by A. J. Gnuse
“Like what? Did you hear? Or see?”
“How about this?” Marshall shimmied his chair back and pulled open the desk drawer. At the very back, wedged into the back corner, he pulled out an old, green pencil bag. He looked at Eddie, not at the bag, when he unzipped it. From inside, Marshall pulled a switchblade, folded, with a plastic, black hilt. A small knife, but the shape of the blade when he sprang it open—curved, jagged near the base, with a long, sloping tip—made it an entirely different tool than their mother’s kitchen knives, even if they were mostly larger, or sharper.
“Mom would kill me if she knew I had these,” Marshall said. “Or, had them. There were two.” Marshall considered the knife in the palm of his hand, closed the blade, and handed it to Eddie, holding it with his thumb and finger in a way that said to be careful. “I bought two from a kid at school. The other knife’s smaller, but it’s the same kind. It’s the type some real kind of enforcer would have. The blade springs out if you press the button. I’ve kept them both in this drawer, and yesterday night, I take the bag out—and one’s gone. Mom and Dad wouldn’t have taken it. Not without fully losing their shit with me. And they sure wouldn’t have taken just one. And you—you said you don’t come in my room.”
“No,” Eddie said.
“Well.” Marshall took the knife from Eddie. “There’s been a lot of things that go on in this house. But this is something that can’t be explained away.” He closed the blade, and instead of putting it into his drawer, tucked it into his front pocket.
Eddie felt sick. Someone, in his room, in his brother’s room, touching and taking his things. All those times he had sensed someone—whoever it was—something had been in their house. This entire time, he and his family had been in danger. He resisted the urge to stand and search Marshall’s room again himself. The air felt malignant.
Marshall scrolled through the on-screen pages while Eddie looked down at his hands. “You can see, all sorts of people talking about them,” Marshall said. “Whether ours comes in and out, or if it’s holed up somewhere in the house, I’m not sure. Whether it’s a ‘he’ or ‘she’ either, I don’t know. But I’m thinking—I’m pretty sure it’s just one. It’s an ‘it’ to me for now.”
An “it.” The pronoun didn’t seem like an accurate word at all. An “it” was a mouse in the wall, or a cat at dusk skulking too far off to make out its eyes. An “it” was like the weather, was like a house—around you, but something separate and removed. An “it” doesn’t listen to you, respond to the words you say, doesn’t stand up when you tell it to leave.
“What do you think it wants?” Eddie asked. The sounds he heard, the footsteps and thumps in the wall, the missing, borrowed books, the little plastic witch and the feeling he got sometimes when he was alone in his room, the day of his birthday—what had been in the foot space of his desk in the closet? And after, from under his bed, the sounds of something leaving. But how could he tell Marshall any of this? How could he explain that it hadn’t seemed dangerous before? That instead—he just hadn’t known what it had seemed. He hadn’t thought about it. Hadn’t realized.
How stupid would he look? How could he say that the times when it seemed so real, he hadn’t said anything because, yes, the thought of someone there, someone less than a full person, like a small cloud, had made him feel good. Had made him feel like when he was alone, he wasn’t, that when he sat down on the carpet, the floor rose up to meet him, that when he entered a room, something shapeless welcomed him silently in.
And what if, maybe, none of this was real. Marshall might be playing a trick on him. Or it could be a test to see whether Eddie really was still a frightened little boy. Or even if Marshall really did believe, like Eddie had, maybe he had been carried away by his own imagination. An old house makes many noises, their parents had told them after their first few nights here. What if they were giving a face to a configuration of noisy crossbeams and walls? What if Marshall had simply forgotten where he had hid the other knife? And even if there was something here with them, what if the thing Marshall talked about was something completely different from what Eddie had heard, what he thought he heard?
“Some of my books disappeared,” Eddie said. “Some of them, from my room. A couple weeks back. Like somebody took them.”
“Really.”
“I hear stuff sometimes, too.”
“Like what?”
“Footsteps. I don’t know if they’re real.”
“They’re real.”
“Are we going to tell Mom and Dad?”
