Dead Echo

by C.G. Banks

  Chapter 5: The Attic

  By five that afternoon she’d tired of focusing on the kitchen. There were still a ton of boxes to unload but the other rooms called her attention, just to come see for a moment. She slowly walked through the house, pausing in the living room to try and imagine where the things she had would go, what else she’d have to buy to finish things out. This place actually had a fireplace, something she’d never figured even in her wildest imagination, the closest she’d ever come a hollowed-out firepit in her grandmother’s backyard for bonfires on nights when the woman had been away. She guessed she’d need those tools she always saw in magazines, the little shovel and brushes, the poker to move logs around. There was just so much.

  And she continued the survey, her eyes tripping over all the boxes lying singly and piled on the floor and against the walls. The movers had been as quick as they dared, placing only the furniture she’d stipulated in the appropriate rooms and just piling the rest anywhere they could. Now the front of the house was top-heavy with their haste, the hall leading back to the bedrooms a minor obstacle course. She muscled her way through to the master bedroom, poking her head inside to make sure the bastards had at least put the bed together. She figured now she’d paid them too much but what did she know about ordering men around? Or anyone for that matter. Now she knew she’d have to put a little iron in her back or the world was gonna chew her up. She’d heard John say that more than she liked to admit but now realized the truth in it. Always the knowledge after the fact. That was what Life taught you: that you really didn’t know how to correctly address something until that thing was receding away from you at the speed of light. Well, she’d have to change that now. John hadn’t been like that and she couldn’t afford to be, paid for house or not.

  Yes, there was the bed, pushed back against the far wall just like she’d told them. The bureau was also in place, along with another dozen or so small boxes. They were all dutifully marked just waiting to be put away. And now she had nothing but time. Time and patience. She backed out of the room to the hall. Chanced a look to the extent of the hall where Terri’s bedroom would have been in a perfect world. Now it would serve only as a holding room, another larger closet in a house full of them. She reached over to the door and pulled it closed, not rightly knowing if or when she’d ever be able to function in there, if she’d be able to enter at all. She thought maybe she’d get a lock, maybe seal the whole room up like an airless chamber. But that would have to all come sometime in the future. Whatever that was. She leaned hard against the wall, tried to steady her breathing as she examined the multitude of boxes lining the floor.

  “First things first,” she whispered, running the back of her hand along her lips. Only think one step ahead, one step at a time. Let the rest come as it may. She glanced up to the ceiling. The attic door was firmly in place above her head. Its skinny pull-string hung down like an exclamation point. Yes, she had to prioritize, get a head for the house, clear some of the mess away so she could get a true picture of what would have to come next.

  The attic.

  The movers had high-tailed it without putting anything up there, and now, really, she could not see herself unpacking most of these boxes scattered in the hall. Many were marked with Terri’s stuff. Patsy hadn’t been able to part with anything before the move, doubted if she’d ever be able to part with any of it, any time. But it would have to be put away whether it was unpacked or not.

  But not now.

  She looked over at the wall switch. There were two, side by side. She reached over and flicked the closest, and the light in the hallway went out. She switched it back on and flicked its neighbor. Nothing happened. But when she looked up at the ceiling there was a vaguely-lit outline around the cutaway. The attic light. She reached up and backed out of the way as she pulled the door down, unfolded the ladder. No time like the present, she thought.

  She grabbed the closest small box, fitted it to her chest and started up. At chin-level she pushed it across the plywood flooring and continued up. It was just like any other attic she’d ever seen, as close to the inverted bottom of a ship as she could imagine, all exposed ribs and naked rafters. Insulation stretched out to the corners, pink and fluffy. Someone had paid special attention to flooring a large area up here, providing a suitable staging area for any number of boxes she (or anyone else) should ever wish to leave.

  And that’s when it caught her eye.

