The Hollowing Season: The East Bedroom

The third step groaned under Maren's weight, and then the fourth, and by the seventh the staircase had decided to speak its opinion of her in a long, splintering complaint that traveled down through the treads and into the bones of her foot. She stopped. Listened. The farmhouse breathed around her, the way old houses did when the weather turned, and somewhere above her head a board ticked once and went quiet.

She had told herself she would not go up.

She had told herself that in the kitchen, standing at the sink with her hands still in the dishwater, watching a fly walk a slow circle around the rim of a glass. She had told herself that on the porch, with her muck boots off and her good boots on, the laces knotted twice because once was the kind of carelessness that invited trouble. She had told herself that at the foot of the stairs, where the wallpaper curled at the seam like a lip, where the wood was dark in a way that had nothing to do with stain.

She was going up anyway.

The banister was a length of turned oak, smooth where a hundred hands had worn it to silk. Her palm found it in the dark. The house was darker than it had any right to be at four in the afternoon, even with the clouds that had been massing all morning over the ridge, even with the rain that had not yet decided to fall. The air in the stairwell carried a taste like pennies held under the tongue, and something underneath that, older, sweeter, the faint and cloying suggestion of flowers left too long in water.

Second floor landing. A narrow hall, four doors, a square of window at the far end that looked out over the side yard and the woodshed and the gray suggestion of the tree line beyond. The door on the left was open to the bathroom, the claw-foot tub crusted at the drain with a ring of rust. The door across from it was shut, and so was the one beside it, and so was the one at the end, and Maren stood for a long moment with her hand still on the newel post, listening to the house do what houses do when they think no one is paying attention.

She was paying attention.

Eliza had always said the east bedroom was the coldest room in the house. Even in summer, even with every window thrown open and a sheet on the floor where the dog liked to lie, the air in that room sat heavy and wrong, as though something had been sealed inside it that did not care to be warm. Maren remembered her sister saying so, the way she had said so many things, with that small lift of the chin and the corners of her mouth tucked in like she was keeping a secret she had agreed not to tell.

The door to the east bedroom was the last one, at the end of the hall. The knob was brass, green with verdigris at the edges where fingers had not touched it in a long while. When Maren wrapped her hand around it, the metal was so cold it almost burned.

She turned it.

The hinges did not make a sound. That was the first wrong thing.

Inside, the room was dim and square and small. A single bed occupied most of the floor, a narrow iron frame painted white once, the paint now flaking in long curls that lay on the worn hardwood like the she'd skin of something. The mattress was bare, the ticking split along one seam, and inside the bed, where a mattress ought to be, there was nothing but a shallow trough of old straw and a smell like a barn left shut through a hard winter.

Across the width of the iron footboard, bolted with rivets that had rusted to the color of dried blood, ran a pair of leather restraints. They were old, cracked, the buckles black with age. The leather had been worked soft with use, and at the edges where it met the metal, it had been worn through to a paler layer beneath, the way a rope wears where it has held a struggling weight too long.

Maren stood very still in the doorway.

The second wrong thing was the walls.

The plaster had been white once. It was not white now. From the wainscoting up to the picture rail, and from the picture rail up to the ceiling, the walls had been written on. Not painted, not papered, but marked, scored into the surface with a point that had been patient and had been steady and had not cared whether the hand that held it bled. The marks were long and shallow, hundreds of them, thousands, and where they crossed they caught what little light there was and held it in a fine web of pale scratches that made the room look as though it had been wrapped in old, dry spider silk.

The marks were not random.

She stepped closer. The floor complained under her boot, and she heard her own breath loud in her ears, and she made herself look.

The same four words, over and over, repeated from corner to corner, from floor to ceiling, until the wall was almost nothing but the shape of them. The letters were uneven, some of them large and some small, some pressed deep and some barely there, as though the hand that made them had weakened and recovered and weakened again across a span of time she did not want to consider. The first word was almost always written the same way. The last three varied. Some of them were spelled correctly. Some of them were not. One, near the baseboard by the window, was just the letters M and A, drawn over and over in a stack like a child practicing, and beside them, smaller, in a hand that had grown very tired, the word PLEASE.

MAMA LET ME OUT.

Maren's mouth was dry. She swallowed and there was no relief in it.

She had known what she would find, in some part of her. She had known it the way a body knows a storm is coming, in the teeth, in the wrists, in the place behind the eyes where the pressure builds. She had come up the stairs anyway, and she had opened the door anyway, and she had crossed the room to the bed, and now her hand was on the iron frame, and the iron was so cold it felt like a living thing.