Marshall squinted into the screen. After a time, he shook his head slowly. “They won’t ever believe us,” he said. “Honestly, I’m thinking the more convinced we seem, the less they’ll be.”
“But why won’t they?” Eddie’s voice cracked as he said the words, and a sudden shame swelled in him. He wanted to mention the missing knife—his fear that it would hurt them, now that it knew they knew—but he was afraid his voice would squeak and tremble—unable to be anything but a little boy’s again.
“Shh.” Marshall twisted in his chair to face his brother, lip curling at the corner. Faces showed so many expressions, were hard sometimes in how they showed many things at once, but Eddie knew this one well. An asymmetry. It only meant two things: embarrassment or contempt. He deserved them both.
“Where have you been?” Marshall said. “Have you not been paying any attention, wrapped up in that little world you live in? I have been telling Dad and Mom this. I’ve been saying something’s not right, that I’ve heard things, that food goes missing, and Eddie, they laugh it off quicker each time. Dad calls me a child. Dad acts like I’m weird. Then they treat me . . . like I’m you.”
Eddie winced.
“And what?” Marshall continued. “I should tell them about the knife? I’d have to tell them where I bought the thing—that’ll look good, Eddie. ‘Hey Mom, I bought weapons from some older dude at school, and now I think a stranger is sneaking around in our house.’ Seriously. I’m not looking for appointments with a counselor.”
Eddie considered the floor. He regretted coming here, to Marshall’s room. Should have just said no at the dinner table, said no, there was nothing, he never noticed anything. Marshall, eventually, would have left, given up. And the thing in their home? Maybe it would have heard. So, nothing would change. Eddie would avoid the noises in the dark, and it would continue to leave them alone.
“You know I didn’t mean that,” Marshall said. “About you—about you being weird. I meant that it’s actually part of the reason I’m talking to you. Only you, really. Because, well? You are weird. You’re the only damn person here who isn’t going to call me a freak for thinking this.”
Eddie looked up.
“Also, stupid, you’re my brother. Who else do I have? All my classmates suck ass.”
Marshall clicked the mouse and loaded another page on the forum. For a while, the two sat like that: Marshall reading him posts, Eddie sitting behind, listening to the titles of the linked news articles. Man Found Living in Ex-girlfriend’s Shed. Remnants of Trespassers in Deceased Elder’s Home.
“You don’t think,” Eddie asked, “the house is haunted, or something, do you?”
“Jesus, Eddie,” Marshall said. “I’m freaking out enough—don’t give us a ghost, too.”
Eddie smiled in spite of the fear. Marshall was joking. This was something you could joke about. Terrifying, but ridiculous, too. And Eddie wasn’t alone in knowing.
His brother had confided in him. Eddie was someone worth confiding in.
“Here’s what we do,” Marshall said. “We fucking deal with it. We look around the house, and if we find proof, we show Dad and Mom. And if we see something, there’s two of us. We make it get out.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. Dad and Mom can suck it. Until they believe us, they can’t help us. They’d probably just want to get in our way.” Marshall smiled and leaned over toward Eddie. “Who knows? Mayb
e after, Dad and Mom might finally listen to us. Treat us with some respect. We might not have to spend every free weekend doing their damn ‘projects.’”
“Really?”
“Well, knowing them, probably no,” Marshall said. “But, you know, we might make the news. People at school will look at you different. It’d be like in all these articles, except with a good ending. We find out how the person’s getting in and out, where they’re hiding when they’re here, and we get ’em out, keep ’em out.”
Marshall’s face was right by his own. Eddie could see the swath of patchy stubble on his cheeks, a constellation of pimples above his eyebrows. He was grinning at Eddie. His neck tense with excitement.
“We can do this?” Eddie said. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” Marshall said, squeezing his brother’s bicep. “Fuck yeah, we can.”
