by Riley Sager
“Just random noises. Doors. Cupboards. Drawers.”
“That’s what I dreamed about, too,” Jess said. “Do you think—”
“Those sounds were real?”
She responded with a nervous little nod.
“They weren’t,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”
“Then why did we both hear them? Maggie probably did, too. That’s why she was scared.” A stricken look crosses Jess’s face. “Shit. What if there was an intruder? Someone could have been inside our house, Ewan. Did you check to see if anything is missing?”
“Half our stuff is still in boxes. As for everything that came with the house, I wouldn’t know what’s missing and what’s not. Besides, the front gate was closed and the door was locked. No one could get in.”
“But those noises—”
I pulled Jess into a hug, her body rigid with tension and her coffee mug hot against my ribs. “It was nothing. We’re just not used to so much house, and it allowed our imaginations to go wild.”
It was a solid explanation. A logical one. Or so we thought. Although Jess’s fears would later come to be fully justified, at the time I believed what I was saying.
Yet another hint of wrongness, of something amiss about the place, occurred a few hours later, when Elsa Ditmer arrived for a second day of unpacking. This time, she brought her daughters.
“I thought Maggie might like to make some new friends,” she said.
Both girls were the spitting image of their mother. Same open, expressive face. Same friendly eyes. It was in personality where they differed.
The younger, Hannah, possessed none of her mother’s reticence. When Maggie came downstairs, Hannah sized her up in that way only the very young can get away with. Apparently finding my daughter acceptable, she said, “I’m Hannah. I’m six. Do you like hide-and-seek? Because that’s what we’re going to play. There’s lot of good places to hide here, and I know them all. I’m just warning you now, so you won’t be surprised when I win.”
Petra, the older Ditmer girl, was quieter. Unlike with her mother, I didn’t detect any shyness about her. She was more aloof. Appraising everything—me, Jess, the house—with a cool detachment.
“I’ll keep an eye on them,” Petra said as Maggie and Hannah ambled off to play hide-and-seek. “To make sure they don’t fall down a well or something.”
At sixteen, she was already taller than her mother and as thin as a beanpole. Her clothes—a pink tank top and khaki shorts—made her limbs seem all the longer. She reminded me of a deer, gangly but fleet. Her hair had been pulled into a ponytail, revealing a gold crucifix similar to the one her mother wore.
“They’ll be fine with Petra,” Elsa said. “She’s a good babysitter.”
As I watched Petra hurry off to catch up with Maggie and Hannah, I couldn’t help but recall what Elsa had told me the day before about her daughter being strong and protective. In the wake of an uneasy first night in our new home, it made me feel better.
So, too, did the idea of Maggie hopefully finding a new friend in Hannah. In the past year, Jess and I had grown increasingly worried about our daughter’s lack of friends. She was, we suspected, lonelier than she let on. Maggie was a quiet girl. Not shy, exactly. Observant was more like it. Content to sit back and watch, just like Petra seemed to be.
With the girls off on their own, we adults split up. Jess and Elsa went to the Indigo Room, which after the day before was hopefully snake-free. I returned to the kitchen, where I sorted through all the plates, utensils, and gadgets the Carvers had left behind. Despite what happened here, it was still hard for me to fathom why Mrs. Carver hadn’t wanted to keep anything. Maybe she was afraid that every single item in the house retained memories she’d rather forget. If that was the case, I was all too happy to sort through the chipped teacups and tarnished silverware, keeping some, packing away others.
Halfway through the task, one of the bells on the wall rang. A different one than yesterday. This time it was one of the numbered bells indicating former guest rooms from the bed-and-breakfast days. The ringing bell belonged to No. 4. Also known as Maggie’s bedroom.
At first, I ignored it, thinking it was just the girls playing. I braced myself for a chorus of rings as the girls explored various rooms, trying out the bellpulls in each. But Maggie’s room was the only one that rang.
And rang.
And rang.
