The bedroom door was ajar. Peter hadn’t even heard the handle turn. It was just open. Bluish light at the doorway struck a path to Peter’s knees, illuminating patches of bare weave in the carpet. But the front room was dim. The neon lights of Mainstreet were out for the night. Only the veil of snow falling past the bay window made silhouettes of the dining table and couch. There was silence. But there was no Cooper.

Peter stood at the bedroom door. His eyes travelled across the walls, taking in the rectangles of darker wood where the picture frames and television set used to be, almost expecting one of them to be shaped like a Cooper. But he wasn’t one of those either. Peter crossed into the front room, noticing how the softness of the carpet changed to the tacky sheen of the floorboards against the soles of his feet. But his eyes remained forward.

The clock made its presence known, ticking quietly at his shoulder. The refrigerator purred. But Peter was almost glad of the company. Cooper wasn’t in the kitchenette either. A draught brushed across his ankles and he turned. The front door was open. He hadn’t heard the handle turn. It was just open.

Peter stood at the window, hands pressed to the glass, watching the street below. There was nothing but snowed-up cars and the night. And footprints. A deer’s perhaps, or a wolf’s. Maybe the animals had wandered into this world while Cooper had wandered into theirs. Peter looked again. One of the footprints was human. Not booted, but bare, with the pad of the foot and five little indents in the snow, one for each toe. He turned back towards the hallway and saw Cooper’s boots still standing there. His toes would freeze then turn as black as charcoal if he stayed out there too long. If he was even out there. Perhaps the feet belonged to one of the Dead. Perhaps there was no difference now – the Dead and the Returned made one at night, free to stalk the streets, free to roam the Earth while the rest of the world slept. Peter’s stomach swilled, guilty to have had another thought like Darlene’s. He moved along the bay, following the footprints, watching them tail off inside the hurrying snow further up Mainstreet. It was almost as if Cooper had been right there but not there at all. Like the rectangles on the wall, the footprints were merely an echo of something that once was. An imprint. A memory. A ghost.

The canoe’s red paint, now full of heat, blistered beneath the burn of the midday sun. Blue jays swooped down from the forest’s gleaming pines to drink. Bull elks took to the shore. Peter waited in the middle of the lake and something slipped beneath the hull of the canoe.

Cooper’s body rippled in broken prisms beneath the surface.