The Thorned Mouth: The Boy in The Stairwell

The brass numbers on the mailbox caught the late sun and threw it back, three-fourteen, half-hidden by a stand of goldenrod gone to seed. Wren Calloway turned the rental car off the county road and onto the gravel drive, and the sound changed beneath her tires, from the steady hiss of asphalt to the crunch and pop of stone that had been there longer than she had been alive. She had forgotten how the gravel sounded. She had forgotten how the air off Hollow Creek in October smelled of wet bark and the particular green rot of fallen apples, sharp enough to catch at the back of the throat.

The house waited at the end of the drive, the same house, and not.

White clapboards gone the color of old bone. A front porch with a sag on the western end that had been there when she was nine. Shutters closed, every one of them, even though it was only dusk. A wisteria had climbed the eastern wall in her absence, its tendrils so thick they pressed against the upstairs window of what had been her bedroom. A swing set stood in the side yard, the chains rusted, the swings missing entirely. The place had the look of a photograph left too long in a window, the colors bled, the edges curled.

Wren killed the engine. The key came out of the ignition and she held it in her fist for a long moment, feeling the teeth of it press into her palm, the small bright pain of metal. She had driven six hours from the city. She had stopped once for gas and once for coffee she had not drunk. Her phone had filled with voicemails from her producer, a woman named Patrice who had a way of making every question sound like an accusation, and she had listened to none of them.

She had come to settle the estate. That was the phrase the lawyer had used on the phone, his voice careful, his consonants crisp, the way people speak when they are trying not to be overheard by the dead. Settle the estate. As if a life could be settled, the way a debt could be settled, the way dust could be settled, by a single decisive motion.

Wren opened the car door. The step down onto the gravel made her knees protest, six hours of highway having stiffened her joints in ways she would feel in the morning. The crickets had already started, a sound so layered and continuous it had the quality of a held breath. Somewhere down toward the creek a frog gave a low, wet note, and something in the tree line answered it, a rustle and a flutter she could not name.

The screen door on the porch was newer than the one she remembered. The inner door, heavy and dark, was original. She took the key from her pocket, the one the lawyer had sent by registered mail, and fitted it to the lock. The mechanism turned with a sound like a small bone breaking.

Inside, the house held the particular stillness of a place that has been closed up. Air that had no movement. Dust that hung in the last of the light from the windows, motes turning in slow columns, gold against the dim. The smell was a compound: candle wax gone cold, cedar from the chest in the hall, paper slowly surrendering to damp, and beneath it all the ghost of a perfume Aunt Maren had worn for forty years, something with rose in it that had outlasted the woman who wore it.

Wren stood in the front hall and did not move. The stairs rose directly ahead of her, a steep narrow flight with a banister of dark wood worn to silk by three generations of hands. At the top of the stairs, where the last step met the second-floor landing, there was a square of gray light from the window at the end of the hall.

She set her bag down by the newel post. The wood of the post was cool under her fingers, the kind of cool that has nothing to do with temperature. She had been a child the last time she had stood in this hall. She had been twelve, and her aunt had taken her by the shoulders and turned her to face the stairs and told her, in a voice that would not permit argument, that she was not to go up to the attic. Not ever. Not for any reason. Wren had not asked why. The set of Aunt Maren's jaw had been answer enough.

Now Aunt Maren was in the ground, three weeks in, in the cemetery on the rise above the holler, and Wren was here, and the stairs were right in front of her, and the attic waited above them.

She did not go up. Not yet. There were things that had to be done first. The lawyer had sent a list: the safety deposit box key to be retrieved from the linen closet on the second floor, the deed to the mineral rights to be located in the desk in the parlor, the personal effects to be sorted before the representative of the estate arrived from the county seat. There was no representative of the estate. There was Wren. But the list had given her permission, in the way that lists do, to move through the house one room at a time and do what needed to be done without having to think about why.

She started in the parlor.

The room had been closed up tight, the heavy curtains drawn, and it took her a moment to find the matches for the oil lamp on the mantel. Her fingers knew the shape of the box on the mantel without her eyes telling them anything, the small rectangular weight, the rasp of the match head against the strip. The flame caught, and the room came forward out of the dark in pieces: the horsehair sofa, the braided rug, the tall clock in the corner that had not worked since before Wren was born. The desk was where it had always been, under the window, its roll top pushed up to reveal a scatter of papers and a cup of dried pens and a framed photograph.

The photograph was of a boy.

