The Hollow Beneath Mercy: The Mouth in The Wallpaper

The key scraped against the deadbolt twice before it caught. Elias Marrow shouldered the door of his rented room at the Widow Halloran's boarding house and stood on the threshold, one hand still pressed flat against the warped wood, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark.

He had forgotten to leave a lamp burning. The error irritated him. He had spent twelve years teaching himself the discipline of small preparations. Leave a lamp. Check the lock. Count the steps. A man who catalogued the dead for a living could not afford the indulgence of forgetfulness.

The hallway behind him smelled of boiled cabbage and the lavender sachet the Widow tucked into every pillowcase. He stepped inside and closed the door. The latch clicked with a sound like a small bone snapping.

Moonlight came through the single window in a pale, slanted bar that fell across the foot of the iron-frame bed and bisected the rolltop desk where he had stacked his notes on the 1849 baptismal register. He set his satchel down. He hung his coat on the hook behind the door. He crossed to the washstand and poured water into the basin, and he did not look at the wallpaper.

He had been careful, all evening, not to look at the wallpaper.

The room was small, no more than ten feet by twelve, and the wallpaper covered every wall from the wainscoting to the ceiling. It was the kind of paper a person would expect to find in a boarding house kept by a devout woman who believed cheerful things kept the devil from settling in the corners. A trellis of pale green ran diagonally across a ground of ivory. Along the trellis climbed clusters of cabbage roses, blown and heavy, their petals the pink of a cheek slapped in anger, the pink of the inside of a wound. Between the roses, small buds no bigger than a thumbnail waited to open. The pattern repeated itself with the mechanical cheerfulness of a hymn printed on a fan.

Elias wet his hands. He pressed the cold water against the back of his neck. He dried his hands on the thin cotton towel and folded it into a neat square, the way his grandmother had taught him, and he set it on the rail of the washstand.

He thought about the entry he had read that afternoon in the vestry of the chapel.

He thought about the date.

He thought about the name.

Then he looked up at the wallpaper, because a man can only refuse to look at a thing for so long before the refusal becomes its own kind of looking.

The roses were where they had always been. The trellis held its angle. The buds waited between the blossoms in the patient geometry of the pattern. Elias let out a breath. He began to turn away.

And in the corner of his eye, near the floor where the wallpaper met the baseboard, something moved.

He turned back. The pattern was still. He stared at it until the wallpaper became what wallpaper is, a surface, a printed thing, dead and repeating. He counted his breaths. He counted the roses in the bottom row. Twelve. Always twelve. He had counted them before.

He crossed to the bed and sat down on the edge of the mattress. The springs gave a single metallic complaint. He unlaced his shoes and placed them side by side under the iron frame, toes pointing toward the door, the way a body should be placed for the undertaker. The thought arrived without being summoned. He let it stay.

The bar of moonlight crawled a quarter inch up the wall. Somewhere below him, in the kitchen, the Widow Halloran was washing the supper dishes. He could hear the faint percussion of crockery, the small domestic thunder of a woman who believed in the sanctity of clean plates. The sound steadied him. It was a human sound. It belonged to a world in which wallpaper was wallpaper.

He lay back on the bed with his clothes on, the way he had taken to sleeping since he had come to Mercy. He folded his arms across his chest. He fixed his gaze on the ceiling. The ceiling was plain. It had been painted over the paper at some earlier renovation, and the paint was flaking now in small crescents that looked like fingernails. He watched a flake near the light fixture drift loose and ride the draft downward and settle on the floor beside the desk.

He thought about Otis Maren.

Old Maren had been sitting on the porch of the bait shop when Elias had walked up the boardwalk that morning. The old man had not looked at him. He had been splicing a length of dirty rope, his knife moving in the slow, practiced strokes of a man who had been doing one thing for too long to remember when he had begun. The river moved behind him in the color of old pewter. A heron stood on the piling and watched the water with the indifference of a thing that had no name for what it waited for.

