by Ronald Malfi
“They’ve got a full-time slot opening up this spring, and I was thinking about applying for it.”
“Teaching?”
“I know it sounds crazy, and I know I didn’t just sit through six years of graduate school to end up back in the classroom . . .”
“But what about your post doc? What about the clinical work you wanted to do?”
“I know. I know,” she said, laughing, and rested her chin on her hand. “I’ve really enjoyed teaching. I like the kids. I like the students.”
I sensed the conversation sway dangerously close to our one area of incongruity—Jodie’s desire to have children. I felt a momentary flare of contempt for her, as if this were some passive-aggressive attempt at bringing up that old subject—I like the kids. But that feeling was just a spark quickly eclipsed by the look of genuine contentment on my wife’s face. Her eyes gleamed like jewels in the candlelight.
“Well,” I said, “if that’s what you want to do . . .”
“You mean you wouldn’t have a problem with it?”
“Why would I have a problem with it?”
“Well, I mean, after all the schooling . . .”
“You should do what you want. If you change your mind down the road, you can always go back to clinical work. Do you think you have a shot at getting the position?”
“I do,” she said nearly breathless. “I really do.”
“Hell,” I said. “Then go for it.”
We made love again that night and it was very nice, although it lacked the unconstrained sense of lust displayed by our previous coupling on the living room sofa the first week in the house.
“What is it?” Jodie asked me immediately afterward.
“What do you mean?”
“You seemed distracted.”
“It sounded like you enjoyed yourself,” I said.
“Is it the notebooks? That I took them out of the trash in London?”
“No.” To my own ears, my voice sounded very far away.
“Then what is it? There’s something.” She rubbed my chest. “I can tell.”
Kissing her forehead, I folded her up in my arms and hugged her.
“You’re not going to say anything, are you?” she asked after a while.
I said nothing more and eventually fell into a dreamless half sleep while Jodie got up and showered before coming back to bed.
Sometime during predawn, I was awoken by what felt like a cold hand touching my chest. I jerked upright in bed, a shriek caught midway up my throat. Jodie slept soundly beside me; I was surprised my start hadn’t woken her. Across the room and through the part in the curtains, I could see the three-quarter moon cleaving through the inky darkness of space and the pearl-colored luminescence of the frozen lake below.
I pawed sleepily at my face while my eyes adjusted to the darkness. There was a needling sense of urgency directing me to get up, get up, get up. I peeled back the blankets and stepped onto the ice-cold hardwood floor. A shiver shot like a bolt of lightning through my body, and I felt my testicles, those two wrinkled cowards, shrivel to the size of dried figs. I pulled on my pajama bottoms and crept out into the hallway, still unaccustomed to the placement of the squeaky floorboards; I winced inwardly each time one creaked, afraid I’d wake up Jodie. But she was snoring steadily and lost in her own dreamland, and I made it to the carpeted section of the landing without incident.
As I’d done on that first night in the house, I peered over the railing to the foyer below. The boxes were no longer there, and moonlight poured in through the front windows unimpeded. I stood without moving, my hands balled into sweaty fists, and listened to the silence of the house all around me. Listened, listened. What was I waiting for? I had no clue. What had awoken me? I did not know.
In the basement, I fumbled for the cord of the ceiling light, and after floundering around in the dark like a mime semaphoring to a fleet of jetliners, I finally felt it wisp against my face. I pulled the light on and my retinas burned. Wincing, I stood in the center of the basement until my eyes adjusted to the light. Then I glanced around for any pools of water on the floor. There were none.
My gaze fell on the handprint across the room. Some fearful, overly sensitized part of my soul was convinced it would be gone—or worse that I’d find more of them now, dozens more, covering every section of the wall—but it was there. That lone child’s handprint.