The third wrong thing was the chair.

It sat in the corner by the window, a small wooden chair with a rush seat, the kind that had always stood in this room for as long as Maren could remember. It was an ordinary chair. It had always been an ordinary chair. But the window behind it was open a crack, just a finger's width, and through that crack a thin line of gray daylight fell across the seat and across the small patch of floor in front of it, and in that line of light there was a shape, a darker shape, the shape of a small pair of footprints pressed into the dust of the floor, and the footprints faced the chair, and the chair was empty, and the room was very quiet.

Maren did not look at the footprints for long.

She looked instead at the wall above the bed, where the words were the largest, where the hand that made them had reached as high as it could. There, in letters tall as her spread hand, the words had been carved deep, and then over them, in a different hand, smaller, neater, the kind of hand that had been taught penmanship in a schoolhouse that no longer stood, someone had traced the same letters in a different medium. The deeper letters were done with something sharp. The tracery was done with something dark, something that had since faded to the color of old tea, and along the edges of the letters, where the medium had run, the wall was stained in long, slow tears.

MAMA LET ME OUT.

She heard, very faintly, the sound of a child humming in the hall behind her. The tune was one she did not recognize. It went on for four bars, paused, and then began again from the beginning, the same four bars, the same notes, in a voice that was not warm and not cold but something in between, something that did not belong to any season.

She did not turn around.

"I know you are there," she said, and her voice came out steadier than she had expected, which surprised her, because her hands were not steady at all.

The humming stopped.

A pause. The kind of pause that has weight to it, the kind of pause that asks a question without using any words.

"You went up anyway," said the voice behind her. It was the voice of a child, but it was not the voice of any child Maren had ever known. It was precise. It was even. It did not rise or fall the way a child's voice ought to. "I told you not to. I told you in the kitchen. I told you on the stairs. You heard me and you came up anyway."

Maren turned.

The hall behind her was empty. The door to the bathroom was still open. The other doors were still shut. The square of window at the end of the hall showed the same gray sky, the same suggestion of the woodshed, the same suggestion of trees. There was no one there.

But the voice had been close. Close enough that if she had reached back she might have touched the shape of it.

"You remember her," the voice said, and now it came from a different direction, from the doorway of the room itself, as though whoever spoke had stepped through the wall and was now standing just over the threshold. "You remember her and you came up to see what she left behind. That is what you came for. That is why you are here."

Maren's hand tightened on the iron bedframe. The cold of it bit into her palm.

"She was your sister," the voice said, and there was something in the way it said the word sister, something that was almost tender and almost not. "She was small and she was kind and she used to sing in this room when she could not sleep. Did you know that? Did you know she sang here? She sang the same song over and over. She sang it to the wall. She thought the wall could hear her."

A pause.

"The wall could hear her," the voice said. "The wall heard everything. The wall remembers everything. The wall is still listening."

Maren looked at the wall in front of her, at the scratched and scored and carved surface of it, at the words that covered it from floor to ceiling. In the dim light, the scratches seemed to move, a slow shifting of shadow, and she knew that was only her eyes and she also knew that it was not.

"What do you want?" she said.

The question came out rough. She heard it and wished she had not asked, because asking was a kind of door, and a door was a kind of invitation, and an invitation was the kind of thing this house had always been good at accepting.

Silence. A long silence. The kind of silence that listens back.

"What do I want," the voice said at last, and now it came from somewhere else, from a new direction, from above her, as though whoever spoke had climbed onto the bed and was standing behind her on the bare mattress. "I want to be let out. That is what the wall says. That is what the hand wrote. That is what she wrote, over and over, until her fingers bled and her nails broke and there was nothing left of her but the sound of the scratching. MAMA LET ME OUT. Did you read it? Did you look? You looked. You read it. You understood it."

Maren did not turn around again. She was afraid of what she would see if she did. She was more afraid of what she would not see.

"I am not your mother," she said.

"No," the voice said, and for the first time there was something in it that was almost like laughter, a small cold chime that rose and did not fall. "No, you are not. But you are the one who came up the stairs. You are the one who opened the door. You are the one who put her hand on the bed and felt the cold of the iron. You are the one who read the words. That is close enough. That is close enough for now."

