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So behind those Puritan walls, dead space waited. A knock on the old wood paneling, and she heard hollow reverberation. Pull out a chink of plaster, poke a finger through, and she’d find it wriggling in nothingness. And behind that panel, under the stairs, around the chimney’s intertwining arteries, the builders left the largest, most mysterious space.
“Why do you think they put in this room? Put in a secret door?” her husband had asked.
“The Underground Railroad, or maybe a place to hide from natives,” the sellers had guessed. “Our kids, of course, say it’s haunted.”
Her husband’s eyes had lit up at imagining the protected families, the besieging natives, the watchful dead.
She’d said nothing, but thought otherwise. Access like this made any patching of bricks and mortar easier, should the need ever arise. The house predated the Underground Railroad. And in this part of New England, conflict with the natives had moved elsewhere long before the house was built.
“Why seal it?” those early builders asked in her imagination. “It could be useful, someday.”
After moving in, her husband hauled out a shop vac. The space had been littered with mortar dust, curled paper, general rubble, and a few desiccated mice. Being so much smaller, she was the one to crawl in and vacuum out the mess while he screwed the hinges of the panel in more securely. She remembered she hadn’t been able to stand, but that it had been easy enough to move around the space on hands and knees given the amount of floor between the rough face of the chimney flues and the splintered side of the pine wall paneling.
She had called her husband’s attention to an old electric heater that vented out the stairs, wires frayed and insides blackened with signs of burn damage. He awkwardly jimmied his wide shoulders into the hidden place to disconnect it and rip it out, rumbling and happily raging over the unsafety of the thing. Always anger over the irresponsibility of others. Always pleasure over fixing something, making it safe. Protecting them, after all, was such a part of the way he saw himself that tangible evidence of such purpose was a sparkling and beautiful thing. Never mind that she’d been the one to find the problem. To diagnose it. He was the one to say proudly on the phone to his parents, “You’ll never believe the fire hazard I tore out from under the stairs….”
“I don’t know what we’ll ever use the space for,” her husband mused. “Given the temperature these bricks likely heat to when you get the beehive oven going, I dunno. Probably we should leave it alone.”
The other hidden spaces created by the walled-in chimney had been filled over the centuries with things that increased comfort. Ducts, wires, and pipes were visible through smaller, less hidden access doors. With this one exception, practicalities like closets, shelves, indoor plumbing, and electric lighting had done away with the secret spaces that accumulated superstition, speculation, and imaginings.
That snowy night, the hidden place seemed altogether different than it had on the sunny day they’d cleaned it out. The face of the open passage was purest black. So black that even in that midnight room, she saw it as a darker pit. A dead mouth with a throat deeper than flint.
Somehow, the depth of that darkness made the rest of the room more visible. She saw her son stirring on the chair in the corner. She lunged, but before she could get to him, the little boy woke up and wailed. She slapped her hand over his tiny mouth. Her son’s surprise and hurt was a tangible thing that vibrated out of his body and socked her in the stomach with shame.
“Shhh, it’s all right, but we have to be quiet, quiet! Look, your sister is here, see? And we all have to be brave, and quiet.”
The little boy’s face kept on with its melt.
Oh no, oh no.
She recognized the beginning of screaming, of pained fearfulness, loud and bawling. The injustice of waking up, in the dark, and Mama putting her hand over my mouth, so mean, I’m cold, where am I? Yes, all that readable in the curl of her little boy’s face. Her hand pressed tighter, and her son grabbed and scrabbled at her wrist.
“We have to be quiet,” she whispered. “We have to be quiet! If we’re not quiet the monster will get us!”
Both children reacted as though her words hurt. If she’d said it at any other time, one of them would’ve pulled a smile, said, “Nooooo, Mama, you’re teasing! There’s no such thing as monsters!” But waking them up, bringing them downstairs to the office they weren’t allowed to play in, putting a hand over a mouth, pleading for quiet, surrounded by the darkness, the cold, the storm, sensing the pulse of her fear. A mother’s fear. It came together in a kind of horror that made them recoil. And they were silent.
Thank goodness.Thank God.
She took her hand away from her son’s mouth, illogically terrified that because of his silence, his stillness, she’d somehow suffocated him. But no, he made small snuffling noises.
Then both children began to whimper, to cry. Frustration rolled over her.
There’s no time for this.
“No! No! Look, here’s the hiding place, here’s where we hide to be safe.” She pointed to the open panel. “See? Look! And, see?” She snatched the blanket, the pillow off the armchair, held them up. “These will be cuddly, right? And we’ve got Fuzzydoll, and Pinkbunny, and we’re going to snuggle in here and hide until the monster’s gone. Cuddle with Mama. All right?”
Clutching the blanket, the pillow, she looked down at their wide-eyed, fear-filled faces.
This is a tough fucking sell.
How long had it been since she’d first seen the man? Minutes? Only minutes. But still far too long. What was he doing now?
Move. Move! You have to hide.
Anytime she showed impatience, urgency, the children reacted with suspicion and slowness. She saw herself in their eyes. Keyedup, whispering, drenched in sweat, shaking in a way she couldn’t control, trying to lure them into a dirty and unfamiliar place.
Because what, you’ve got a throw pillow? A couple of stuffed animals? Act calm. Get them inside.
Behind them she saw her husband’s computer on the desk. Grimaced resentfully at its unhelpful bulk. He’d somehow disabled the internet on it. Said otherwise it was too tempting to browse, connect to the wi-fi, procrastinate, to take himself out of what he called “work mode.” He wouldn’t even bring his phone into the office.
