The Vanishing 13th Step：Chapter 2

"This house will eat up the sound."

Old John from the town's hardware store threw bolts into a tin bucket, and the sound of metal collisions became muffled as if something had swallowed them. He pointed to the photo of the stairs I brought with me: "All the old houses in Cold Spring have only 12 steps, and the 13th step is for the Lingering Ones."

Now I am standing in the middle of the spiral staircase, and the counter on my phone shows 13. There is a notch on the back of the 7th step, and with a magnifying glass, it is a Latin sentence: "Qui inveniet nos?" (Who will find us?) The cotton of the attic dolls leaked from the rips in the skirt, and when I scanned the wall with a building surveying laser, the rag dolls suddenly pointed to the west tower.

The woman who was crossed out in the family album appeared - in the shadow of the trees in the picnic photo in 1923, she held a Leica M3 camera exactly like mine.