Girl in the Walls

by A. J. Gnuse

  She Is Revealed

  “ELISE?” BRODY SAID, AND ELISE KNEW EXACTLY WHAT WOULD HAPPEN.

  Traust would grab him. Wrench him around the house to make the boy show him every place he knew she might hide. If he didn’t, Traust would hurt him. Brody, smaller even than she was, in his mud-stained overalls and sloppy hair—stupid! So stupid! The staircase creaked beneath the man as he made his way closer to the boy, homed in on the boy. This kid, her friend. Like a stupid, younger brother.

  Give it up.

  “No!” Elise screamed to him. “Brody, run! Get away! Run!”

  Elise’s voice so loud through her throat it felt like flesh was tearing free. Brody would have to hear her, and she hoped he’d comprehend. The downstairs now sloshed and churned. Traust moved through the water fast as he could manage, one sloshing stride after another. And she heard Brody, seeing the man, cry out in surprise. Elise imagined what he must look like through the laundry doorway, coming at Brody: a real-world devil, wordless and grinning, arms pumping. The man’s knees arching, legs kicking droplets high into the air.

  “Run, Brody, run!” And she heard his body collide with the screen door, the boy splashing, floundering out in the yard. Elise pictured his legs bogged, hands snatching wildly at the water in front of him, trying to pull himself faster away.

  “Don’t trip,” she said. “Please don’t fall.”

  Don’t get caught.

  But a part of her knew already Brody was safe. Even if he was slow, and his legs short. Even if he stumbled, submerged himself fully, struggled to make it back to his feet. Even if somewhere safe was far, somewhere beyond the tree line, away. Because she knew the man wouldn’t follow him outside of the house. Traust wouldn’t go any farther than the threshold of the back door. Wouldn’t risk it—a bird already in hand. Because the man had heard her voice, and knew now where Elise hid.

  Traust, across the house, bounded up the stairs. Quiet at the head, where the hallway began, but only because he’d stopped in place to remember, to calculate the placement of the voice’s source.

  Floorboards chirping under his feet. Into the parents’ bedroom. Closing in.

  Elise had to get out. Get away. Somewhere in the dark of the laundry chute beneath her, the floodwater began, but until she reached it, until her foot broke the plane of its surface, she had to descend, hands and toes gripping the nooks and beams of the walls, slick with condensation. Had to move carefully. If she fell from here, she wouldn’t be capable of running.

  “Hear you,” Traust said. He was in the bathroom. The shriek of the shower curtain being torn to one side. The click of the cabinet as it opened. Above her, Traust would be seeing medicine bottles, Band-Aids, a blood-pressure meter and thermometers, and below the shelves, at the bottom, a rough crease in the wood along the back of the cabinet. Elise had lost count of the steps she’d taken, and couldn’t find the next grip. Her toes groped lower against the smooth, wet wall. She looked between her limbs down into the dark—low enough to drop?

  Above, the man pulled the back of the cabinet loose with the tips of his fingernails, and the wood ground against the sides. Elise, looking down between her legs, saw the black square of water come into view, her shadow cast across its surface. And above her, the silhouette of Traust’s head in the chute’s frame.

  “See you,” he said. His shoulders swelled into the chute, eclipsing nearly all the bathroom light.

  The water was too far below her. She ignored the handholds she couldn’t find and used her forearms and heels and the flat of her back to wedge her way down.

  The shape of Traust hesitated. Elise could sense him thinking it through. She was too far down from him. Out of reach. He could rush back downstairs, but what if she was gone when he got there?

  Elise lowered herself another half-foot, a quick lurch, and that’s all it took. She was getting farther away from him. Pulling back into the dark. But he wouldn’t lose her again. Traust came down after her.

  He Descends

  SHOULDERS PINCHED TOGETHER, ARMS OUTSTRETCHED, BRIMMING over the lip of the cabinet into the chute. His body was too huge to fall, snug up against the sides. So, snake-like, he wrenched it back and forth, all face and hands and elbows.

