Girl in the Walls

by A. J. Gnuse

  But every time they were in a room alone, they felt it. Not much different about a man and a woman from a boy and a girl. Just bodies that had been grown and expanded. But they couldn’t believe their boys. Instinctually, this truth immovable in their chests.

  Still, more than other nights, it was hard to turn out a light.

  No One Ever Leaves

  SOMETHING HAD BEGUN.

  Elise felt it in the musty dead air. He was still there in the boys as they moved above her. He was in their parents now, too.

  Each time her eyes closed, the man was above and beside her, searching. She knew that, although weeks could pass, her scalp would still ache when she remembered him, holding tight the ends of her hair in his hand.

  No one ever fully leaves. The man had left his imprint here before he went. In each of the moonlit rooms, the furniture all cast his shadow.

  He’d be here, around her, in the weather. The heat, the muggy humidity, its pressure as she lay there, nauseated, as though someone was resting on her chest. He was in the quiet, whenever the birds went silent in the yard.

  Still here, wherever he was. Passing their house in his truck with his brights on in the middle of the night. He’d still be here, even if he were hundreds of miles away in his own scoured, emptied-out home. He was here and he was a thousand miles away, in the shifting patterns of weather and nature. He’d been in the dew point, and temperature, and barometric pressure that had been formulating, even as Elise turned the loose knob of the library’s door to return into her home. The natural order of the world building, in the months while she hid, to come. This home was no longer hers and he sought to take it away.

  The strongest storms never actually arrive. They’ve been here, almost silent beneath it all, rising the entire time.

  Part 5

  The River Is a Sleeping Giant

  IN A STORY, THOR, THE BRAVE CHILD OF ODIN, JOURNEYED FAR TO the north, beyond the marshes and mountains, great plains and lakes, and cold expanses of forests under a frozen, gray sun, to a house he discovered, half-buried in the snow and ice. His brother, Loki, had betrayed him, and the weight of the world had finally grown too heavy. He had been looking for a place to be alone.

  The God of Thunder entered the old house and closed the door behind him, shutting out the blistering wind. He walked through the old rooms, past antique furniture that had turned pearlescent with frost. Upstairs, he found a bed, and he lay there until he felt the cold seep through the thick ribbons of his muscles, until his bones drank that cold, until each of his limbs fell numb and asleep.

  During his time in that house, Thor was visited by corpses. They were his ancestors, whose flesh hung in strips from their faces. They were his old teachers and neighbors with decayed, dusty eyes. All were silent; rigor mortis had frozen their jaws shut. They cooked meals for Thor, brought soup to his bed and laid the bowls on his chest. They implored him, as best they could, to sit up and eat.

  Thor would do this for them, but it was all he would do. The wind whistled outside between the great drifts of snow, and the sky was a spiral of spent charcoal. Days here lasted six months. He spent them all knowing how each passing moment brought everything closer to their end. The corpses in the house pleaded with him to please get up and go home. But he did not understand. He was already home. He was in the last place he would ever be.

  This was not a story from Elise’s book of Norse myths. She made this one on her own. She no longer had the book. Mr. and Mrs. Mason cleared out her nook beneath the plywood in the attic. They had turned each thing over in their hands before they dropped it into a garbage bag, which they brought to the curb. They had thrown away the books. Did they think the books were cursed?

  Elise’s story of Thor was one she told herself while she lay beneath the house on the cool, dark soil, waiting through the sweltering days with the footsteps of the family above her. She told the story to herself, and to Odin. He told her to stop before she even finished—couldn’t stand hearing one so sad. (He then mentioned, kindly as he could, that he didn’t think it good for a young girl to lose such a deal of weight.)

  Elise arose to life at night, but only to check off the barest minimums. Summer wore on above her, and she waited for the changing of the season; she waited until the seasons would whirl around her, wrapping her bones like thread around a finger.

  She lay, and across the levee, barges, resting along the batture, were locked onto tugboats and pushed onward away. The river was a corpse in the coffin of its levees. As the girl dozed beneath the floors of her home, the river sat upright.

