Girl in the Walls

by A. J. Gnuse

  It was now that Elise knew where the truck would stop. It didn’t turn into her driveway. But it had intended to. Didn’t make it that far. The engine choked and gave out, stalling on the road just in front of her home. But close enough. The driver unbuckled himself. Fumbled with something in his passenger seat. The wake caught up, swirled around the big, black truck, leaked through the windows, continued down the road beyond him. Traust.

  He’d come back. The first to return—he must have outlasted the storm nearby, close enough to return as soon as he had. Waiting through wind and lightning and flood, to come and find her.

  Elise backed into the foyer. The man jumped out of his truck with a splash. Elise turned. She had to find somewhere to hide.

  Not enough time to be quiet. Even so, Elise swallowed the urge to scream.

  Return

  MONTHS BEFORE, ON THE WINTER MORNING WHEN ELISE HAD RETURNED to her home, cold air fogged all of the windowpanes. The lawn’s dry grass crunched beneath her. Her feet aching from miles of night-time asphalt, from the roadside debris she hadn’t seen that jutted into the soles of her shoes. The cold wind permeating her coat—more than once, she’d wished she’d taken the blanket from the foster home bed, to have thrown over her shoulders as she walked.

  Elise had entered her yard as a thief would. Furtive glances over her shoulder. Careful of the angles of sight from the road. Calculating the row of azalea bushes, the low-hanging branches of a magnolia tree, an outcropping of the house so that they might block her from sight as she found her way inside. Between the curtains and half-closed window blinds, she had seen the living room’s Christmas tree had been decorated, its lights left off. No sign of movement within.

  Behind her, the world had sidled behind the pampas grass, beneath the lip of the levee. Playing the child’s game Red Light, Green Light. Elise had circled the house, palms pressed against the windowpanes and pushing skyward. The glass moaned as her hands slid uselessly up. She had turned doorknobs, jerking them with her wrist and rattling them.

  Bridging the Gaps

  AS ELISE SEARCHED FOR A PLACE TO HIDE, THIS TIME AFTER HER house had been flooded, with Traust returned, the memory of that day nagged like déjà vu. Like she’d been brought back, as if reminded by a singular, familiar smell. Her mind now in three places.

  Past, searching for where her old house could take and cradle her. Present, where she searched for a place to hide. And she was also with Traust. Picturing what he now saw, wading through her yard, and climbing the submerged front porch steps.

  Traust had come to break into her home, as Elise had before him. But the doors were not closed or locked. There was no one else around to hide from. So much easier for him. They were alone together. He needed only to step in.

  Enter

  SHE HEARD HIM IN THE FOYER. HE TOOK LARGE STRIDES; HE LIFTED his legs high out of the water and stabbed them back below. Into the living room, where she’d been, turning in place a few moments before. Passing the dining room, with its tumbled chairs and water-logged piano. Into the kitchen. His body sent ripples through all the water in the house. Elise heard the pans and pots that floated in the kitchen clink against the flooded cabinet doors. His legs pushed through a sea of things; she imagined him gliding—his shoulders hunched, hands swimming through the air, head bobbing side to side. He elongated in her mind, his eyes becoming lidless, lips folding back to reveal the teeth. He turned back and climbed the stairs, boots dripping with each step.

  When he spoke, he bellowed to her from above. He spoke to her as if they’d been speaking the whole time. “You remember the storm’s eye?” he told her. “Brief here—I think. Only truly caught the edge of it. Must have lasted fifteen minutes where I was.”

  Elise heard him up in the attic, his boots, the heavy thump of the plywood floor being once again removed and thrown aside. The volume of his voice increased when he spoke down into the crevice that led into the walls.

  “It was that—what’s it called? That respite. You remember? When there was no wind or rain. When everything went so still. You know, it’s that time we have to be most careful. Heard too many stories of people going outside during the eye, seeing the sky go clear with the moon and stars, and thinking the storm over. Then they get caught in the eyewall winds. One hundred fifty, two hundred miles an hour.”

