Migrators

by Ike Hamill

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, my son,” Alan said. He already felt the syrup going to his head. He felt goofy this morning.

  “Remember last week when I asked if we could move?”

  “Yeah?” Alan asked. He took another bite of his pancakes. A part of him wished he had sausage links to go with the pancakes. Liz didn’t mind when Alan ate meat, but there were a few foods she couldn’t handle. She said sausage links looked like baby fingers. They were forbidden from the house. Alan wondered if Liz realized that Joe ate hamburgers last summer when he stayed over at his friend Pete’s house.

  “What do you think of moving?” Joe asked.

  “We talked about this, Joe,” Alan said. “This is our home. It’s the place where your mom had her fondest childhood memories and we want to ensure it stays in the family.”

  “Who will get the house when you guys die?” Joe asked. Joe rubbed his head and squinted.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How is it going to stay in the family? I’m going to move away for college, right? Then I’ll go wherever I want.”

  “And your mom and I will work here until we retire. Then we’ll get to enjoy all this luxury.”

  “But what if I don’t want to move here when you die? The house won’t be in the family anymore.”

  “Maybe someone else will want it—one of your cousins. We’ll work it out one step at a time,” Alan said.

  “I just think that if I don’t want it, then why do we have to keep it? I don’t need it, and we barely know those other cousins. They only come here for Thanksgiving, right?”

  “And some come for Christmas,” Alan said. “Look, Joe, some families have traditions. It’s how they make their mark on the world. This place is your mom’s mark.”

  “I don’t think we should have to live here just because she came here sometimes when she was a kid.”

  “How about we live here because it’s a good place to live? It’s a great community, and we have woods and a lake. We get to try snowboarding this winter—that will be fun, right?”

  “I don’t know,” Joe said.

  “I don’t see what the problem is, Joe,” Alan said. “Do you miss your friends? You seemed happier here with your new friends than you ever did down in Virginia.”

  “I just don’t like this place,” Joe said. He set his fork down and leaned close to Alan. Joe whispered, “I hate it here.”

  “Give it a chance.”

  X • X • X • X • X

  Alan fought the urge to take a nap after breakfast. He regretted the pancake impulse. It always seemed like a good idea when he was cooking, but afterwards he felt exhausted for the rest of the day. His body didn’t handle the huge influx of sugar well. With a bunch of tools collected into a bucket, Alan trudged up the stairs to the attic. If the lumber company came through and delivered the materials that afternoon as promised, Alan would only have a few hours to move them inside before the rain was supposed to fall.

  The diagonal of the window opening was a little smaller than a sheet of the bead board. It would have to do. Alan needed to remove both the upper and lower sashes and maybe even some of the trim if he was going to fit the sheets inside. The result as he imagined wouldn’t look as tidy as drywall, but it would be a huge improvement over the insulation he’d hung.

  His utility knife cut through layers of old paint around the molding. For the most part, it didn’t chip or peel around the blade. The paint accepted the cuts and adhered to the wood beneath. Regret bloomed in Alan’s gut. His knife was invading the integrity of the old house. He was destroying—albeit temporarily—a part of the history that his wife treasured.

  Alan shook away the thought. It was an attic. There was no value to this old window, however hand-crafted or precise the workmanship might be. As he finished his cut around the perimeter of the first piece of molding, Alan wondered if the board he was about to pry away from the window had been installed in 1852. He wondered if the board had been milled from a tree felled to clear the field out back.

  Fuck it, he thought.

  Alan tapped his pry bar under the molding. The bar dented the edge of the board and the old nails groaned. The nails popped free, sounding like firecrackers going off in the still air. He tugged the board and released it from the window. Alan ran his hand across the back of the wood. It was dark with age. At the edge where the pry bar had damaged the wood, he saw that the board was a thick chunk of maple—denser and harder and more expensive than anyone would use in new construction. Alan tossed it to the floor and started on the next board. It only took a few minutes to disassemble the window and remove the sashes. He measured the opening and smiled.

