Girl in the Walls

by A. J. Gnuse

  The Front Porch

  EDDIE SAT ON THE GLIDER BENCH AND TRACED THE SHADOWS IN the yard with his eyes: across the azalea bushes whose flowers had begun to fade, speckles and the strips in the yard where the setting sun shone through the trees, and the roof’s stark shape angled on the patch of pampas grass a full acre away. The river was high. Eddie could see the white top of a cruise ship, huge as a cloud, sailing down for the Gulf. The music playing through the ship’s loudspeakers sounded like the buzz of a mosquito just behind his ear. Eddie closed his eyes until the ship had passed.

  Earlier today, his parents told him how they’d leave in a few days for an anniversary trip, and he and Marshall would have the house alone for a night. Even so, neither of the boys had mentioned the footprint in the attic. Yesterday evening, they’d spoken in low voices to one another, tapping on the shared bathroom door whenever something ballooned in them they needed to say. Broken thoughts, in halting sentences. But had anything been said?

  Marshall’s words, most often. He had the most to say. Spoken as much to his younger brother as to himself. Saying:

  We’re right. We were actually right—but can we tell them?

  We can’t.

  Because what proof was the print? Hardly there—already drying—couldn’t even think to grab Mom’s camera before it had evaporated.

  —I’m not crazy, right? You remember it, too? Shaped like? There was the heel, a missing space for the arch, and the big toe—looked like a toe, didn’t it? Crescent-shaped, skinny, but if you stepped, pushed off on your foot like this? A callus on the toe might form the print. Toes missing, the balls of the foot not all there, but they might have dried already.

  Right?

  The window wasn’t leaking, the ceiling wasn’t—we watched it to make sure. It was a print—a person’s print. Stepped on the wet roof, then came back in.

  Someone small. Smaller than us, for sure. We can do this, I think.

  But how? Eddie thought.

  We still can’t tell them. They still won’t believe us! We need proof. We need to do something. We need—to know what to do. We both have to stay calm. I can ask those people online. That one guy would know. He believes us already anyway. We need to—Eddie, we can do this. We can do this.

  But how?

  Eddie rocked on the glider bench. There was no going back to before. No more pretending noises were nothing, that inconsistencies—missing and moved things—didn’t happen, weren’t there. A door half open when he’d left it mostly closed, the rise and fall of a dust ruffle half-seen out of the corner of his eye. Once a person knew, there was no going back.

  The balance was gone. Balance of not really knowing. Of walking through the upstairs hallway in the evening, passing darkened rooms to either side, and not flipping their light switches, leaving them be. Of hearing, while sitting at his desk, the groan of a floor behind him, and not turning because the weird belief—one felt more than thought—that what he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him. Whoever that boy had been weeks ago who heard the noises in the walls, who’d even left his damn books out for the thing, Eddie no longer understood him. His reasoning, his stupidity. Eddie had kept this hidden from his own family. He’d protected it. Why?

  “Fuck you, Eddie,” he whispered at himself. “Fuck you. You idiot traitor. Goddamn weirdo.”

  The only consolation Eddie had was that he had told it to leave. He had tried. Even if he’d kept it secret, he still knew it had to go. He still couldn’t tell Marshall that. Couldn’t tell anything of before, of how he used to think. Eddie didn’t need his brother finding out, getting angry at him for being so useless for so long.

  Eddie rocked on the bench, aggressively now, until the back of his seat bounced against the house’s siding and jarred his neck with each collision. It hurt, was dizzying, but Eddie did it anyway—if only he could be shaken all over, shaken like that old Etch-a-Sketch toy, somewhere up there now in the attic, until everything that had happened a few days, few weeks, months, could be shaken clean from him. Hell, if he could, he’d shake himself clear from this whole house, clean away the present until he was back at the Northshore, back further, all the way until he was an infant. So he could try again. One more time to try to be someone else. Anyone else. Just not the person he was right here, now. Frightened, and stupid.

  Footsteps sounded from inside the house. Tennis shoes dragging on the foyer’s tile floor. The old antique doorknob twisting, its cast-iron clunking against cypress wood in the socket, and the whine of the large hinges. Marshall’s face appeared around the door’s lip.

