The jar sat on the second shelf of the kitchen dresser, between a tin of dried fennel and a cracked ceramic rooster that nobody had ever bothered to throw away. It was not beautiful. It was not particularly old-looking, though Elspeth suspected it was very old indeed. Glazed in a dull amber that had gone slightly green at the lip, sealed with a cork stopper wrapped in dark thread, it was the kind of object that the eye slid past without meaning to. Guests never asked about it. Children never reached for it. Even the cat, who knocked everything else from every surface she could reach, had never once touched the jar.
Elspeth had grown up in this kitchen. She knew the sound the floorboards made in the cold, and the way the window above the sink fogged in winter so that the yard outside looked like something half-remembered from a dream. She knew which drawer stuck and which burner on the stove ran too hot. She knew everything about this house except the jar.
Her mother had never explained it. Her grandmother, before she died, had pressed Elspeth’s hand once and said only, “Leave it be, love. It’s not time.” Her great-aunt Rocio, who visited twice a year from the coast and smelled of salt and cedar, would look at the jar sometimes with an expression Elspeth could not name. Not fear. Not reverence. Something older than either.
I should tell you, I have watched this family for a long time. Longer than Elspeth knows. Longer, perhaps, than is comfortable to admit.
The morning it began to hum, Elspeth was making porridge.
She heard it before she understood what she was hearing — a low, steady resonance, like a finger run around the rim of a singing bowl, except that no one was touching anything. She stood very still with the wooden spoon in her hand. The sound rose and fell, almost like breathing. The jar sat exactly where it always had, between the fennel and the rooster, and yet the air around it seemed thicker, as though the light was having to work harder to pass through.
She put the spoon down.
That afternoon, her neighbor Gordon came by to return a borrowed ladder. Gordon was a broad, unhurried man in his late sixties who had lived on the lane longer than anyone else and who had a habit of saying almost the right thing at almost the right time, which Elspeth had always found both comforting and faintly unsettling. He came in for tea, as he usually did, and sat at the kitchen table with his large hands wrapped around the mug. His eyes moved to the dresser. They stayed there a moment too long.
“That old jar of yours,” he said, not quite casually. “Has it always had that color to it?”
“Yes,” Elspeth said. “Always.”
“Hm.” He sipped his tea. He did not look at it again, but she noticed he angled his chair so that the dresser was at his back.
That night, Elspeth dreamed of a woman standing in a field of tall grey grass under a sky the color of pewter. The woman was not facing her. She wore a coat that moved in a wind Elspeth could not feel, and she held something against her chest — small, round, amber-colored. The grass whispered around her ankles. Elspeth tried to call out, but her voice had no sound in this place, and the woman did not turn.
She woke to the smell of something burning, but nothing in the house was on fire.
The second morning, the thread around the stopper had come slightly loose.
Elspeth stood in front of the dresser for a long time. She was not a woman who frightened easily. She had buried her mother two springs ago and her grandmother the winter before that, and she had done both things with steadiness and grief in equal measure, not letting one crowd out the other. But looking at that loosened thread, at the tiny gap of dark between cork and rim, she felt something she had not felt since childhood: the precise sensation of standing at the edge of something that had been waiting for her.
Gordon arrived without being invited. She had not called him. He simply appeared at the back door with mud on his boots and a look on his face that told her he had not slept either.
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