The Guest Room
ELISE LAY ON HER BACK WITHIN THE GUEST ROOM WALL AND LISTENED to the short strokes of Mrs. Laura’s paintbrush against the baseboard. She had seen the paint bucket in the back porch the evening before, with the little spatter of color on the tin lid. Brown. Chocolate brown. They had painted the walls beige, and the trim would be brown. With the white windowpanes, the transformation of the room into an enormous s’more would be complete. Elise imagined her mom’s face: her mouth falling open in pure horror.
Another thing that had been her parents’—the peach walls and pearl trim—would be gone. She hadn’t yet had the chance to look, but Elise assumed the new coat of paint would also erase the faint impressions of her horses by the door. Elise had been five when she had made them. While her parents installed a dishwasher downstairs, she’d taken her school pencils to the baseboard, drawing three horses, realistic as she could manage. She’d been punished, of course, sent to bed a full two (!) hours early—brutal, but Elise had known what she was getting into, though she’d only done it out of boredom. When her mom, who hardly got upset, first saw them, she bowed her head and bit her forefinger to fight back tears. Elise still remembered the shame in seeing her that way, waiting for her to say anything at all. How Elise wanted simultaneously to be taken in her arms, and to be far away, out of her sight. The house seeming so broken-down and big, her mom so tired.
But when her dad came, he dropped to the floor, crossed his legs, and studied the drawings. Recognized the simple fix: a pencil’s eraser would clean away the graphite animals. Once clean, there’d be nothing left but her pressmarks, the semi-invisible inversions of bones. Of course, like all projects in that house, it still took him over a week to finally erase them, long enough that Elise began to wonder if he actually liked seeing them there, with their elongated legs and wild eyelashes.
But now, even the pressmarks would be gone. Normally, Elise would be in a foul mood all day, grieving over the remnants of a memory painted over and cleared away. But she’d had a good morning, and the feeling clung to her like warmth from a nap in a patch of sun. Earlier that day, she’d shown Brody how to hide, to really hide, the way she did—to nothing himself to the point that even she couldn’t find him. No sounds of his fidgeting, no sense of his breathing; she could almost convince herself that he wasn’t hiding, that he hadn’t come over, that she’d only dreamt up him coming over that morning. Brody wasn’t behind the living room sofa, or in any of the closets, and she knew he had no interest in ever climbing into any of the spaces between walls. (“That’s a no,” he had said to her once, looking up into the access panel in the pantry.) So, he’d gotten good with what he had. Too good. She’d begun to search ridiculous places—the bell of the dryer, the freezer—afraid that he crawled in somewhere and suffocated himself. She gave up.
“All right!” she cried. “Game over! You win! Come out!”
And out he popped, smiling with self-satisfaction, from beneath the guest room’s armoire. He had slid into the opening on the back bottom that’d been exposed when the Masons had pulled it away from the wall.
“Look at this!” Brody had said, coming over to her and thrusting his cupped hands into her face, as if to show her some bug he’d captured. In his hands were paint chips, fat and curled like worms, the guest room’s new beige color on one side and the old, flesh-colored peach on the other. Elise had been mad, first from being beaten in their game, and then thinking that he’d scratched the strips loose from the wall with his fingernail as he waited for her to find him. But Brody told her how he’d only scooped them from the floor into his palm. She wanted to believe him.
“They’re beautiful,” she’d said. And they were, in a way. “Don’t eat them.”
Now, that afternoon, Elise listened to Mrs. Laura hum while she painted. No melody, just the occasional, disjointed notes. Every few minutes, the woman grunted as she stood, took a few paces over, and sat back down. She hadn’t wanted the boys’ or even her husband’s help on this step. This was careful work. The painter’s tape had been removed, and now the Mason mother filled in the spaces that had been overlooked and touched up the mistakes. Elise enjoyed the time beside her. Why was it? Women somehow felt different, Elise figured, even having them nearby, not speaking. There’s something in a mother that’s in all mothers, maybe. There’s something in a mother that’s there already in girls.
