“Can you hear me? There’s somebody living here now! I’m trying to get some sleep!”
Almost immediately, I received three sharp knocks on the wall in reply.
“Listen!” I yelled. “All I want you to do is to shut up! Do you hear me? No more knocking! Just let me get some sleep!”
There was silence. I stayed where I was, kneeling up in bed, half-expecting to hear another knock, but none came.
After a while, I allowed myself to wriggle back under the covers and re-arrange my nest.
An hour passed. I dozed and dreamed. I heard whispering and laughter. Sometimes I was asleep and sometimes I was awake. I thought I could see someone sitting hunched in a hood in the opposite corner of the room, and it turned out to be nothing more than a shadow. Then, later, I woke up sweating and although the room was silent I knew that somebody had been speaking to me. I lay bunched up in my covers, listening, holding my breath, my brain feeling as cold as an empty linoleum corridor.
Somebody said, “Help me.”
I lifted my head a fraction.
“Help me,” the voice repeated. A woman’s voice, but very faint.
I sat up in bed, listening so intently that my eardrums sang.
“Please help me call somebody, please”.
I pressed my ear against the brick walls.
“Help me,” she repeated, and this time there was no doubt that she was next door, whispering to me through the wall.
“What’s wrong?” I called back. “Can you hear me? What’s wrong?”
“– lp me,” she said.
“Listen!” I shouted. “Are you locked in? What’s wrong? Has somebody locked you in? What’s happening in there?”
“– me, for God’s sake, hel –”
I sat up straight. I didn’t know what the hell to do. A strange woman on the opposite side of my bedroom wall was begging me for help, but she wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. Either that, or she couldn’t hear me. But if she were whispering, and I could hear her, then she must be able to hear me yelling.
I climbed out of bed. I went through to the living-room, found the phone and picked it up, intent on calling the police. But then I thought I’d better make one last check. I’d called the police once before, when Vicky and I had been arguing, and that experience had been sufficient to make me feel highly prudent about summoning the law. I went back to the bedroom and knocked on the bricks with my ashtray.
“Are you okay?” I called. “Are you hurt, or anything like that? Do you need an ambulance?”
“He’s coming,” she whispered. “Please hurry, he’s coming!” Then she screamed, and her scream was so piercing that I shouted out, too, and dragged my pants off the back of the chair, and hop-stumbled into them, and grabbed at my shirt, and wrenched open my door and ran down the stairs to the street not even stopping to think that I was scared.
Outside it was cold and windy, with a fine flying drizzle in the air. I banged at the door of the house next door, Number 29. “Let me in!” I shouted. “Let me in! You touch that woman and I’ll call the cops!”
I banged and yelled and yelled and banged, and two or three lights went on, in bedrooms across the street. I tried to wrestle the front door open with my shoulder, but even though it was old and rotten and the gray-green paint was flaking, it wouldn’t budge.
I stepped panting into the street and peered up at the second-story windows. They were dark and blank. They looked almost as if they had been boarded up from the inside. I wondered if I ought to shout out again, or find an axe and try to smash the door down, but neighbors were watching me now, hostile and inquisitive, and I decided against it. If anything serious was going on next door at Number 29, I’d better call the police, and leave it to them to break in.
I ran back upstairs, and hammered at the bedroom wall. “It’s all right! Hold on! I’m calling the police!”
There was no reply. My God, I thought, he’s killed her. He’s killed her and I couldn’t stop him. I picked up the telephone with shaking hands and dialed the local police station. It was almost a minute before they answered.
The patrol car parked on the curb outside with its red-and-blue lights flashing and now the whole neighborhood was awake. A thin gray-haired police officer with a Boy Scout hat was standing on the sidewalk waiting for me when I opened the door. “You the fellow who made the complaint about twenty-nine?”
“That’s right. I heard a woman calling for help. Then a scream. She said something about a man coming to get her. I tried to break into the house but I couldn’t.”
