The Thing in the Ceiling

The Thing in the Ceiling

The phone table was under a layer of dust. I lifted the receiver, and under the ring there was a tone in it, low and even. The line was carrying current.

"Hello?"

A voice I knew came back down the line, and the house went ordinary again.

"God, James. You finally picked up."

Michael.

I let the arm with the knife in it drop.

"Michael... that you?"

"Who else is it going to be? I've called your cell a dozen times. What in the hell are you doing up there in Milton?"

"I shut my phone off," I said. The lie took nothing out of me. "How did you get through on this number? I thought the line here was cut 10 years ago."

Michael made a small sound on the other end.

"I had the phone company put the line back in for that house last week. I knew you'd go hide in it and turn your cell off."

I didn't say anything. I leaned back against the edge of the wooden table, and the tiredness came up over me again.

The phone table was oak, a half-moon top with one leaf folded down against the wall. I drew my thumb through the dust on it and the dust rolled up gray ahead of my nail. The wood under the line was polished.

"How are you doing?" Michael brought his voice down and meant it. "The session with Dr. Evelyn Reed, day before yesterday. Did it get anywhere?"

"Same as before," I said. "None of it helps much."

"You have to give it time, James. You've had a lot on you."

"I know."

He waited a second, then got to what he had called about.

"What about the new book? The publisher came at me again this morning."

I tightened my hand on the receiver. The empty wallet address came up, and the GhostInk account behind it.

"I'm writing," I said.

"Really?" Michael said. "It came back?"

"Yeah. I'm cleaning up the first chapters."

"That's great. What's the structure? Can you give me anything?"

I looked up at the ceiling, where a few minutes ago somebody had been walking.

"Something different, Michael. Cruel, strange, and true all the way down."

"That sounds promising." Michael laughed a little. "When can you send me the rough draft?"

I closed my eyes and ran the math. The $15,000 came up again and pushed at me.

"Give me a week."

"A week?" Michael said. "You're sure?"

"I'm sure. A week and I'll send you the whole outline, finished."

"All right. I believe you. Don't let me down, James."

"Thanks, Michael. I'm hanging up."

"Get some rest."

The tone came back, long and flat. I set the receiver down on the cradle.

The house went back to being quiet. I stayed against the table and looked at the phone. One week. I had just put a date on myself.

The drawer under it held the old directory and a stack of mail my mother had never thrown out. Near the bottom was a card on heavy stock thanking Walter and Miriam Miller for 11 years of work with the Hudson Valley Cognitive Foundation, and behind the card a photograph of three people on the annex steps with a framed certificate held between them. Two of them were my parents, and the third man had white hair and was holding the left side of the frame. I put both back the way I found them and shut the drawer.

I walked to the bedroom and let myself down onto the old bed, which smelled like damp.

Being tired that far through took me under fast.

The dark in my head didn't leave me alone.

The dream I had been having since that night 31 years ago came back and took me.

I was standing in the middle of the Milton house in a rainstorm. This time none of it was soft at the edges. Every detail held its shape.

The attic ceiling was dark with rainwater. The crawlspace hole stood open on a deeper black.

And there was one more thing in it, small, that had never been in the dream before.

Out of that hole came a sound: a scrape... scrape... of metal working on something soft, and behind it breathing, wet and thick, like something choking on itself.

The black eyes in the crawlspace weren't empty this time. A heavy black liquid started out of the corner of one of them, ran along the grain of the oak, and dropped plink... plink... onto the floor beside my bed.

"James..." A whisper, low and wrecked, right up against my eardrum.

"Huh—"

I came awake sitting up.

I pulled the sweater off over my head and dropped it on the floor, where it held the shape it landed in.

The alarm clock on the nightstand had no cord in it and read 3:40. The inside of the window had gone over with condensation and the sill under it was wet through. I wiped it once with the flat of my hand and dried my hand on the mattress.

The nightmare hadn't frightened me, which was new. I sat in the dark and noticed that my hands were warm. They were never warm.

That sound. The liquid and the whisper.

It was cruel, and it had been composed.

I got up and went to the desk. I took the old notebook and turned to the page where I had put down a few lines earlier.