  Security

  THE MAN INSTALLING THE SECURITY SYSTEM TOLD LAURA ITS WEAKNESSES. “We say motion detectors, but in a house like this, as big as it is, we really mean window guards. If the door is opened, or a window is broken, it’ll set off.”

  “There’s nothing for all the interior rooms then?” Laura asked.

  The man raised an eyebrow. “Nothing like the security system from a Mission: Impossible movie, no.”

  Laura ignored the insult. Odd that, more than anything, she just wished he were quieter when he spoke.

  “This is fine,” she said. Good enough to keep someone out, which is what they needed. Avoid another break-in, which is how she and Nick now referred to that day, when they referred to it openly at all. She’d become more aware of the objects in her home, what they would mean to another person, and how thin the boundaries were that retained them. Each piece of furniture, VCR, desktop computer, jewelry, china—had become a charged item. There was nothing intrinsic about the objects they owned that insisted it was they who owned them. Nothing about the boundaries of a house—the metal mechanics of a lock, the pane of a window—that did anything other than slow a trespasser down.

  And theirs, their trespasser, had been invited in by their boys. Laura wanted to think of it as a robbery, but that man hadn’t stolen anything. Nothing at all, from what she could tell, which made it worse. Her jewelry, outside a single necklace, all accounted for—and he wouldn’t have taken only one slender, rope chain. Nick had left sixty dollars in a wooden box on their nightstand. Untouched. Made the whole thing seem more perverse. Invasive. He hadn’t come for their things. He had hurt her boys, had attacked their home, and had left. To her, nothing about that seemed finished.

  “It’s fine,” Laura said again, and left the man to his installation. An expensive system, and over whatever budget they’d been clinging to since moving into this damn, huge house. No wonder the family before them had moved out, with as much of a mansion as it was, as much of a sinkhole. Draining them, the whole family. Maybe these were punishments for moving into a place too big for a family, one that extended beyond their needs.

  She left the back porch and stood for a minute in the library, one of the rooms that had been put well enough back into order. She looked over the books and pulled one of the older periodicals from a lower shelf where it didn’t belong. The boys hadn’t known how they’d been organized—she figured she would be finding little mistakes in them for months. Little reminders. As Laura stepped up on the shelves to place the periodical with the other old journals and books higher up, she saw, in the glass of her and her husband’s diplomas, the outline of her reflection. The white windows behind her, the room a still life. A smudge of a woman, dwarfed by the gray shapes of the library.

  A few days ago, one of the other teachers at Nick’s school had offered to give them old ADT alarm stickers for the windows. Said he thought it might be enough to scare off any potential, returning intruder, without having to pay the monthly fees. “Burglars only go for the easiest houses in the neighborhood,” Nick had told her before bed. “Why spend money we don’t have to?”

  Laura had asked him if he had mentioned to his friend at work that theirs had been no typical thief. “How much did you tell him, Nick?” she asked.

  Nick went quiet. Sat down in bed and turned his keys in his hands. “I didn’t tell him much, Laura.”

  They didn�
�t speak that night until they had finished readying themselves for bed. With the lights turned out, Nick agreed to buy the whole system.

  If only the repairs that needed to be done throughout the house could be finished, Laura would have it so that evening would never be mentioned again. Never acknowledged. The house repaired, her boys repaired, everything safe and accounted for, and forgotten. Laura hadn’t even told her mother when she’d called earlier that afternoon. “Our summer’s going well,” Laura had told her. “Very hot, very busy. Lots and lots of projects. How are you?”

  The security system wouldn’t change much. But it was that button Laura wanted more than anything, that button she could press before bed. The one that lit the machine’s screen blue, with the robotic voice she’d heard advertised in the video online that declared, loud enough to be heard through an entire first floor, “Doors and windows armed!” With the system, she wanted to give their house a voice. One that told them it was watching for others, instead of them.

