The Spite House(23)

As they walked back to the stairs to move to the third floor, Dana said, “The bathroom and bedroom situation up next is a little bit awkward.”

A closed white door faced the stairway on the third floor. Another door, this one ashen brown—almost the same color as the wall—was to the right of the stairs.

“I’m sure you noticed the bulge in the building from the outside. The jetty? That’s the bathroom hallway. The original owner had it added after his niece and nephew moved in, when he converted this floor to their living space. Before that, this floor was his own bedroom, and the top floor was supposed to be his workshop. I’ll take you down the hall on the way back. Follow me.”

Eric said, “There were kids living here back then?”

Dana hesitated. “Miss Houghton didn’t tell you that?”

Eric shook his head. Dana inhaled a hiss and thumped herself lightly on the forehead. “Well, shit. Could you do me a favor and not tell her that I told you?”

“Sure,” Eric said. “How old were they? The niece and nephew.”

“Young. That’s honestly about all I can tell you. I don’t really know much of the history. I’m not from here. In fact I’m from the Philadelphia area myself. Have to admit, nice as the weather is here, I do miss home sometimes, don’t you?”

“Sometimes,” Eric said, and turned his head slightly as he smiled, as if to inspect something on the bare wall. He wasn’t really from Philadelphia. She’d suspected it before, when she spoke to him over the phone, and her bluff now made her certain of it. Not that she was looking to catch him in a lie about his background. That wasn’t her job. They had people looking into his past, starting with learning his real name. She’d let those experts do what they were paid to do. All she’d wanted was to keep him from asking her about things she wasn’t supposed to tell him.

She opened the white door and walked him through the first empty bedroom, then through a second door and into the adjoining, second bedroom. Each had a single window facing the valley and enough room for a full bed, a dresser, and an armoire, all of which were set to be delivered on less than a day’s notice as soon as the decision was made on who would occupy the house.

“And here’s the full bath,” Dana said, opening the door to an intrusive enclosure in the second bedroom. “I know it’s small, but everything works as well as you need it to.”

The space was barely big enough to turn around in. It somehow contained a toilet, sink, and small bathtub. To the right of the sink was another door that looked like it had been made at a time when tall or broad people didn’t exist.

What lay beyond that door was the floating addendum of a hallway. The overhang she had mentioned a moment ago. She had never liked this part of the walk-through, even before what happened to the Renners. This was her first time in the house since that couple had left and they had found Jane’s journal, which contained multiple references to the hallway being “the darkest part of this place.”

“Will that hall hold up?” Eric asked. “You said it was a late add-on.”

“It was. But it’s sturdier than you’d think,” Dana said.

“Sturdier than I think isn’t necessarily sturdy.”

She nodded and opened the hallway door. “I’ll go first, you follow. If it can hold the two of us, your daughters will be able to walk it safely, too.”

“And if it doesn’t hold us?”

“You’ll get to say ‘I told you so’ all the way down.”

She flipped the light switch and went in first. The floating hall was an import from a claustrophobe’s nightmare. Dana did not look back to verify it, but she was sure there wasn’t enough room for Eric to put his hands on his hips without his elbows stubbing the walls, and he wasn’t a particularly outsized man. She was a little more than half his size and even she felt squeezed in.

At the center of this narrow space was a light bulb fixed to the ceiling. Its yellow light barely brushed the shadows at each end of the hall. Its thinly stretched efforts felt worse, in the moment, than the idea of total darkness. It provided just enough light for Dana to begin to think she could see something down the hall. A lean, largely featureless shape that should not have looked familiar. This was a shade that was almost there. At most a remnant someone had left behind, which Dana should have found doubly harmless because, for one, she couldn’t really see it, her imagination was only working to make her see something, and secondly, even if it were there—which it wasn’t—it was insubstantial. As imposing and tangible as a memory.

Another line from Jane’s journal came to mind. The last line, spread across several pages. “Something here has taken part of me and won’t give it back.”

Eric’s increasingly heavy footsteps brought her back to the here and now. Made the nothing at the end of the hall stop pretending to be something in her head.

Even in sneakers his steps overpowered the sound of her heels stabbing the floorboards. Did he want to shake the hall apart? Not that he could even if he jumped up and down, but did he have to test it? That was all he was doing, she told herself. Testing how much the floor could withstand before his girls had to use it, the little one possibly running its length at some point, to avoid having an accident. It was understandable for him to want to see how sturdy it was, then, but she would have appreciated him conducting his heavy-footed test after letting her get to the end of the hall. Instead of telling him as much, though, she just walked faster. For some reason she made a conscious decision not to speak when she came through here, as if afraid someone who wasn’t supposed to be there might respond to her.