Girl in the Walls

by A. J. Gnuse

  “And trade one oversized, crumpling plantation-style house for another?”

  “And trade a busted-up house for one that’s not our problem.”

  Mrs. Laura snorted. “Okay,” she said. “But what about the boys?”

  “What about them?”

  “Are they coming?”

  “It’s one night. They’re sixteen and thirteen.”

  “Eddie’s not,” Mrs. Laura said, and hesitated. “You know what I mean. You can’t just say he’s thirteen and act like that’s all there is to it. And Marshall’s . . .”

  “He’s Marshall,” said Mr. Nick. He exhaled sharply through his nose. “Look.”

  “And Eddie’s moved all those things in his room . . .”

  “We’ve talked about that—”

  “Have we?”

  “Well, maybe we’d get the chance to? Maybe we could talk without one of us losing our shit? Without us being exhausted? Without falling asleep before—” A firmness had formed in his voice. When he spoke again, it was with a conscious attempt to soften it. “Laura, it’s one night. Honey, I think we need this.”

  Mr. Nick crossed the room. The floor creaked when he knelt beside her, and his voice lowered, not much more than a whisper. “I just went by Marshall’s room. I heard them. They’re in there together. They’re talking.”

  “Okay?”

  “I heard Eddie laugh,” he said. “Both of them were. Think about that. When was the last time you heard Eddie laugh?”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” The bristles of Mrs. Laura’s paintbrush slid along the trim once more.

  Mr. Nick stood beside her. He waited in silence. “Laura?” he asked finally.

  “I’m thinking,” she said. She placed the paint cup on the floor. “What did it sound like? When you heard Eddie laugh?”

  Once Done, Decided

  IN THE DARK, ELISE FOUND SHE COULDN’T HELP BUT GRIN, HER cheeks full and squeezed tight. The parents would be gone, for a night. Not as happy as she’d known anniversaries to be, but it still reminded her of her own parents, the times she remembered her mom standing barefoot in her dress in front of her bedroom’s full-length mirror. Elise, on the bed, helping untangle her earrings. As a reward, receiving a spritz of the lavender perfume on the wrists. Elise’s dad’s razor buzzing in the bathroom. They’d go out—his jacket folded over his arm, her high heels clicking across the foyer—like some actor and actress in an old movie. Elise would be left home with the sitter, which, to be fair, made for its own fun, as almost as soon as the gray-haired woman came she fell asleep in a living room armchair. One year, Elise had taken advantage and eaten the remainder of the Mardi Gras Moon Pies she’d gathered from the parades the week before, four or five of the cakes in one triumphant binge. She read out on the front porch after dark, and when the sugar finally left her veins, she grew tired, and on her way to bed, buried her sitter’s sleeping body with pillows.

  An anniversary, even one for the Mason parents, was good. For them, and for her—fewer people home, more space. Eddie and Marshall stuffed away in their bedrooms as night rolled in, and the whole empty house around them? If she was careful, she might even have Brody over. Convince him to be quiet enough, and she might be able to play a game of checkers in the back porch. The boys’ bedrooms were so far away from the stairs, they wouldn’t hear.

  Well, more likely, maybe not checkers, with the rumble of its pieces in the box, and clicking of the pieces on the board. Too risky. Instead, maybe they could read beside one another, down in the library. Or outside, on the front porch. Or, well, maybe since Brody wasn’t such a good reader, maybe she could just tell him what was happening in her book. Quietly.

  “So, next weekend?” Mrs. Laura had told her husband, before she finished touching up the trim and crumpled up the loose strips of painter’s tape on the floor into a ball. “Saturday. We put it all away. We leave it here. Recharge, I guess. The boys can keep an eye on themselves, and we’re back first thing in the morning?”

  “It’s a date.”

  Together, No Stone Unturned

  THE BOYS’ FIRST DAY OF SUMMER VACATION, AND THEIR FATHER HAD GONE in to prep for summer school. Their mom had a weekend appointment for a house showing, and she wouldn’t be home until three.

