Rooms(22)

Thomas wasn’t mentioned in my will. How could he be? He was by then a phantom.

It’s funny—I knew him a little less than two years. Even in living terms, that hardly amounts to anything. And in time that is not-living, in the endless, chalky sweep of eternity, which wears years to sand and blows everything back, dustlike, into void, it is nothing.

But that’s the beauty of life: time is yours to keep and to change. Just a few minutes can be sufficient to carve a new road, a new track. Just a few minutes, and the void is kept at bay. You will live forever with that new road inside of you, stretching away to a place suggested, barely, on the horizon.

For the shortest time, shorter than the shortest second’s breath, you get to stand up to infinity.

But eventually, and always, infinity wins.

Sandra is talking to herself, going on about the morning and the will in particular. She’s still delighted by the mystery of Adrienne Cadiou. I wish she would be quiet; the Walkers have exhausted me, left me with a shivery sense of discomfort, like a body gripped with fever.

“New bet,” Sandra says. “What are the chances that Minna will bed that—?”

Just then, something moves. A disturbance—a rippling feeling, a passage through spaces, like coming up to the surface when you’ve been submerged and holding your breath. For a second there is only confusion: a rush of sounds; a blur of brightness, painful and unexpected.

I think of penetration: Ed and the sound of the hyena; Thomas exhaling; a high belly, full with strangeness.

“What in the devil . . . ” Sandra’s voice is high, strained. She feels it, too. “What is that?”

And then I know, all at once, what is happening. It has happened to me before, many years ago, when Sandra first arrived.

Now comes the nausea, and a sense of swinging; then the world breaking apart, as it did when I was small and would spin and spin until I fell backward, watching everything dissolve into color.

Just like that, there it is. A third presence.

Another ghost.

The nausea subsides, leaving me gasping. Sandra lets out a mangled cry. For once in the history of her death, Sandra is struck dumb. I have a brief moment of panic: Richard Walker has, after all, come back.

But then it speaks.

“It’s dark,” she says simply. Her voice is faint, barely audible. She must be young. She is small; she takes up hardly any space. A child.

“God help us,” Sandra says.





PART III

THE BASEMENT





ALICE

Who is she?

There have been no deaths in the house since Sandra’s, and that was in 1987. There have been no deaths on the property, either, not since the incident with the kitten and the old well.

Now a girl! Unfathomable.

She might easily tell us. But she chooses to remain silent. Since yesterday she has not said a single word beyond “It’s cold.” How old is she? I should say: how old was she? Twelve? Fifteen? No matter what I ask her, she refuses to be drawn out. And suddenly I find that I’m remembering things I haven’t thought about for ages. Lost children, cowering in the dark. Little Annie Hayes, who disappeared from her parents’ farm. I even remember the date the search party was assembled: March 6, 1942. A Tuesday.

Strange, the things that stick.





AMY

Amy wasn’t allowed to go in the basement. Mommy said it was dark and Amy would be scared. But she knew that Mommy was the one who was scared.

Amy thought she might find a doll down there. Once she had found a doll in the basement of her nana’s house. It had a wide white face and curls of brown hair and floppy arms and legs but a hard body. She had kept it for a while, but then Mommy made her throw it out after one of the arms got torn off by Brewster, the dog that lived across the street. Amy wanted to perform surgery, but Mommy said no people will think we’re poor I’ll buy you a real doll for Christ’s sake. Then she said: Sorry.

Amy liked her new doll, but not as much as the one she had found.

She wondered if Penelope from The Raven Heliotrope had ever had a mom, maybe the kind of mom who didn’t let her do certain things. Amy thought the basement might look a little like the Caves of Werth, which were filled with treasure.

Uncle Trenton was no fun anymore and wouldn’t read to her. Mommy said Uncle Trenton was dead and then they went to the hospital to see him and he was white and he wouldn’t get up or talk. But then he did get up, but he still didn’t talk very much.

Amy was glad they had come to Grandpa’s house. She wished she could talk to Grandpa in the Garden of Forever and ask whether all the people from the book were there.

The house was full of white fluff stuff. Mommy said cottonseed. Amy collected it all and placed it in a cup in her room.

It looked just like snow.





SANDRA

Like the world’s worst case of constipation: that’s what the basement is like. Like stopped-up bowels and a fat case of gas.

It’s even worse now that we’ve got an intruder. Small as she is, she doesn’t belong. It feels like I’m trying to get my stomach around a whole Thanksgiving turkey. I wish I could digest her and spit her right back out where she came from.

The new ghost likes the basement, God knows why. Rolled-up carpets, dismantled televisions and old radios, cartons and cartons of books, and the old boiler: it’s all down there. The piano like a kidney stone we can never quite manage to piss out. Burned-out lights and Christmas ornaments. The Walkers have been home for three days now, and even Minna hasn’t braved the basement.