  “Hey,” he said. “How you holding up?”

  Eddie covered the lower half of his face with his hand. He wasn’t so sure what he meant by the movement, but his brother acted as though he was. Marshall closed the door behind him and took a seat next to Eddie on the bench. “Yup,” he said. They sat together as an elderly man on horseback passed on the levee, and as the patches of orange sunlight on the lawn diminished into gray. Their parents were somewhere inside, finishing their work in the guest room, maybe, or reading, working, or watching the small television in their room.

  Eddie said, “You remember the termites?”

  Marshall snorted. “I still find little bodies in the corners of my room. I remember.”

  “Sometimes I still think I’ve got some crawling on me.”

  “Oh, God,” he said. “Yeah, I know the feeling.”

  “It’s awful.”

  “You just gotta—” Marshall scrunched his shoulders up and shook himself as if trying to shiver away a chill. “You got to get those thoughts off you.”

  Wind blew, and trees responded in the yard. Marshall leaned back and his knobby knees bobbed while he tapped his heels on the porch. Dark, coarse hair showed from where his pants pulled up on his thighs, above the knees, and for the first time Eddie realized his own legs would be covered soon enough. Marshall held a solid four or five inches of height on him, but Eddie could not imagine, once he grew to be that tall, he’d ever feel as big as how Marshall looked to him. The older brother was a giant. There were bigger boys, some in Eddie’s own grade, but it didn’t make it any less true.

  “Hey,” Marshall said. “I really need to show you something.”

  Another Believer

  UPSTAIRS IN THE BEDROOM, MARSHALL’S COMPUTER SHOWED AN email thread of short responses. Eddie followed Marshall’s cue and stood, hunched, elbows on the computer desk, not bothering to take a seat. Their parents’ voices were an undertone from down the hallway. Marshall went over and closed his bedroom door while Eddie read.

  “It’s that guy from the forum I showed you before,” Marshall said. “The one who emailed me. He’s been sending advice. We’ve gone back and forth a few times. And since now, well, since we know for sure that there’s actually someone here . . . I told him about what we found in the attic, the print, and—” Marshall grabbed the mouse and scrolled too quickly for Eddie to understand the conversation, but the younger brother’s eyes clung to certain words:

  food go missing?

  Stairs? Attic? Basement?

  noises in the attic and hallway

  footprint, it looked like

  What else have you found?

  We looked through the whole house and

  exactly where is your

  Plaquemines parish

  will be coming

  Eddie saw Marshall had sent their full address.

  “He said it’d help if he knew where we were,” Marshall said, almost as if it were an apology. Once at the bottom of the thread, he scrolled up again, still too quick. Marshall nervous, or embarrassed. He looked only at the computer. “I figured he was trying to help by looking at online blueprints or satellite pictures of us, or something. I wasn’t thinking he’d actually want to come.”

  Abruptly, Marshall closed the browser, and the desktop appeared—beneath the icons, a shadowed, leering grin. Artwork from one of his favorite Disturbed albums. Marshall turned from the computer a
nd took a seat on his bed, staring at a space somewhere behind Eddie. “I really didn’t ask for it, but he said he’d go ahead and come down to check things out for us. I told him if we just knew what to do, we could handle it, but I guess . . . I don’t know. I’m not sure. He said it wouldn’t be a big deal. He’s an electrician. Or he’s done work like that. Pest control, too. He said he knows houses, and it’d be quick. He seems weird, but . . . He won’t charge us or anything. He—with this kind of thing, he said it’s just something he wants to help with. I guess, probably more so because we’re young.”

  “Do Mom and Dad know he’s coming?” Eddie asked.

  “He wanted to come as soon as tomorrow,” Marshall said. “He wanted to drive all evening and get here before morning. I got him to wait. He’ll come on Saturday, when the parents are doing their anniversary thing.”

  “Mom and Dad don’t know.”

  “I still don’t really feel like they’d believe us.”

