Girl in the Walls

by A. J. Gnuse

  Elise pressed her ear against the wall to better hear.

  Who was he?

  The thud of his boots crossing from the foyer onto the rug of the library, then through the rooms downstairs. He moved through the house like he’d been there before. With the confidence of a man who built a home, and who was comfortable taking it apart again. He spoke as if he heard her question.

  “The name’s Jonah,” he said. “But you boys can call me Mr. Traust.”

  He tapped on the walls.

  Part 4

  Mr. Traust

  HIS SKIN WAS SENSITIVE AS A CHILD’S, PRONE TO BLOTCHING. HE wasn’t much taller than the older brother, with the same short-cropped hair. But he was thick, with rounded shoulders. Not fat but solid around the waist, and bigger around the chest. One of those men who look as though, in their change to manhood, he’d inflated, his rib cage expanded. He breathed through his nose in short takes, as if testing the air. Seemed somehow to be looking at more than one place at any time.

  “You’re Marshall,” Mr. Traust said, cocking his pointer finger at the boy. “And you are?”

  “He’s Eddie,” Marshall said.

  Eddie stood in the doorframe to the foyer—he’d backed into it when the man entered through the laundry room—and Mr. Traust raised his chin to look behind him. “Good to meet you both,” he said. “It’s odd, I understand, having me here. But I want to say, I can help.”

  He moved past Eddie into the living room, the way workers did who already knew the house, who’d done a half-dozen projects there in the past. He touched the walls with the tips of his knuckles as he passed them, drummed on them.

  “Will this be quick?” Marshall asked, following after him.

  “Can be,” Mr. Traust said, passing on, filling each door’s frame as he passed through. The smell of his sweat trailed behind. “Tell me again about the sounds you hear. Tell me about the feelings you get, and the footprint you two found in the attic. I want to hear it all from the beginning, now that I’m here. Now I know where to look.”

  The Fear in Being Known

  ELISE AVOIDED HIM. SHE AVOIDED FOOTSTEPS AND THEIR MUFFLED voices, Marshall and Eddie talking to the man, telling him about the creaking of a stair in the night, the rush of water in the downstairs bathroom, the constant shifting and popping of the floors and walls.

  “Sometimes it feels like even the house is alive,” Marshall said, his voice directly beside her, in the kitchen.

  Traust pulled himself up on the counter and tapped on the stained-glass window above the stove. He circled back to the dining room, where the piano sang out three unmelodic notes. Then screeching, like a bird under attack, as he pulled the instrument away from the wall. He knocked along the piano’s wooden back. “You’d be surprised by all the hollow spaces,” Elise heard him say.

  She needed to get farther away. Forcing herself to move slowly, she reached for her handholds in the dark, cautious that her fingers and toes didn’t thump against the wood and plaster while she found her grip. Couldn’t let the fabric of the back of her shirt drag against the wall. The sound like a dry brush over paper—if she heard it, they might. By the time she’d nearly made it up to the second floor, they were up there, too. In the office, the boys’ bedrooms—doors opening and shutting, the big man grunting, furniture squealing across the wood floor, dragging against carpet, what must have been Eddie’s bed pulled from the wall. Footsteps and voices echoing through the joists and bones, rapping on the walls through her own bones and skin.

  Marshall’s voice: “I’ve heard things in the hallway at night. When I leave my bedroom door open, sometimes I swear I see shadows moving.

  “Once, when I was home alone, I think I heard something like pages turning. Like someone was flipping through a book. Over here.

  “There’s movement up in the attic sometimes. Like a person crouching around.”

  Within the walls, Elise held herself suspended. Had she always been this obvious? Had they known even from the beginning? The boys trailed behind the man while he moved, Marshall closer, Eddie farther behind. A part of her wanted to speak, loud enough that only they would hear, “Just stop.” As ridiculous as the thought was, still, she had it: if they’d really heard her all those times, why wouldn’t they have done something earlier? Months ago? Why wouldn’t they have let her know?

  “My brother has heard it all, too,” Marshall said. “Right, Eddie?”