A board creaked behind her. She heard it clearly. She heard the weight of it settle, and then the softest whisper of a footfall on the bare floor, and then nothing.

When she turned, the room was empty.

The chair was empty.

The footprints in the dust were gone.

The room breathed out after the presence left. That was the only word for it. The air loosened, the shadows withdrew to their proper corners, and the iron bed frame ticked once, twice, as though releasing tension it had held for a hundred years. Maren stood where she stood and let her lungs finish their work. In. Out. In.

She did not move for a long time.

The kerosene lamp on the dresser had burned low while she was gone from herself. The flame hunched against the glass like a thing trying to hide. She crossed to it and turned up the wick with fingers that did not feel like her own, and the room brightened by a degree, and she saw that the dust on the floor had been disturbed in a new pattern. Not footprints. A circle. A wide, sweeping circle, as though something had walked the perimeter of the room many times, in one direction, and then back again the other way.

She had not heard that.

She had not heard any of it.

Below her, the floorboards gave a long, low groan, the kind of complaint old wood makes when the night air turns and the joists remember the weight of winters. Maren looked down. The boards between her and the parlor below were the same wide-pine planks that ran through the rest of the house, but here they were darker, almost black, and the seams between them were not seams at all but thin dark lines like pencil marks drawn with a steady hand. She had walked this floor a thousand times in her life. She had never noticed the lines.

And then she heard it.

A voice. Small. Pleading. Unmistakably childlike, though no child had lived in this house since before her grandmother's time, since before her mother's time, since the years before the Ashworth name had meant anything at all in the valley. The voice came from beneath her feet. It came up through the lines in the floor as though the wood were only a thin skin over a much larger room.

"Grandmother," the voice whispered. "Grandmother, let me out. I'm cold. I'm so cold, Grandmother. I can't find the way."

The temperature in the room dropped so sharply that Maren's next breath fogged in front of her face, a pale ghost of a cloud that hung in the lamplight and did not dissipate. Her skin prickled. The hair on her arms lifted. The kerosene flame shivered, flattened, fought to stay lit.

"Grandmother," the voice said again, and now it was not pleading. Now it was patient. Now it was the voice of a child who has been asking for a very long time and has learned the shape of the asking. "I know you're up there. I can hear you breathing. I can smell the lamp oil. I can smell the dust. Come down and sit with me. Come down and tell me a story. You used to tell me stories, Grandmother. You used to sit on the stairs and tell me stories about the fox and the well."

Maren's mouth opened. No sound came out.

The voice below laughed, a small sound, a bright sound, the sound of a bell struck once and then dampened with a thumb. "You're not her," it said. "I know you're not her. She is gone. She went away and left me here. She wrote on the wall and then she went away. But you are here now. You are the one who came up the stairs. You are the one who opened the door. You are the one who put your hand on the bed. That is close enough. That is close enough for a story."

The circle in the dust shifted. Maren watched it happen. The dust at the far edge of the circle lifted, swirled, and settled again in a slightly different pattern, as though an invisible foot had completed one more circuit of the room. The voice was moving. The voice was walking its circle beneath the floor.

"Do you know what she did, the grandmother?" the voice asked, conversational now, almost friendly, the way a child asks if you know what is hidden in the egg before the Easter hunt. "She put me in the bed. She put me in the bed and she closed the door and she went down the stairs and she never came back. Not once. Not ever. She let the years go by and the roof caved in a little and the birds came in and the birds went out and she never came back. Do you think that was kind, Grandmother? Do you think that was the kind of thing a grandmother should do?"

"I am not your grandmother," Maren said. Her voice came out steadier than she expected. She had not expected to speak at all.

"No," the voice agreed, and there was a small pause, a thoughtful pause, the pause of a child considering an unfamiliar word. "No, you are not. But you are here. And that is something. That is more than she gave me. That is more than anyone has given me in a very long time. I had almost forgotten what it was like to have someone in the room. I had almost forgotten the sound of breathing that was not my own."

The flame in the lamp steadied. Maren became aware, slowly, that the room was no longer dropping in temperature. The cold had found its level. Her breath no longer fogged, though the air still tasted of iron and of something older than iron, something mineral and far away.

The voice below began again, softer now, almost a hum.

"She had a name, the grandmother. She had a name and I am not supposed to say it. I am not supposed to say it because saying it makes her come back, and I do not want her to come back. I want someone new. I want someone who will sit on the stairs and tell me a story. Will you sit on the stairs, Grandmother-that-is-not? Will you tell me a story about the fox and the well?"

