by Robert Hodum
Then the house’s grip changed, it became something else, someone else. I spent a lot of time alone in the house. Rainy overcast days were the worst. With plenty of sunny summer days and friends waiting in the back lot to decide what adventure we’d have that day, I never went home until my parents returned. I’d head back just before 5:30 in the afternoon. Sometimes, I’d sit on the stoop, waiting outside. School vacations were dreadful particularly in the winter. And as much as I hated school, I couldn’t wait to get back and away from her.
I never talked to any of my buddies about the house or the presence. They all had houses that looked like mine. Why would mine be different? So, I’d have to get tough, endure the winter when I wasn’t out sleigh riding, wrestling in the snow or snowball fighting, I’d put the T.V. on low and listen for things coming down from upstairs.
Sometimes I’d be in the kitchen when I heard noises on the second or third floors. I’d grab a carving knife that I’d usually only see during Thanksgiving. Dad, dressed in a white shirt and tie for that holiday, would proudly carve the white meat in symmetrical sheaves,. He’d sharpen that knife till it glistened. How I loved Thanksgiving, but hated seeing that knife. It reminded me of what was waiting for me the following week when all returned to their routines. The noises would return and I’d have to scramble for it in a moments notice. I thought that I could somehow threaten it out of the house, by shouting it out, walking around the house brandishing that knife. I’d stomp up the stairs, announce my coming, and tell it to get out of my house.
No one ever answered, she knew better.
After all, this was really her house.
My parents could see it on my face when they’d come home. When was I going to learn that the banging was just the hot water pipes or that new houses settled and creaked … that no one was in the attic? But they didn’t know what it was like to sit in the playroom, waiting to hear something moving on the second floor, then on the first, just out of sight, coming down the stairs, around the nearest corner, feet away from me. I decided I could survive this and vowed never to tell them about the noises, the whispers, the feelings ever again. I certainly wouldn’t tell them about her.
She was in the closet. I knew she was there, always at night. In the morning I’d slide open the door to get dressed and she’d be gone. The morning light burned into the corner of that closet, cleaning it of her essence. But she lingered, up in the attic, her lair. At night, every night I’d hear her shifting behind the closed doors that I had pulled fully closed before getting into bed. I’d lay there in the dark, staring at the door closest to me, and watch it be slowly drawn open. Just enough for her to look out, just enough for her to slip her long sharpened wooden nails around the door’s edges, clicking them on the molding’s varnished surface. I’d sit up in a panic and turn on the light. The door would be closed just like I had left it only minutes before. But in the dark I knew I could see the door shifting open and then her talons would inch around the doorframe, slowly pulling the closet’s door open. I’d be asleep only after repeatedly checking the door and then laying in wait for any movement.
Aunt Mae came to visit around the holidays. Down from Hartford, Connecticut where she lived in a rented room and worked for Muscular Dystrophy, her visits offered me an oasis of hugs, Slap Jack card games and soothing conversations. Aunt Mae’s frailty, her translucent white skin and boney frame, was always covered by well-ironed dresses, white lace handkerchiefs that stuck out from a pocket or were hidden somewhere under her buttoned sweater. She half whispered her conversations, gently caressing my hair, her sweater with that scent of perfume and mothballs, her drawn, mottled smiling face, her weary eyes, and the kindness. Peace had come with Aunt Mae. No noises now.
But there still was the closet. It was with my Aunt Mae that I shared these stories, these fears knowing that she would stroke the top of my hand. She never once said that it was impossible, that these were just dreams, just simply a child’s imaginings. Aunt Mae counseled me saying, “Just like so many other things in life, Bobby, this too will pass.”
And so, I invited her to sit with me in the closet.
We didn’t tell my parents. Up to my room, sliding open one of the doors, we made room moving toys and shoes and sat down in the shadows. I told her everything. She listened without interruption with the face of a believer who glanced up at the trap door while I spoke. It was logical I told her that if the wooden lady couldn’t be found in the closet, she had to be up in the attic. That would be her world.