  “Oh,” Eddie said. He looked down at the carpet, at its separate threads. Gradually, Eddie realized he was angry. He had curled his lips between his teeth and was biting them hard enough to hurt. He wanted the email conversation in front of him again. Marshall had closed it too soon. Eddie wanted to read it and to dwell on each word. He wanted each stupid word to boil while he looked at it. To evaporate. He wanted the feeling they evoked in him to boil, too. Those emails made him feel like half the ground below them was sinking. At this point, Eddie didn’t care if their parents didn’t believe them. He just wanted them to know. But Marshall was holding them out. He was making it worse. He was keeping them alone.

  “I’m pretty sure I know what you’re thinking.” Marshall’s voice had softened. “I wish we could tell them, too. But you know they’re not going to help us. If Dad and Mom knew we were trying to—they’d only try to convince us it’s in our heads. Anything we hear, or see. It’d all get drawn out. Every day would be another day where something—something might happen. To us, or them. This way is doing something about it. Quicker. And maybe safer for everybody.”

  Eddie had no idea what this was and wasn’t.

  Marshall sighed and wiped his face with the palm of his hand. Kept his eyes pinched shut while he continued to talk. “Earlier, when I was up here. I was listening, you know? I freaked out. I needed to talk to someone, someone who believed us, and I mean, he’s believed even before anything . . . It’s just, I’m sorry . . . it should have been with you. I should have at least checked in with you first. We should have written him back together.”

  Eddie stared at Marshall’s shoes.

  “But,” Marshall said, “I don’t know. Maybe, it’s pretty good this guy’s offered to come down. Like a contractor. What if he actually helps? You know, he said he has tools that would make it pretty simple.”

  “Tools?”

  “Yeah. I’m not sure what. But he told me he’d come and set them up when Dad and Mom leave. That the whole thing would be quick, and they wouldn’t even have to know. If he comes and finds someone here, we’ll tell them once it’s over. But if he doesn’t, yeah, we’ll look stupid, but only to him. We’ll be right back where we are. Then we’ll think again about what to do.”

  Marshall looked him in the eyes. His jaw muscles had knotted, a small bulge forming like a rock, a hard ripple beneath a current of water. He needed reassurance, Eddie realized. When had that happened before? How small Marshall seemed here, in the middle of the room, with the walls and white expanse of ceiling above them. How small did that make him, too?

  Eddie wanted to bellow, bellow deep from his chest, loud as he could, and purge all that bile that brimmed in him. Wanted to shout in his brother’s face, and shout at everything around them. Incomprehensible words—it didn’t matter. But he didn’t. Eddie sat quiet. Listened as their father went into his office and closed the door behind him.

  “I mean, besides,” Marshall said. He bent over, dipped slowly to look beneath the bed. When he sat up again, he looked tired. “I really didn’t want us to be alone here that night anyway.”

  Eddie swallowed. Looked away, and nodded. He hadn’t thought of that. Eddie guessed he must have figured with Marshall being there in the bedroom beside his own—hadn’t considered it being alone.

  “We can do this.” Marshall stressed each word, as if saying them was enough.

  June

  LOUISIANA SUMMER IN FULL EARNEST. HUMIDITY AND THE HEAT OF the air out there like the threat of a vise grip, invisible arms waiting to wrap and tighten around the chest. Louisiana summer, and impossible even to stay inside without feeling it there, too: the pockets of heat collected in closets and crawl spaces, each its own hot, dark belly of a beast. The AC vents did what they could, but their air, with its unnatural chill, felt little better, the way it changed a drop of lukewarm sweat sliding down a lower back into some frigid, twitching thing—not a fire but an ice ant. The cold air hyperthermic, making the heat of the safe, hidden places, when returned to, seem even hotter than before.

  Mr. and Mrs. Mason packed their weekend suitcases. They thumped around their room, water pipes squeaking when they stopped to scrub their hands and forearms again, cleaning them of the lingering spots of paint. They took showers and cried out to each other, in a game they’d begun to play, each time they discovered another remnant of their projects still clinging to their bodies and hair. Downstairs, the refrigerator became stocked with food—frozen TV dinners, two half-gallons of milk, apples and oranges, shrink-wrapped tilapia, corn dogs, frozen vegetables—more than enough to sustain the boys for an afternoon and night.

