The Compass Points at Something That Follows

I collect old instruments, and the brass compass at the boot sale was lovely and cheap and clearly broken — its needle didn't point north, it pointed off at some fixed random bearing, which is why the seller let it go for pennies. I bought it for the case and the craftsmanship, meaning to leave the dud needle to its confusion.

At home I noticed the needle wasn't random. In my study it pointed to a spot near the door. I turned the compass; the needle swung to keep pointing at the same spot. I walked around the room holding it level; the needle tracked that one fixed point in space, unwavering, the way a compass tracks north — except it wasn't north, it was a specific location in my study, about six feet from wherever I stood, roughly behind me.

I carried it into the kitchen. It found a new spot — again about six feet away, again roughly at my back — and locked onto it, and held it as I moved around the room, the needle always indicating a position a little behind me and to one side, a fixed distance, a patient constant bearing on something that was not a magnetic pole and not a lump of iron in the wall, because I checked, exhaustively, for both.

Whatever the compass points at, it points at it in every room, at a consistent distance, consistently behind me. When I walk down the hall, the needle swings to keep the spot at my back as I go. When I turn around quickly — and I have, many times, some of them not proud — the needle simply resettles, smoothly, to put the spot behind me again, wherever 'behind me' has become. The compass has, in effect, one true north, and its true north is a point that maintains a fixed following distance from me, at my back, always.

I want to be clear that I feel nothing. There is no cold spot, no presence, no dread — nothing but a brass needle that insists, calmly, that something is standing about six feet behind me, always, and has been since I brought the compass home, and moves when I move, and keeps its distance, and never, ever lets the compass point anywhere else while I'm holding it.

I've stopped carrying it around, because a device that continuously indicates the position of a follower I cannot see or feel is not a device I want to consult in the dark. It sits on my study shelf now, and its needle points, permanently, at a spot in the middle of the room — the spot where I usually stand to look at it. It's waiting, I suppose, for me to come and hold it, so it can go back to telling me where the thing behind me is. I don't hold it much anymore. But sometimes, testing myself, I pick it up in a new room, just to see, and the needle always swings at once, patient and certain, to a point six feet off, at my back, and I always, always have to fight the urge to turn around, and I never, ever see anything when I do, and the needle just resettles, and waits.