Wren set the lamp on the desk and picked up the frame. The boy in the photograph could not have been more than ten. He stood at the base of a tree Wren did not recognize, his hand on the bark, his face turned half toward the camera. The light was the slanted gold of late afternoon, and the boy's hair was dark, and his eyes were dark, and he was looking at the camera with an expression she could not parse. Not smiling. Not frowning. Watchful. The kind of watchfulness that belongs to a child who has been told to be quiet for so long that the quiet has become the only face he knows how to wear.

She turned the frame over. On the back, in Aunt Maren's careful hand, two words: Eli Marsh.

Wren did not know the name. She had grown up in this house on and off, summers and the long stretches when her mother had needed to be elsewhere, and she had known the names of the people in the holler the way a child knows the names of the constellations, by pointing, not by understanding. Eli Marsh had not been one of the names she had pointed at. She was almost sure of it.

She set the frame back where she had found it, facedown, and opened the roll top the rest of the way. The deed to the mineral rights was in a manila envelope at the back of the desk, under a stack of letters tied with a ribbon that had gone the color of weak tea. She put the envelope in her bag. She did not untie the letters. That was a task for another evening, for a different kind of courage.

The linen closet on the second floor.

She went out into the hall and stood again at the foot of the stairs. The square of gray light at the top had not changed. The dust motes still turned in the air. From somewhere in the house, a clock she had not seen yet was marking the hour with a single low note, and the note faded into the sound of the crickets through the walls.

Wren put her foot on the first step.

The wood gave under her weight with a creak that was almost a word, almost a name, and she paused, one hand on the banister, listening. The house did not say anything else. The house was waiting to see what she would do.

She went up.

The second-floor hallway was narrower than she remembered, or she was wider, or both. The doors were closed. The wallpaper was a small repeating pattern of blue flowers on a cream ground, and where the paper had pulled away from the plaster, the plaster beneath was the color of unhealed bruises. The window at the end of the hall gave onto the side yard, and the swing set was just visible through the glass, a dark geometry against the last of the light.

The linen closet was the second door on the left. Wren opened it, and the smell of lavender and cedar came out at her, so thick it was almost a taste, and she stood for a moment with her eyes closed, letting the smell do what it was going to do. When she opened her eyes, the closet was exactly as it had been. Sheets folded on the shelves. Towels in stacks. A wooden box on the top shelf that she had not put there.

She reached for the box. Her fingers were brushing the wood when she felt the cold.

It was not a draft. A draft would have moved the sheets, would have stirred the dust, would have been something she could locate and name. This was a stillness that had a temperature to it, a cold that came from inside the air rather than from outside it, a cold that seemed to be looking at her.

Wren lowered her hand. She turned, slowly, in the doorway of the closet.

The boy was standing at the top of the stairs.

He was the boy in the photograph. She knew it before she had a thought about it, knew it the way you know your own name when someone calls it in a crowd. The same dark hair. The same dark eyes. The same watchfulness, but sharper now, focused, the face of a child who is not a child and has not been a child for a long time. He was wearing clothes that did not belong to any decade she could place, a shirt of some coarse fabric, trousers that ended at the calf, shoes that had been black once and were not black anymore.

He was looking at her. He was looking at her with an intentness that made the small hairs on her arms stand up, one by one, in a slow wave that ran from wrist to shoulder.

He raised his hand.

Wren did not move. The cold in the hallway was deepening, settling into the floorboards, into the walls, into the bones of her feet through the thin soles of her shoes. She could see her own breath now, a small pale cloud that formed and dissolved in front of her mouth, and the boy's breath too, the same pale cloud, as if they were both standing in a January dawn and not in a hallway in October.

The boy pointed.

He pointed up.

There was a hatch in the ceiling at the end of the hall, a square of painted wood set into the plaster, and a brass ring set into the hatch, and the ring was the only metal in the hallway that was not tarnished. It caught the gray light and gave it back, a small bright point. The boy's finger was leveled at the hatch, and his face was set in an expression that was not a warning and was not a plea. It was something older than either. It was the look of a person who has been pointing at the same thing for a very long time and has not yet been understood.

Wren opened her mouth. She did not know what she meant to say. A name. A question. Some small sound that would have been the start of a sentence.

The boy vanished.

There was no fade. There was no movement. One moment he was there, solid and cold and looking at her, and the next he was not. The air where he had been standing closed over the absence of him, the way water closes over a stone that has been thrown into it, and the cold broke, and the warmth of the hallway came back, and the house was just a house again.