They were frantic rings, too. Strong. This wasn’t a group of girls lightly pulling on a rope. This was a full-on tug.
Curious, I left the kitchen and made my way to the second floor. Up there, I no longer heard the bell itself. Just the ragged slide of the rope as it kept being yanked from the wall.
Maggie was the one doing the yanking, which I learned when I entered her room, catching her in mid-pull.
“There was a girl in here,” she said, her eyes shining with fear.
“Are you sure it wasn’t just Hannah?” I asked. “You’re supposed to be playing hide-and-seek, remember?”
Elsa Ditmer had joined us by then, drawn by the ruckus. She remained in the hallway, seemingly unwilling to enter the room.
“It could have been Petra,” she said.
“No,” Maggie told us. “They’re hiding.”
Hearing their names, Hannah and Petra emerged from their hiding places elsewhere on the second floor. Both stood with their mother in the doorway.
“We’re right here,” Hannah said.
Petra peeked into the room. “What’s going on?”
“Maggie said there was someone in her room,” I said.
“There was,” Maggie said, stomping her foot.
“Then where did she go?”
Maggie pointed to the armoire, that great wooden beast plunked down directly across from the bed. The doors were closed. I flung them open, revealing the armoire’s empty interior. Maggie, though clearly caught in a lie, doubled down.
“But I saw her!” she cried.
By this time, Jess had joined the scene. With the frazzled patience only a mother could possess, she steered Maggie out of the room. “Let’s get you some lunch and then a nap. After last night, you’re probably exhausted.”
I followed them out of the room, only to be stopped in the hallway by Elsa, who said, “Your daughter. She’s sensitive, yes?”
“Aren’t all girls that age?”
“Some more than others,” Elsa replied. “Katie was also sensitive.”
“The Carver girl?”
Elsa gave a quick nod. “Girls like that can sense things the rest of us miss. When that happens, it might be wise to believe them.”
She left then, retreating quietly down the hall.
At first, I dismissed what she told me. Maggie was my daughter, not hers. And I wasn’t about to pretend to believe made-up things just to appease her. But that night, I couldn’t stop replaying Elsa’s words in my head.
Especially when the noises returned.
Not just the usual sounds of a house settling in for a long summer night, but the dreams as well. The bumps and thumps of doors, cupboards, closets opening and closing. The cacophony filled my sleep, silencing itself only when I woke a few minutes before midnight.
Sitting up in bed, I looked to the bedroom door, listening for the slightest hint the noises were real. All I heard were sleep-heavy breaths from Jess and a chorus of crickets in the woods outside.
I immediately thought of Maggie and how Elsa Ditmer had—quite rightly—pegged her as sensitive. It dawned on me that her advice about believing Maggie in reality meant seeing things through my daughter’s eyes. To understand that, even though I knew these were the sounds of a house settling, they could seem quite menacing to someone so young. And if they were keeping me awake, then it was possible Maggie also couldn’t sleep. Which is why I decided it wouldn’t hurt to check on her.
Sliding o
ut of bed, I crept out of the room and down the hallway to Maggie’s room. As I approached, I saw the door—which, at Maggie’s insistence, had been left open after we kissed her goodnight—suddenly close with a soft click.
So she was awake.
I opened the door a crack, expecting to see Maggie climbing back into bed, preparing to read one of her picture books by moonlight. Instead, I saw that she was already in bed, covered by her sheets from toe to shoulder. She was also, it seemed, fast asleep. By this point, both Jess and I could recognize when she was faking sleep. The shallow breaths. The flickering eyelids. The exaggerated, stone-heavy stillness of her limbs. This was the real deal, which prompted a single, worrisome question: Who had just closed her bedroom door?
The girl. The one Maggie said she saw.
That was my first thought. A crazy notion, immediately dismissed. There was no girl. As for the bedroom door, that had closed on its own, be it from a draft or from loose hinges or from the simple fact that it had been hung wrong when it was installed all those decades ago.
