That was the first thing Stella asked me as she settled in at the table.

I looked around the diner. It was two in the morning. The place was mostly empty.

“What do you mean?”

“How many people are in here right now? Besides us,” she said.

“Maybe five, six,” I replied.

Stella’s lips trembled. “How many people are in the room exactly?”

She was terrified.

I counted. The waiter, the old man staring into a bowl of soup by the door, the two young women coming down from a night of partying over pancakes, the guy in a ballcap trying to cut through his overcooked steak, and the middle-aged woman in a pea-green overcoat.

“Six,” I said. “Six people.”

Stella instantly relaxed. “Thank you.”

Stella and I hadn’t seen each other in five months. I was in school out of state and was home for the summer. Stella had gotten into a good university but her sister, Anne, had died in a car wreck two weeks before she went off to school. The death hit her hard. Real hard.

I wasn’t sure why she’d called me. I doubted it was to catch up and it certainly wasn’t to party. Stella knew I abstained from everything. For me, that decision was the end result of being raised by verbally abusive alcoholics and knowing the genetic odds.

Stella looked rough. Not strung out but existentially exhausted. There were scars on her hands, bruises mottling her tattooed forearms, and some unusual scarification marks on her neck. Two of them, they looked like clumsy Zs but reversed as if done in a mirror.

Stella’s friend Cory had dropped her off at the diner about thirty minutes before I'd gotten there. I didn’t know him well but what I did know, I didn’t like.

“So, how’re you holding up?” I asked.

Stella didn’t answer.

The waiter appeared and Stella looked him over cautiously before she ordered a black coffee and a slice of blueberry pie.

I got a hot tea and a side of fries, though I wasn’t exactly hungry.

We sat in uncomfortable silence for a few minutes before Stella, staring down at her hands, asked, “What’s the worst thing you ever did?”

I shrugged, said, “Lied to people. Lied to get out of things. Mostly to my friends, in high school. But I’ve changed. I don’t do that anymore. Oh, I also shoplifted once. A pair of socks.”

Stella laughed.

That’s when the waiter reappeared with our drinks and food. Stella jumped. Her eyes wide. Face flushed. The other people in the diner turned and looked but did nothing.

“You alright?” The waiter asked, weirded out.

Taking a deep breath, Stella slowly sat back down.

“Yeah, sorry,” she said. “I just… just it’s been a long night.”

The waiter shook his head as he put the stuff down. When he left, Stella sipped her coffee and then she looked over the mug at me, her eyes tearing.

“I did the worst thing you can do. I tried to kill someone.”

I wasn’t sure I heard her correctly.

“What?”

Stella nodded; eyes locked on mine. “A jogger. Cory and me hit him with the car.”

“Oh my God. When did this—”

“On my way here.”

The blood drained from my face.

“We should call the cops. He could still be there, hurt and—"

“Don’t bother,” she interrupted, “we went back and checked on him. There was no jogger.”

“What’s that fucking mean?”

I was starting to lose it.

“Please don’t start playing games with me,” I said. “I don’t want to hear this sort of bullshit.”

“Isn’t bullshit,” Stella replied. “Ask Cory.”

I didn’t want to call Cory.

Stella said, “I didn’t actually see the jogger. Cory did. That’s how I knew. So, I asked him exactly where the man was and I grabbed the wheel and Cory screamed at me as I made the car slam into the guy. Sent him flying. Like it mattered. Cory hit the brakes hard. He was losing it, talking about going to prison and his life being over. But I told him not to worry. That pissed him off something bad. When he got out of the car to go help the jogger, he just froze up, because there was no one there. Road was empty. Me, I expected that.”

She took another sip of coffee and poked at the slice of pie with her fork, stabbing the crust and examining the blue-tinged tines in the dull fluorescent light.

“See, it can look just like a person. Could be any age. Dressed any sort of way. It talks like a person. Eats, drinks, does all the regular sorts of things people do. Doesn’t exactly sound threatening, I know, but wait for the twist: I can’t see it. This thing pretending to be a person, it’s invisible to me. But you, you and everyone else… you can see it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about…” And I didn’t.