The police-officer tirelessly chewed gum and stared at me with interest. “You tried to break in but you couldn’t?”
I nodded. “The door was locked, I couldn’t budge it.”
“The door was locked,” he repeated. I was beginning to feel as if one of us was some kind of mental retard.
I inclined my head toward Number 29. “Don’t you think you’d better try to get in there, to see what’s happened? There’s a woman in there and she could have been hurt.”
The police-officer fastidiously adjusted his hat. “Well, you come along with me, sir, and we’ll see just exactly what’s been going on.”
I closed the front door behind me, and followed him along the sidewalk. Several neighbors had come out into the street and were standing staring at me, their arms folded in suspicion, their faces conspicuously unfriendly.
“You lived here long?” the police officer asked me, without turning around.
“I moved in this afternoon.”
“Thought I hadn’t seen your face before. I know most faces. Excepting those that want to hide them deliberate.”
To my surprise, he walked straight past the front door of Number 29 without even glancing at it. “The screaming was coming from here,” I told him, trying to catch up. “It was coming from right next door.”
The police officer carried on walking to the corner of Number 29. He turned into the alleyway beside it, and then turned and beckoned me.
“What?” I said, uncertainly.
“Come on here,” he said. “Take a look for yourself.”
I stepped after him into the alleyway, convinced that I was going to witness something terrible. Yet he seemed so calm.
“Look,” he said, and pointed, and I took one last step forward and saw that behind the brick facade of Number 29 with its tightly-locked door and its blanked-out windows there was nothing but a vacant lot, overgrown with grass and dead-nettles and strewn with tires and broken bedsteads and other debris.
I raised my eyes slowly up the scabby outside wall of Number 31, and saw the patchy brickwork of my own bedroom wall, twenty feet above the ground. Nobody could have scratched or whispered or screamed at that wall, not unless they had a twenty-foot ladder. An extraordinary unbalancing shudder went through me, and I turned back and stared at the police officer in total perplexity.
He chewed his gum and smiled. “I’d say you had a nightmare, wouldn’t you?” he asked me.
I stared back at the wall. It was beginning to drizzle more heavily now, and the drizzle made a soft prickling noise among the weeds.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “It surely didn’t seem like a nightmare. Not at the time.”
“Best get back to sleep,” the police officer told me, and without another word he walked back to his patrol car, slammed the door, and drove off.
The next morning, at Irv’s, Carl leaned across the counter and said, “Heard about your little frack-ass last night.”
“News travels fast,” I told him, with a mouthful of cheese Danish.
“Aint much escapes my attention,” said Carl. “Jim Kelly said you heard some woman screaming, something like that, in Number Twenty-nine.”
“Who’s Jim Kelly?”
“Plumber, lives opposite you.”
I swallowed Danish and stirred my coffee. “Yes, well, I must have made some kind of mistake. The police officer who showed up said I was probably having a nightmare.�
�
“That’s what he always says.”
“What do you mean, ‘that’s what he always says’? You mean it’s happened before?”
Carl nodded. “All over town. Here, there, and everywhere. John Peebles heard it over on Sycamore; Mrs Dunning heard it on East Main. In the end, the Chamber of Commerce asked some professor from the University of Chicago to come down and see what the hell was going on. Collective hysterics, that’s what he called it, something like that. Community guilt.”
“Guilt about what?” I asked him.
“Not what, who. Nesta Philips, the local grade-school teacher. She was leaving school one winter afternoon four years ago and that was the last time that anybody saw her. They never found hide nor hair of her, excepting one of the combs she wore in her hair, and that was all clogged up with dried blood. They never found Nesta, and they never found who killed her, and that’s why the population of Archman is supposed to hear whispering and screaming just the way you did last night. Kind of makes your hair stand up on end, don’t you think? I’m surprised that Dennis didn’t tell you.”
“Who’s Dennis?”
