The child's eyes winked open then
half-closed, and she slithered spryly from bed, creaking the morning-cold floor
as she entered the hall.
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
It came beneath snorings and the odd report
of turning bodies. Sarah thought it originated from the stairs.
Scratch. Scratch-scratch, scratch.
She padded down the balcony hallway and
then the stairwell, navigating the dark with the cautious of the blind. The
scratching started up again and she gave pause, frozen on the third riser. Her
chest moved in and out.
She fumbled on a light and the darkness
shocked away. Sarah rounded the newel post and stood studying the stairwell's
underbelly, an angular wedge with a child-size door in the middle. The door was
locked.
She'd scarcely noticed it in her eleven years,
and never its lock, a bulbous metal knot in a black iron hasp. It said no, by
presence alone. The upstairs snored as she stood contemplating.
Then: scratch-scratch, THUD!
Sarah gasped backward, then scratched off
the light and scrambled back to bed. When the noise returned, she muffed her
hands over her ears.
***
The
home's morning noises were radio and scuffing chairs, and the dynamite sizzle
of bacon and sausage. Sarah awoke late, but not because it was Sunday. After
the scratching, sleep had returned reluctantly.
Sarah descended the culprit stairs as she
had the night before, with calculated steps and peeks over the railing. The
little door was still closed and locked. When it didn't scratch, she made for
the kitchen.
Mom, Dad, and Sarah's twin brothers awaited
her there, their eyes coming up then sucking back down. Mom was fussing with
various foods simultaneously. Invasive sun shot through a window to white the table.
Sarah said hello, and received a sleepy acclamation of greeting.
She took her usual spot, opposing the twins
and her father. The twins were nineteen, strapping young men full of winks and
advice and overbearing. Father was lost behind a newspaper, the pages
periodically crackling down for a gulp of coffee. Mom moved for the four of
them.
"Something's under the stairs,"
Sarah said, when it felt right.
Mom paused in her work, her back to the
room. Dad seemed to change behind the paper. The twins took sudden interest in
the table. Only the radio spoke.
Sarah searched the room, pausing at her
brothers, who now offered no winks. She waited, all the sudden feeling smaller.
"Well? What's under the stairs?"
The paper lowered to Dad looking a way Sarah
didn't like. "Why do you say that, dear?" His words thawed Mom, some
toast at last receiving its butter.
"I. I heard scratching last night.
From under the stairs, and ..." Sarah shrunk smaller, smaller. How will
she reach the table?
Dad, still with that unheimlich face, said,
"Is that so?"
"Yeah. It woke me up. I came down and
it kept on."
Dad made no immediate reply. Mom's work
continued, but her back was listening. The radio switched songs, and for a
second the silence was enormous.
"Mice," Barry said, from Sarah's
right. "Must've been mice." Mitchell, beside him, agreed.
Sarah squirmed like there was an itch; the
three big men were staring at her. "Well, maybe ..." she said. Half
of her insisted it was too loud for mice, but the other said mice, definitely
definitely mice. "Yeah, I guess it was mice," she added, capitulating
to the stares.
Dad at once normalized, his face lifting.
"Well, then," he smiled. He sipped his coffee and looked to enjoy it.
"Well."
Before Sarah could decide something was
wrong, Mom was distributing crowded, steaming plates. The Barclays ate.
***
That
Sunday was spent with Betty Hollers from next door, where the stairs didn't
scratch. Sarah only remembered her stairs at bedtime, when it came time to
scale them.
She stood at the first riser, a questioning
to her. Just moments ago she was exhausted; no longer. The home's evening
noises played out from unseen rooms, Mom humming blithely as she performed some
chore. Sarah's eyes kept sinking to the little door, its forbidding lock.
She was still there when her mother appeared
from a hallway, the humming ceasing with her steps. Janice Barclay was a tall,
curvy version of her daughter, perhaps some future incarnation stumbled into
the past. She stopped upon finding Sarah at the little door.
"Sarah, honey?" Janice said, her
basket of laundry flagging below her waist.
Sarah looked up. "Huh?"
Mom's eyes sliced to the stairwell; back to
her daughter. "Everything all right? You look unwell."
"Was just ..." Sarah looked at
the disastrous stairs. "Just thinking of the mice. Under the stairs."
It made Janice tense, her hands torturing
the poor laundry basket. "Don't you worry about under the stairs,"
she snapped. "You get on to bed. It's late."
Mom's tone brought a feeling like sick and
crying mixed. Sarah slunk away from her mother's eyes, up one riser then the
rest. She felt the eyes all the way upstairs, and still as she closed the
bathroom door.
***
That
night, Sarah thought the scratching was just a dream, or the home's night noises,
or something else. But it was none of those things and she knew it.
The sound sent her deep under the covers,
but this helped little.
***
Monday
was a school day, Mom's hand shaking Sarah awake.
"Come on, hon. Don't wanna be
late," Mom said, mistaking Sarah's groans for resistance. Footsteps.
Sarah dressed, then stood not quite at the
stairhead, awkward with fear. The stairs had gained thorns and traps, and heads
with vulgar faces. She managed down them by closing her eyes and thinking of
rainbows.