  This is going to be easy.

  Alan walked to the top of the narrow stairs.

  I’ll set up the ladder and get the strapping up here. That way I can keep an eye on the driveway in case they come early. I wonder if I should bother to shim out the strapping to make it all flat.

  Alan was lost in thought as he walked through the bedroom and found the top of the main stairs. He realized what he was doing—he was stretching this little project out forever to delay the process of evaluating his photos. He could have worked in a cold attic. Now that the insulation was up, it was certainly tight enough up there to spend an hour a day arranging his photos so he could choose which ones should go in the book.

  I wonder if should get rid of the sash weights and fill that space with foam. I could always put latches on the windows, and foam would definitely reduce the airflow around that window.

  Alan walked down the stairs, running his hand down the thick bannister. When he was almost to the landing, a scraping sound made him turn around. It was the sound of a cinderblock being pushed across a rough concrete floor. It was the sound of stone on stone, grinding across a thin layer of crushed dust.

  Alan stopped.

  The dress, he thought.

  He saw a woman, standing on the stairs. She was about halfway up and had her hand on the bannister, where his had slid just seconds before. She wore the rose-colored dress. Alan’s tongue felt like dry sandpaper against his lips as he licked them. He closed his mouth. This time he could see her face. Liz looked a lot like her mom, Emily. Their face had the same perfect shape—their cheekbones and chin formed a beautiful triangle to frame a smile; their eyes were perfect almonds, crinkled at the corners with good cheer. Alan had studied the picture of Emily in the old hoop dress and noted how pretty Emily had been.

  This was not Emily.

  The woman above Alan on the stairs was old and sour. Her chin pointed at Alan, like an accusation. Her eyes were beady black sparks. When the woman on the stairs smiled, Alan felt his testicles tighten closer to his body and a chill run down his back. The woman, no more than seven feet from Alan, took her free hand and raised a pointed finger to her ear. The finger pushed aside the white curls of cobweb hair. The woman kept her eyes locked with Alan’s as the pointed finger moved to her mouth. She laid the dusty claw of a finger across her pale lips and shook her head slowly.

  Alan’s voice was little more than a croak as he formed three words. “Who are you?”

  The woman’s smile widened. She shook her head back and forth and kept that finger across her lips.

  Alan stood, looking at the woman. Outside, he heard a car coming up the driveway. He couldn’t turn his gaze away from the woman on the stairs. She stopped shaking her head and removed her finger from her lips. She tapped each of her fingertips against her thumb, starting with the pinky, as if she was counting to four. After the index finger, she flared out all her fingers. Alan heard a dry snap as one of her knuckles popped. He saw all of this with his peripheral vision because his eyes were still locked on her beady black pupils.

  Alan felt a trickle of sweat running down his side from his armpit.

  With all his will, he managed to lift his foot towards the next step.

  The woman slowly moved her hand towards Alan. As soon as he was close enough, he meant t
o grab her.

  “Alan?” Bob’s voice called from the kitchen.

  Alan opened his mouth. No sound came out.

  He moved his other foot and took another step towards the ancient woman.

  Footsteps were moving through the dining room. “Alan?”

  His hand was up and moving towards her outstretched hand. Alan took another step.

  The footsteps came down the hall.

  Alan sprang at the woman. As his hand shot towards her, she leaned forward, reaching to meet his grasp. Her lips parted to reveal a rotted mess of jagged teeth. As his hand closed the distance, Alan’s eyes jumped to her hand. He saw the long fingernails at the end of her dry fingers. He wondered what her skin would feel like.

  In the corner of his eye, he saw the movement of Bob coming down the hall.

  His fingertip collided with the woman’s reaching hand.

  She exploded into white flame. Alan’s arm jerked up to shield his eyes against the glare. He blinked at the afterimage burned into his retinas. He yelled a senseless syllable.

  “What the?” Bob asked as he arrived at the foot of the stairs.