“Dennis is the local deputy. The fellow who said you were probably having a nightmare. You know what they say about Dennis? You can always rely on Dennis to be just. Just plain stupid.” Carl snickered at his own joke, and shook his head. “He’s as even-handed as the day is long, and twice as dumb.”
I swallowed coffee. “It’s hard to believe that what I heard last night was just an hallucination. I mean – I couldn’t be feeling guilty about Nesta Philips, could I? I never even heard of her, till now.”
“There’s stranger things under the sun than you or I ever dreamed about, fair Horatio,” Carl misquoted.
“But she sounded so real. She sounded just like she was right next door.”
Carl made a face. “You saw for yourself. There is no next door.”
“She could almost have been – inside the wall.”
“You mean, bricked up?” Carl asked me. “You mean she’s climbed up a whole story, right inside a cavity wall, just to keep you awake at night? Even if it was possible, it still wouldn’t make any sense.”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “None of it makes sense, whichever way you look at it.”
It was well past midnight before I heard it again. It had taken me nearly two hours to get myself to sleep, and just when I was beginning to slide into unconsciousness, I heard a scritch, scritch and I sat up in bed, startled, wide awake, clutching the covers as tightly as a child.
“Is that you?” I asked, in a choked-up voice.
There was a long silence. Two or three cars swished past on the wet streets outside. “Is that you?” I repeated.
Again, there was a soft scratching, claws on brick.
I hesitated for a while, and then I said, “Are you in any kind of danger?”
No reply.
“Are you trapped? Is that it? Are you trapped inside the wall?”
No reply.
“Listen,” I said, more boldly now, “if I’m going to help you, I have to know where you are.”
There was a very long silence. I was beginning to think that she wouldn’t answer me, but then I heard that fearful, electrifying whisper. “Help me. Please, help me.”
I leaned against the wall. “But where are you?” I begged her. “I can’t do anything until you tell me where you are!”
“Help me, he’s coming. Please help me. Please! You don’t know what he’s going to do to me! Please!”
“Listen to me!” I yelled at her. “I can’t do anything! I don’t know where you are!”
It was then that she started to sob and scream and beg me to help her, beg me. There was nothing else that I could do. I galloped downstairs to my station wagon, dragged out my tool-box, and took out a hammer and a maul and a tire-iron. I made such a clanking noise with the tools that a light went on, across the street, and a voice cried out, “For the love of mike!”
Back upstairs in the bedroom, I dragged the bed clear of the wall, and immediately starting hammering at the bare brick. As I did so, the woman’s voice screamed and screamed, and babbled hysterically for help. I was almost hysterical myself. I kept hammering away, dislodging the mortar with the maul, and then levering the bricks out with the sharp end of the tire-iron.
After the third brick had banged on to the floor, there was a loud knocking at my apartment door. “Hey! What the hell’s going on! What the hell are you doing in there? Don’t you know it’s one o’ clock in the morning!”
I ignored the shouting, and kept on knocking bricks out of the wall. The voice said, “I’m calling the landlord! I’m going to have you thrown out of here, you inconsiderate bum!”
I dislodged half-a-dozen more bricks, and they went tumbling across the floor. Now I could see right inside the cavity of the wall. I lifted my bedside lamp and held it up, so that it shone down into the wall where it sounded as if the woman’s voice had been coming from.
“Can you see this light?” I shouted. “Can you see this light?”
Silence.
“Can you hear me? Can you see this light?”
Again, silence. I began to have the dreadful feeling that she might have climbed right up inside the wall-cavity, all the way to the level of my bedroom – and that my first few blows with the hammer had dislodged her, and sent her dropping twenty feet down to ground level again. She could be wedged inside the wall somewhere, unconscious, or seriously hurt.
Yet the wall-cavity was no more than five or six inches wide. Nobody could have crawled up inside it, even if they had been deranged enough to want to. It was too narrow and too dark, and they would have been lacerated by the rough mortar and the razor-sharp edges of the bricks.
