortified. “Just for a moment.”
Michael studied him, then smiled.
“Course,” he said. “Everyone needs a ladder sometimes.”
They set it up beneath the attic hatch.
Silas hovered at the foot of it, hands clenched. The ladder felt enormous in his hallway. Wrong. Too present. Seven rungs. He counted them twice.
The attic hatch loomed above, its outline darker than the ceiling around it, as if it had been holding something back all these years.
“I can’t,” Silas whispered.
Michael placed a steadying hand on the ladder. “I’ve got it,” he said. “It won’t go anywhere.”
Maura appeared beside Silas, smoke curling toward the hatch.
“Seven up,” she said calmly. “Seven down. That’s fourteen. Perfectly respectable number.”
Silas swallowed.
He climbed.
Each rung felt like a small betrayal of everything he had carefully arranged his life to avoid. At the top, he pushed the hatch open.
Nothing rushed out.
Inside were boxes. Old coats. Bags folded into themselves. Dust, yes, but no teeth, no hands, no waiting shapes.
Maura leaned in beside him, impossibly solid.
“There,” she said, pointing.
A tan suitcase.
Silas retrieved it, heart hammering, and descended slowly. Seven down. Fourteen. Safe.
He closed the hatch.
The ladder came down.
Michael chatted about nothing while Silas thanked him far too many times. Michael left, ladder in hand, none the wiser.
Maura opened the suitcase.
Inside, wrapped in a scarf that smelled faintly of sea air, was the photograph.
She touched it once.
“That’ll do,” she said.
And for the first time, the room felt properly quiet.
Maura’s sister lived three streets away, in a house that still had its original number and had never once argued with it.
Silas stood on the path for a long moment before knocking the silver-framed photograph heavy in his hands. He had wrapped it carefully in brown paper and string, nothing flashy, nothing tempting.
The door opened on a woman with Maura’s eyes, though quieter somehow, as if she had learned to keep them guarded.
“Yes?” she said.
Silas cleared his throat. “Ms. Eddington. I….this is going to sound odd.”
She smiled faintly. “It usually does.”
He handed her the parcel.
“I live in Nether Oak Close,” he said. “At twelve-A.”
Something flickered across her face at that, but she said nothing.
She unwrapped the photograph slowly. When she saw it, her breath caught, not sharply, but as if something long held had finally loosened.
“Oh,” she said.
The wall. The sea behind them. Two girls laughing.
“She loved that day,” the woman said softly. “She talked about it all the time, and I” She stopped, then laughed quietly. “I’d forgotten what it looked like.”
Silas shifted his weight. “She wanted you to have it.”
The woman looked up. “She?”
Silas hesitated, then nodded once.
Ms Eddington studied him for a moment, really studied him, and then, quite deliberately, she did not ask the obvious question.
“Thank you,” she said. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
Silas shook his head. “No, but… thank you.”
As he turned to leave, she added, “She always did hate loose ends.”
Silas smiled despite himself.
“So do I,” he said.
When Silas returned home, the house felt different.
Finished.
The living room was exactly as he had left it, tidy, ordered, safe. The faint scent of smoke was gone. The sofa cushions lay undisturbed.
On the sideboard stood a single black Sobranie cigarette, unlit, laid neatly beside the saucer.
Silas did not touch it.
That night, he slept soundly.
In the weeks that followed, small things changed.
The post stopped arriving for number thirteen altogether.
The crack never returned, but Silas no longer checked the floor every morning.
He bought his own attic ladder, with 6 rungs 6 and 12 seemed … better.
It lived in the shed, leaned carefully against the wall, and though he did not use it again, he no longer felt uneasy knowing it was there.
Once, just once, Silas considered hanging a mirror in the hallway.
He decided against it.
Some things, he thought, were fine left un-reflected.
Silas noticed it on the morning of the second of January.
He was standing at the back door, setting out Freya’s saucer of milk, when something caught his eye on the hall table.
He frowned.
He was certain he had not put anything there.
It was a small thing. Easily overlooked. A silver paper party hat, carefully folded and placed beside his neatly stacked post. The elastic was intact. The paper faintly creased, as if it had been worn once, briefly, and then set aside with care.
Silas stared at it for a long time.
He did not touch it.
Instead, he looked around the hallway. The walls were bare as ever. No mirrors. No cracks. No reflections watching him back.
Everything was in order.
And yet……
Later that day, Charlie the postman arrived with the usual bundle. As he turned to leave, he hesitated.
“Odd thing,” he said. “Your number.”
Silas felt his stomach tighten. “What about it?”
Charlie pointed.
The small brass plaque by the door still read 12a.
But beneath it, barely noticeable unless you were looking—unless you always looked—was a second marking, scratched lightly into the metal, no deeper than a fingernail could manage.
Not a thirteen.
Just and X and three small lines.
XIII.
Charlie shrugged. “Probably been there years. Funny how you only see things once you stop trying not to.”
Silas waited until he was alone.
Then he took a cloth and polished the plaque carefully.
He did not remove the marks.
Some things, he had learned, were better acknowledged than erased.
That night, as the streetlight settled without flickering, Silas raised a glass, not of champagne, but of tea, and said, quietly, to an empty room:
“Happy New Year, Maura.”
And somewhere, quite out of sight, a woman laughed.