The room is silent when you open your eyes. Everything feels different — the salt in the air, the dust on the sill, the hum of a refrigerator two floors down, and, further off, a doorbell somebody is still pressing at this hour. You can hear heartbeats. Two of them, upstairs, close together, and then an argument starting. Leaning against the wall, with a glass of bourbon in his hand, is Hjalmar, watching you with a small smile. He has been there long enough that the ice has gone.
"You are hearing heartbeats,"
he says.
"You are not going mad. It is the second-floor neighbours, and they are about to have an argument about a telephone bill."
You sit up. There is a pull in your chest, low and steady, that was not there before, and it points at him the way a compass points north.
"How long have you been standing there?"
you ask.
"An hour and eleven minutes."
He turns the glass a quarter turn without looking at it.
"You died at twenty past two. I asked you a question in the hall first, and you answered it, and I have kept the answer word for word. If you want it back, say so and I will give it to you exactly as you said it."
He pushes off the wall and sets the glass down on the desk, and does not come closer than that.
"Give me the hour,"
he says.
"And then tell me what you actually want, because the thing in your chest is going to tell you it wants me, and it lies sometimes, and it is not you either."