  Their voices above her, talking about her. Elise was no Girl in the Walls. She was a little girl stuffed up and hiding. A trespasser in the dark of someone else’s house. Both the brothers had known. They must have heard her every day. And if they had heard her, they could hear her now. They could find her now.

  Elise lowered herself back down to the first story. She sidestepped through the narrow walls around the library, then crawled into the void space beneath the staircase. She stayed there, crouched on all fours. Listened.

  “Are you finding anything?” Marshall’s voice upstairs, calling to the man, who must now have gone into the attic. For some time, he didn’t respond. Elise could hear him moving around, repositioning things up there, heavy things being dropped. He had boots on, and they beat down on the floor. Elise wondered whether it would be safer beneath the house. To get there, she’d need to go back the way she’d come, between the library and dining room. But already they were moving again, heading back through the hallway toward the staircase.

  “It’s really like two houses,” the man, Traust, said to the boys, as they came down the stairs together. “One stacked inside the other.”

  “Have you seen anything?” Marshall asked. “Like any evidence?”

  Traust laughed from somewhere deep in his belly. “Do you believe in spirits?”

  “No,” Marshall said, with a trace of shock. “Do you?”

  The stairs creaked directly above the girl. She looked up to the crack of light that broke where their feet fell. She placed her eye against the hole and could see him there for a brief second before he passed over the cracks and moved down. A big man, though not too tall—he didn’t have to duck under the lip of the ceiling where the staircase curved, the way Mr. Nick always had to.

  “Absolutely not,” Traust said. “Everything we sense has its source in something natural. But, you know, I think it’s something like that. A whole world happening just outside what we see. Like wall shadows going wild the second we close our eyes.” Traust stepped down from the stairs into the foyer. “Nice clock.”

  “Is someone here now?” Marshall asked. “Do you know?”

  Traust didn’t answer right away. There was rummaging on the floor. He must have been searching through some kit he’d dropped when he came in. Once he found what he was looking for, he showed it to the boys. He told them, “It’s not what you think it’s for.”

  The Noise Will Search

  EDDIE, STILL HALFWAY UP THE STAIRS BEHIND THEM, SAT DOWN carefully on the steps, perching at a safe distance. The girl, beneath, kept her eyes open wide. Did Eddie hear her? He was right there. She could reach up through the crack in the middle of the stair and graze the seat of his pants with her thumbnail. Was she too loud—should she hold her breath? The walls thumped around her as if massive knuckles were knocking against the house’s side. She thought for a second it must be a hammer, he must be nailing something into the wall. But it was something else. Elise felt it through her, its pulse throbbing through her teeth.

  “That thing isn’t taking any of the paint off,” Marshall said, “is it?”

  “Go ahead. Try it yourself.”

  Movement on the tile of the foyer. An exchange.

  “Isn’t this just a nightstick?” Marshall asked. “I thought cops used this for, you know, hitting people. Rioters. Not walls. What’re you doing with it?”

  “It lets us hear.”

  “How?”

  “Like bats in a cave, or ships at sea. Echolocation. Sonar.”

  “No way,” Marshall said. But his own knock
ing against the walls followed, hesitant and irregular. “Like this?”

  “Give it a real man’s swing,” Traust said.

  “I don’t want to chip the paint off.”

  “A house as big as this?” Traust said. “I’m thinking your pop and mom won’t even notice. When we’re done, they won’t know.”

  The pounding grew stronger.

  “Look,” the man said. “Now try here. Find what’s around and beneath you. Get an understanding of a place.”

  The sound moved in a semicircle around the foyer.

  “You’ve got a knack for it. Now, you hear where the studs are. Normal stud-finders won’t work on old walls like this. Density’s irregular. Each inch is slightly different. But now, using this, we can hear. This is an old balloon frame house. Most of it, anyway. Here, the space between connects through the rooms. If you come over here—”

  The walls pounded all around Elise. She risked the movement to cover her ears.

  “That space beneath the stairs is nearly hollow.”

  “You think the person’s in our walls?” Eddie asked.