  Alan fell back against the wall and came to a stop on the bottom step.

  “What happened?” Bob asked. “Was there a fire? Something electrical?”

  “What do you see?” Alan asked. The words tore from his throat. “What do you see?”

  “Where?” Bob asked. “What’s happening?”

  “On the stairs,” Alan asked. He blinked and rubbed at his eyes. Drool escaped the corner of his mouth and Alan wiped at it with the back of his hand.

  Bob stepped up the first few treads. Alan reached out blindly and grabbed at Bob’s leg, stopping him from going too far.

  “There’s smoke, or vapor,” Bob said. “I don’t know. I guess it’s just dust. What was that flash?”

  “It was her.”

  X • X • X • X • X

  Bob helped Alan to one of the folding chairs in the shed and then handed him the wet paper towel. Alan pressed it to his eyes.

  “My eyes itch,” Alan said.

  “We should get you to the emergency room,” Bob said.

  “No, it’s fine,” Alan said. “It’s just like I looked at the sun or something.”

  “What made the flash?” Bob asked.

  Alan told his friend of the vision. As he acted out the encounter, Alan reached forward and Bob took his hand.

  “Alan, you’ve got blisters,” Bob said.

  The tips of his fingers were puffing up with little circular dots.

  “It’s going away,” Alan said, blinking. “Just little spots now. Christ, I hope the house isn’t on fire.”

  “I don’t understand,” Bob said. “Was it the same woman, or not?”

  “I don’t know,” Alan said. “I didn’t see her face the first time. Joe said it was Emily when he looked at the pictures of his grandmother, but he could have been fooled by the dress. It was definitely the same dress. Bob looked up at the attic window as Alan spoke.

  “Tell me again what she motioned,” Bob said.

  “She pointed at her ear, then she went like, shush, and then she counted—one, two, three, four. And at the end she splayed her fingers at my face, almost like she was throwing something. My blood sugar must have spiked from those damn pancakes or something. Maybe there’s something wrong with the syrup. Oh, jeez, I hope Joe isn’t hallucinating at school right now.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine. And they have people who can help him if there is a problem.”

  Alan dabbed at his eyes with the paper towel. He glanced around, blinking and testing his vision.

  “Almost back,” he said.

  “That is some really freaky shit,” Bob said. “What are you going to do?”

  “What do you mean? About what?” Alan asked. He leaned over and rested his elbows on his knees and looked at the ground.

  “About that crazy vision you just had on your stairs?”

  “Oh. What’s to do? I just had a hallucination. Like you said—it was a crazy vision.”

  “You’ve got to call somebody or something though, right? I mean there must be some kind of exorcists, or a priest, or some ghost hunters or something. Isn’t there that show on Saturday nights? Maine Ghost Hunters or something? What’s the name of that thing Zerolux something?”

  “Those people are nuts, Bob. Either I had a vivid daydream or maybe an acid flashback. Big deal. One weird hallucination every forty years or so isn’t going to kill me.”

  “Isn’t this the second time you’ve seen that lady on your stairs?”

  “The first time doesn’t count. That was probably some weird reflection from the screen door that Joe and I just talked each other into seeing as a woman. Then when Liz showed us the pictures, we filled in the rest of the details. Today—I’m sure that today was just a weird waking dream or something. There’s a word for that, isn’t there?”

  “I saw the flash too,” Bob said.

  “Yeah,” Alan said. “That’s the thing I need to be worried about. If there’s some kinda buildup of static electricity or a faulty circuit or something, I need to figure it out. I’ll call the electrician who hooked up the generator. He can check out the wiring. I’m sure the Colonel has some less-than-legal wires stuffed in the walls. You know I read that electromagnetic fields can give people hallucinations. That would explain both things—the vision and the flash.”

  “And your fingers?”

  “Same thing,” Alan said. “Even more reason to believe it was electrical. Who ever heard of ghost blisters?”

  Out on the road a truck rumbled to a stop and then chuffed as the brakes disengaged. It beeped as it began to back into the drive.