It was a Wednesday night, and tomorrow evening the boys would be done with school. They couldn’t possibly be doing homework, but even so, they were closed off in their rooms. (Or was Eddie outside, in that space of his between the two trees beside the shed? Elise hadn’t been keeping track as well lately as she might have.) Mr. Nick finished grading in his office. The house was next to quiet, empty-feeling. Elise had always preferred a loud house in the evening, one that drowned her own sounds in its own, but tonight, this was what she wanted. Mrs. Laura stood again and yawned. She was stretching.
Earlier that day, when it was nearly time for Brody to leave, the two of them had discussed how they would do it: how he would be able to come back when the Mason boys were home for summer. They always had Sunday mornings, when the family went to church. And the Masons were sure to have vacations, weekend trips to the beach, or visits to their family up north. And there’d be other times, times when Mr. Nick would be teaching summer school and Mrs. Laura away at work, Marshall would find another part-time job somewhere, and Eddie—well, hopefully a summer camp was in his future.
In the event of impromptu Mason departures, for a family lunch out or something else, Elise would hang her unicorn T-shirt in the guest room window—a flag for Brody, if passing by on the levee, to know the coast was clear. They could make it work, and while they planned, a weight on her shoulders that had been building over the last few days—or longer—had risen from her.
In the guest room wall, the book of Norse mythology was her pillow. She’d stopped reading it for a while, taking the time to flip through the other books she had taken from Eddie’s room. She had nearly finished the book, and had become apprehensive about allowing it to become another in her small stack in the nook of ones she had already read. A finished book is one that no longer feels like it can crawl around while you sleep. Once completed, it’s just an object, one to keep, to be remembered, but one that no longer lives a life of its own. Dead weight she had to keep hidden. She continued to read the stories, but with hesitation. In the most recent one she’d read, Odin’s sons, Thor and Loki, were sent to investigate the wicked ice giants’ kingdom. To safely slip unknown throughout the giants’ borders, the two manly gods disguised themselves as beautiful, dainty women. The whole story was silly, but it was loaded full of action and adventure and deceit, and as Elise read through it, she had to force herself not to turn the book’s pages too quickly. At one point, when the king of the ice giants told Thor that he’d never seen a woman with such a full, flowing beard, Elise had to chomp full-down on her hand from releasing a thunderous guffaw. In her mind, Thor stroked his bushy red beard thoughtfully before tucking it back where he had had it hidden, beneath the frilly lace around his neck. Thor told the Ice King h
ow he kept the hair so smooth—conditioned every evening. Beside him, his brother Loki nodded in agreement. To Elise, Loki looked just like Brody, wearing a black party mask and cape, and an enormous, beflowered sun hat.
Someone moved through the hall, and she heard Mr. Nick’s voice in the doorway. “Hey,” he said, with a softness in his voice Elise hadn’t heard from him in a while. “How’s it going in here?”
“Coming along,” Mrs. Laura said.
“It looks good.” He stood there in the doorway, quiet. He must have been watching her work. “It’s been crazy, hasn’t it? This year. This house.”
Mrs. Laura’s brush tapped against the side of her paint cup. Elise pictured her turned to her husband, her lips pursed into another tired smile.
“You know it’s coming up?” he asked. “Or have you been too busy reconstructing this impossible mansion of ours to remember?”
Mrs. Laura laughed softly. “Remember what?” She shifted her legs atop the plastic on the floor. “Remember you? Remember me?” She sighed. “All I can recall are each of Home Depot’s separate aisles, and the exact names of all the shades of paint cards.”
Elise could sense Mr. Nick smirking. “So, no celebration this year?”
“This year?” Mrs. Laura said. “Let’s get the house in order first. That’ll be . . . 2055? Our seventieth anniversary?”
“I think we need a celebration. Pronto. The two of us. Like, a real, actual break.”
“I mean, if that were something that was possible.”
“Let’s go out of town,” Mr. Nick said.
Mrs. Laura was quiet. She dabbed her brush against the cup and went back to painting.
“Just one evening,” he said. “Get out of the house. I don’t bring any papers to grade with me. We leave the work. Leave it all here.”
“Where are you thinking we’d go?”
“Burloway—the old plantation house outside Baton Rouge? I looked into it. They rent out rooms. We could stay there for a night.”
