He takes a few steps into the apartment and his shoes stick to the floor. There is something disrupting the grain of the hardwood. A glistening tackiness. He crouches to examine it. He can see little slivers in it now, what appears to be hair. And it’s everywhere. Not a specific trail, but a larger mess. What could be blood.

The whimper sounds again, this time rising to a yowl. He startles, because it seems to come from all around him. “Darla?” he says, and his eyes settle on the shadows below the couch. Something is moving.

Out of the darkness, it slithers more than crawls. All teeth and blood and muscle. Like something born too early. He doesn’t understand it to be a cat at first. Not until it opens its mouth to hiss. Some of the hair has been roughly shorn from its body. And hatch marks redden its bare skin. One of its eyes is jellied in its socket. The cat flashes by him and races, with a yammering cry, for a secret space deeper in the apartment.

From here he can see the length of the layout. All the way through the dinette, kitchen, to another door that likely leads to a shared basement. A hallway branching off the kitchen must lead to the bathroom and bedroom. And it’s here that he goes, his feet syrup-sticky, calling out to Darla and trying to muffle the chest-shaking coughs that bother him all the way.

The bedroom consists of a bed and a bureau. She’s not as messy as he is, but close, with heaps of rain and snow gear lying about, a pair of cross-country skis stacked in one corner, a snowboard in the other. A backpack rests on its side like a black pupa. A beige bra dangles from a doorknob. The cat mewls and growls beneath the bed, as if it can’t decide whether to give in to pain or rage.

“Darla?” he says again when he tries the bathroom, the door half-shut. He pushes it open and finds the sink and toilet splattered with the same mess she left behind in the lab’s trash can.

A window is open and the rain sizzles outside. A breeze blows through, and the shower curtain breathes it in and out. He can’t be sure if he hears someone whispering on the other side or if it’s the sound of wet tires on the road. He creeps closer and reaches out a hand to tug aside the curtain, but before he can, the wind shifts and the fabric eases back and takes the shape of a face pressed against it.

The eyes appear as gray hollows and something wet soaks through where the mouth is.