  Elise slipped, dropped a few inches, and caught herself against the chute’s sides with the length of her back and knees. But already Traust was close, reaching for her. She slipped again, her feet buckling up this time, her body in a V, backside sinking—she was going to fall into the water and be stuck with her arms and legs above her. And he was going to follow, and crush her.

  Traust shouting, but she couldn’t understand. The words bounced around her. His shoulder digging into her thigh, and the palm of his hand engulfing her face. Her cheeks squeezed between his thumb and forefinger, and he was trying to pull her closer.

  Elise fell. The water surrounded her—abrupt, cool—and Traust’s voice was muted. Elise was walled in, all sides. Her feet above the surface of the water, kicking wild. Stuck in a submerged coffin. His body came down and broke the surface of the water, the current rushing around her, and then he was pushing down on her. His bulk mashing her into the floor, his back on her chest, his hard head between her hip and her arm. Her lungs compressing. The air forced from her.

  Elise needed to breathe. One wall had pulled away. The painted board with the tree come loose. She reached behind her head and gripped the lips of the hole and pulled herself, wriggling from beneath him, out. She gasped into the air and dim light.

  Her feet found footing beneath her, but her legs were weak, knees bending. She tried to run, turning and stepping, but the pull of the water tugged her off-balance. She fell and was swallowed by the water again. Frantic, she stood and pulled her hair from her eyes. Saw the laundry room’s wall quivering—Traust pummeled it from the other side.

  He raged, water splashing through the narrow hole where the board had been. His arm groping for her beneath the water. Elise stepped back. On the wall above, the plaster was cracking from the kicking of his feet. He’d already broken through the wood of the chute. The hole she’d pulled herself out of was small, but if he could fit into the chute, he could come through, too. His neck and shoulders were pinned by his weight against the submerged floor, but Traust could surely twist his arms, pull himself up and out. The water churned across the whole room, slapping against her thighs. Elise backed away, step after step. Where else could she hide? Once he pulled himself free and up, in four or five of his steps he’d catch and fall down upon her. She heard him beneath the water, muffled yelling, like the house itself was calling to her. But he wasn’t coming out.

  Elise stepped back and watched. The raging down there, the torrent of water reaching her, all the water in the house seeming to pitch up and down. The crack in the wall growing, the walls thumping. But with each beat, the noise grew softer. A steady heartbeat growing slow.

  By the time Elise had backed into the foyer, the water around her legs had grown smooth. She stood there for a minute while the bubbles of air on the water’s surface popped, two at a time, then one after another. They burst, dissolving into the water’s flat, dark plane, until no more remained. Eventually, Elise went back into the room, where the man in the walls had gone quiet.

  When We Go Missing

  ONCE, WE WERE CHILDREN LYING IN BED WITH OUR EYES CLOSED. The overhead lamp still on, turning the insides of our eyelids crimson. We waited to hear them enter our rooms. For the pressure at the foot of our beds, the squeal of the bedsprings as they leaned to brush the hair from our foreheads. When our parents’ footsteps led away, we felt the remainder of their kiss on our faces as the room around us darkened, and our eyelids changed to indigo, the color of sleep.

  It’s a feeling we’ll have when finally we leave this world. We hope.

  When floodwaters come, they will lap at our faces, wrap our waists, and pull. Our chests will rise with the current, as if swelling for one last breath, and will be pulled free, unmoored, bodies turned by the
current like the slow hands of a clock. We’ll lie on the surface of the water the way a sleeper sleeps, ushered away as the water recedes.

  When the girl pulled him loose from the wall, his body rose halfway. Only the hump of his back broke the surface, like the cresting shoulders of a small whale. She guided him on, steering him with her hips and the tops of her forearms. Through the rooms, on out. Out the door through which he had come, looking to find her. Outside, the world was a receding lake, and when he was with it, he receded too: a gray shape pulling away toward the trees.

  The man’s body would be found, eventually, or it would always be missing. There are only two ways for things to go. The setting sun shot fire across the water’s surface. She might fall here, let herself be immersed. Let the murky cold sweep all over her once again.

  If she weren’t so tired. Weren’t so unsure she would be able to stand back up.