Wren stood in the hallway and listened to her own heart.

It was beating very fast. It was beating the way it had beaten when she was nine and had fallen out of the apple tree in the side yard and had lain on the ground with the wind knocked out of her, unable to breathe, sure that the next breath would not come. It was beating the way it had beaten when she was sixteen and had come downstairs at three in the morning and found Aunt Maren sitting in the dark in the parlor, not sleeping, not reading, just sitting, and had asked her what was wrong and received no answer at all.

She did not go to the hatch. Not tonight. She went back down the stairs, one hand on the banister, each step a small deliberate act of will, and she did not look at the top of the stairs as she passed it, and she did not look at the square of gray light, and she did not look at the place where the boy had been standing.

She went back to the parlor. She sat down on the horsehair sofa. She set her hands on her knees and looked at the photograph of the boy on the desk, facedown in its frame, and she did not turn it over, and she did not open the letters tied with the ribbon, and she did not go back upstairs.

The lamp burned on the mantel. The crickets sang outside. The clock in the corner of the room that had not worked since before she was born gave a single soft click, as if some part of it had stirred in its long sleep, and then was still again.

Wren sat on the sofa and did not turn on any other light, and she did not open the letters, and she did not go back upstairs, and she sat there for a long time in the yellow light of the lamp, listening to the house, and the house listened back.

The morning came thin and gray, the fog rising off the ridge until the trees across the hollow looked like suggestions of trees, the kind of thing you might talk yourself out of believing in if you looked too long. Wren woke on the horsehair sofa with a kink in her neck and the taste of last night's dust still on the back of her tongue, and for a moment she lay still, listening to the house, to the small ticks and settle of it, to the way the old wood spoke in its sleep.

The clock in the corner had stopped sometime in the night, or maybe it had not been going to start in the first place. The lamp had burned down to a stub of orange in its glass bowl. The photograph of the boy lay where it had lain, facedown on the desk, the paper yellow at the edges where it curled up out of the frame.

She got up slowly. She stretched, and her back popped, and she went into the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove and stood with her hands on the rim of the sink, looking out the window above it at the fog coming up off the ridge, and she did not think about the hatch. She thought about tea. She thought about whether there was tea in the cupboard. She thought about the fact that she had not eaten since the sandwich on the road yesterday, and that she should eat, and that she should go into town today for supplies, and that she should call Eli Marsh, the historian the lawyer had mentioned, the one who had been writing to Aunt Maren for years about the house and the family and the land and the feud, the one whose name she had seen on the ribboned letters last night and had not opened.

The kettle began to whisper. She turned off the burner before it could scream.

She found tea in a tin in the cupboard, loose-leaf, dusty, the kind of thing Aunt Maren had bought by the pound from a woman down the road who grew it in her garden. She made a cup and stood at the counter and drank it without milk, because there was no milk, and without sugar, because she did not want to take the time to find it, and she looked at the ceiling above her as if she could see through it to the hatch above, and the floor above that, and the attic above that, and the trapdoor at the top of the ladder she had not climbed.

The tea tasted like dust and mint and something else she didn't want to name.

She washed the cup. She set it on the rack to dry. She went back into the parlor and picked up the photograph of the boy, carefully, by the edges, and she turned it over.

The face was young, thirteen or fourteen, with a mouth that wanted to be serious and eyes that would not let it, and a cowlick at the front that she remembered, suddenly, the way you remember a word in a language you used to speak. She had seen that cowlick. She had seen it across a kitchen table on a Sunday morning. She had seen it in the rearview mirror of her mother's car. She had seen it in a hospital corridor in town, the day her mother had brought her to see Aunt Maren after the funeral, and Maren had been sitting in the parlor in the dark, not sleeping, not reading, just sitting.

She had seen it in dreams she did not want to remember.

She set the photograph back on the desk, facedown again, carefully, the way she had found it. She did not pick up the letters. She did not open the ribbon. She went and got her coat from the bag by the front door, and she pulled it on, and she went out onto the porch and into the morning, and the fog was cold against her face, and she stood on the top step and breathed it in.

The barn was a darker shape against the gray. The oak at the edge of the clearing was a suggestion of a tree. The path down to the gate was a suggestion of a path.

She did not go into town. She did not call Eli Marsh. She went back inside, and she closed the door, and she lade it, and she went back to the foot of the stairs, and she stood there, and she looked up.

The square of gray light from the hatch was still there, faint, patient, like it had been waiting for her.