But then I looked to the armoire. The place where Maggie said this imaginary girl had disappeared.
Both of its doors were wide open.
Five
The armoire doors are closed.
No surprise there. It probably hasn’t been opened in twenty-five years.
What does surprise me is that someone—my father, I assume—has nailed the doors shut with a pair of two-by-fours. The boards crisscross the split between doors, giving it a distinctly forbidden look. Like a haunted house on a trick-or-treat bag.
Appropriate, I guess.
Also ridiculous.
Then again, the same could be said of my choosing to sleep in my old bedroom. There are plenty of other places where I could set up camp while I’m here. My parents’ old bedroom being the largest and, presumably, the most comfortable.
But it’s this room that speaks to me after I haul my luggage upstairs. No. 4 on the wall of bells in the kitchen. I’d like to think that’s due to familiarity. In truth, I suspect it’s simply because the room is nice. I can see why my dad chose it be my bedroom. It’s spacious. Charming.
Except for the armoire, which is the opposite of charming. A hulking, ungainly thing, it dominates the room while also feeling like it belongs somewhere else. The parlor. The Indigo Room. Anywhere but here.
The way it’s been boarded up doesn’t help matters. I can only guess as to why my father felt the need to do it. That’s why I go back outside, retrieve a crowbar from the truck, and pry off both boards in four quick pulls.
The wood clatters to the floor, and the armoire doors pucker open.
When I open them all the way, I see dresses.
They’re small. Little-girl dresses in an array of Easter-egg colors. Flouncy and frilly and cinched at the waist with satin ribbons. Shit no self-respecting child should ever be forced to wear. I sort through them, the fabric slightly stiff, dust gathered on the shoulders. On one, a strand of cobweb runs from sleeve to skirt. That’s when I realize these dresses are mine, meant for a much-younger me. According to the Book, my mother hung them here with the hope I’d one day want to dress like a Stepford Wife. To my knowledge, I never wore a single one. Which is probably why they’ve been left in the armoire, unused and unloved.
But when I move to the closet under the eaves and open its slanted door, I find more of my clothes inside. Clothes I’m certain I did wear. They’re exactly my style. Sensible jeans and striped T-shirts and a pair of sneakers with a wad of gum stuck to the left one’s sole. It’s a lot of clothes. My whole five-year-old wardrobe, it seems, is contained in this room.
In the 60 Minutes interview—the same one with shy little me and my awful bangs—my parents claimed we had fled Baneberry Hall with only the clothes we were wearing. I’ve watched it so many times the exchange is permanently etched in my memory.
“Is it true you’ve never been back to that house?” the interviewer said.
“Never,” my father said.
“Ever,” my mother added for good measure.
“But what about your things?” the interviewer asked. “Your clothes? Your possessions?”
“It’s all still there,” my father answered.
As with most things related to the Book, I never believed it. We couldn’t have left everything behind.
Yet as I stare into a closet filled with my old clothes, I start to think that maybe my parents had been telling the truth. That suspicion is heightened further when I go from the bedroom to the adjoining playroom. The floor is scattered with toys. Wooden blocks. Chunky Duplo bricks. A naked Barbie lies facedown in the carpet like a murder victim. It looks like a little girl had suddenly left the room mid-play, never to return.
I try to think of why my parents would have done such a thing. Why deny their only child her clothes? Her toys? Surely, I must have loved some of them. A favorite shirt. A beloved stuffed animal. A book I’d made my parents read to me over and over again. Why take that away from me for no good reason?
The best answer I can come up with is that it was for verisimilitude. That no one would have believed my parents if they had returned to grab that Barbie, for instance, or those gum-marred sneakers. That, in order for this long con Chief Alcott talked about to work, they needed to willingly abandon everything.