Maren had not spoken until Elias had stopped at the bottom of the steps.

"You went down to the chapel," Maren had said. Not a question.

"Yes."

"You read the register."

"The 1849 volume. Some of the pages were torn out."

"Some of the pages were always going to be torn out."

Elias had climbed the two wooden steps and leaned against the porch rail. The rail was soft with rot and he had felt the fibers give under his forearm. He had kept his voice low. The street had been empty but the town had a way of carrying sound across the water and depositing it in front of windows that should have been closed.

"I need to know what happened to the girl whose name was entered twice," Elias had said.

Maren had not stopped splicing. The knife had gone on with its patient work. The hemp had frayed under the blade and given off a smell that was green and vegetable and old.

"You need to know a great many things," Maren had said. "That is not the same as being owed them."

He had set the spliced rope on the plank beside his boot and looked up for the first time. His eyes had been the color of the river in shadow and had had the same patient, sedimented quality. He had been handsome once. The bones of his face still carried the scaffolding of that handsomeness, but the skin had weathered around it the way a husk wears away from a cob.

"There is a house on the north side of the square," Maren had said. "It used to belong to the catechist. It is empty now. The lock is broken. The front room has a paper on the wall that is not paper."

Elias had felt something move behind his sternum. Not a pain. A recognition.

"What does it do?" he had asked.

"It remembers," Maren had said. "The way water remembers the shape of a stone."

He had picked up the rope and resumed his splicing. The conversation had been over. Elias had stood on the porch for a long moment, listening to the soft rasp of the blade against the hemp, and then he had stepped down to the boardwalk and gone to the vestry.

That had been fourteen hours ago. Now he lay in his rented bed and watched a flake of paint descend the wall and tried not to think about what kind of paper remembers.

The sound of dishes stopped below him. A chair was pushed back. The Widow Halloran's footsteps crossed the kitchen floor in the slow, deliberate cadence of a woman who had begun to measure her life in the distance between one task and the next. Elias heard the gas in the hall burner tick down to a whisper. He heard her door close.

The boarding house settled around him in the way that old houses do, with the small percussive sounds of a structure adjusting to the cooling of the night. A joist ticked. A shutter turned against its cleat. Somewhere in the walls a mouse traced a path between the lath and the plaster and made a sound like a fingernail drawn along the grain of wood.

Elias closed his eyes. He counted the thirteen names on the memorial stone in the churchyard. He recited the dates of the founding families in the order his grandmother had taught him. He gave himself over to the small arithmetic of memory, which had been his refuge since he was a boy and which had failed him only once, on a night in a different town, in a house that no longer stood.

Sleep came on him in the way that sleep comes to a man who has fought it past the point of usefulness. He did not feel himself slip under. He felt only the bar of moonlight move off his feet and the room take on the cooler gray of a moon higher in its arc.

He woke without knowing what had wakened him.

The room was the same. The bar of moonlight had traveled on up the wall and now fell across the washstand, leaving the bed in a deeper shade of dimness. The Widow's house was silent. The mouse had gone quiet in the wall. The gas in the hallway had been turned off and the smell of it lingered faintly under the lavender, a ghost of combustion.

Elias lay still. He did not move his head. He did not turn his eyes.

He had been wakened, he understood, by the same instinct that turns a man in the woods toward the thing that is watching him. The instinct that lives below the name of instinct, in the older part of the brain that knows the shape of a predator before the predator has been seen.

He was looking at the wallpaper.

He could feel, without turning his head, that the wallpaper was looking back.

His eyes were fixed on the ceiling. The flaking paint was above him. The crescent moon of a chip near the fixture was just visible in the gray light. He held his gaze on the chip and counted his breaths and did not look at the wall.

He counted seven breaths.

On the eighth, the room changed.

The change was not a sound. It was a redistribution of something that had weight but no name, a thickening of the air at the periphery of his vision, as though the wallpaper had exhaled. The room felt inhabited in a way it had not felt a moment before. It felt as though something on the wall had shifted its posture.