She put her hand on the banister. She did not climb. She went into the kitchen. She took the kettle off the stove. She went back into the parlor. She sat down on the horsehair sofa.

The house waited with her.

She sat for a long time. The light in the room shifted from gray to a thin, watery yellow as the fog thinned. She could hear, faintly, the sound of the creek down in the hollow, and the distant lowing of cattle in the field beyond the fence, and the wind in the oak at the edge of the clearing, moving through the leaves with a sound like a hand running through dry paper. The smell of the dust and the old wood and the dried lavender in the bowl on the mantel sat in the room like a presence.

She got up. She got the flashlight from her bag in the parlor, the one she had brought from the city, the one that took four batteries and lasted forever. She tested it. The beam was bright and white. She clicked it off.

She went to the foot of the stairs. She put her foot on the first step.

She climbed.

The stairs were narrow and steep, and they creaked under her weight in a way that made her want to lift her feet and set them down more softly, as if she could move through the house without disturbing it, as if the house could be persuaded not to notice her. She did not lift her feet. She climbed in the way she had climbed them all her life, one step at a time, her hand on the banister, her eyes on the square of gray light above her.

The second floor was dim. The doors to the bedrooms were closed. The door to the room where she had slept as a child was closed, and she did not open it, and the door to the room where Aunt Maren had slept was closed, and she did not open that, and the door to the small room at the end of the hall, the one with the little window that looked out at the barn, was closed, and she did not open that either.

She went to the hatch. She stood under it. The square of gray light fell on her face, cool, faintly damp, smelling of dust and the old insulation above. She reached up and pushed the trapdoor open, and it swung up on its hinges with a groan that went through the house like a sigh, and the light fell down on her in a pale slant, and she could see the bottom rungs of the ladder that came down out of the opening, wooden, old, the wood pale and worn smooth where generations of hands had gripped it.

She put her foot on the first rung. She climbed.

The attic smelled of dust and dry wood and the faint, sweet, faintly sick smell of old paper and old cloth, and something else underneath, something she did not want to name. The light from the hatch fell in a pale square on the floorboards, and the rest of the attic was dim, and she clicked on the flashlight and swept the beam across the space.

It was larger than she had remembered. The rafters rose above her in a dark fan, and the roof sloped down on either side, and the floorboards were dusty and bare, and there were old trunks against the walls, and stacks of newspapers tied with string, and a rocking horse that had belonged to someone she did not know, with one glass eye missing and a mane of yellow yarn that had faded to the color of old straw.

She moved the beam across the space. The shadows jumped and ran. She did not look at the place where she had seen the boy. She looked at the floor, at the walls, at the trunks, at the stacks of paper, at the rocking horse with its one glass eye.

She saw the ladder.

It was at the far end of the attic, set into the floor, a wooden ladder that came up through a square opening cut in the floorboards, the same pale wood as the ladder she had just climbed, the same worn smoothness on the rungs. The opening had no door. The opening had no frame. The opening was just a square cut out of the floor, and the ladder went down into the darkness below, and the darkness smelled of dust and dry wood and something else, something colder, something she did not want to name.

She walked across the attic to the opening. The floorboards creaked under her feet. The flashlight beam shook in her hand, and she made it steady, and she stood at the edge of the opening and looked down.

The ladder went down into a darkness that the flashlight could not reach. She could see the first few rungs, pale and worn, and then the darkness swallowed the beam, and the beam came back at her as a faint, dull gleam on the wood of the rungs, and she could hear, faintly, far below, the sound of something shifting, a small, dry sound, like a leaf turning over on a floor.

She knelt at the edge of the opening. She set the flashlight on the floor beside her, the beam pointing down into the dark. She put her hands on the edges of the opening, and she leaned forward, and she looked down into the space below.

The ladder was gone.

She stared. She leaned further. She moved the flashlight, and the beam swept down the opening, and there was no ladder, and there was no floor below the opening, and there was no room, only darkness, and the darkness smelled of dust and dry wood and something else, something she did not want to name.

She sat back on her heels. She picked up the flashlight. She clicked it off. She sat in the dark and breathed, and the house breathed with her, and the silence was louder than static.

She clicked the flashlight on again. She swept the beam across the opening.

The ladder was there.

She stared at it. She stared at the rungs, at the pale wood, at the worn smoothness, at the way the beam fell on them and made them glow faintly in the dark. She did not move. She did not breathe. She sat with her hand on the edge of the opening and the flashlight in her other hand and the beam steady on the ladder, and she waited.