Of course, I was still troubled by its presence . . . but something else from earlier that evening was needling at me now, too. Something important that I’d missed, though just barely. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
I returned to bed accompanied by the uneasy feeling that I had overlooked something, then spent much of the following morning in a similar state. With Jodie at school, I attempted to get some writing done but found, not surprisingly, that my mind refused to focus. Soon I was drinking too much coffee while wandering around the house, watching a light snowfall through the upstairs dormer windows.
By noon, I’d checked on the handprint three times. Nothing had changed except that in the daytime it seemed less ominous. In fact, by one thirty I was beginning to convince myself that maybe Jodie was right—that perhaps this handprint had been here all along. The open paint can? I’d probably just left it there when I’d finished using it and hadn’t placed it under the stairs as I thought I had. It was a child’s handprint after all. And we had no children.
I decided to clean up the room that would become our office. There were still stacks of boxes in here, some of them nearly to the ceiling. I grabbed one and almost fell backward at the weightlessness of it: the thing was empty. I drummed my fingers along the side as I carried it and a number of other empty boxes out to the trash.
Some latch finally caught in the recesses of my lizard brain, and I suddenly realized what I’d been struggling to decipher about the handprint on the wall downstairs. Strangely, it had nothing to do with the handprint and everything to do with the wall. Because the drumming on the empty boxes made the same sound as my finger tapping against the drywall last night.
Hollow.
I rapped a set of knuckles along the drywall in the basement. Sure enough, it sounded hollow, as if there was nothing on the other side of the wall. I moved down the length of the wall, still knocking, until I heard the difference in the sound where the drywall had been hung directly over beams or cinder block.
Fueled by curiosity and an unanchored surge of emotion, I cleared junk from the hollow wall until the whole section was exposed. I traced the seams of the drywall, which hadn’t been taped up, while I calculated approximate square footage in my head: the basement was smaller than the ground floor, though I found no reason why this should be. By all accounts, the basement should have approximated the perimeter of the ground floor. Of course, that didn’t mean—
Sliding down the seam between two sheets of drywall, I discovered a tiny hiccup. I looked closely at it, practically pressing my nose against the wall. It was a hinge. Farther down the seam was a second hinge . . . and toward the bottom I located a third.
It wasn’t a wall at all.
It was a door.
But there was no doorknob, no handle, no way of opening it. I went to the opposite seam and attempted to cram my fingers between the two sections of dry-wall in order to pry it open, but it was impossible. Perhaps the door had been sealed shut long ago?
A door to where? Another room?
I hadn’t a clue.
Then I heard my old therapist’s voice saying, Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out, while I thought of the storage cubbyholes we’d had in our North London flat: little hinged doors in the walls that were held closed by magnets.
Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out.
I pressed a palm flat against the “wall” and pushed slightly. I felt it give perhaps half an inch . . . then unlatch itself from the wall as it eased open on squealing hinges. The door opened only three or four inches, revealing a vertical crack of darkness.
I didn�
��t realize just how excited I was until I reached out to pull the door open farther and saw how badly my hand was shaking. In the back of my throat, a weak little laugh escaped.
I opened the door.
CHAPTER TEN
By the time Jodie and I moved into the house on Waterview Court, I had already authored four novels in the supernatural or horror genre, dealing with spooks and specters and villainous entities with villainous designs. As I stood before the open doorway in the basement wall, it occurred to me that I had written countless scenes like this one. In my writing, I have always attributed an indistinct merging of trepidation and fear to my characters as they stood on the cusp of uncertain discovery.
But I was not afraid, as so many of my characters had been in the past; instead, I felt a cool, almost menthol satisfaction wash through me, as if I’d just figured out the final clue in an unusually taxing crossword puzzle.
Therefore, my first thought upon opening the door was, Fuck, I’ve been doing it all wrong.
It was a cramped little room with no windows. Dark humping shapes loomed in a suggestion of pattern, although I couldn’t figure out just what I was seeing. I opened the door wider to allow for more light, but the single bulb in the center of the basement ceiling wasn’t cutting it. On a whim, I reached into the room and fumbled along the inside wall and, to my astonishment, located a light switch. I flipped it on and waited several seconds for my mind to catch up with what I was seeing.