Stella finally looked up at me.

“Two weeks ago, we were tripping. Me and Cory and this woman named Genevieve. She was the guide. This was at Cory’s house, on the deck. We dropped N-Bomb, that synthetic MDMA stuff. We’d been using hallucinogens and trying to explore an inner mental space. Tripping together, sharing the same imagery. It’s crazy how, if you’re in sync, like emotionally and mentally, you can basically travel together. I know how it sounds; I do. But… it was really working for us. We were… I’d guess you’d describe it something like astral traveling. We’d built this architecture, this city, in our minds and then explored it. Mostly it was made of shifting, beautiful buildings. Structures that rose over us like mountain ranges. And, uh, in this mental city, that’s where we came across it.”

The diner door chimed as the two young women having pancakes left.

Stella watched them go, then turned back to me.

I didn’t need an explanation.

“There are four people in here now,” I said.

She nodded, sipped more coffee, and then continued.

“Well, this night, we traveled deeper into the city than we’d ever been before. We ended up in a tower. Had a spiral staircase. We all went up to the top floor and found a locked door –”

“You’re all seeing the same thing?” I interrupted, not buying the experience.

“Yes,” Stella’s demeanor had intensified, the twitchiness melted away. “We all saw it.”

“OK.”

“So, we get to this door. It’s a metal door. Dented, but from the inside. Bulging out. Like someone was kicking the door, trying to smash it down. Genevieve, she got scared. Told us to not open that door. To stay far away from it. She said a voyager was on the other side.”

“Voyager?”

“That’s what Genevieve called it. Being a guide, she knew the sort of constructions we were exploring. She’d seen doors like this one. And she’d been warned about the voyagers. The way she told it, they were like us… explorers in inner space but not from our reality. From another one. A bad one. But long story short, I opened the door.”

“Why would you do that?”

Stella stirred her coffee, lost in thought for a second.

As she did, one of the cooks quietly came out from the kitchen and sat at the counter. He flicked through a newspaper someone had left and glanced over at me. He nodded, gave a little smile. I wondered if he’d made the fries I wasn’t eating.

“After Cory and Genevieve drifted away,” Stella continued, still staring at her drink, “I heard a voice on the other side of the door. My sister’s voice. She was begging. Pleading with me to let her out. I swear it was her. So, I opened that metal door.”

Feeling the stare of the cook, I ate a few of the fries. They were cold, soggy.

“What happened?” I asked Stella.

“When I opened it, something suddenly brushed past me. Something clammy, cold. It touched me, very briefly. There was pain…” Stella unconsciously motioned to the Z scars on her neck, then continued. “Anyway, there wasn’t a room on the other side of the door. Just a void. A deep emptiness. When the trip was over, I immediately felt a change. I felt… like I was being watched. The whole rest of that night, the next day, the next week, something was following me. A shadow. A presence. And I knew, I just deep in my gut knew, that if it caught up with me, if it touched me again, I would die.”

She kept stabbing at her slice of pie. Breaking the crust, letting the congealed blueberries slowly tumble out in a little landslide of jelly.

“You told me that you can’t see this thing, Stella.”

The door to the diner opened and two men in work overalls walked in, each holding a hard hat. Their clothes dusty. Stella suddenly straightened in her chair.

“Two men just walked into the diner, right?”

I nodded. “Yeah, just those two guys.”

Stella settled.

“Why me?” I asked. “Why did you want to meet? To tell me this?”

Stella smiled. First time she’d done that all night. “Because I knew you’d believe me.”

I swallowed hard, my throat suddenly, impossibly dry.

“You’ve been a good friend,” Stella blinked away welling emotion. “In high school, when things got bad. With… with boyfriends or assholes, you were the one I could confide in. The one that trusted me. The one that, no matter what I did, no matter how stupid it was… you were there for me. A shoulder to cry on, a hand to hold…”

And she reached across the table and took my hand.