  He was crouching up there in the attic, just talking to her.

  “I was almost tempted to get out of the truck myself. Wanted it to be over! Even if I knew better. I’d watched the whole thing—that rain and lightning—all through my windshield. And I didn’t think I’d make it through the second half. We did, though.”

  She heard him groan as he rose to his full height.

  “Can you hear me? Do you know what I’m talking about, with the eye? Maybe you didn’t notice. So much flooding here, I guess you might have been distracted.”

  In the laundry chute, Elise held herself above the water of the first floor, suspended in the dark, her hands and feet tucked into her crevices. It was a hundred degrees or more inside the walls. Sweat beaded on her forehead and gathered on her eyelashes and lips. Traust came back down the attic stairs. He had his toolkit. She heard him rummaging through it.

  “You think I don’t understand why you need to hide. I could ask you a hundred thousand times to come out, and I know you won’t. Because, you well know, I’ve asked you a hundred thousand times already. In my own home, and in others. And you’ve never once listened.”

  When Elise had nightmares as a little girl, she’d pull herself from bed and go down the hall into her parents’ bedroom. If they were asleep, she wouldn’t wake them. She’d crawl halfway beneath their bed, feetfirst, her upper body exposed to the room. She’d lie there, the coarse carpet prickling her cheek as her parents breathed above her. Other times, if something frightened her when her parents were away, and her sitter was asleep in the living room with the television on, Elise would sit still and wait. If what frightened her couldn’t hear her, it wouldn’t find her.

  Traust did not tap on the walls, as he had before. He knew the house now. He came up and down the stairs. He’d go quiet, for what must have been five minutes, ten minutes. Elise would only hear when he coughed or cleared his throat.

  She wanted to yell at the man. Scream at him.

  Who do you think I am? Why won’t you leave me alone?

  Why He Hunts Her

  THIS IS WHAT HE BELIEVES: THERE’S A GREAT SPINE TO THIS WORLD, and it’s twisting beneath his feet. Rearranging what he sees. Keeping them always out of view. But every second, he knows: he’s closer. He stood in the upstairs hallway, where his voice carried best. There, he told her:

  Remember that woman who swears she has you, too? That you hide yourself in a suitcase she keeps in the back of her closet? And when she hears you, or thinks she hears you, she drags it out and kicks you. Kicks until her toenails have gone bloody. Until her throat’s all torn from the yelling. Or that old man who says you’re using his wife’s perfume? That stuff he’s kept in her nightstand drawer since she’s passed. But now, with her gone, he’s still smelling it.

  When I went, he told me—he said this!—that one day, when he knows for sure you’re there, he’ll lock you in. He’ll board all the doors and windows shut. Set the house on fire.

  When I went there, to both those homes, you weren’t in either. I looked and prodded. Pulled back their insulation. Ripped off the tops of their suitcases. Took their dressers all apart. Cut open the mattresses and the backs of all the couches, whether they wanted it or not. Anyone else would have to wonder if they’d been making the whole thing up.

  You know, I’ve got so much I need from you.

  Remember when I was a kid, how I’d lie in my bed and tell you that, someday, you won’t snicker at me? Remember how, eventually, my parents came back to the holes I hammered in the four walls of every room in that awful house? But I’d already left. Because you’d left, too.

  All those houses we’ve gone to! I u
sed to pretend, when looking for others like you. I’d fix those houses’ wiring, put in their overhead fans, check their circuit breakers. But, each time, every day, when I got the chance I’d squint into the closets and under the beds.

  Listen, I tell you that finding you here is for us. All of us, like me. To know we’re okay. And that these thoughts we’ve had—they’re real. We’re not alone. Not a single one of us is.

  You’re in there. You’re holding tight.

  I figure I’ll have to tear you piecemeal.

  Mr. Traust Removes the Walls

  HE BEGAN WITH THE HAMMER, PUNCHING INTO THE DINING ROOM WALL AND pulling at the space behind with a crowbar. The noise overwhelmed her. Water splashing as the plaster came loose, the blows and the wrenching, his grunting and curses. Elise safe in the chute for now, but he was tearing open the walls of her home. He roared as he pulled. He shouted out, saying he would find her. Traust went around to the library—closer now—and she heard him shoveling books by the armful into the water. He hammered at the slots of wall between the shelves.