  At first she wasn’t sure, as if not fully comprehending the fact of what she thought she saw. She squinted into the recesses of the attic, but no, there it was. A small little child’s table, surrounded by matching chairs, something any parent could have bought for a little girl’s tea party, just outside the ring of light, back there behind the duct work. “What the hell?” she whispered. She stepped off the last step to the plywood, bent over and shaded her eyes with her hands to cut the glare that poured off the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling.

  There was no doubt.

  Someone had definitely left it arranged so. But why? Patsy knew she wasn’t the first owner of the house, but this just didn’t seem to make much sense. She stepped to the side of the hole in the attic, bent over beneath the slanted rafters, straining to make out the little tea-set. Why in the world…? She looked around at all the other emptiness; nothing up here but the box she’d lugged. Curiosity definitely had the better of her by now (that with a healthy little chill down the spine), forced her footsteps closer to the duct work, even now trying to formulate possibilities in her head. She rounded a cluster of two-by-fours that held up the crown of the roof and finally got a good look.

  Sure enough. A little tea set, laid out as if for a girl’s tea party. But covered in dust, and meticulously drawn. The small table with pictures of dolls and laughing children, four matching chairs pulled up close. Weird enough, sure, plenty if you got right down to the heart of it, but what sent the wave of shivers and, following close on, revulsion was what was set out in geometric perfection. Four plates and matching cups, brimming over with what had now become a slimy mess of squirming activity.

  “What the hell?” she said again. She reached up and grabbed a rafter, steadying herself as she carefully stepped over the air-conditioning duct in front of her. Like everything laid out for a party, she thought, her mind starting to go places she didn’t want it to go. She squatted down, biting back the burgeoning edge of fear that crept up over her shoulder, the hair on the back of her neck just beginning to stand up. Four little tea sets with matching forks and spoons, each laid out as if in accordance with a weird Mrs. Manners. The saucers and cups were grimed over and black and when Patsy bent closer the faint whiff of corruption reached her nostrils. The black substance looked like congealed blood with fat white maggots writhing within. Further streaks of black on the table’s dirty surface looked like they’d been made by little fingers, like children experimenting in watercolors. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she thought she caught a glimpse of movement far back in the shadows near where the roof edge descended to the attic floor. She snapped her gaze up to get a fix and the next instant the light hanging from the ceiling blinked out.

  Everything went to pitch black.

  She screamed in surprise, immediately regretting her loss of control as her heart stepped up a stampede. She fell back against another piece of ductwork and came close to stepping between a rafter and going through the ceiling. Luckily her hand found a beam and she caught herself. In the pitch black. She cast a frantic glance over her shoulder, searching out the attic door. A little ghost of illumination drifted up from the hallway below, but not much.

  Not enough.

  Then, a scrabbling somewhere farther back in the gloom, her eyes tricking her for a second that two pinpoints of red glowed from that general direction. No, fucking way…get a hold of yourself! Another scream threatened to burst from her throat but she bit back on it hard, knowing that if she did scream again she would be coming out of the attic one way or the other,
and since she was too far away from the ladder, it would most likely be through the goddamn ceiling.

  She closed her eyes in the dark and counted slowly to twenty, all the time her mind painting the picture of her proximity to the little table and its odd contents. All the while waiting for a hand from one of the mysterious, missing party-goers to close on her shoulder, a fetid voice to whisper in her ear. But there was nothing. The trip-hammer velocity of her heart gradually dwindled under the count and she opened her eyes. There were no further noises, no hints of motion, if, in fact, there had ever been any in the first place. “Calm down, Patsy,” she murmured, the claustrophobia biting into her with all teeth now. “You’re being ridiculous, dammit.” But the admonition did little to still her. There, right over there was the opening. The old light bulb had simply gone out. Everything was perfectly logical, perfectly ordinary if you didn’t go placing horrors down on top of it. She opened her eyes and found the light again coming up from the hallway. Her eyes had had time to adjust and the attic was not so dark now, the noise could have easily been the attic vents circling in the wind; they could definitely use some oil. There had been no red pinpoints of light in the back corner. She was a grown woman, for chrisake! She took another moment and practiced breathing steadily, purposefully. Hell, rats and birds got in attics all the time; she knew that. People left shit they didn’t need with no intention of scaring the bejesus out of anybody who’d find them later.