I stood staring at the huge hole in my bedroom wall, and dropped my hammer on to the floor. As I did so, I heard the front door of my apartment open. My landlord Mr Katz came in, wrapped in a green padded bathrobe, looking white-faced and furious.
He stared at the wall and spread his hands wide. “What’s this? You stupid momzer! What have you done to my wall?”
I sat down on the bed. “I thought I heard something inside it.”
He looked at me with his mouth wide open. “You thought you heard something inside it? Like what?”
“I don’t know. It sounded as if somebody was trapped. Maybe it was all my imagination.”
“An imagination like yours my brother-in-law should have! He runs a demolition company!”
“I’m sorry, Mr Katz,” I said. I suddenly felt weary and stupid and very alone. “I’m really sorry.”
“I should throw you out, you know that?” said Mr Katz, stepping forward in his mules and peering down into the drafty cavity. “I should throw you out right now, with all these – cardboard boxes after you.”
But he turned back again, and said, “You’re going to be teaching at the school, right? I know Mrs Henry, the principal, she and I are good friends. So for her sake, I’ll give you a last chance. You repair this damage, you make this wall good, and don’t ever again break anything else in this apartment, not so much as a lightswitch, and we’ll forget it ever happened.”
He picked up one of the bricks from the floor. “Get new bricks, these are all broke. And get this rug cleaned, too. Then we’ll forget it.”
He stared at me for a long time without saying anything. Then he laid his hand on my shoulder and said, “You got divorced, maybe that’s it. Sometimes a sadness stays in your head, and then comes out some other way, like breaking down walls maybe.”
“Maybe,” I said, without looking up.
On Saturday morning I went down to the Archman Brickworks down by the river to pick up a dozen matching bricks to repair Mr Katz’s wall. It was a damp, foggy morning. The brick-kilns smoked steadily into the fog. Everywhere around there were huge stacks of recently-fired bricks, flettons and marls and engineering bricks. I walked up to a young man who was sitting in a forklift truck reading a copy
of Guns & Ammo and listening to tinny rock music on a Sony Walkman.
“Office?” I shouted, and he jerked his thumb toward a small shack with a corrugated-iron roof at the side of the main tunnel-kiln building.
In the office, a kerosene heater had raised the temperature until it was almost asphyxiating. A fat red-faced man was shouting at somebody on the telephone. Abruptly, he clamped the telephone down and turned to face me. “Well?” he demanded, “what can I do for you?”
“I’m looking for some bricks,” I said, lamely.
He dragged out a handkerchief and noisily blew his nose. “I guess you came to the right place. How many do you want?”
“Eleven,” I told him. I rested my brown-paper shopping sack on the table, and lifted out one of the bricks from my bedroom wall. “Eleven like this.”
The red-faced man took the brick and hefted it in his hand. “This is a hand-made job. First-quality facing brick. We don’t make these any more.”
He handed the brick back. “We may have some left in stock. Come around to the back.”
Thankfully, I followed him out of the overheated office into the chill outside. He waddled ahead of me over the gritty, brick-red ground. We passed stack after stack of different-colored bricks, until at last we reached a row of stacks that were protected from the weather by a lean-to roof.
“Here we are,” said the red-faced man. “No more’n five dozen left. We used to have a guy who made them special, all by hand, but after he was gone, there wasn’t no point in training anybody else to make them. It’s all mechanized now. Two tunnel-kilns and a Hoffmann kiln. You can drive your car down here and pick what you want.”
He waddled off again, leaving me to select my eleven bricks. I lifted them up, one by one, making sure that none of them were chipped, and that they matched the pale rosy hue of the sample brick from my bedroom wall. I had almost finished when I thought I heard somebody whisper.
I said, “What?” involuntarily, and looked around. But the brickyard was deserted and foggy. Even the boy in the fork-lift had gone.
Then I heard it again, and it was unmistakeable. “Help me.”
Fortnight of Fear Page 12