He turned his head.

The roses were where they had always been. The trellis held its angle. The buds waited between the blossoms in the patient geometry of the pattern. The bar of moonlight lay along the washstand and gave the paper its only true illumination, a wash of pale gray that bleached the pinks and the greens into the colors of bone and pond.

Elias stared.

He stared until the wallpaper became what wallpaper is.

Then he sat up and swung his legs off the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the wall and waited.

He waited for a long time.

At some point, without his willing it, his gaze relaxed. He had been holding it so tightly that the muscles around his eyes had begun to ache. He let the focus soften. The roses lost their outlines and became smears of pale color in the gray. The trellis became a suggestion. The pattern became what it had been before it had been printed, a field of undifferentiated dye on a substrate of wood pulp.

In his peripheral vision, at the floor near the baseboard, something moved.

He did not look at it directly. He kept his gaze soft, unfocused, the way a man keeps his gaze when he is watching something in the water that will sink if he startles it.

A rose had opened.

Not all the way. Not the blown and heavy bloom of the pattern. A smaller thing. A fissure in the printed petal, a dark line that had not been there when he had entered the room. The line widened as he watched. It became a shape. The shape became a mouth.

The mouth was small. It was no bigger than a thumbnail. It sat in the heart of a cabbage rose and it opened and closed with a rhythm he could not at first place. It opened, and the dark behind the paper was visible for an instant, and then it closed, and the rose was a rose again.

He counted. The rhythm was slow. It was the rhythm of a person breathing in sleep.

He made himself look away. He made himself stand. He crossed the room to the washstand and poured fresh water into the basin and plunged his face into it. The cold drove the air out of him in a single rough syllable. He came up with water running down his jaw and stood there, breathing, and did not turn toward the wall.

He dried his face. He set the towel down. He walked to the rolltop desk and sat in the chair and took out his pocket watch and laid it on the desk in front of him. The hands stood at quarter past three. He watched the second hand take its small, mechanical steps around the dial. He listened to it tick.

When he looked up again, the mouth was gone.

The rose was a rose. The trellis held its angle. The pattern repeated itself with the mechanical cheerfulness of a hymn printed on a fan.

Elias sat at the desk until the first gray light came through the window and the Widow Halloran began to move in the kitchen below him and the smell of coffee rose through the floorboards and the town of Mercy began, as it began every morning, to pretend that the night had not happened.

Elias folded the watch shut and slid it back into his pocket. He pressed both palms flat against the desk and felt the grain of the oak, real and cool, and the slight tack where a previous tenant had spilled something sticky and never wiped it away. The morning was assembling itself around him in the usual ways. A hinge complained somewhere down the hall. A door opened and closed with the soft, deliberate weight of a woman who had been opening and closing doors since before he was born. The smell of coffee thickened, and under it the faint, persistent note of boiled cabbage that lived in the wallpaper of this house like a memory of a meal no one remembered cooking.

He rose and went downstairs.

The Widow Halloran stood at the stove with her back to the room, stirring a pot of oatmeal with the slow, circular patience of a woman who had long ago made peace with the fact that the oatmeal would be eaten and the pot would be washed and the morning would follow the morning that followed it. She did not turn when he came in. She had not turned for him in three days. She had not turned for any of them since the seventeenth.

"Mrs. Halloran."

"Mr. Marrow." She did not stop stirring. "There is coffee in the pot. There is a cup on the hook. You know where the cups are. You have known for thirty years."

He took the cup down. He poured the coffee. He watched the steam rise from the black surface and disperse against the ceiling, where a water stain from the roof leak of 1934 still spread in its brown, irregular halo. He took the cup to the table and sat and held it in both hands without drinking.

"Otis came by last night," he said. "After you were abed."

She stirred. The spoon made its slow, inevitable circle.

"He left something for you."