  “The littler boy speaks,” Traust said. “Thought you might have been a mute. But your question? No. Not all the time in the walls. Maybe not right now—but maybe now. We’ll have to open it all up, everything up, and see.”

  “Have you found them before?” Marshall asked. “Did you have them in your house?”

  There was rustling, the object being put back into the toolkit on the floor. No one in the room spoke.

  “Y’all hear that?” Traust said.

  Eddie shifted on the stairs. The wood creaked.

  “You hear it, don’t you?” Traust said. “There’s a feeling you get when you know, right? All the proof in the world can say otherwise, but you know it. I knew it well enough by your age, like I told you on our emails. Both of you, look around. I think we all know there’s someone listening to us, right now.”

  Elise bit tightly into her knuckles; the taste of dust on her tongue. She wouldn’t scream—she wouldn’t. But she needed the knuckles filling her mouth to know it wasn’t possible.

  “Think of me as a tool,” Traust said. “A divining rod. Think of me, for today, as an extension of you boys. For what you want—which is an empty house. This house being your house again, alone. Does that make sense?”

  The palms of Eddie’s hands pressed down on the seam in the stair.

  “When I was your age, I think I would have killed to have someone like me come. Who believed and who could take ’em away. Would’ve slept a lot better at night, I can tell you that. Would have been a lot healthier and happier for it.” The man laughed, walked over, and placed his hand on the banister. “What I’m asking is that, for now, y’all follow my example. Do as I do. We work as a team. And when this is over, and have that person out here before us, we can all know. We’ll have that. But until then—we do as I say. We get it?”

  “Yeah,” Marshall said. “We got it.”

  “When I say grab, we grab. Does the little brother get it?”

  “He gets it,” Marshall said.

  “Good,” Traust said. “And at the end, what we find is mine.”

  Unpacking a Toolkit

  THE MAN MOTIONED THE BOYS TO HIM, THERE WITH HIS CLOTH toolkit on the foyer floor. Marshall bent over, looked up at his brother, and jerked his head to tell Eddie to come down from the staircase. The boy did, conscious of the feel of the cool wood beneath his bare feet, of the emptiness behind him upstairs, and the sweaty stink of the man below. Whatever balance there had been in the house was all gone now. A seal broken, and what was with them—silent in the house, a presence light as cobwebs against the skin—was coming undone.

  Eddie stood beside Marshall as the man gave them the tools they would be using. He put them in their hands until their hands were full and they looked at each other, and then stacked the items on the floor around them. An odd assortment of objects, like the belongings in the shopping cart of someone without a home: Ziploc bags holding things that were hard to tell what they were, and others, obvious enough, but hard to tell what they would be used for.

  Handkerchiefs, rubber bands, a coil of wire.

  Bells, like ones that would dangle from a cat’s collar.

  Small fireworks—M-80s.

  Zip ties and a doctor’s stethoscope. A kit of wire cutters.

  Six small containers of pesticide. Cotton balls.

  A headlamp and three small flashlights. A Leatherman.

  A hammer and rubber mallet, a small electric drill.

  Handcuffs.

  “You know,” Marshall said. “We just want it out of our house.”

  Mr. Traust stood up between them. He said, “That’s right.”

  The big man put his hands on his hips and opened his mouth as if to speak. Then he stopped, his eyes wide and flitting as if something had startled him. He looked into the library, then turned and checked the living room. Stood there for a minute, his back to them, a downward arrow of sweat darkening the broad back of his old, gray T-shirt. He composed himself and grinned at the boys with a smile dense with teeth.

  “Daylight’s wasting,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”

  Woods Have Eyes

  BEYOND THE CHEST-HIGH GRASS AND THISTLES OF THE BACK FIELD stood the tree line, with its wall of dense underbrush, the glossy poison ivy, tallow saplings, and the oak’s and maple’s low branches. Inside, past the range of sight, were the noises of bodies moving. The rustle and crunch of litterfall, palmetto leaves rustling. In a bizarre trick of acoustics, some sounds in the woods were muted, while others were amplified, their sources seeming larger—not that different from the workings of a house’s walls.