  Laura left the library and paused in the living room’s doorframe. Both her sons sprawled on the same sofa, barefoot in shorts, watching television. Nick must have given them a break from the work upstairs.

  She wondered if they should have taken TV away, too. They’d withheld allowance, banned Marshall from his computer, required of them a hundred hours of work in the house before the summer’s end—and that was after they’d finished cleaning, repairing—but maybe they should have taken the TV, too. Laura hated that slack-eyed, sleepy look they made when they rewatched shows they’d already rewatched before. But seeing them there now, she realized maybe she’d been projecting that look of lethargy on their faces. That it wasn’t actually there.

  An alertness to them somehow, she couldn’t explain it, a readiness to the way Marshall held the remote on the arm of the sofa, a tenseness to Eddie’s posture, like he was paying attention to something completely different. Startling almost, once she’d noticed it, like turning around to find someone sneering at you. How long had her boys been this way? Was it something Traust—she hated that name—was it something he had done to them? Something he told her boys, a threat? Or was it something he did to them they weren’t telling her? That they’d remember, and carry with them for the rest of their lives? Was this something she’d failed to notice, always had? Laura wanted to know now, to sit down on the sofa between them, to grab them against her, and take it wholly from them, whatever they knew. Let it all drain from them into her.

  But she knew her boys. She knew they’d pull from her arms, turn their elbows out against her. If they told her what they were thinking, it would be of their own accord. She would have to wait. To be primed for a hesitation, a weight bogging down the middle of some daily perfunctory conversation, and to be there for them, receptive and open when finally they spoke to her. But also, she was their mother. There was shame in how she didn’t know already.

  “Hey,” she said. “If I’m not down when the guy finishes, call up after me, okay?”

  Nodding, not looking away from the television. A quick bobbing of the chins. Her boys had reached out to that man. Marshall had, and Eddie had known he had, but didn’t tell her or their father. They’d been afraid here, in their own home, and they hadn’t told her anything. They’d reached out to that man and not her.

  Laura climbed the stairs, hearing the creak of the wood beneath her, the sound sinking down into the black beneath them. Unaccounted space, another one, hollow. Seemed like she was now always noticing them. The nest in the attic floor flashed through her mind. Had Traust left it there? Had it been her boys? These were her only options.

  Laura found Nick in their bedroom, still wearing his paint-speckled pants, the container of plaster patch and a putty knife in his hands. He stood, head half-turned over his shoulder, as if caught by their television on his way to the bathroom. The glow of the set shimmered across the lens of his glasses. Another face looking away at a screen. She felt invisible in her own home, like a specter. That might be what she preferred right now.

  “Laur,” Nick said when she had passed by the bedroom through the hall.

  “What is it?”

  “Storm in the Gulf. Like we didn’t have enough going on.”

  “Is it big?”

  “The Gulf water’s hot. Record high. Should be.”

  She stepped back into the doorway. “Coming at us?”

  “Probably.”

  Laura nodded.

  “Okay,” she said. As if that was all that could be done. Acknowledge the next blow. Move on. She entered the bedroom and stood beside him to watch the forecast. He wrapped his arm around her waist, and she let him. Eventually, she lay her head on his shoulder. A tight red, rotating eye crossed over the Florida panhandle. What land should have killed, hadn’t, the weatherman said. It’d get bigger.

  “We’ve ignored our kids,” she said.

  “We’ve ignored a lot,” he said. And after a moment: “Something would have happened. Eventually. Whether we left or not.”

  Laura didn’t reply. Bad luck always in threes, the old wives’ saying. Passed down for who knows how long. Laura had learned it when her father, her grandfather, and a school friend all passed when she was in high school. The same age as her boys now. Ever since then, when someone she loved died, she braced herself for the others. She counted the losses on her fingers when she was alone in the shower. Wrote their names in cursive into the droplets of water on the tile. She dreaded the threshold of four, which meant two more to come. But the death of loved ones, at least, was easy to count. How could she count what was happening to them now?