  Get a grip on yourself, she warned.

  She breathed out loudly once more, her hand on her chest, and then set out fumbling across the plywood to the attic door. It was at the moment when she felt most in control that she heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps in the hallway.

  This time she did scream and tore across the remaining space to the door. “Who the hell’s in here!” she yelled. No answer from below. Without looking down she thumped down the ladder violently enough to test its construction. And now she squatted on the floor, her eyes casting about frantically, fully in the throes of terror. She heard nothing, only the gentle circling of the attic vents above, mindless to her fright. She didn’t want to say anything else, as if in voicing her fear she would somehow make whatever she was afraid of real. She looked down the hall toward the living room. There was nothing in the hall, no sound coming from elsewhere in the house. All in your mind, the voice that always whispered about the gun consoled her now. She stood up, walked to where the hall entrance gave on to the living room. Sure enough, nothing at all. She’d been spooked, but there was nothing. She crossed over to the kitchen/dining room entrance, checked the front door to make sure it was not ajar.

  Closed.

  No sound of footsteps, no guttural laughter from the carport. No children playing a joke on the new tenant, no terrible presence of a killer loose in her new house. She walked back into the living room, chanced another look back down the hall. The attic ladder was right where she’d left it, mocking her terror.

  She tried to laugh and found she couldn’t. The paranoia was too close, too personal. For just a moment she imagined the movement she thought she’d seen up there, those two little pinpricks of red. The children’s table with its terrible place settings. “I’m losing it,” she said, very small now. All the boxes were where she’d left them, the house nothing more than a place waiting to be put to rights. She’d had a moment, one lost moment of irrationality, but now it was gone. The world was back to normal. Surely…

  She leaned against the doorjamb, wondering if she’d have the courage to walk over and shut the attic door. For just a moment she had another vision of seeing actual movement up there, small things skittering away from the light and back into the darkness. No, she’d didn’t think she’d be able to walk back over there.

  She really didn’t.

  But after another couple of minutes she did. She braced up and marched back to the attic door. Chanced a look up the steps but didn’t see anything. “Of course you don’t, you idiot,” she chided herself. “There’s nothing up there to see.” She thought about climbing the steps again, poking her head above the attic floor to just get another look around. But her heart started its trip-hammer beat again. “You’re tired, Patsy,” she told herself. “It’s been a long day and you should really get some rest.” She reached over and folded the bottom third of the ladder up into its place. Then she folded it again.

  There was nothing up there, not one goddamn thing.

  She set the attic door back into place and reached over and shut the light off. The vague rectangle of light blinked out and only then did her heart slow. She stood in the emptiness of the hall, alone with the multitude of boxes, waiting, listening for any odd scrabbling sounds from above. But none came. No scatchings from the attic door, no miscreant sounds. She leaned against the wall and tried to bring herself back to normal. After five minutes she felt she could breathe again.

  But further work was out of the question.

  “Just tired,” she told herself. “Been a long day.” But in the back of her mind she did see the pinpricks of light in the corner, saw the table and the things arranged on it. “Tired,” she said again. “That’s all it is,” and in the depths of her heart she hoped so.

  An overwhelming sense of exhaustion cascaded down around her then, sucking away what little energy she had left. She thought about the bedroom and the bed, considered the proximity to the attic door, and decided against sleeping there. At least for the moment…just for the time being. The couch in the living room would do just fine. The bed would have to be made if she was going to sleep in the bedroom tonight, anyway, and she was really not up to the task. It would be fine to just throw a blanket on the couch and retrieve a pillow from one of the boxes. She could do that.

  She could do that just fine.

  And though she thought sleep would be light years away, when she laid down on the couch in the living room, consciousness fled and she fell into a dreamless expanse where nothing had to be evaluated for sanity and nothing more need be done. At least until morning.