Squeezed it. Tight.

Truth was, I’d had a crush on Stella most of high school. She was a friend, for sure. And, for a while, a good friend. I liked being that rock for her. But I’d always hoped for more. Like most friendships, it began with a one-sided attraction. Mine. And even though I hadn’t seen her in half a year, those feelings remained. Dormant but there. Waiting to be awakened.

As Stella held my hand and smiled, I noticed… I felt, her fingernail tracing something on the inside of my palm. At first slight, just a little pressure. Only, it got sharper until—

“Ouch. Shit!”

I pulled my hand away to find Stella had cut me. She’d sliced a shape with her sharp pinkie nail into my skin. It was a backward letter Z. Like the ones on her neck. A ribbon of blood began to well up from the center of the small cut.

“What the hell, Stella?”

She just shook her head and stood up, backing away from the table, repeating over and over, “I’m sorry… I’m sorry… I had to, OK? I had to…”

“Had to what? Hurt me?” I was furious, confused.

Everyone in the diner turned to watch us. Only the cook got up from his place at the counter and walked over, eager to lend a hand.

I waved him away. “It’s OK. I got it under control.”

That was when Stella broke, her voice barely a whisper, “What?”

“I told him I got it.”

She went pale. “WHO?! Who’d you tell?”

“The cook!” I yelled. “He’s just trying to help you.”

“THERE IS NO COOK! No one’s there!”

Stella began shrieking, scrambling backward. She slammed into a nearby table. Chairs fell over. Silverware scattered.

“No, no!” she yelled. “No one’s there!”

The cook kneeled down beside Stella and, for a split second, bewildered as I was, I honestly thought he was going to help her up.

He didn’t.

Instead, he leaned in close to her. She was crying and shaking and clearly couldn’t see him. The cook turned to me, nodded with a sick grin, and then opened his mouth wide to reveal jumbled, bloody gums filled with jagged teeth.

He tore her throat out with a single bite.

And as Stella’s blood pumped out across the linoleum flooring, the cook vanished. Not a slow fade. Not dissolving into mist. Just there one second and gone the next.

Someone screamed, I think it was the woman in the pea-green overcoat.

Afterward, when the cops came, a story emerged. All the other people in the diner that night, they said Stella cut her own throat with a knife. Where she got the knife from and where it went, they didn’t know.

They also said that the cook had tried to help her. That he attempted to close the wound and save her life. The cops couldn’t find him after the EMTs got there. When I went back to the diner the next day to ask about what happened, the waiter claimed they didn’t even have a cook who resembled the man I described. The man I saw.

It was as if, after Stella’s death, all the details of her demise began to unravel. Like the universe was erasing her from existence entirely.

And now, the voyager – whatever it is – has come for me.

It’s been five days since Stella died in that diner.

Five days I’ve been haunted and hunted. I tracked down Cory and he led me to Genevieve. She told me what fate awaited me. According to her, voyagers use the symbol – the backward Zs that were on Stella’s neck, the one she scratched into my flesh – to track their victims down.

Stella, I guess she thought she could trick the voyager into taking me instead of her.

It didn’t work.

And now she’s doomed me.

It’s just a matter of time before there’s an extra person, a person I can’t see, sitting across from me on a bus or walking behind me on the street.

Right now, I’m in my bedroom at my parent’s house.

I haven’t left in forty-eight hours and they’re getting worried about me. They’d heard I lost a friend – though they can’t seem to recall anyone named Stella going to high school with me – and so they’re being compassionate and letting me stay cooped up.

But they’ve told me I’ve had visitors. Folks stopping by unannounced. Folks who, when I crane my neck out my window to catch a glimpse of them standing on the porch, aren’t there at all. Just my parents talking, gesturing, into empty space.

I’m going to have to leave this room eventually.

That or my parents will get worried enough that they’ll have me helped out, likely to the hospital. And when I get there, I’ll be asking the same questions Stella did.

How many people are in here right now?

How many exactly?