The Boarded Hatch

The Boarded Hatch

I stopped where I was with one hand still up, halfway into a wave I had already started. The child on the rusted swing stayed where he was, small legs hanging clear of the ground, the same crooked smile held in place. His eyes were flat and black. My gray shape was in them, standing in the middle of a Milton afternoon.

Before I could put a word together, a man came out of the old wood house fast, thin, with a hollowed-out face. He took the boy by the arm, pulled him up off the swing, and looked at me the way Mrs. Fox had looked at me through her window that afternoon, on guard and keeping her distance.

He didn't say anything to me. He walked the boy inside, shut the mossy door, and the bolt went over with a dry click.

I was alone on the empty dirt road. The swing kept moving in the fall wind with nobody on it: creak... creak...

I started walking. I didn't understand what this town was doing, why people looked at me like I had carried something in with me, or what the boy had meant by any of it. I wasn't going to stand out there and work it out. I went back up the road toward my parents' house with my head down, moving fast.

The road ran back through town for about a quarter mile before it turned off toward my parents' place. I went past the library, one room with a wheelchair ramp built onto the side, and the brass plate by the door credited the ramp to the Hudson Valley Cognitive Foundation. An old man sat on the porch across from it with a blanket over his legs. He was still turned my way when I got to the end of the block.

The dark came down quickly. It took the overgrown yard first and then closed in around the two-story wood house. The $15,000 I had sent GhostInk was still sitting in my stomach, and the afternoon was on top of it.

I turned on every light on the first floor, for the quiet and for the hunger. The bulbs were weak and yellow, and all they did was bring up the damp stains along the walls.

Nine fixtures on the first floor and seven of them still had a bulb that worked. The thermostat in the hall read 44 degrees. I went into the kitchen and the one over the back door read 51. I didn't go back and check either of them again.

In the small kitchen I put together dinner out of a few slices of sandwich bread and a box of macaroni and cheese. I set a small metal pot on the gas burner and lit it. The flame went hiss and the smell of melting cheddar came up, and none of it made the room any warmer. I stirred the thick orange sauce with a wooden spoon and watched it bubble, thinking about a wallet address with nothing left in it.

Clack.

I stopped stirring.

It was a small sound and a clear one, and it came from the ceiling directly over my head.

I looked up. The oak boards up there had gone the color of old paste, and rainwater had left long stains running through them.

I stood with the spoon still in my hand and my head back until my neck ached. Nine boards ran between the light fixture and the far wall. The gap along the third one was wide enough to take a dime, and it went the whole length of the room.

The quiet came back. There was only the cheese going pop... pop... on the stove. A rat, I figured. Or a squirrel working across the roof. I went back to the pot.

Thud... thud... thud...

The sound had changed. Those were footsteps.

Slow ones, unhurried and heavy, a man in hard-soled shoes crossing the dusty attic boards over the second story. Right over my father's study.

The wooden spoon went out of my hand into the pot. Hot cheese sauce came over the rim and across the stovetop, and I left it there.

I held my breath and kept my eyes on the ceiling. The footsteps stopped at the attic, directly above the top of my head.

Then a second sound came. A rasp of metal against wood, and behind it a tapping, light and even... tap... tap... tap...

It held its interval exactly. Three beats, a pause, three beats. I counted 11 sets before it quit.

Someone was watching me. I could place where from: the gaps between the rotted floorboards over my head. The black eyes that had been in my dream since that night 31 years ago were up against one of those gaps now, looking down at the top of my skull.

I turned off the burner. I took the steak knife off the counter, the stainless one with the fine edge. I backed out of the kitchen with my eyes on the wooden stairs that went up to the second floor. The dark at the top of them was solid.

Every step went creak under my weight. I kept one hand on the rail and the knife out in the other and went up, step by step. The higher I got, the thicker the air was with rotted wood and 31 years of dust, and under that was something faint I couldn't name, bitter and manufactured.

I stopped on the eleventh step and stood there until the sweat on my back went cold. The knife handle had gone slick. I changed hands, dried my palm on my jeans, and took the last three. The bitter smell was strongest on the top step.

I came out onto the second-floor hallway. The hall light flickered and put out almost nothing.

My father's study door stood open on a black gap.

I got close and kicked it the rest of the way in. Bang!

The room was empty. My laptop sat on the desk where I had left it, the screen dark. In the ceiling, a panel of wood had been screwed down over the crawlspace opening, four rusted screws sunk deep into the frame. Nobody was in there.

I set the knife on the desk and stood up on the chair to reach the panel. Four screws, sunk to the head, the slots packed solid with rust. I pushed up on the panel with both palms and got nothing out of it. The wood around the screw heads was clean.

I let my breath out and had about a second of believing my nerves had made all of it...

Ring... ring... ring...

The landline downstairs started going.

The bell was metal and it was loud, and in a house that empty it came through the walls.

It was my father's old corded phone. The line to this house had been cut 10 years ago and the cord had never gone back into the jack, and the thing was ringing down there in the dark.

I stood at the top of the stairs with the steak knife still out in front of me.

It kept going on the first floor.

It came in waves and took apart everything that had been standing still in the house.

I swallowed and went down one step at a time. I counted them on the way down.

Fourteen. I kept my hand off the rail on the way down and used the wall instead. The seventh took my weight without a sound. Every other one in the flight had something to say about it.