Forty

You count your steps in the dark and up a stair, and push a door open onto gravel between two walls of yaupon. Along the foot of the hedge the candy corn lies whole, with no ants on it.

A kernel makes a short rising note when you lift it. The next makes a falling one.

Every step you take, a sheet drags a pace behind the hedge. When you stop, it stops. Through a gap in the leaves, in the clearing, the three bedsheets are nearer than they were.

At step forty a chair rolls out of a side path on your left and onto the gravel ahead: an office chair with the seat gone and a steel box bolted in its place, five casters of five sizes, a teal light on the box blinking. It picks a scrap of tin foil out of the gravel and puts it away inside itself.

It rolls one length for each step you take. You stop, and it stops mid-roll with one caster off the ground. You stay still a while. So does the chair.

At step sixty it is gone off the end of the row, toward the far corner.