A Whisper From Another Room

It’s about quarter past eight on a Monday night, and I’ve just put my young son down to bed for the evening. I’ve let him stay up a bit past his bedtime, as I often do on nights like this when my wife is working late, and by the time I finally turned on his blue nightlight and laid him down in the crib he fell asleep before his head hit the mattress. I look out over the toys and books he left strewn about the floor in the wake of his playtime and with a yawn decide to leave it to deal with tomorrow morning.

Closing the nursery door gently behind me I linger in the hallway, debating whether to jump in the shower right away or go down to the basement where I keep my stationary bike. I still haven’t made up my mind by the time I hear something from across the hallway, behind the door that leads to my bedroom, a sound I know well. The dog has decided to burst into a fit of cacophonic yelping.

Muttering a few of my favorite expletives under my breath I move to calm the animal before he can wake the baby, but then I stop short when I hear something else from inside the room.

A whisper.

“Shhhhhhhh…”

I realize immediately that I couldn’t actually have heard what I thought I heard. With my wife at work my son and I are alone in the house. I know it must have been my imagination, or even the wind coming in through the window, as hackneyed as that sounds. So I hold on to that certainty and I open the door before I even have time to worry that there might actually be someone on the other side.

(Or to realize that the windows are all shut.)

And sure enough, there’s no one in the bedroom except for the dog. He’s fallen silent now and standing on the bed, alert and rigidly posed, but he isn’t looking at me and doesn’t even seem to notice when I enter. Instead, he’s staring straight ahead to the closet.

My gaze follows his.

The closet door is open.

This is impossible. My wife would never, ever leave the closet door open when she left for work. I rarely go in there at all, since I work from home and mostly do so in my pajamas and bathrobe. The door reveals nothing of what’s within beyond the first foot or so, any deeper blocked by hanging clothes and shadow.

Of course my mind, conditioned by years of watching scary movies and reading creepy pastas, immediately goes someplace dark. I remember the urban legends I’ve heard of people, families who had discovered someone living hidden in their house, crouched away in the attic or lurking in the basement between boxes of Christmas ornaments and plastic crates of outgrown clothes, impossibly still and impossibly silent only to emerge in the nighttime, pale from their seclusion, hollow-eyed from the darkness, and gaunt with hunger. Creeping through the hallways with a practiced soft step, combing through the kitchen for whatever crumbs their unwitting hosts might miss.

These are the fantasies that play through my mind’s eye as I approach the closet doorway and its curtain of hanging shirts, skirts, and dresses that prevents me from peering any deeper.

I hesitate before I push them aside.

I know that all these urban legends are just that, of course, and I know that there’s no one living in my closet. But that doesn’t stop me from picturing the visage that will greet me from between the hanging garments if I’m wrong about that; the lean and pallid face, the deep and lidless eyes staring out with nothing behind them, the long and dark and stringy hair.

Again I act before I have time for a second thought, before I have time to remember that not all those stories were just urban legends, that some I’d heard recounted as actual fact on one of my wife’s true crime podcasts. I grit my teeth and I push the clothes hangers apart with both hands like Moses parting the Red Sea to reveal nothing I didn’t know would be there. The vacuum cleaner. A stack of shoeboxes, some mine but mostly hers. A couple suitcases and a few crumbled piles of clothes that fell off the hanger to be forgotten on the floor. And against the far wall, the tiny door that leads to the long, narrow corridor that runs behind the walls to connect our room to the nursery.

The crawlspace. I’d forgotten about the crawlspace.

I’ve only looked inside there once, when we first bought the house. To be honest I’m a bit claustrophobic, and the crawlspace always creeped me out. Tonight, though, it’s creeping me out for a whole new reason. All but frozen in place, I can barely bring myself to look away from that little door. Over my shoulder the dog hasn’t moved a muscle; I can feel his gaze passing over my shoulder and landing on the door. Is that a low growl that escapes his throat?

By now I’m thoroughly disturbed, and I remind myself that all I need to do is open up the door to the crawlspace and look inside. When I see that it’s empty I’ll know for sure that this whole thing has just been in my head.

I reach for the knob.

That’s when I notice something I couldn’t see before in what little light has managed to stream in through the hanging clothing. The little door to the crawlspace is already ever so slightly ajar.

Now I’m thinking about other things, too. Many of them, all at once. Little details from the past few months, innocuous in isolation but which woven together form a dire tapestry from which I cannot look away.

I’m thinking of all the times over the last few months I’ve been sitting by myself at night in the living room reading a book and heard the dog barking from here in the bedroom, apros pos seemingly of nothing. I think of other sounds too, of my wife mentioning to me in the morning that she’s worried we might have rats in the walls because of the scratching she heard, long after I’d fallen into too deep a sleep to be awakened by such things.

I think of all the leftovers that have gone missing from the fridge that I’ve always just assumed my wife had taken to work, even though I know that she buys a salad from the hospital cafeteria every night. I think about the pie, the last slice of cherry pie that she had been saving for herself. She had been so irritated at me just the other day for eating it. She couldn’t believe me when I told her I didn’t. “Then who ate it?” I remember her asking. “If you didn’t eat it, who did?”

Again, that image of the face appears in my mind, growing more vivid as it grows more likely, its crooked teeth creeping out from underneath thin, wormlike lips between narrow, hollow cheeks. Worse, the jaw falls open with dismay as the man realizes I’ve discovered him, falling open wider than should be possible and he screams a horrible angry cry more akin to that of a dying beast than any human being.

And I think about how careful he would have been to avoid just this. To have lain low so still and silent, to subsist on what few crumbs the three of us would not notice missing. To have grown so scared and desperate to have shushed my dog before scampering away again.

I dread looking upon him, yes, but he dreads it just the same. It’s exposure he fears most. What he wants, if indeed he even exists, if he even could exist, all he wants is to be left alone.

My hand falters; I lower it but then raise it again to push the crawlspace door shut once more.

I back out of the closet.

I shut that door behind me, too.

I go downstairs to the dining room and pour myself a glass of scotch. I know I shouldn’t start drinking until my wife gets home, but I’m going to start a little early tonight.