  Laura imagined the house in a storm. Wind rattling the gutters. The sky darkened outside. A leak in the roof somewhere, and the sound of dripping water. Downstairs, she heard the buzz of the workman’s drill.

  The weather station had cut to the ten-day forecast. Sunny and hot, until the uncertainty at the end. Lots of variables. “We’ll see,” Nick said.

  He looked down and scraped the side of the putty knife clean against the container’s lip. “You know, they will catch him,” he said. “They’ve got his description. They know his truck. And they can track him on those forums.”

  Over a week. Enough time for the man to be anywhere. Laura only wished she could have seen him. Had a face and a body to give him. Not knowing made him worse in her imagination. He hardly seemed human.

  “They’ll find him,” Nick said. “He won’t ever come back here.” But Nick knew no better than her, and she didn’t know at all. The words her husband said meant nothing. Even so, Laura realized she wanted them. “You know,” Nick said. “It actually could be good, if the storm hits. If it’s small. It could be a time-out we need. Stay home from work. Hunker down as a family, light some lanterns when the power goes. Spend a couple hot days cleaning branches from the yard.”

  “We won’t be staying if it hits,” Laura said.

  Nick was quiet. “Okay,” he said.

  After a few minutes, once the weather report turned to commercial, he talked broadly about evacuation plans. Casual conversation, as if going over ideas for a dinner they might have on an upcoming weekend. What they’d done before when they’d needed to leave. How a couple years ago, they drove up to her mother’s, which wasn’t bad. Nick spoke about how they could make a vacation out of it. Have time to talk on the way. Everyone. Enjoying themselves by getting away.

  But already, in her mind, Laura was counting. Her fingers extending from her fist, pressing into her thigh. The man who came—Traust—the first. Two was the storm, if it hit. Three was something else, something coming or something that had been with them here all along. On the television, the weatherman gave his predictions. “They never come when we want them to.”

  “Okay,” Laura said, though it was the last word she would use to describe what she felt. Her home had come unhinged. She was flailing, whipped around by the wind.

  The house around her was its own continent. Every room outside of their own right
now might as well have been its own ecosystem. Their children downstairs. The worker in the back porch installing the window sensors. The attic above them. The sudden hush after her husband pressed the button on the remote and turned the screen dark. For a brief second, they both heard a light creak from the floorboards in the hallway. Nick rubbed the side of her arm and went into the bathroom to wash off his tools.

  “Okay,” Laura said, and closed her eyes.

  Below the Floor

  SHE FELT FEVERED, HER FOREHEAD SLICK WITH SWEAT, AND NAUSEA that churned like her insides were changing positions. She was hungry, but the thought of food made it all worse. She was thirsty, but she was too tired to once again go through it all, to pull herself up into the walls, to listen and wait as the Masons stomped through their home, and find a moment to sneak into the first-floor bathroom and drink from the sink.

  Odin sat near her, hunched and cross-legged, his great knees jutting like boulders.

  “You’re dehydrated,” he said.

  I think you’re right. She thought the words. Too risky to speak.

  The god looked at her for a moment. He tugged at his long beard.

  “So,” he said. “What do you think that boy, your friend, is doing now?”

  You’re the all-knowing. Shouldn’t you know?

  Odin shrugged.

  The god traced the seams of the floorboards above them with the tip of his large thumb. “Do you think,” he asked her, “it was him that called the fire department? If so, pretty clever, for a small boy. The police came eventually, true. But firemen don’t arrest a trespassing girl if they’re to find her first.”

  Elise didn’t answer. Maybe it was Brody who called. Maybe it wasn’t. She didn’t feel like bestowing any feelings of gratitude on that thief, on the off chance he didn’t deserve it. His fault she was down here, in the dirt below her home. His fault that Eddie and Marshall had come after her—that the man had come. His fault she was no longer safe anywhere, and that she’d lost her things, her parents’ things, from her attic nook. And his fault she now heard them, the boys, calling out to her throughout the day after every noise they heard that wasn’t her, telling her they know she’s still there.