Floating Staircase(24)

As I’d done on that first night in the house, I peered over the railing to the foyer below. The boxes were no longer there, and moonlight poured in through the front windows unimpeded. I stood without moving, my hands balled into sweaty fists, and listened to the silence of the house all around me. Listened, listened. What was I waiting for? I had no clue. What had awoken me? I did not know.

In the basement, I fumbled for the cord of the ceiling light, and after floundering around in the dark like a mime semaphoring to a fleet of jetliners, I finally felt it wisp against my face. I pulled the light on and my retinas burned. Wincing, I stood in the center of the basement until my eyes adjusted to the light. Then I glanced around for any pools of water on the floor. There were none.

My gaze fell on the handprint across the room. Some fearful, overly sensitized part of my soul was convinced it would be gone—or worse that I’d find more of them now, dozens more, covering every section of the wall—but it was there. That lone child’s handprint.

Of course, I was still troubled by its presence . . . but something else from earlier that evening was needling at me now, too. Something important that I’d missed, though just barely. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

I returned to bed accompanied by the uneasy feeling that I had overlooked something, then spent much of the following morning in a similar state. With Jodie at school, I attempted to get some writing done but found, not surprisingly, that my mind refused to focus. Soon I was drinking too much coffee while wandering around the house, watching a light snowfall through the upstairs dormer windows.

By noon, I’d checked on the handprint three times. Nothing had changed except that in the daytime it seemed less ominous. In fact, by one thirty I was beginning to convince myself that maybe Jodie was right—that perhaps this handprint had been here all along. The open paint can? I’d probably just left it there when I’d finished using it and hadn’t placed it under the stairs as I thought I had. It was a child’s handprint after all. And we had no children.

I decided to clean up the room that would become our office. There were still stacks of boxes in here, some of them nearly to the ceiling. I grabbed one and almost fell backward at the weightlessness of it: the thing was empty. I drummed my fingers along the side as I carried it and a number of other empty boxes out to the trash.

Some latch finally caught in the recesses of my lizard brain, and I suddenly realized what I’d been struggling to decipher about the handprint on the wall downstairs. Strangely, it had nothing to do with the handprint and everything to do with the wall. Because the drumming on the empty boxes made the same sound as my finger tapping against the drywall last night.

Hollow.

I rapped a set of knuckles along the drywall in the basement. Sure enough, it sounded hollow, as if there was nothing on the other side of the wall. I moved down the length of the wall, still knocking, until I heard the difference in the sound where the drywall had been hung directly over beams or cinder block.

Fueled by curiosity and an unanchored surge of emotion, I cleared junk from the hollow wall until the whole section was exposed. I traced the seams of the drywall, which hadn’t been taped up, while I calculated approximate square footage in my head: the basement was smaller than the ground floor, though I found no reason why this should be. By all accounts, the basement should have approximated the perimeter of the ground floor. Of course, that didn’t mean—

Sliding down the seam between two sheets of drywall, I discovered a tiny hiccup. I looked closely at it, practically pressing my nose against the wall. It was a hinge. Farther down the seam was a second hinge . . . and toward the bottom I located a third.

It wasn’t a wall at all.

It was a door.

But there was no doorknob, no handle, no way of opening it. I went to the opposite seam and attempted to cram my fingers between the two sections of drywall in order to pry it open, but it was impossible. Perhaps the door had been sealed shut long ago?

A door to where? Another room?

I hadn’t a clue.

Then I heard my old therapist’s voice saying, Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out, while I thought of the storage cubbyholes we’d had in our North London flat: little hinged doors in the walls that were held closed by magnets.

Sometimes we go in; sometimes we go out.

I pressed a palm flat against the “wall” and pushed slightly. I felt it give perhaps half an inch . . . then unlatch itself from the wall as it eased open on squealing hinges. The door opened only three or four inches, revealing a vertical crack of darkness.

I didn’t realize just how excited I was until I reached out to pull the door open farther and saw how badly my hand was shaking. In the back of my throat, a weak little laugh escaped.

I opened the door.





CHAPTER TEN

By the time Jodie and I moved into the house on Waterview Court, I had already authored four novels in the supernatural or horror genre, dealing with spooks and specters and villainous entities with villainous designs. As I stood before the open doorway in the basement wall, it occurred to me that I had written countless scenes like this one. In my writing, I have always attributed an indistinct merging of trepidation and fear to my characters as they stood on the cusp of uncertain discovery.

But I was not afraid, as so many of my characters had been in the past; instead, I felt a cool, almost menthol satisfaction wash through me, as if I’d just figured out the final clue in an unusually taxing crossword puzzle.