  Outside, it rained, and the windows glossed from the water, while droplets pattered against the roof. The boys began in the garage. They searched for incongruous things. What would the signs look like? They imagined matted blankets, a stranger’s shoes and backpack, maybe even a large cardboard box tucked behind the kayaks, as if someone homeless from one of the downtown streets had brought his meager belongings here. The brothers weren’t sure what they were looking for. They’d know when they found it.

  They picked up the loose boards from the woodpile in the garage and squinted into the tight spaces within, checked around the backside of the pressure washer and tiller and ladders, around the bucket of old baseball mitts and balls that Marshall used, when he was Eddie’s age, before tryouts got competitive and he failed to make the team. They looked behind the heaped mess of badminton netting and racquets, bought by their dad for the family, which they had tried only twice in the backyard of their old Northshore home.

  They moved on. They crawled into the back of the living room closet and split their parents’ hanging coats to either side; they opened kitchen cabinets, pulling out a Crock-Pot and a food dehydrator, looking behind. In the pantry, Eddie climbed on his brother’s back and peered into the access panel, but saw only the swallowing dark, the hollow insides of the house. They went on hands and knees to search beneath the beds upstairs. They pulled out a stack of towels in the linen closet and sifted through the clothes hanging in the armoire.

  They were prepared if they found someone. Marshall carried, in his back pocket, the other switchblade. He had tried to sharpen it further with one of his mother’s kitchen whetstones, but poorly, so now the blade was scratched along its sides. Still sharp enough to sting when he pressed it into his finger, though. The point more than sharp enough to jab.

  Eddie wore the backpack Marshall had given him for his birthday. An old aluminum baseball bat poked out its top. Each time they opened another closet door, or dropped to a knee to see beneath a bed, Eddie held it out, its end wobbling in front of him. The width of the bat was as big as his upper arm, larger even, and he’d never actually swung one before—during PE, he’d always sat on the balance beam to the side by the pull-up bars. It felt good to hold it out between him and the dark of a closet as Marshall reached in and switched the light on. When he closed his eyes and squeezed the handle, the bat was like a sword, large and ornate, something a knight carried. But every time they searched somewhere new, threw open a door, looked behind a corner, he had to make sure he kept his eyes open. Tried not to blink.

  The Attic for Last

  THAT WAS THE PLACE, MOST LIKELY. WHEN THEY SEARCHED THE house, they passed by the door time and again, ignoring it for now, as if they’d jinx it. Though the outcome they wanted to prevent wasn’t fully clear to them: whether they hoped no one was there, and their imaginations had gotten the better of them, or that someone, hiding, was.

  When they stood before the attic door, there was a true, small comfort in Eddie, knowing that the house, searched, behind him was safe, and that whatever it was now waited in a direction he could point to. The drawback was that the attic might as well be hunched and waiting.

  “Are you ready?” Marshall asked. He opened the door without a response.

  Below the sounds of the rain on the roof, the ventilation fan hummed, and up the length of the staircase, the dim glow from the dormer window awaited them. They climbed the stairs slowly, side by side, the wood popping beneath their feet. Halfway up a sudden torrent of heat swallowed them. Warm air rises to the top, Eddie remembered. Like stepping into a warm pool, from the top down.

  At the head of the stairs, the boys paused to look around them through the shadows in the spaces behind the boxes and spare
furniture and equipment. Thick roofing nails jutted through the wood-like weeds. “I’ll get the light,” Marshall said, and he crossed over to the pull chain that brought an orange, incandescent glow. The center-heart of the room burst into color, but the place beyond the cardboard and plastic bins and dark suitcases remained gray and shapeless.

  “How do we do it?” Eddie asked. They were surrounded on every side. They might as well have been in an entirely different house.

  “I guess,” Marshall said, “we just move the boxes?” He weaved his way between a stack of paintings and full garbage bags to the perimeter, ducking below the low ceiling’s nails. “We look from the outside in.” He pulled a flashlight from his back pocket and shone it into the crevice where the ceiling met the floor. He pivoted and pointed its beam as far as he could to the other side of the attic. “Here we go.”