I heard my mother’s voice calling us.
“Shhh … let’s stay here, she whispered.
“Don’t worry you’re with your Auntie Mae.”
They finally found us huddled together laughing.
Now, Aunt Mae was the oldest surviving sibling of my father, nevertheless she was gently reprimanded that day for encouraging me, for reinforcing every fear I had, for humoring me. And how could you sit in that closet with him, she’d be asked. We were quiet at dinner. Aunt Mae never asserted herself, and would only politely direct conversation when appropriate. But that night she looked at her younger brother and told him to get a ladder and look up there and see where that light was coming from. And, he did.
Access to the trap door required shifting the clothes, wedging between the top shelf and the doorframe and pushing open the two-foot square trap door to see in the cavernous attic. It ran the length of the house. Cotton candy-like insulation was visible above the floor joists and a row of plywood flooring ran from the trap door opening to the end of the attic, stopping below the attic vent in the peak of the inside wall. The corners and sides of the house pinched down by the roof rafters disappeared into the shadows. No light from this sunny Saturday penetrated there.
With a Here, look. See, nothing at all; my dad flashed the beam of the flashlight around the attic, its light barely reaching the attic’s outer corners. I came up the ladder and looked in, holding the flashlight, straining to see if I could see her shape hunched down in the dark. I waited to hear the clicking of her nails ... silence.
Too many shadows, too many indiscernible forms, I was unconvinced, but didn’t let on. I couldn’t let Aunt Mae lose face. I explained that she came out only at night. I was about to insist that we repeat this exploration at night, but I was afraid the moment that Dad pulled back the trap door, she’d be perched on its edge, nails ready to slice us.
There … nothing’s there and you saw for yourself. Right? My father assured.
Unconvinced, I agreed. Right, Dad, nothing there.
My aunt’s visit ended. We returned to the routine of work and school. But the nights continued dark and foreboding as always. And they thought that looking up in the attic would reveal her darkened corner lair! She wouldn’t allow that.
And so the wooden lady visited whenever she wanted, clicking her nails and drifting slowly up to stand by my bed. In spite of her, life moved on as my aunt had assured.
Over the course of the following years she came less. Christmases, Easters, birthday celebrations, family gatherings and parties, advancing through Elementary and Junior High schools, making phone calls to girlfriends replaced throwing dirt bombs, the years had passed. Her presence had waned.
And then it was time for us to sell the house.
The morning we moved out, I peeked into my old bedroom. The closet doors were shut. When I entered Junior High and my brother had married, I moved up to his room on the third floor, quieter and more private, better for studying and daydreaming. The closet there was just a closet.
The last day our house echoed, empty of furniture, all the boxes collected and en route across town. I stood there in the silence, my parents waiting in the car. I told them that I had forgotten something.
The house stood quiet. Every party, family gathering, my cousins and I dancing in the living room to the Beatles, discovering Christmas trees at dawn, the sing-alongs my si
ster’s friends would have, my brother standing at the door in his sailor’s uniform, all of us in tears as his leave ended, my sister in her robe carrying our dog Tex down the stairs with curlers in his fur, the conversations, jokes, and arguments at the dinner table, the many windows I’d accidentally broken, carving pumpkins and returning here after roaming the streets on Halloweens, every word said, and those never given voice in these halls and rooms … everything was here. I listened and remembered.
I could hear Aunt Mae whisper, “This too will pass, Bobby.”
The car’s horn broke the silence.
I moved down the stairs to the playroom.
At the door to the garage, I stopped and waited, listening.
A stair-rung creak and a clicking from upstairs, a clicking on the floor where my childhood bedroom once was, echoed through the playroom. Like the tapping of a stowaway, trapped in the hold of a sinking ship that drifted into ocean’s blackness, she signaled.
The wooden lady would be alone now.
I smiled, stepped out of the house, and locked the door.