Under the old line I wrote one more, short, before any of it could leave me:

"It doesn't only watch. It breathes with the blood of the one given up under the floor."

I read the line back, and it satisfied me, which should have been a problem.

Nine pages in the notebook had writing on them. While the ink dried I went back through the earlier ones and found a line on page four, in my own hand, that I had no memory of putting there. I squared the notebook to the edge of the desk and laid the pen across it.

The laptop screen came up out of sleep.

A new-mail tone went off: Ding!

I was across the room before I decided to be. I took the mouse and opened the encrypted inbox.

Email from GhostInk.

He hadn't taken my money. The $15,000 was doing exactly what I had paid it to do.

The attachment was named: Scenario outline — The Perfect Suffocation.

I clicked, downloaded it, and opened it.

The screen light came up on my face. I got as far as the first line of the manuscript and stopped moving.

I read it again. Then I read it a third time, standing there with one hand on the back of the chair.

The writing was cold and exact and worked out past the point where a healthy person stops. I read the whole first page standing over the desk, and I did not sit down.

The attachment ran dozens of pages: diagrams, psychological breakdowns, a detailed timeline. I didn't have the patience to read it word by word. I went down the headings and took the spine of the murder case he had built:

The killer went at his victims in the exact moment they were at the top of it, physically. He used no force at all. He controlled the air in a sealed room and turned the highest point into a quiet suffocation. He left one thing behind at every scene: an odd fold in the bedsheet, and one private keepsake of the victim's swapped out for another.

Everything deeper, the criminal psychology, the way the detective gets walked into the trap, the particulars of each smaller case, was laid out in order underneath. The spine alone was enough. I had the book.

I didn't wait. I typed back to GhostInk right there:

"The spine is worth it. The transaction ends here. No further contact."

I hit send, closed the GhostInk application, and shut the laptop. The worry about being cheated was gone, and so was the guilt. What moved in to take the space I didn't look at.

I put a pen on the desk in front of me. The work had already cut me loose from the room.

Everything that had been shut down for months came open at once. I took a stack of white paper and the fountain pen and wrote like a man with somebody else in him.

I was putting skin on a skeleton I had bought. The cold sentences came out of the pen smooth enough to be disturbing. The pitch and the first three chapters were finished inside half a day. I typed all of it up, attached the file, and emailed it to Michael.

I had gone through 61 sheets of the white paper and both cartridges in the fountain pen. My right middle finger had a ridge on it where the barrel sat, and the ridge was still up an hour later. The last 11 sheets leaned the other way, and I typed those up with the rest.

Less than an hour later the landline downstairs rang again.

I picked it up on the second ring.

"Jesus, James!"

Michael's voice came through the receiver. It had gone up out of its own register.

"I just finished the three chapters you sent. This is exceptional. This is really, really good."

I leaned back against the edge of the table and let myself smile.

"What did you think?"

"What did I think? That closed-in feeling, and being inside the guy's head, it's past anything you've written. And that whole idea, taking a life right at the top of..."

Michael kept going, and I could hear paper turning on the other end.

"God, the critics are going to take their hats off. The editorial board reads this and they lose their minds."

"I told you, Michael."

"It's the top of the mountain." Michael laughed, and the relief came through it. "This doesn't just pull you out of the hole. This puts James Miller back at number one."

"I hope so."

"There's no hoping about it."

He hesitated, and then his voice came down and turned curious.

"But listen... I have to ask. A criminal structure this dark, worked out this far down. Where did you get it from?"

The question came down on top of everything I had been feeling and put it out.

The smile went off my face. I looked at the dust on the receiver.

What comes up in a man who has taken someone else's work came up in me, and the cold of that house went into it.

I turned and looked out through the dusty glass at the empty yard with the wind going through it, and past that, up the road, where a boy on a rusted swing had looked at me that afternoon with flat black eyes.

I didn't say anything for a long time. Long enough that Michael had to come back on:

"James? You still there?"

I took a breath. My voice came down low, and it went somewhere else, like I was talking to the dark standing around me instead:

"From a devil I shut up in the crawlspace without meaning to, Michael."