  The boys moved, and the attic floor moaned as if the house itself was stirring, one massive, slumbering body turning to its side. The boys opened boxes, began pulling out winter clothes and old toys. They wanted to see whether something had coiled up beneath them. They rifled through piles of seasonal decorations. At one point, Marshall let out a yelp. Eddie shouted in return and clutched wildly at his baseball bat in the bag behind him.

  “It’s nothing!” Marshall said. He raised a hand and motioned his brother to calm himself. “Just a cactus. Stuck my finger. Damn thing was in a Christmas wreath.” He sucked at his finger and looked around him. “The fuck is that doing in there anyway?”

  They continued, opening the drawers of an ancient cabinet, getting on their hands and knees to shine a light into the space below the large metal AC unit. The wind spattered moisture against the small window, and the rain continued against the roof above. The boys searched ten minutes, twenty minutes. When finally Eddie found it, he was surprised to see how small it was. All this searching, and he could lay his palms flat against the floor and cover it completely. Eddie called his brother over to the dormer. “There,” he said.

  A print, from some bare foot smaller than their own, drying already, half-gone on the wood beneath them. Outside the window, the puddles on the roof rippled with each new falling drop of rain. On the floor, the toes of the print pointed inside. As if someone, hearing them in their search downstairs, had opened the dormer window to escape to the roof outside. Then, halfway out, one foot down upon the wet shingles, had paused, had decided against leaving, and had come back inside.

  “Someone’s still in here,” Eddie said.

  They Stood Above Her

  BENEATH THEIR FEET, THE PLYWOOD FLOOR BOWED INTO HER belly. The crossbeams pinned Elise’s arms to her sides. They stood on her chest. Their weight compressed her lungs. This was being buried. Elise resisted her urges to kick up at the floor with her knees. Above, they weren’t speaking. Only standing there. She sensed them motioning to each other. Turning all around. Elise forced gulps of air into her tight chest, miniature gulps, her lips working like a goldfish’s.

  Were they trying to crush her?

  Finally, the boys moved, released her. Elise shuddered. Couldn’t help it. The plywood above her tapped against the frame—her whole body tensed, but they didn’t stop walking. Didn’t hear. The boys went on to the center of the attic and stood for a moment in the stairwell.

  Elise’s forehead pressed against the plywood. The bones of her chest ached as she breathed. Blood pulsed through her temples. She tried to hear what they said.

  Earlier, when Elise had tried to run after she heard them searching beneath her, to crawl out on the roof, she couldn’t. The heavy, cold drops of rain on her leg, the sudden shift in temperature and humidity, the windowsill slipping from her grip—the inside had still felt safer.

  But now, they were whispering. Elise couldn’t hear them. Their voices so quiet, she realized, they knew she was close.

  Marshall and Eddie descended the staircase, their steps falling in unison. The attic door’s hinges squealed, the door coming shut very slowly.

  Elise did not move, for as long as she could manage.

  Go Away

  WHEN THE NEXT MORNING ARRIVED, THE RAIN HAD FINISHED, AND the sky was cloudless at sunrise. The light through the windows was a vibrant pink, fog-like in the air. For those who hardly slept, the color was unreal, the fatigue must be playing tricks on their sight—no way could a sunrise turn a house so clouded, lambent. To look out in the yard was to see the same: the oak trees, mud of the lawn, gray gravel of the driveway—all doused in the orange-rose hue. The old rhyme: red sky in the morning.

  Hours passed while the birds downstairs, like gatekeepers, announced their alternating shifts. The Masons rose from bed and readied themselves for Mass. They left together, the lot of them, piling into Mr. Nick’s red Saturn, the boys to the backseat, the older brother turning for one last glance at the house, a hard look, as though daring it to reveal its maw and to snap at him as he left. But how could Marshall be any more wrong? With the car pulling out the long length of the driveway, the house did not bite, but instead finally exhaled, slouching into something shapeless and beaten. How far will crossbeams sink before they crack? How quickly can composite parts—shingles, siding, ducts and vents, floorboards—collapse and separate, decay into the ground before even Odin the All-Seeing wouldn’t recognize what they’d been?