"He always leaves something for someone." Her voice was dry, indifferent, the voice of a woman who had outlived both her husbands and her capacity for surprise. "Sometimes it is a fish. Sometimes it is a story. The fish are better. The fish keep."

"This was neither."

"Then it was a story." She lifted the spoon and let the oatmeal drop back into the pot in a long, pale ribbon. "Otis Maren has not told me anything worth hearing since his mother died and took the last of his good sense with her. That was 1962. I remember because it was the year they paved the road past the church and the year my second husband stopped pretending he was not already dead."

Elias set the cup down. He took the folded paper from his coat pocket and laid it on the table between them, the way one lays a card face up on a table, the way one lays a thing down so that the other person must look at it.

She did not look at it.

"I have work," she said.

"Mrs. Halloran. The well."

The spoon stopped.

It was the first time in three days he had heard her go truly still. Even her breathing seemed to hesitate, as if the air in her lungs had briefly forgotten which way to go. The kitchen was very quiet. The clock on the mantel marked its seconds. The coffee steamed and sent its thin thread of scent upward into the stained plaster.

She turned then. She turned slowly, the way a woman turns who has spent her life in this kitchen and knows every inch of it and does not need to look where she is going. Her face was composed. Her eyes were the pale, washed blue of a winter sky that has decided not to snow. She looked at him. She looked at the folded paper. She looked at him again.

"Sit down, Mr. Marrow," she said, and for the first time in thirty years she sounded as though she meant it.

He was already sitting. He did not point this out.

She untied her apron and hung it on the hook by the stove and pulled out the chair across from him and sat with the careful, deliberate movements of a woman who has decided that what is about to happen will happen in a particular way and that she will be the one to determine the shape of it. She put her hands flat on the table. The hands were large and competent, the hands of a woman who had kneaded bread and wrung chickens and hauled water and buried two husbands and intended, if God allowed it, to bury a great many more things before she was done.

"Well," she said. "Well, well, well."

She did not reach for the paper. She did not ask what was in it. She looked at him with the patient, measuring look of a woman who has known him since he was a boy and who has watched him grow into the particular kind of man he had grown into and who has, over the years, formed opinions she has never seen fit to share.

"You have been a good tenant, Mr. Marrow," she said. "You pay on time. You do not bring women to your room. You do not play the radio after eleven. You take your boots off at the door without being asked, which is more than I can say for most of the souls who have passed through this house, and I include in that assessment my own two husbands, the second of whom tracked mud through my parlor for nineteen years and never once apologized because he was too busy being sorry for himself."

"Thank you, Mrs. Halloran."

"I am not finished." She lifted one hand. "You have also been a fool. You have been a fool in the particular way that educated men are fools, which is to say that you have confused the ability to read with the ability to understand. You have spent thirty years reading other people's letters and counting other people's bones and you have not once, in all that time, stopped to ask yourself why a town would bother to keep a historian if it did not, on some level, intend to be lied to."

He opened his mouth. She raised the hand again.

"I am still not finished." Her voice was quiet. "You came here three days ago because a boy walked into the river and the river did not give him back and you wanted to know why. I told you the river gives what the river wants and that is the end of it. You did not listen. You have never listened. It is, I suspect, the reason your wife left you. It is certainly the reason the Marrows have not held land in this county for sixty years despite being, by every account that matters to bankers and assessors, one of the founding families."

The clock ticked. The coffee cooled. Outside, a dog barked once and then thought better of it.

"Now," she said, and her hands pressed harder against the wood of the table, and the knuckles went white in a way that had nothing to do with age and everything to do with the particular effort of holding oneself in place, "you have come to me with a piece of paper that my brother left on my step in the middle of the night, which means that Otis has finally decided to unburden himself of a thing he should have unburdened himself of in 1947 when our father died and took the last of his secrets with him, or in 1953 when our mother followed him, or in 1962 when Otis himself stood in this kitchen and looked at me with that look he has, that look like a man who has swallowed a fish and cannot get it down or up, and told me that he was sorry for what he was about to do and that I should not follow him and that I should not, under any circumstances, go down to the river after him."