  The Pull of Every Thing

  THAT EVENING, ELISE LAY ON THE STAIRS, HALFWAY UP, DRAPED across them like a cat. The humid wood firm against her cheek. Hard to know how long she lay there, once night came, but over time, the water diminished out through the door until only sediment and shallow puddles lingered across the tile floor. It felt comforting to lie on the stairs, even if they were hard and narrow. This was a part of the house Elise had never lain on before. Had never embraced. That seemed important now.

  Below her, the granddaughter clock had soaked in the standing water like a patch of dry and porous soil. The glossy hue vanished, its wood now soft and vulnerable as a freshly healed wound. The painted birds still there, colorful on the clock’s face, yet Elise wondered how long until they faded and cracked from the ruined wood underneath.

  Eventually, Elise made it up to the parents’ bed once again. She slept through the remainder of the night until late in the morning, dozing through the light and the chitter of a squirrel in one of the trees in the yard. She wavered in and out of sleep, scratching where mosquitoes had bitten her along her arms, ignoring the growing pangs in her stomach and her dry throat. Elise pulled a pillow over her face. She was in no rush to get up and search the ruined kitchen again. Already she had caught the rotten smell of what was emanating from the insides of the refrigerator, whose doors hung open from the man’s search, the perishables inside free to rot in the muggy heat.

  But finally, when she pulled herself upright and descended the stairs, she saw that there was no longer any need to search for food and clean water. It had been taken care of for her. In the front doorway lay a towel, two water bottles, an energy bar, and a box of Cinnamon Life cereal. Elise stared at the collection of items.

  “Brody,” she said.

  She took the items back upstairs. She had her breakfast in the attic. She brushed broken glass from the sill and spent the meal looking out the dormer into the backyard. She pictured Mrs. Laura pulling upright the trampled tomato vines. Mr. Nick with a wheelbarrow of loose, broken limbs. Marshall and Eddie together dragging one of the large fallen branches. Her own mom and dad working somewhere else in the front yard.

  For the rest of that morning, Elise circled her home and surveyed the damage, and what remained. She noted the impressions of herself throughout, the signs of her presence there—tangled bedsheets, her jeans lain out on the roof to dry, stacks of books she’d brought upstairs from the library which she hoped to save from the humidity and mold. Elise realized how a house seems smaller once all the windows are open. A breeze can pass through the whole building as if the building weren’t there. Ghosts bled in from outside and drifted through the air of the rooms, and out again into the pucker of sky that showed between the tree’s branches.

  Here, Odin, the All-father, came to Elise and knelt on one knee before her. He put his face next to hers, and he told her that, somewhere out there, her parents were buried in the ground. Lying on their backs, side by side. That every night, constellations refracted in their glossy-white eyes. “In the end,” he said, “no one is ever missing. They’re beneath us all the time.”

  In the next few days, the floorboards beneath her would bend and buckle. Paint would flake from the walls, and mold would grow black and speckled throughout their insides. Elise could make it work, if she wanted. A new challenge, in a way, to exist hidden in a house that was fading as fast as this one. Elise was good enough at a life like hers to know that she could. If that’s what she decided she wanted.

  The floodwater had drained almost fully from the yard, and the jeans on the roof were taken back inside. The bedsheets pulled straight the way they’d been left when the Masons packed up their car and left. The windows that had been opened the morning after the storm were closed. The library books she had saved were brought back downstairs and stacked on the drying coffee table.

  That afternoon, Elise left her home. She entered into the yard, and the flattened grass between the fallen branches was wet and warm beneath her feet. Mrs. Laura’s flowers along the driveway were bent and weak, but alive—Elise pinched a Snapdragon’s purple mouth open and shut. The scent of magnolia at the end of its bloom. The warmth of the sun on her neck and arms.

  Elise passed his flooded-out truck on the road, and she scaled the steep levee. Her calf muscles strained as she climbed to its peak. The river was big and brown and churning onward, like the glistening muscles of a horse. On the other side, just above the top of the parallel levee, she could make out the roofs of other homes, the buildings peeking up at her, apprehensive, from afar. Elise walked along its length, kicking sun-baked gravel, brushing mosquitoes from her calves with the sides of her feet. Elise walked until she found the wooded road she’d known Brody to take sometimes when he’d come to her house.