Maren did not answer.

The hum below turned to a whisper. The whisper turned to a sound that was not quite a sound at all, more a pressure in the bones of the floor, a vibration that came up through her boots and into the soles of her feet and stayed there.

"The fox," the voice said, "went down to the well. The well was deep and the water was black and the fox looked down and saw her own face looking up. The face said, come in. The face said, the water is warm. The fox put one paw over the edge. The fox put two paws over the edge. And then the well said, that is close enough. That is close enough for now."

Silence.

The lamp burned.

The dust did not move.

Maren stood in the circle of its own making and listened to the house settle around her, and knew, with a certainty that sat in her chest like a cold stone, that the voice below the floor was not finished with her, and that the story was not the story it had told her it was, and that the word close enough was a word she had heard twice tonight already from a mouth that was not a mouth at all.

She did not move.

She did not move for a very long time.

The lamp guttered.

Maren looked at the flame and thought, very simply, that she would not put it out. She would not leave it burning either. She would stand here until the oil gave what the oil had to give, and then she would decide. Her hands at her sides were steady. Her mouth tasted of dust and something older, something like the back of a cupboard that had not been opened in years.

She counted her breaths.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

On the sixth, the child spoke again, and the voice came from the wall this time, from behind the wallpaper that was not wallpaper, from a mouth she could not see.

"You are not leaving."

"I am leaving," Maren said, and her voice was her own, and it did not waver, and that was enough for now.

"You are not leaving because if you were leaving you would already have moved. You have not moved. Your feet are in the same place they were. I am watching your feet. I can see the dust your boots made when you came in. I can see the dust your boots will not make when you go out. The dust is a language and I am reading it."

Maren looked down. The dust around her boots was, she realized, scuffed in a pattern that looked almost like letters. She did not try to read them. She had been raised by a woman who taught her that some things written in dust were not written for the living, and that to read them was to answer them.

"I am leaving," she said again, "when I am ready."

"When will that be?"

"When the lamp goes out."

There was a pause. The pause had texture. The pause was the texture of something considering, something tilting its head, something that did not have a head but had the idea of one.

"That is fair," the child said. "I will wait with you."

"You will not wait with me. You will do whatever you were going to do anyway."

"Yes," the child said, and the word was almost fond, almost tender, almost the way Eliza had said yes when Maren had asked her if she wanted to come down for supper. "Yes, that is what I will do. I will do whatever I was going to do anyway, and I will call it waiting with you."

Maren's throat closed. She swallowed against it. She would not weep. She would not give the house that. She had given it enough already, given it her boots on the boards, given it her attention, given it the shape of her listening.

"Tell me one thing," she said, and her voice came out rougher than she meant. "One thing that is true."

"True is a hard word."

"Tell me one thing that is not a lie."

Silence.

Then, from the corner nearest the door, the small voice said, "She loved the cold. Your sister. She loved the cold and she would not wear her coat and your mother would call her name from the porch and she would not come. She would not come because the cold was the cold and she wanted to feel it. That is true. That is not a lie."

Maren closed her eyes.

The cold had been a battle, the autumn Eliza had died. Maren had laid Eliza's coat across her lap more times than she could count, and Eliza had laughed and said she was warm enough, and Maren had wrapped a shawl around her anyway, and Eliza had let her, and the shawl had smelled of cedar and of Eliza's hair, and that was before, that was the year before, that was a hundred years before any of this.

"She would have liked this house," the child said, and the cruelty of it, the absolute precision of it, was a knife that went in between two ribs and found the soft place without any effort at all. "She would have liked the cold of it. She would have walked the halls in her stockings. She would have put her ear to the doors."

"Stop."

"I am not being cruel. I am being kind. I am telling you what she would have liked, because no one else will, because no one else was there when she died, because you were in the field and she was in the house and the house took her the way a house takes a coal from a fire."

Maren opened her eyes.

The room had not changed.

The lamp had not moved.

The dust on the floor was still.

"I was not in the field," Maren said. "I was on the porch. I heard her call. I heard her call and I did not come because I thought she was calling the cat."

"No," the child said softly. "You were in the field. You were at the far fence. You did not hear her call because the wind was wrong. The wind was wrong and you were far and she called anyway and no one came."

Maren's hand went to her mouth.