She stopped. She looked at him. Her eyes had not changed. Her voice had not changed. The composure of her face had not changed. But her hands, pressed flat against the table, were trembling now, a fine, almost invisible tremor that ran through them and into the wood and Elias could see the surface of the table vibrate, a thin, continuous shiver that he could feel through his own palms where they rested near hers.

"I did not follow him," she said. "I have never followed him. I have stayed in this house and I have fed the travelers and I have mended the roof and I have swept the floors and I have, Mr. Marrow, I have pretended for sixty years that the well under this house was a well and that the foundation was a foundation and that the water that comes up between the boards in the spring is groundwater and not something else."

She reached across the table and took the folded paper and opened it and read what Otis had written and her face did not change but her hands stopped trembling, which was worse.

"Drink your coffee, Mr. Marrow," she said. "It is getting cold."

He did not drink his coffee. He watched her fold the paper again, very precisely along the original creases, and lay it back on the table between them.

"You knew," he said.

"Of course I knew." She looked at him as if he had asked her whether she knew that the sky was up. "I have lived in this house for seventy-one years. I was born in this house. My mother was born in this house. Her mother was born in this house, in the room you are sleeping in, in the bed you are not sleeping in, on a night in February when the river froze and the well rose three inches up through the floorboards and my great-grandmother, who was a Halloran by marriage and a Pike by birth, stood in that room and looked down at the black water creeping across the boards and said, in a voice my grandmother remembered clearly enough to repeat to my mother who repeated it to me, 'It is hungry again.'"

The clock ticked. The coffee sent up its last thin thread of steam.

"The well is under the house," she said. "Not under the foundation. Under the floor of the kitchen, beneath the flagstone by the stove, beneath the dirt beneath the flagstone, beneath the clay beneath the dirt. It was there before the house. It was there before the town. It was there before your ancestors and my ancestors and every other set of ancestors that this county has been so careful to remember and so careful to forget. It was a spring, once. A real spring, with clear water and sweet water, the kind of water a man could drink without making his bargain. But that was before the first one went in."

She paused. She looked at the folded paper. She looked at him.

"You have read the town records. You have read them better than any man alive. So you know that the founding of Mercy was not, as the histories say, a matter of pious men seeking religious liberty in a wild country. You know that Mercy was founded in 1649 by a company of men who had been run out of every other place they had tried to settle, not because of their beliefs but because of their practices. You know that the first record in the town ledger is not a record of a town meeting but a record of a purchase, and that the thing purchased was not land but a tract of marsh on the north bank of a river that the local tribes would not approach and that the local tribes, when asked, said only that the water there was 'wrong' and that the hill above it was 'old' and that men who went there did not always come back, and that when they came back they were not, in the way that mattered, the same."

She folded her hands in her lap. The tremor had stopped. The composure had returned. She spoke now in the flat, measured tone of a woman reciting a thing she was tired of carrying.

"Your ancestor, Josiah Marrow, was the most educated of them. He had been a minister in the old country. He had also been, by his own hand in a letter that survives in the archives at the university, a student of certain older things. He believed, as he wrote, that the marsh was not empty. He believed that it was, in his phrase, 'a mouth that had forgotten how to swallow.' He believed that if the mouth were given something to swallow on a regular basis, and if the mouth were thanked for its swallowing, and if the mouth were, in his other phrase, 'kept honest with the dirt and the dark,' it would not trouble the town. He wrote this in a letter to his wife in 1651. His wife burned the letter in 1653. The letter survives because he had already sent a copy to a colleague in Boston, who preserved it out of academic habit and who died, by all accounts, in his bed, though of what cause the records do not say."

She paused.