  Once there, she came down the levee, letting gravity pull her, catching speed. Her strides grew in length as she crossed over the ditch and pavement onto the dirt road. She followed it, sidestepping ankle-deep potholes, jumping over fallen limbs, ducking beneath the larger trunks when she had to. Mud in the cracks between her toes. Dragonflies hummed around her. Between the clouds, the sun like an apricot. The woods on each side of her, and the canopy above, were a living hallway.

  The Girl in the Walls left her home to thank her friend for the things he brought her. And after, if she ever planned on returning, she must have changed her mind. Elise didn’t come back.

  Foundation

  LATER, AFTER ABANDONED AND FLOODED VEHICLES HAD BEEN towed away, the roads reopened. The return began. Patient, long lines of cars alternated through the broken traffic lights. Car tires crunched over the fallen branches and shattered glass. From the elevated interstate, the city extending in every direction, with battered shingles and pockmarked roofs, some peeled completely open as if, during the storm, something inside had shot straight up through their ceiling into the sky.

  The waterline scarred the sides of homes where the floodwaters had risen and stood, stagnant. For many, the question of whether to rebuild and stay, or go on, elsewhere. Farther from the Gulf, from the turgid, hot summers, and the humidity and insects, the threat of flood, the curbside littered with sodden, rolled-up carpets and refrigerators that’d never be purged of the smell. There were other storms to come—stronger ones. Hurricane season wouldn’t end for months. And next year would breed more. One storm blends into every other, when they’re recollected and described. Was that Betsy that took the old shed from us? Was that Camille who took our favorite tree?

  Each storm, the same—the ones that have happened, and the ones that will.

  A barge teetering on top of the levee. The broken trees, the battered house, the deep divots in the yard from where it appeared some tow truck, a day or so ago, had circled round, its tires cutting into the mud, to pull along a vehicle that had stalled out on the road in front of their home.

  Inside, the water had taken all of their belongings and rearranged them. Pulled from cabinets, spilled across the floor. The walls had drunk in the moisture as if they’d been thirsty for it. They were still saturated—a thumb pressed into them
was like touching a doused washcloth. The whole building would need to be gutted.

  And through the destruction of their home, it was clear that the man Traust had come back. Holes knocked in their walls and floors, throughout the entirety of their house. He’d left his boots upstairs. When Nick found them there, toppled on their sides in the upstairs hallway, the father tore through the house, throwing himself into each of the rooms, searching for him. But eventually, it was clear the house was empty. He wasn’t here. At least not anymore. Their father’s anger welled up in all of them—why won’t he leave us alone? The stacked books on the coffee table in the library: what was he even doing?

  As long as he was held in the frame of their anger, the man shrank to nothing more than a reoccurring pest. Like mice. Like termites. Marshall swore that if he ever saw Mr. Traust near their home again, he’d grab the nearest thing to him and crack it over the man’s head. He’d taken his father’s keys from the peeling foyer table and thrust them into a set of imaginary eyes.

  “If I could just get my hands on him,” Nick said to Marshall, and as bodiless as the man seemed to them now, hanging loose around them like water vapor, they understood the desire, and satisfaction, of pinning something down you hate.

  Laura, who’d gone silent once they’d entered their home, pinched the mouths of the boots together between two fingers of one hand. And in the other, she took the toolkit they found in the office. She went out to the back field, far back, until she was nothing more than a torso pushing through the tall weeds. She swung her arms like pendulums and threw the man’s things as far as she could past the tree line into the woods.

  Eddie met her in the backyard. He was too old for her to reach out and take hold of his hand. He was never comfortable with touching, besides. But she could walk beside him, past her muddied garden, around the garage and the azalea bushes. They didn’t need to speak. They circled around the house, catching out of the corners of their eyes their grayed reflections on the windowpanes, Eddie murmuring while he counted the steps. She could do it all night, Laura realized. Or at least as long as he wanted to.