One Flight Behind at the Cambridge Street Car Park

My aunt Denise won't take the stairs in any car park now, not even the two-storey one at Tesco, and for years she wouldn't explain why. She told me the whole thing last November, at her kitchen table, peeling a satsuma into one long spiral and not looking at me while she talked.

She worked nights at the Cambridge Street multi-storey in Bolton for about six years, maybe seven, she always loses track, the one behind the old Debenhams that's a gym now. Eight floors, one stairwell at the north end because the lifts packed in around 2015 and never got fixed properly. She liked the job. Radio for company, flask of tea, the odd drunk asleep in a Fiesta. Her supervisor kept a whippet in the booth some winters, a scrawny thing called Ronnie that she says she still thinks about more than she'd like to admit, though it's got nothing to do with any of this.

The rule she worked out, not one anyone taught her, was this: if you're on the stairs and you hear someone behind you, count the landings. Whoever it is stays exactly one flight back. You go down, they're a flight up. You stop on three, they stop on four. She tested it for weeks without telling anyone. Sped up, slowed down, sat on a step for ten minutes with her thermos. The gap never changed. One flight. Always.

What she worked out next, she wishes she hadn't. If you turn round and look up the stairwell, there's nobody there, obviously, there never is. But the moment you look away again, the sound isn't behind you any more. It's ahead. Same one flight, but below you now if you were going down, or above if you were going up, and coming towards you instead of following.

Her rule, the one she actually kept to, was never check. Whatever floor you're heading for, keep going. Don't stop to listen. Don't look back to see if it's still there.

Because the one time she did stop, she was on floor five, nearly done for the night, and she wanted to hear if it was still keeping pace. The footsteps didn't come from a flight away that time. They came from directly above her, on the same flight, close enough that she felt the draught off the fire door swing when it should have pushed past her instead.

She didn't see anything. She never saw anything, not once in six years. She just felt the air move, and after that night she started counting floors out loud under her breath, every single time, because if you lose count you don't know which flight it's on any more. And if you don't know that, you don't know which direction it's going to come from.

She finished the satsuma. Didn't eat it. Just left the spiral of peel sitting there on the plate, whole, unbroken, like she'd forgotten what it was for halfway through.

"Anyway," she said, "that building's flats now. They kept the stairwell."

I hadn't told her I was renting one of those flats. Floor six, north end. The old fire door still swings on its hinge if the wind's up, and the letting agent had called that a character feature.

I'm on the stairs now, actually, phone against my ear, three flights up carrying a case of beer for tonight. Somewhere below me, one flight down, exactly one, something has started keeping time with my feet.

I stop talking.

I start counting.