I guess my parents thought it was a sacrifice worth making. One they later made up for by lavishing me with things following the Book’s success. My father was especially fond of spoiling me. I was the first girl in my school to have a DVD player. And a flat-screen TV. And an iPhone. When I turned sixteen, he gave me a new car. When I turned seventeen, he gave me a second one. At the time, I chalked up the gifts to post-divorce guilt. Now I think it was a form of atonement for making me live with the Book.
Call me ungrateful, but I would have preferred the truth.
I leave the playroom and head down the hallway, peeking into the other rooms on the second floor. Most of them had been guest rooms during Baneberry Hall’s stint as a bed-and-breakfast. They’re small and, for the most part, empty. One, presumably a remnant from the B&B days, contains a twin bed stripped of sheets and a tilted nightstand, the shadeless lamp on top of it leaning like a drunk man. In the room next to it are an old sewing machine and spools of thread stacked in tidy pyramids. On the floor sits a cardboard box filled with Life magazines from the fifties.
Since most of this stuff came with the house, it makes sense that my parents would leave a lot of it behind. None of it looks to be of any real value, and I can’t imagine there was any emotional attachment to a broken nightstand or a mid-century Singer sewing machine.
It’s a different story in my parents’ old bedroom at the end of the hall. Although I assume this is where my father slept during his annual overnight stays here, the room looks like it hasn’t been touched in twenty-five years. Just like my playroom, it’s been frozen in time. My mother’s jewelry from back then—far more subdued than what she wears now—litters the top of the dresser. Nearby is a striped necktie, coiled like a snake. A dress sits in a puddle in the corner. The heel of a black pump peeks out from beneath the fabric.
The room, in fact, is filled with clothes. The dresser, arranged with a His side and a Hers, is stuffed. Each pull of a drawer reveals socks and underwear and things my parents never wanted me to see. A box of condoms. A tiny bag of marijuana hidden inside an old Band-Aid tin.
More of my mother’s clothes hang in the closet, including a floral sundress I remember only because she’s wearing it in a framed photograph my father kept in his apartment. She looks happy in that photo, with my father beside her and baby me in her arms.
Thinking about that photo now, I wonder how it ended up at my father’s place. Did it once grace Baneberry Hall? If so, did my father take it with him when we left? Or did he steal it away years later during one of his many secret visits her
e?
Then there’s the biggest question: Why take just that photograph?
Because everything else has been left behind. My father’s suits and jeans and underwear. A watch that still sits on the nightstand. My mother’s wedding dress, which I find in the back of the closet, zipped into a plastic garment bag.
It’s all still here. My father hadn’t been lying about that. It makes me wonder what other aspects of the Book are true.
All of it.
The thought jabs into my brain, unprompted and unwelcome. I close my eyes, shake my head, will it away. Just because we left everything behind doesn’t mean this place is haunted. All it means is that my father had been willing to sacrifice everything—his house, his possessions, his family—for the Book.
Back in my own room, I unpack my bags, stowing my adult wardrobe next to my childhood one. I strip off my jeans and work shirt, replacing them with flannel shorts and a faded Ghostbusters tee stolen from an old college boyfriend. The irony of it was too funny to resist.
I then climb into a bed that was slightly too big for five-year-old me and too small for present-day me. My feet stretch over the edge, and a good roll in either direction is likely to send me tumbling to the floor. But it will do for the time being.
Rather than sleep, I spend the next hour lying awake in the darkness and doing what I do with every house I work on.
I listen.
And Baneberry Hall, it seems, has plenty to say. From the whir of the ceiling fan to the creak of the mattress beneath me, the house is full of noise. Outside, a gust of warm summer air makes the corner of the roof groan. The sound joins the chorus of crickets, frogs, and night birds that inhabit the woods surrounding the house.
I’m almost asleep, lulled by nature’s white noise, when another sound rises from outside.
A twig.
Snapping in half with a heavy crack.
Its sudden appearance silences the rest of the forest. In that newfound quiet, I sense a disturbance in the backyard.
Something is outside.
