“This way!” said Clara.
She paraded through the hall, up the steps to the landing, where she had placed a metal stepladder. She thrust her hand up, pointing.
“There’s the attic. See if you can make sense out of the damned noises up there. And don’t overcharge me when you’re done. Wipe your feet when you come down. I got to go shopping. Can I trust you not to steal me blind while I’m gone?”
With each blow, she could see him veer off balance. His face flushed. His eyes shone. Before he could speak, she marched back down the steps to shrug on a light coat.
“Do you know what mice sound like in attics?” she said, over her shoulder.
“I damn well do, lady,” he said.
“Clean up your language. You know rats? These could be rats or bigger. What’s bigger in an attic?”
“You got any raccoons around here?” he said.
“How’d they get in?”
“Don’t you know your own house, lady? I—”
But here they both stopped.
For a sound had come from above.
It was a small itch of a sound at first. Then it scratched. Then it gave a thump like a heart.
Something moved in the attic.
Timmons blinked up at the shut trapdoor and snorted.
“Hey!”
Clara Peck nodded, satisfied, pulled on her gloves, adjusted her hat, watching.
“It sounds like—” drawled Mr. Timmons.
“Yes?”
“Did a sea captain ever live in this house?” he asked, at last.
The sound came again, louder. The whole house seemed to drift and whine with the weight which was shifted above.
“Sounds like cargo.” Timmons shut his eyes to listen. “Cargo on a ship, sliding when the ship changes course.” He broke into a laugh and opened his eyes.
“Good God,” said Clara, and tried to imagine that.
“On the other hand,” said Mr. Timmons, half-smiling up at that ceiling, “you got a greenhouse up there, or something? Sounds like plants growing. Or a yeast, maybe, big as a doghouse, getting out of hand. I heard of a man once, raised yeast in his cellar. It—”
The front screen door slammed.
Clara Peck, outside glaring in at his jokes, said:
“I’ll be back in an hour. Jump!”
She heard his laughter follow her down the walk as she marched. She hesitated only once to look back.
The damn fool was standing at the foot of the ladder, looking up. Then he shrugged, gave a what-the-hell gesture with his hands, and—
Scrambled up the stepladder like a sailor.
When Clara Peck marched back an hour later, the Ratzaway truck still stood silent at the curb.
“Hell,” she said to it. “Thought he’d be done by now. Strange man tromping around, swearing—”
She stopped and listened to the house.
Silence.
“Odd,” she muttered.
“Mr. Timmons!?” she called.
And realizing she was still twenty feet from the open front door, she approached to call through the screen.
“Anyone home?”
She stepped through the door into a silence like the silence in the old days before the mice had begun to change to rats and the rats had danced themselves into something larger and darker on the upper attic decks. It was a silence that, if you breathed it in, smothered you.
She swayed at the bottom of the flight of stairs, gazing up, her groceries hugged like a dead child in her arms.
“Mr. Timmons—?”
But the entire house was still.
The portable ladder still stood waiting on the landing.
But the trapdoor was shut.
Well, he’s obviously not up in there! she thought. He wouldn’t climb and shut himself in. Damn fool’s just gone away.
She turned to squint out at his truck abandoned in the bright noon’s glare.
Truck’s broke down, I imagine. He’s gone for help.
She dumped her groceries in the kitchen and for the first time in years, not knowing why, lit a cigarette, smoked it, lit another, and made a loud lunch, banging skillets and running the can opener overtime.
The house listened to all this, and made no response.
By two o’clock the silence hung about her like a cloud of floor polish.
“Ratzaway,” she said, as she dialed the phone.
The Pest Team owner arrived half an hour later, by motorcycle, to pick up the abandoned truck. Tipping his cap, he stepped in through the screen door to chat with Clara Peck and look at the empty rooms and weigh the silence.
“No sweat, ma’am,” he said, at last. “Charlie’s been on a few benders, lately. He’ll show up to be fired, tomorrow. What was he doing here?”
With this, he glanced up the stairs at the stepladder.
“Oh,” said Clara Peck, quickly, “he was just looking at—everything.”
“I’ll come, myself, tomorrow,” said the owner.
And as he drove away in the afternoon, Clara Peck slowly moved up the stairs to lift her face toward the ceiling and watch the trapdoor.
“He didn’t see you, either,” she whispered.
Not a beam stirred, not a mouse danced, in the attic.
She stood like a statue, feeling the sunlight shift and lean through the front door.
Why? she wondered. Why did I lie?
Well, for one thing, the trapdoor’s shut, isn’t it?
And, I don’t know why, she thought, but I won’t want anyone going up that ladder, ever again. Isn’t that silly? Isn’t that strange?
She ate dinner early, listening.
She washed the dishes, alert.
She put herself to bed at ten o’clock, but in the old downstairs maid’s room, for long years unused. Why she chose to lie in this downstairs room, she did not know, she simply did it, and lay there with aching ears, and the pulse moving in her neck and in her brow.
Rigid as a tomb carving under the sheet, she waited.
Around midnight, a wind passed, shook a pattern of leaves on her counterpane. Her eyes flicked wide.
The beams of the house trembled.
She lifted her head.
Something whispered ever so softly in the attic.
She sat up.
The sound grew louder, heavier, like a large but shapeless animal, prowling the attic dark.
She placed her feet on the floor and sat looking at them. The noise came again, far up, a scramble like rabbits’ feet here, a thump like a large heart there.
The End