The ladder did not move. The darkness below the ladder did not move. The attic smelled of dust and dry wood and something else.

She clicked the flashlight off. She clicked it on.

The ladder was gone.

She clicked it off. She clicked it on.

The ladder was there.

She set the flashlight on the floor beside her. She knelt at the edge of the opening. She leaned forward. She looked at the rungs, at the pale wood, at the worn smoothness, and she did not touch them. She did not put her hands on them. She did not put her foot on the first rung.

She sat back. She got to her feet. She walked back across the attic, past the trunks, past the stacks of paper, past the rocking horse with its one glass eye, and she did not look at the place where she had seen the boy, and she went to the hatch, and she climbed down the ladder, and she pulled the trapdoor shut behind her, and she stood in the dim hall on the second floor with her heart beating the way it had beaten the night before, and she did not go back up.

She went downstairs. She went into the parlor. She sat down on the horsehair sofa. She set her hands on her knees and looked at the photograph of the boy on the desk, facedown in its frame, and she did not turn it over, and she did not open the letters tied with the ribbon, and she did not go back upstairs.

The lamp burned on the mantel. The clock in the corner of the room that had not worked since before she was born gave a single soft click, as if some part of it had stirred in its long sleep, and then was still again.

She sat for a long time. The light in the room shifted from the thin, watery yellow of the morning to the pale, dustier yellow of the afternoon. The smell of the dust and the old wood and the dried lavender sat in the room like a presence. She did not move. She did not eat. She did not call anyone. She sat and listened to the house, and the house listened back.

The house waited with her.

The night came down over the house the way nights had come down over that house for a hundred and forty years, slow and without particular malice, settling into the hollows and the corners like water filling a bowl. Wren watched it from the kitchen window, where she stood with her forehead nearly touching the glass, her breath making small dim halos on the surface that came and went and came again. The ridge to the east was the last thing to lose the light. The trees on it became a ragged black line against a sky that was still faintly, dirtily blue, and then were not a line at all but a darkness indistinguishable from the darkness behind them. The first star came out over the pasture, low and orange and a little sick looking, the way stars looked from the bottom of a valley.

She had eaten, finally. A can of soup from the cabinet, heated on the stove, eaten standing at the counter with the spoon in one hand and the other hand wrapped around her own wrist as if she were trying to keep herself from shaking apart. The soup had been tomato, and it had tasted like warm metal and a memory of something sweet. She had drunk a glass of water and then another glass of water and had felt neither better nor worse for any of it. She had not gone back upstairs. She had not opened the cellar door. She had sat in the parlor until the last of the light left the windows, and then she had gotten up and turned on the lamp by the rocking chair, and the lamp had given its reluctant yellow and she had sat down again.

She was not afraid, exactly. Fear had a particular flavor, a particular feel in the chest and the back of the throat, and what she felt now was not that. It was something more like recognition, the way a person who has been sick for a long time recognizes the signs of the next decline before the doctor has said a word. She knew what she had seen. She knew what she had not gone back to look at. She knew that the house was not finished with her and that her refusal to go back upstairs had not ended anything but only changed its shape.

She went to bed because there was nothing else to do with the hours. She left the lamp burning in the parlor. She left the kitchen light on too, and the bathroom light, and the hall light on the second floor, so that the house was lit from top to bottom with a yellow glow that leaked from under every closed door and made the stairs a series of pale oblongs against the dark wall. She brushed her teeth in the bathroom with the door open. She changed into the flannel shirt she had been wearing the night before because she had not brought enough clothes and had not gone to the house in the lane for the bag she had left there in her hurry two days before. She stood in the doorway of Maren's bedroom for a moment, the room that had been hers since she was a girl and was hers now by default and by grief and by the long, strange accident of being the one left, and she looked at the bed with its white cotton coverlet and the pillow that still had the faint impression of where Maren's head had lain, and she went in and pulled the coverlet back and lay down on top of it because she did not want to be under anything, did not want the weight of fabric on her, and she closed her eyes.

She slept, eventually. She slept lightly, in snatches, the way a person sleeps in a waiting room or a train station, with one ear tuned to a sound she could not have named but was certain would come. The house made its sounds. The timbers ticked. The wind moved through the eaves in a long, slow exhalation. Somewhere on the second floor a door she had not closed all the way drifted the rest of the way open and bumped softly against the wall, once, twice, and then was still.

She woke at some time she could not have said. The lights in the hall and the kitchen and the parlor were still on. The house was still. She lay on her back and looked at the ceiling and listened to her own breathing and to the silence that lived underneath it, and she was almost asleep again when she heard it.