She remembered. She remembered now. She had been at the far fence, the fence at the bottom of the property that bordered the creek, and she had been mending a rail, and the wind had been coming up the slope, and she had not heard. She had not heard and she had come in at dusk and Eliza had been gone and her mother had been white in the kitchen and her father had been nowhere and there had been a search and there had been no search and there had been a burial and there had not been a body and the years had gone by and Maren had told herself, in the long quiet of the farmhouse, that she had been on the porch, that she had heard and not come, because that was a sin she could carry, because that was a sin that had a shape, and the truth, the truth that she had been far and had not heard, was a sin with no shape at all.

"You remember," the child said.

"I remember."

"It is better, the truth. Even the ugly truth. It has corners you can hold."

Maren lowered her hand. Her face was wet. She had not felt it wet. She wiped it with the back of her wrist and the skin there was cold and the tear left a track that felt like a small river going down toward her jaw.

"I am leaving," she said.

"Yes," the child said. "I think you are."

The lamp, as if it had been listening, as if it had been waiting for permission, flickered once and went out.

The dark that came in was not complete. The window, she realized, was letting in the first gray suggestion of dawn. She had not noticed it before. She had been so deep in the room, in the dust and the lamp and the voice, that she had forgotten there was an outside at all.

She made herself stand still for one more breath.

Then she moved.

She crossed the room. Her boots made prints in the dust that were new, that had not been there before, and she did not look down at them. She went through the door. The hallway was darker than the bedroom had been. The stair rail was under her hand and the wood was cold and the cold was not the cold of a house in winter. It was the cold of a thing that had no fire in it.

She went down the stairs. The stairs did not creak. She remembered that. The stairs had not creaked. Some part of her had expected them to creak, and the silence of them was worse than any sound.

At the bottom she stopped. The front door was ahead of her. It was standing open.

She knew it had not been open when she came in. She had closed it. She had been the last one out of the house for the night, and she had closed it, and the latch had caught with the small sound that latches make when they have done their job.

The door was open to the gray morning.

The air that came in was the air of the fields. She could smell the hayfield that had been cut in August. She could smell the wet of the creek. She could smell the wood smoke from her own kitchen, far away, impossibly far, and yet clear.

She stepped onto the porch.

The porch boards were silver with dew. The sky was the color of a worn blanket. The trees at the edge of the yard were still. The world was the world.

And there, in the thin dust that the porch did not quite have, in the pollen and the fine dirt that had blown in overnight, was a trail of small bare footprints.

They came out of the house. They went across the porch. They went down the porch steps. They went along the path that Maren had taken when she had come in, and they kept going, past the path, out into the grass, out toward the woods.

The prints were small. The prints were a child's prints. The toes were narrow and the arches were high and the heels were round and they were made, Maren saw, by feet that did not leave any dew on them, feet that did not press the pollen aside so much as pass through it, feet that had made a trail in dust the way a thought makes a trail in the mind.

She did not follow.

She stood on the porch and looked at the trail and the trail went on into the gray and the woods were at the end of it and the woods were not the woods she knew, were not the woods she had walked since she was small, were a place that had been changed by what had walked into them, or had always been a place that was not quite a place, and the morning came in like a slow breath, and the house behind her was silent, and the lamp inside was out, and the voice was gone, or was not gone, and she did not know which.

She closed her hand on the porch rail.

The wood was cold.

The cold was the cold.

She breathed in. She breathed out. She went down the steps and onto the path and she did not look back, because looking back was a thing she had decided she would not do, and the decision sat in her like the truth the child had given her, with corners she could hold.

Behind her, the door of the house stayed open.

Ahead of her, the footprints kept going.

She did not follow them. She walked beside them. She walked the path she had always walked, the path that went around the house and out to the road, and the prints were in the grass to her left, in the dew, going on, and she did not turn her head to look at them, and she did not need to, because she could feel them there, the way a person can feel the edge of a cliff in the dark.

The woods were at the end of the field. The road was at the end of the field on the other side. She chose the road.

The footprints, she thought, would keep going.

The footprints had been going, she thought, for a long time.

She walked. The morning grew. The gray thinned. A bird somewhere, in the trees that were not the woods the prints went into, gave a single call, and then was quiet, and then called again, and Maren kept walking, and the farm was behind her, and the house was behind her, and the open door was behind her, and the lamp that was out was behind her, and the child was behind her, and the truth was with her, and the truth was that she had not heard her sister call, and the truth was that she was here, and the truth was that the morning was here, and that was enough for now.