  To bend is to bow down, as the One-Eyed would say. And to bow too low prevents one from ever standing again.

  Even so, she bent.

  The boy arrived when he was told, the robins’ time, shortly after the Masons had left. He rapped on the back door with the knock she had taught him: one, one-two, one. But she wasn’t there, waiting for him. Minutes passed, and Brody knocked their pattern again—he’d never needed to knock twice before—and still waited. He grew impatient and bored, and then worried: had she been found out? Taken away? Worse? Alone between those walls, had she made a miscalculation; some grip she’d used for months finally worn smooth, that failed to hold her. Fallen into a narrow, hidden space? Should he try the side door again, even though she’d told him to leave it alone? He stood on his toes, but couldn’t see far enough into the house through the windows. He knocked their pattern again and again.

  Then Elise appeared.

  She wasn’t the same. An old woman now in a small girl’s body. Dark rings below her eyes, shoulders drooping—a girl like a tallow tree bent from a storm, an abandoned cabin slumping in the woods. She stood in the doorway on the other side of the screen, her limp hand on the latch, keeping it shut. And she told him what happened. How they’d come for her.

  Two brothers who knew to look for her, and who had nearly found her. They tore her home apart searching, then sewed it back up as if it had never happened. And after, they went back to their rooms, whispering for what must have been hours, halting with each sound heard, quieting to listen for her. Their parents came home, but the boys said nothing, from as much as she could tell. But they knew. She heard their doors swinging open throughout the night, as if expecting to surprise her, to come at her there, in the spotlight of their rooms’ overhead lamps, and grip her in their hands. She was hunted now. Abruptly, now. Something had changed.

  Did he know why?

  “No,” he said. “I don’t. I really don’t. But wait. Didn’t the younger one know about you before?”

  “He’d never come looking for me. Not until now.”

  “Are you okay?”

  Elise lay her forehead against the screen, turning her pale skin dimpled. She held the handle shut, looked at him through the upper halves of her eyes. When she spoke, she hardly moved her lips.

  “You steal the things you bring me,” she said. “The fingernail polish. Food. The Gameboy. Board games. Everything you’ve brought here—you stole from other houses.”

  Brody plucked at the screen door handle with his fingertips. “I brought some things I thought you’d like.”

  “Did you take things from this house, too?”

  “Not really,” he said. “Not m
uch.”

  “What did you steal?”

  “I was going to bring them back!”

  “What’s missing? What exactly?”

  Brody cocked his head to one side. Gritted his teeth. Chewed on something imaginary. A caricature of nervousness.

  “I don’t know. Just a couple things. A movie maybe. A couple coins, some dollars. A seashell. A flip knife. Some things.”

  “Get away.”

  “I can bring them all back right now!” He tugged on the screen door with both hands, but she wrenched the door back shut and hooked its small latch.

  “But I can go back home right now,” he said. “I’ve got them all under my bed. I wasn’t stealing—I just took some things, Elise. I take things sometimes, but I can bring them back—”

  “Don’t say my name.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t call me by my name. Don’t think you can say it!”

  Brody took a step back down the porch steps, as though she’d lifted her heel and thrust it into his belly. “But I can fix it,” he said. “I can bring it all back.”

  “You’ve never seen me before,” she said. “You’ve never seen me here at all. I’ve never existed, and if anyone asks, you never knew me. A hundred years from now, if you think you remember me—you’re wrong. It was a dream and a lie.”

  “But I’m sorry.”

  “It’s too late for that!” She was shouting now. “Brody, you’ve ruined it for me.” The girl’s lips pulled across her face. Her cheeks red, eyes wet. “It’s my home, Brody. This is my home, and you’re ruining it!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t come back,” she said. “Don’t ever come back. Get away.”

  Door shut, and locked.

  “Go away!” she said.

  Said again inside. Go away. And again, again, until she was sure he had gone. Go away, she said, until the walls of her home echoed along with her, cried with her, too.