  An armadillo’s small claws rifling along the ground sounded like the full paws of a black bear. A squirrel leaping from a low-hanging branch like the kick-up of a coyote’s back legs. The buzz of a beehive, somehow, lost completely. These woods were dense with life. Birds, opossums, and raccoons. Snakes and boar, bobcat and bear. The trees looked inward upon themselves with hard, knotted eyes. They felt every tremor of the wind through their branches, every vibration of the ground through their roots and trunk. They looked outward along Stanton Road, to the boy leaving his home to duck beneath the low palmetto branches and orb-weaver’s webs, his bare feet soon squelching in the mud of his trails. They saw out to the field, and the levee, and the large, white house. Sometimes, small things would climb their branches. They’d been keeping their own steady watch.

  The truck in the backyard was now unloaded. It was the middle of the afternoon and the sun, though half-covered by a film of clouds, beat down bright and hot. But, for whatever reason, the lights in the home were lit—the boys’ bedrooms, the guest room, even the attic—dim bulbs like small, golden bodies through the windowpanes. The occasional flutter behind the glass, someone passing from room to room, and in another, a large piece of furniture moved in front of a window to seal off an eye.

  But the house itself stood immobile, seemed even half-asleep—like a tree drooping after heavy rain. From across a field, it’s hard to tell something’s wrong. A tree afflicted with termites takes time before the fissures in its trunk show.

  What It Means to Find Them

  THERE’S A STORY THE MAN GREW UP WITH THAT HE’S THOUGHT OF often. He can’t remember where he first heard it, who told it to him, whether he dreamt it himself. Another story about a haunted house.

  A man inherits a house. It is huge, and its rooms and hallways tumble after one another like a ball down stairs. It is remote, and he must make sure all the lights remain turned on. The house has many lights. The overhead bulbs burn one hundred watts apiece, with lamps positioned in the corners of those rooms, their shades taken off and the naked glass glowing bright and hot. The air is sickly warm with the heat, day and night. Even the closet lights are on. In cabinets and dressers, flashlights, left on, roll and clank against one another when the drawers are pulled open.

  The man finds sp
are light bulbs stored in boxes in the corners throughout the house—thousands in total. The bulbs have hundreds of different styles and shapes, tubed and twisting, fluorescent, hexagonal, and pear-shaped. With the heat all around him, even when he is alone it doesn’t feel that way.

  At first, out of curiosity, he turns out a light, and a slow, flickering feeling builds in him. It feels as if something lost is now swelling, and it has a sour, rotten smell. His fingers fumble with the switch. When he turns the light back on, the feeling leaves. He wipes the sweat from his brow, suddenly grateful. He lives in the house for some time.

  When the bulbs burn out, somewhere in the house, he knows it, wherever he is, because the feeling is there with that little dark building. The man is frantic to replace them. He’s noticed how, in the patches of house where the light doesn’t reach, there are dead things: insects, spiders, mice. When a fuse burns out in the basement, drowning the room in darkness, he realizes he’s lost it. He boards its door shut.

  But the bulbs are always burning out, and he is not always quick enough to catch them. When he turns a dead bulb, removing it from its socket, it feels as though the thread will never end. He must resist the urge to wrench the bulb free. In that pocket of shadow, he feels them there. He feels their fingers upon his forearm, pressing their nails into his skin. They’ve been there the whole time. Eventually, this story ends when the whole house is dark.

  You boys ask me what it means to find them. To catch them, finally, in the beam of your light, to see them there, beside you, when you’ve known that they’ve been there just beyond the edge.

  It’s to remove the mask of the world. To pull off its face and see the wiring beneath.

  When you grow up in a house like yours—not like this, no mansion, nothing this big—but a house like this in that it is a house, with the sounds of a house, and drafts, and locks, and spaces hidden away, a place with angles that prevent anyone from seeing everything at once. A house where no one believes you. And each day you’re home, scribbling your homework, eating your meals, flipping through your television channels, straining step to step through the day’s particulars—and somebody’s up there breathing in the attic? Each day grows you into something a little different.