  “I will rip apart every board and fiber of this house until I find you,” Traust said.

  He was in the laundry room. The walls shaking, and in the chute, particulate fell around her, across her shoulders and face. Caught at the back of her throat.

  “I will pull you from them,” he said.

  Elise held in place. So close to her, but now working back, away, toward the stairs. Trying to pull the wood away to look into the dark beneath them.

  Sweat in the cracks along her palms, the webbing between her fingers. Elise supported herself in the chute, holding tighter to the walls on either side, keeping her fingers from slipping. She pictured herself, for a second, as Atlas, holding the world still.

  This place was hers.

  Elise clenched her teeth. Her muscles in her hands and fingers ached. But this was her old game, she told herself. There were rules. If she didn’t move, he’d never find her.

  Stay Away

  PAST THE FLOODED LAWN AND FIELD, THE WOODS WERE BROKEN: cypresses snapped at their waists, deciduous leaves stripped bare, skeleton trees and spiraled, drifting deadfalls.

  A dead place, except for him, Brody, already on his way. He turned from his damaged house—windows broken and the linoleum wet and the wood cabinets ghost-white and puckering, the shed partly caved from a fallen tree—and he left for the woods. His aunt and uncle were preoccupied by the broken glass and tree limbs, by covering small holes in the roof with a tarp.

  Once Brody passed the tree line, he pressed on over fallen trunks and flattened underbrush, needing to forge new paths through, difficult ones, circling back long ways before being free to move forward again. At times, it was easy to lose his way, since his markers were all gone, or changed. The squinting-eye tree split in half. The empty eagle’s nest vanished. Eventually, he found the waterline, where the elevation of the undeveloped land began to dip. He waded bodily into the flood, soaking his overalls. His bare feet had to feel their way over branches and roots in the gray water. He worried about snakes and snapping turtles beneath the surface.

  “Get away,” Elise had told him, but Brody had been to her house every day since. Just outside. Just beyond the line of trees, trying to see her if he could. “Get away” didn’t mean he couldn’t try to catch a glimpse of her through the windows. “Get away” meant nothing if he found that her ceiling had come down, and she’d been buried by it. If she’d broken a wrist, the bone snapped and jutting white through the skin of her forearm. If she’d stepped on broken glass, the foot swollen, wound turned purple from the brown water.

  Brody looked out across a field and yard submerged in water, a marsh. The house beaten and flooded, shingles blown away, siding slashed like from the claws of a tiger. They’d been hit worse than his house. The Masons’ car was still gone from the driveway—she was alone in there. Brody climbed on a fallen trunk and sat there awhile, the clouds above floating on. He heard what sounded like someone’s voice, and for a moment he thought it was his uncle, shouting for him to come back and pounding the sides of trees with a hammer. It was hard to tell which direction the sound came from. Ms. Wanda’s house? But her car was gone, too.

  Brody shielded his eyes from the sun and squinted at the girl’s house. The windows all pulled open. Upstairs, the shape of someone moving in the dim inside. There was no one else it could be.

  “Get away” meant nothing to him anymore. The world had flooded, had changed. The rules changed. He’d check on her. He’d make sure she was okay.

  Safespace

  THE LAUNDRY CHUTE WAS HERS, A WALL WITHIN THE WALLS.

  Two exits, below and above. Only two ways to escape. But that meant only two entrances, too. Harder to find. Somehow, the one above worried her more, behind the stacks of toilet paper in Mr. and Mrs. Masons’ bathroom cabinet. As if the obviousness of the downstairs tree painting made it safe. Traust was searching for something hidden. The board with the tree wasn’t hiding. She thought of it as the sort of protective rune a Norse god might carve.