It was a child’s bedroom . . . or at least the suggestion of one: a tiny bed was squeezed into one corner, its mattress overloaded with piles of small, colorful clothes. Against one wall was a little writing desk on which sat a lamp with a cowboys and Indians lamp shade, and a bookshelf burdened with countless toys and children’s books climbed another wall. There were a plastic chair in the shape of a giant cupped hand by the desk and a toy chest overflowing with stuffed animals at the foot of the bed. Glow-in-the-dark stars and crescent moons stuck to the ceiling and against the back wall, which was bare, unpainted cinder block. Several cardboard boxes were stacked in the center of the room, no different than the boxes we’d used in our move; they had been the looming dark shapes I’d first seen.
It looked like a museum display, a re-creation of a child’s bedroom circa 1958, something you might see behind glass in Epcot with a brass plate reading Replica Bedroom of American Boy.
I entered the room, bracing myself for violating some sacred space, but I felt only a faint light-headedness. Except for a filthy throw rug tucked halfway beneath the bed, the floor wasn’t carpeted, and my footfalls on the concrete echoed in the tiny chamber. I examined the shelves of toys and the stacks of folded clothes on the bed. With the toe of my sneaker, I lifted the lid of the toy chest the rest of the way and looked into a well of drowning stuffed bears, pigs, monkeys, and other less definable creatures.
Then I walked two complete circles around the stacks of boxes at the center of the room. The cardboard appeared old, covered in places in a black slick of mildew. I opened the top box: more colorful and small clothes, just like the ones piled on the bed. I took out a striped polo shirt that looked practically new, then dropped it back into the box. I set this box on the floor so I could access the one beneath it. This one contained more clothes. A third was burdened with toys: a stuffed bear, a baseball hat, a worn baseball with frayed stitching. Sneakers here, too, their laces tied together, their soles caked with petrified mud. An electric pencil sharpener. What looked like the axle off a toy car with a plastic black wheel still attached to each end. A children’s illustrated edition of Treasure Island.
I went through all the boxes in this fashion—with a mix of utter disbelief and mounting light-headedness—until I reached the one at the bottom of the stack. Yet it wasn’t a box at all but a bright blue plastic container with a red rope handle. I felt a twinge of something crucially significant lock into place, like a dead bolt sliding home, but I wasn’t sure what it was at first.
I crouched down before the blue container, which was no bigger than a can of paint, and popped off the lid without the slightest difficulty. They say olfactory sense is the one linked most directly to memory, and I had no doubt this was true. The scents that struck me were of cedar chips and the bedding of hamster cages, of cured wood, and, just faintly, of polyurethane. Inhaling that intermingling aroma ushered me back to an early childhood, much earlier than those horrible days following my brother’s death.
Inside the blue container were wooden building blocks of varying colors, shapes, and sizes, a replica of the set I’d had as a child myself. By the time my mother had sold my blocks at a yard sale, they were riddled with gouges and nicks, and most of the colored paint had peeled away. These blocks, however, looked brand-new and practically unused. I picked one up, brought it to my nose, smelled it. The bittersweet scent of childhood.
I recalled Adam’s story about Elijah Dentman, and I knew that I was standing in Elijah’s bedroom. This was all Elijah’s stuff. As horrible as this little dungeon was, he’d slept here, played here, said his bedtime prayers here.
A cold sweat broke out along my neck. My mouth went dry. What kind of parent keeps their kid in a hidden bedroom behind the basement wall? A bedroom with no windows, no natural light?
Without warning, I recalled the Christmas party at Adam’s house and my conversation at the buffet table with Ira Stein. Clear as day, I could hear Ira saying, The Dentmans were a peculiar family, as I’m sure you’ve heard. Not to speak ill of those poor people and what happened to them, of course.