  “Excellent, they’re early,” Alan said. “Here comes the delivery. Hey—thanks for coming over and helping me with this, by the way.”

  “Yeah,” Bob said. He frowned. “No problem.”

  X • X • X • X • X

  “Got it?” Alan yelled.

  “Yup,” Bob said. “Let go.”

  The job got harder with each sheet. Alan went down the ladder quickly and grabbed the next panel of bead board. He balanced the long end on the rails and leaned into it as he walked up the rungs. They weren’t heavy, but they tipped easily and with each new sheet Alan lifted, he felt like he was pressing his luck too far. They only had two more to go.

  The bright spots in his eyes were down to small pinpricks in his vision. His eyes were getting better with each passing hour.

  “Ready?” Alan asked.

  “Yes,” Bob said. “Okay.”

  At the top of the ladder, Bob let Alan lead the way. They turned the sheet and then angled it to fit through the window. When Alan let go, Bob pulled it inside. Alan went back down for the last sheet. About halfway up the ladder, a breeze kicked up and rocked the panel in Alan’s grip. His foot slipped on the rung and his knee banged into the ladder. He made it up three more rungs before another breeze gusted even harder.

  The panel began to overbalance. He let go and let it hit his torso as he gripped the ladder with both hands. He was ready to let the panel drop to the ground—it would be damaged, but self-preservation trumped his frugality. It was pinched against his wrists and the weight of the wind kept it pressed into his chest. Alan felt his grip slipping.

  Suddenly, the weight was gone.

  Alan looked up and saw Bob. He was leaning out the window and holding the panel in one hand.

  “Damn, Bob, be careful,” Alan said. He found his balance again and took the weight of the panel.

  “You looked like you needed help,” Bob said.

  They wrangled the last piece through the window.

  “I’ll meet you in the kitchen—I need something to drink,” Alan said.

  “Sounds good.”

  Alan scuffed the flattened grass with his foot on his way through the yard on his way inside. In the kitchen he turned towards the sink and was about to fill a glass when he heard Bob’s vo
ice from down the hall.

  “Hey, Alan?” Bob called.

  “Yeah?”

  “Come here, would you?”

  “Okay,” Alan said. He filled his glass and took a sip as he walked.

  Bob was standing on the stairs. He pointed down at one of the treads. The colonel had covered the old wooden steps with a carpet runner, secured at each interior corner and just under the lip of each tread with metal rods. The carpet was ugly, but still had years of wear left in it. It was low on Alan’s list to replace.

  The staircase had fourteen steps. On the seventh, there were two footprints.

  Not footprints, Alan thought. The opposite of footprints. I’ve seen something like that before.

  Alan knelt down to touch the carpet runner. In the center of the step he saw the charcoal grey outline of two feet scorched into the fibers. He touched his middle finger to one. He rubbed the ash between this finger and thumb. Alan scraped at one of the outlines with his fingernail. He found clean carpet underneath.

  “I think this will come up with some carpet cleaner,” Alan said.

  “Wait, Alan, this is physical evidence of what you said you saw on the stairs. It was no electrical flash—no static discharge. Right? You can’t ignore this.”

  “I was probably standing there when the flash happened,” Alan said.

  “You weren’t. I saw you. You were several steps down from there,” Bob said. “Besides, these marks aren’t even the same size as your shoes. They’re much smaller. Come here, try to put your foot in one.”

  “I’m just going to get the carpet cleaner,” Alan said. “I want to get this cleaned up before it gets tracked up and down the stairs.” He descended and headed down the hall for the closet. “You know,” he called over his shoulder, “those probably aren’t footprints at all. It could just be some weird ash from the flash. I’m lucky the whole house didn’t burn down.”

  When Alan returned with his spray bottle, Bob was taking pictures with his phone. Alan waited for Bob to finish and then sprayed the carpet. The ash came up with some blotting.

  “There,” Alan said. “Problem solved. Thanks again for your help today.”