Wren.

Her name. From somewhere below her. Not from the hall, not from the parlor, not from any part of the house she could have located with her eyes closed. From lower. From beneath her. From under the floorboards of the bedroom itself, as if the voice had risen through the wood and the joists and the lath of the old plaster from some depth that had no name.

Wren.

The second time was louder, and it was not a whisper. It was a call, a hoarse, ragged call, the kind of call a person makes when they have been calling for a long time and their throat is raw with it and they cannot stop because stopping would mean something they are not willing to let it mean. It was a child's voice, or something that had learned to wear the shape of a child's voice, and it said her name the way the boy in the attic had looked at her, with a recognition so specific and so wrong that it took her breath.

She sat up. She put her feet on the floor. The boards were cold, and the cold came up through the soles of her feet into her ankles and her shins, and she stood and crossed to the door and went out into the hall, where the light was still on and the air was still and the doors to the other rooms were all closed except for the one at the far end that had drifted open onto nothing.

Wren.

The third time, from below. From the direction of the kitchen, the parlor, the front hall. From the ground floor, or from under it. She went to the top of the stairs and stood on the landing and listened. The voice did not come again. The house was quiet in the way a house is quiet when it has just stopped making a sound and is waiting to see what you will do next.

She went down the stairs. The third step creaked under her foot. The seventh step creaked. The others were silent. She crossed the hall. She went into the parlor. The lamp was still burning on the mantel. The photograph on the desk was still facedown. The letters were still tied with their ribbon. The rocking horse was where she had left it, its single eye catching the lamplight and holding it.

She went into the kitchen. Nothing. The stove was cold. The window was dark. The cans on the counter sat in their neat row. She went back into the hall and stood at the foot of the stairs and listened again, and this time she thought she heard it, very faintly, from a direction that was not the parlor and not the kitchen but somewhere between, somewhere lower than either, somewhere she had not been since she was a girl and had been told to stay away.

The cellar door.

It was under the stairs, set into the wall at an angle that made it almost invisible if you did not know it was there, a small wooden door with a brass latch that had gone green with age. She had not thought about it in years. She had not opened it since she was perhaps nine or ten, when she and some other child had crept down the stairs one afternoon while Maren was in the garden and had pulled the door open and had started down the stone steps into the dark before Maren's voice, sharp and without volume but with a force that had stopped them as if a hand had closed on the back of their necks, had come from somewhere in the house and told them, in a tone that permitted no argument, to shut the door and come upstairs and not to touch it again.

She had not touched it again.

She crossed the hall. She knelt on the floor in front of the door, in the narrow space between the bottom of the stairs and the wall. The brass latch was cold under her fingers. She lifted it. The door swung inward on its hinges with a sound like a sigh, and a smell came up out of the opening that was not the smell of damp stone but something older, something that had the sweetness of apples gone to rot and the mineral cold of wet earth and under it, faint but unmistakable, the iron tang of blood not yet a week old.

She did not light a match. She went down the steps in the dark, one hand on the wall, the stones rough and cold and faintly damp under her palm, counting as she went. Seven steps. Eight. Nine. The floor of the cellar leveled out under her feet, and she stood in the dark and let her eyes adjust, and slowly the shapes in the room came to her, the shapes she remembered from the one time she had been there, the bins against the wall, the old workbench, the stone floor, the ceiling low enough that she could feel the weight of the house above her pressing down.

She did not see the boy. There was no one in the cellar. There was no sound in the cellar but the sound of her own breathing and, far above her, the faint creak of the house settling into the night.

But the walls were wet.

She put out her hand and laid it against the stone at the level of her shoulder, and her palm came away slick and warm, and in the dark she could not see what was on it but she could smell it, the same iron smell, stronger now, and she wiped her hand on the leg of her jeans and put it back on the wall and moved sideways along it, and the wetness did not stop, and she kept moving, and her fingers found the corner of the room and turned it and went along the next wall, and the wetness was there too, and on the next, and on the next, and when she had gone all the way around the small square room and come back to the place where the stairs began, she understood that the walls of the cellar were wet from floor to the height of her own head, every one of them, in a continuous unbroken ring, as if something had been thrown against them or had run down them in great quantity and not long ago.

She struck a match from the book she had left in her pocket. The small flame bloomed in the dark and threw the cellar into a sudden, jumpy orange, and in its light she saw, on the wall nearest the stairs, a handprint.