  Traust took his hammer to the upstairs hallway floorboards, but he wasn’t breaking through. She heard him smashing the mirrors in the bathrooms. Trying to look behind them? Maybe the thought of his reflection moving beside him felt too much like her. Eventually, he called to Elise, saying he’d found her toothbrush at the back of the cabinet beneath the boys’ sink.

  “Purple,” Traust said. “Bristles hardly bent.”

  Elise couldn’t help but shake her head. Small beads of sweat dripped free from her chin into the water far below. That wasn’t even her brush. Hers was downstairs. Must have been one of the boys’ old ones.

  Elise smelled a cigarette burning. For a moment, she worried it was the smoke he’d used before, the poison, but the water on the first floor must have been preventing him setting off any more. He was resting now. She heard him exhale as he lowered himself down to the floor above.

  “I want you to know,” he said, “when I was a boy, I wondered, for a while, if you were a friend. But then you never came out. And with that, you made me alone. Cut off from everyone else. I was a little boy who believed, and now I’m a man who can’t stop.”

  She heard him grunt, and the sound of boots dropping to the floor. He was taking them off. She wasn’t sure if it was because his feet had begun to blister from being wet, or if he were only trying to move quieter, to surprise her in some other part of the house. If he were trying to sneak up on her, he wouldn’t. Traust didn’t know which of the hallway floorboards creaked, like she did, and how to avoid them. She heard him each step of the way.

  “I want to let you know,” Traust said, “I don’t have to hurt you. I just want to see that you’re real. My whole life I’ve needed it. Even when I’m with other people, surrounded by them, talking at each other, all I’m listening to is the sound of another empty room. A woman in bed with me, but all I ever think of is what’s underneath the box springs. Life’s a long thing when you’re alone. Except, I’m not. I come home and sense that rustle on the other side of the door as I turn the key. I’m never alone. I’m never left alone. Finding you is finding out there’s nothing wrong with me—so, come out.”

  A pause.

  “So, come out now,” he said. “Or I’ll burn the house down. Or, when that family comes home, I’ll kill each one of them. Do you care?”

  Stay where you are.

  “When I find you, I’ll bag you up and bring you home with me. I’ll keep you handcuffed to the radiator. When I wake up at night, I’ll look over, each time, and see you were real. I’ll see you’re there, long after you’re rotted away to bone.”

  Monster

  TRAUST WAS A MAN, FAR AWAY FROM HIS HOME. AND HERE, ELISE was in hers. He wailed at her house, at her, hoping she might hear. But as long as she hid, he could never find her. She heard it in his voice—trying to frighten her, because he himself had grown frightened. Grown tired with the day passing. Elise could outwait him. And whe
n he gave in, wading out into the water of the front yard, she would watch him go—slouched and worn. Defeated, again.

  He was the bump in the night that turned out to be nothing at all.

  Her mother and her father had died, but Elise was real. The Masons had gone, but she was still here. Traust was in her home, but she was more patient. She had turned herself into the dust in the walls. As long as she hid, she was incorporeal. She was the walls, the floodwater, each shift and sound and movement in every part of the house the man was not, could not reach.

  “I’ll hurt you,” Traust said. And she believed him, but only if he got the chance.

  Breaks Apart

  ELISE HEARD HIM ABOVE, IN THE HALLWAY, BUT THEN, ALSO, BELOW. He’d lost all sense of himself. He’d split. Rended. The sounds of him came from two separate places at once. Traust upstairs, and softly, in the back porch. A pattern knocked steady on the door. One. One-two. One.

  Elise recognized what it was. She realized who was making it. “Oh no,” she said aloud. Couldn’t help it.

  Traust had gone quiet. He was listening now, too. The knocking continued.

  “Go,” Elise whispered. “Get out of here.”

  Slow steps above her. Cautious, almost delicate. The light squelch of the man’s wet socks on the wood. Building momentum. Downstairs, Elise heard the back door push open against the weight of the water. She heard Brody’s voice, frail, winding through the damaged rooms of the house.

  “Elise?” he called to her. “Are you okay in there? Are you hiding? It’s me. It’s okay if you come out.”