"The seventeenth, Mr. Marrow, was my father. Not by blood. By name. Thomas Halloran was not my father. My father was a man named Ezekiel Vesper, who came to this town in 1901 to take a position at the academy and who disappeared in the spring of 1902 and whose name my mother, who was young and frightened and three months gone with me, agreed never to speak again in exchange for the town's agreement to let her marry Thomas Halloran and raise the child as his and to live, for the rest of her life, in the house that stood over the thing that had taken him."

The clock ticked. The dog barked again, farther off this time. The smell of the oatmeal had thickened and was beginning to catch at the back of the throat.

"The seventeenth," she said, "was the one the well would not let go. The others, the ones before, they went down easy. They went down like water into water. But my father, Mr. Marrow, my father fought. He fought for three days. You could hear him under the floor. You could hear him in the walls. My mother put her hands over my ears and sang to me and my stepfather sat at this table with a glass of something he did not drink and listened to the boards rise and fall and did not move. On the third night, the boards went still. The water came up black through the cracks and stayed for a week. When it went down, the wood was swollen. We pumped the cellar. We pumped it dry. The next spring it was back. We pumped it again. The next spring it was back. We have pumped it every spring for seventy years. We have replaced the floorboards three times. We have replaced the joists twice. We have, in 1947, after my father died and left us the money, paid men from out of county to come and tear up the cellar floor and dig down to the clay and pour a new foundation, three feet thick, reinforced, the best that money could buy in that year."

She stopped. She looked at him.

"In the spring of 1948, the water came up through the new foundation. It came up through the concrete. It came up through the rebar. It came up, Mr. Marrow, through three feet of engineered stone as if the stone were not there."

She stood. She went to the stove and took the pot of oatmeal off the heat and set it on the trivet and stood with her back to him for a long moment, her hands on the edge of the stove, her shoulders set in the particular line of a woman who has carried a thing for seventy years and has just, for reasons of her own, decided to set it down.

"The house is drinking," she said, without turning. "It has been drinking since 1902. Every spring it drinks. The water comes up black and it soaks into the joists and the sills and the studs and the lath and the plaster and the wallpaper and it stays there. You cannot dry it out. You cannot pump it out. You can only replace the wood, and the wood you replace, within a year, swells and darkens and begins to smell, if you put your nose to it, of something that is not quite stagnant water and not quite rot and not quite anything that has a name in this world."

She turned. She looked at him. Her face was composed. Her eyes were dry.

"You came here, Mr. Marrow, because a boy walked into the river and did not come back and you wanted to know why. I will tell you why. The boy walked into the river because the river told him to. The river tells them. It has always told them. It tells the ones it wants. It tells them in their sleep. It tells them in the wallpaper. It tells them in the pattern of the floorboards when the wood swells in the spring. It tells them in the taste of the water. It tells them, Mr. Marrow, in the particular way the light falls on the marsh at dusk when the water is going out and the mud is black and the gulls are circling and the mouth in the wallpaper opens, just for a moment, just enough for them to see what is behind it."

She sat down again. She folded her hands on the table.

"The well is under this house," she said. "The river is connected to the well. The marsh is the mouth of the well. And the well, Mr. Marrow, has been hungry for a very long time."

She reached across the table and picked up the folded paper and held it out to him.

"Take this back to my brother," she said. "Tell him that I have read it. Tell him that I knew. Tell him that if he has finally decided to do what he went down to the river to do in 1962, he had better do it before the spring, because the spring is coming early this year, and when it comes, the water will rise, and when the water rises, the house will drink again, and when the house has drunk enough, it will open, and when it opens, Mr. Marrow, it will not be a mouth in the wallpaper anymore."

She let go of the paper. It lay on the table between them.

"Now drink your coffee," she said. "It is cold, and you have had no breakfast, and there is a long road ahead of you, and you will need your strength for what is on it."

Elias drove back to his office on the west side of town, where the morning light was already turning the windows of the old municipal building into sheets of pale gold. He did not stop at the diner. He did not stop at his house. He parked crookedly in the small gravel lot behind the archive, fumbled with his keys, and let himself in through the rear door that always stuck in the damp.