“You’ve got to come downstairs and see this,” I said when Jodie got home. It was five thirty, the sky had grown prematurely dark, and I’d spent the entire day going through Elijah Dentman’s stuff.
Looking exhausted, Jodie set her books and purse down on the kitchen table. She eyeballed me as if I’d just approached her in a dark alley as she went to the refrigerator and took out a beer. “Don’t tell me you found more handprints on the walls.” There was a none-too-subtle condemnation in her voice.
“Better,” I said.
“Did you even shower today? You look brutal.”
“Come on,” I said, already heading down the hallway toward the basement. “Come see.”
She followed me.
“There was a little boy who lived in the house before us,” I said at the foot of the stairs as Jodie plodded tiredly down the risers. “Elijah came here with his mother and uncle when the grandfather got sick.” I deliberately left out the fact that the kid had drowned in the lake behind our house. When she reached the bottom step, I took her wrist and rushed her over to the opening in the basement wall. “You’re not going to believe this, but I think I just found the kid’s bedroom.”
Together we stood shoulder to shoulder, like a couple waiting to get on the subway, in the doorway to Elijah Dentman’s bedroom. I laughed, still amazed by my archeological find, and stepped into the room while negotiating around the boxes I’d placed randomly on the floor after going through them.
Jodie remained in the doorway. There was a look of perfect incomprehension on her face. No, not just incomprehension—apprehension. Fleetingly, I conceded that maybe I wrote those scenes in my books right after all.
“Look at this place,” I said. “They kept the poor kid down here like a prisoner.”
Slowly, Jodie brought a hand to her mouth. Her face had gone the color of soured milk.
“It was like unearthing a bomb shelter or a time capsule or something after a nuclear holocaust.”
“How . . . how did you find this?”
“It was right here behind the wall. I pushed on the wall, and it opened like some pharaoh’s secret fucking passageway.” I waved her in. “Come here and look at this stuff.”
“No.” She didn’t move.
“What?”
“Get out of there. I don’t like it.”
“What are you talking about? Isn’t this totally fucking bizarre?”
“Yes. It is.”
I tapped my sneaker against the plastic container of wooden blocks. “I even had these same blocks when I was a kid.”
“How nice for you. Please come out.”
I watched her on the other side of the doorway—really, on the other side of the wall—and for all the distance I suddenly felt between us she could have been in an alternate universe. It was just a temporary feeling, though, and once it passed I went to her and rubbed her arms.
Jodie looked at me, but at the same time her eyes were distant and unfocused, as if I were made of smoke and she could see straight through me.
“Hey,” I said, “what’s the matter with you?” Then the answer dawned on me, and my goofy grin faded. “You know about Elijah. You’re creeped out because you know he died here. That’s it, isn’t it?”
My words surprised her—she’d known, but she hadn’t expected me to know. Before I could fully read her face, she turned away. It wasn’t forceful enough to betray any sense of emotion, but it caused my hands to drop from her arms just the same.
“Tell me,” I said. “You knew, didn’t you?”
“A woman at Adam and Beth’s Christmas party told me.” Jodie wandered over to the washer and dryer where she feigned casual interest in the big orange box of detergent on one of the slatted shelves beneath the basement stairs. I wondered if the woman in question had been Nancy Stein. “I asked Beth about it later, and she said it was true.”
“Why did you keep it a secret from me?”
“Didn’t you keep it a secret from me?”
“I was trying to protect you. There was no need to tell you about it.”
“And I was trying to protect you, too.” When she faced me I could tell she was fighting tears. “I won’t have you chastise me for this. I won’t allow it. I remember that night at your brother’s house after your mom’s funeral. And I’ve been there for your low points when Kyle’s memory haunts you. I hear you talk in your sleep about him. But mostly I know how you are and how you dwell on things, how you torture yourself.” She clenched her beer bottle so tight I feared she would shatter it. “So, yes, I didn’t think you knew, and I had no plans to ever tell you. If I had to keep that secret for your own mental health, then I would have taken it to my grave.”