  “You sure you’ll be okay here?” Mrs. Laura asked Eddie from his doorway. She squinted one eye and pointed in the direction of Marshall’s bedroom. She mouthed the words, “He bothering you?”

  “I’m fine, Mom,” Eddie said.

  It would be the same as any other time the boys spent at home. After all, Marshall still only had his learner’s permit, could still only drive with an adult riding beside him. His mother’s car would rest in the driveway, useless to them both, its odometer checked and noted, and casually mentioned by their father that it had been checked and noted.

  Marshall still hadn’t finished cleaning out the garage. But the task had become less pressing, after one of the roofing shingles above inexplicably had broken through and had begun to leak, through the sub-roof, onto the worktable. “Just wait on it,” their dad said. In the meantime, Marshall was to use his computer “for work, for once,” and to search for another job. Beggars can’t be choosers, and Marshall was to beg. He was to have a list of prospective businesses by the time they returned. The boys were given other instructions—to water the outside plants, bring in the mail, turn off the lights at night—which Mr. Nick listed separately to each boy, declaring them loudly into each boy’s doorway. When it was Marshall’s turn, Mr. Nick was interrupted halfway when his son shouted that he had heard it the first time.

  “Dear God,” Marshall said. “Please stop, and get on with the damn trip already.”

  Leaving

  SATURDAY MORNING, THEIR MOTHER OUTSIDE IN HER NAVY-BLUE dress, back bent between the garden leaves, doing a last-minute sweep for anything amiss. Their father bringing the bags out to the car. Eddie watched them both through his open window. His mom had learned last night their neighbor Ms. Wanda was visiting family that weekend, so instead of her phone number taped to the fridge, the boys had the number of a family friend, living on the Northshore, who’d drive an hour and a half down the long Causeway and through the city, if need be.

  While Eddie watched his parents, his bedroom wall twitched. Marshall’s room thumping from his morning pushups. Eddie’s mom sensed him watching through the window. She looked up and waved.

  When his parents drove out, the driveway puddles splashed brown specks on their side windows. Eddie listened as their car tires beat over the seams of the road as they followed the length of the levee away.

  Waiting

  QUIET, FOR A TIME. NO S
OUNDS BUT CICADAS OUTSIDE, AND INSIDE the mechanical birds crying out on the hours. The whir and rumble of Marshall’s desktop computer. Eddie rose from his bed to return a book to the shelf. No sound anywhere else but the ragged breath of someone, returning into the blind dark. That girl, cautious and tired and reduced, feeling rivets and scars of the walls beneath her fingertips, finding her way through.

  Nearer

  ON THE ROAD, EACH HOUSE PASSED IS A BLURRED FACE.

  Their facades cry out—a flash of brick or color or pale siding—one after another. Windows like eyes. They’re all reaching out to brush the side of his face.

  Each moment passing, he tells himself, is one closer.

  When He Arrives

  SOON, AT THE TIME THEY’D AGREED, OR EVEN SOONER, THE MAN’S truck tires churned through the driveway, splashing potholes. His big, black Ford, rocking on its chassis, pulling up outside the back door where the steps met the grass.

  The engine cut out, and a car door thumped shut. The boys’ footsteps pattered through the house as they left their rooms and descended the staircase steps to meet him. The screen door squealed open, then a hard knock on the back door. A man’s voice, deep and resounding, carrying the sluggish drawl of one of the Southern states to the north and east. He’d come a long way.

  “Here we are,” the man said. “Here it is.”

  His voice, deep like a god’s. The thought shot through the girl’s mind, as if she weren’t the one to think it.

  He led the boys back inside. “So, this is it.” His voice went against the grain of the house, vibrated against its wood and tile, sounded like it could come from several rooms at once.

  Not a god’s voice. A god’s voice was deep, but hidden. Like the rustling of leaves. Like a heartbeat. This was a voice like a king’s. Not a good one.