The archive was cool and dim, and it smelled, as it always did, of dust and old paper and the particular staleness of rooms where the light was filtered through green glass. Elias sat down at his desk and unfolded the paper that Mabel Pike had given him. He read it once. He read it again. He smoothed the creases with the flat of his hand and began to copy it into the ledger he kept for documents of uncertain provenance, his pencil moving slowly because his hand was not quite steady.

When he had finished, he locked the original in the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet and sat for a long moment with his hands flat on the desk, looking at nothing.

Then he went to the cabinet where he kept his supplies, and he took out a bound sketchbook that he had not opened in fifteen years. It had been a gift from his mother, bought at the five and dime in the city the year before she died. The paper inside was thick and cream-colored and slightly rough under the fingertips, the kind of paper that took charcoal well. Elias sat down again and opened it to the first blank page.

He uncapped a stick of willow charcoal, held it lightly between his thumb and forefinger, and tried to remember the wallpaper in the upstairs hallway of the house on Ashworth Lane.

He had seen it first three days ago, when he had gone up to measure the windows for the storm shutters. He had noticed it because the pattern was unusual, a dense, repeating motif of stylized flowers and vines that seemed to shift depending on the angle of the light. He had stood in the hallway for perhaps ten minutes, looking at it, and he had noticed, at the very edge of his vision, that some of the flowers appeared to have mouths.

He had not thought much of it at the time. Old wallpapers often had strange figures in them, faces hidden in the grain of the wood, animals lurking in the pattern of the carpet. It was a trick of the eye. It was nothing.

But the next morning, when he had gone back to the house to check the measurements, the mouths had been in different places.

He had told himself that he was misremembering. That the light had changed. That he had not really looked closely enough the first time to know where the mouths had been. He had walked the length of the hallway twice, slowly, his eyes moving from one section of the wall to the next, and the mouths had been in the places he had expected them to be, and he had made a note in his pocketbook and gone back to the office.

The next day, they had moved again.

He had stood in the hallway for an hour, staring at the wall, and the mouths had been still. He had counted fourteen of them. He had drawn a small diagram in his pocketbook, marking their locations relative to the window and the door and the hairline crack that ran from the ceiling to the baseboard. He had gone home. He had eaten his dinner. He had slept badly.

The next morning, when he had gone back, the mouths had been in the places he had drawn them the day before yesterday.

Elias turned to a fresh page in the sketchbook. He held the charcoal above the paper and tried to bring the image forward in his mind. He closed his eyes. He saw the hallway. He saw the wallpaper. He saw the flowers. He saw the vines. He saw the mouths.

He opened his eyes and began to draw.

The charcoal moved across the paper with a soft, dry whisper. He drew the pattern of the wallpaper as he had first seen it, the stylized flowers and the curling vines, the dense and repeating motif. He drew the hallway around it, the baseboard and the chair rail and the crown molding, the shadow of the window frame. He drew the mouths where he now knew them to be, the fourteen of them, each one slightly different from the others, each one placed at a slightly different angle among the leaves.

When he finished, he sat back and looked at the sketch. It was competent. It was accurate, as far as he could tell. The proportions were right. The shading was right. The mouths were where the mouths should have been, if the mouths were still where they had been yesterday.

He turned the page and began a second sketch, this one depicting the wallpaper as it had appeared on the second day, the day he had first noticed that the mouths had moved.

The charcoal whispered against the paper. The pattern emerged. The flowers and the vines, the hallway around them. He drew the mouths where he now knew them to have been on that second day, the positions he had noted in his pocketbook before he had realized that noting them was necessary.

When he finished, he held the two sketches side by side. The first one, done from memory now, showed the mouths in the positions they had held on the third day. The second one, also done from memory, showed the mouths in the positions they had held on the second day. The two drawings were identical.