Her plate was already set when she arrived
at the table, for the first time. Mom had preceded her, too. It was wrong,
somehow. Like the scratching.
"Come on, hon," Mom said over a
mouthful. "Gonna be late." No one else seemed to notice Sarah.
She hoicked into her seat but didn't eat,
her eyes circling the table. Her fork played with her food, seemingly on its
own.
Mom was looking at her. "You okay, hon?"
She met her mother's gaze. "Why's there
a lock under the stairs?"
The room stopped, just like Saturday. Sarah
felt, as much as saw, her mother's face close. Dad's coffee mug lowered without
being sipped, and he said, "No reason, dear." The twins were still
eating, though without their previous zeal.
"But why?" Sarah said.
"What's in there?"
Dad: "There's nothing in there."
"Then why lock it?"
Mom: "Everyone has locks under their
stairs."
"Betty's stairs don't."
It made Mom straighten in her seat, her
eyes jumping to Dad.
When no one spoke, Sarah said,
"There's scratching in there. Something in there -- and not mice.
Too big for mice." Pause. "Why not just open it up?"
The twins' chewing degraded. Something
passed between Sarah's parents, and Dad said, "There's nothing under the
stairs." He looked at her heavily. "Now, eat."
Sarah's fork had never stopped dowsing her
plate. It at last chose a puff of eggs, and Sarah ate, if only to relieve
herself of those faces. For the first time ever, she found herself looking
forward to school.
***
The
school day was worrisome. Sarah couldn't forget the stairs, and how Mom and Dad
said there was nothing under them when there was. Teacher called on her once,
and Sarah couldn't answer the man's question. The other kids laughed.
Betty Hollers wasn't in Sarah's class, but
they did share the bus. Sarah waited until just before their stop.
"Do your stairs scratch?"
Betty was drawing. "Stairs
scratch?"
"Yeah," Sarah said. "Like at
night, like? From the underneath?"
Betty said no, without much interest. Her
picture was of a unicorn and trees.
"Do your stairs have a lock on
it?" Sarah asked.
Betty thought visibly, her eyes rolling
about. "Nope. I hide in there during hide-and-go-seek." She smiled.
Sarah said, "Yeah, thought so,"
and withdrew out the window. When her house crawled up, she felt sick.
***
Earlier
in life, the twins were fond of terrorizing their young sister with a particularly
grotesque Halloween mask. That was how it felt to hear the scratching that
night, like seeing the mask except real.
Sarah arose screaming from bed, and only
got louder. At once, the snoring cut out and her parents appeared. They stood
over her, reduced to columns of leg and waist because Sarah had sat or fallen.
Barry and Mitchell darkened the doorway, not nearing.
Sarah wouldn't calm, her parents consoling
perfunctorily. They looked a way they never had before, like strangers Sarah
wasn't supposed to talk to. Her father put a hand on her shoulder, and it
offered no comfort whatsoever.
Movies had taught her that bad noises never
happen in others' presence, but the scratching defied this, playing out in full
presence of Mom and Dad and the twins. "See? See?" Sarah said,
looking between them.
She'd hoped to find defeat or surprise in
her family's faces, but there was neither. "Sounds like mice," one of
the twins suggested, and it was all anyone said.
***
The
scratching awoke her that morning, and continued throughout breakfast. She
several times asked if they heard, don't you hear it? But no one would
answer.
School was a relief and too short, and when
Sarah got home, the scratching had not ceased. She heard it from outside, a
muffled scratch, scratch, scratch. Her legs locked up and she had to persuade them.
Sarah opened the door and lingered there.
The stairwell was again a circus of harmful things, the Halloween mask plus
worse. She had begun to call out hello, when she noticed the liquid.
The maroon substance started at the little
door and ended in a shallow pool in the floor's declivity, resembling a stream-fed
lake. It froze Sarah all over again. She told herself it was not blood, was not
blood.
Her steps had never been more careful, then
she was squatting by the pool, her dress touching her Mary Janes. The pool had
some depth, with little floating chunks she couldn't identify. "It's not
blood," she said aloud, just heard over the incessant scratching. Her eyes
traced the pool to the little door, which suddenly appeared very weak.
"Not blood."
Then her mother was nearby, scolding:
"Sarah Barclay. What've you spilled?"
Sarah backed guardedly toward the door. "I
didn't spill it," was all she said. She felt to be talking to a bully,
maybe.
As her mother went for a mop, Sarah
retreated to her room and stayed there. After mopping up the blood, Janice
Barclay squeezed it into a jar and stored it away.
***
Sarah
spent the evening in her room, without dinner or TV. Her winter earmuffs dulled
the scratching; with some added tissue paper, she could barely hear it at all. She
didn't remember falling asleep, only the scratching waking her up, the next
morning.
The noises had started Sunday, and it was
now Wednesday. Sarah anguished downstairs and then stopped at the little door:
more not-blood had sprung forth, collecting into a greater pool. Sarah cleared
it with a berth.
She came to the kitchen, and breakfast was
wrong. Dad was without his paper or coffee, the twins sitting board-straight,
Mom too. Eight eyes glued to Sarah and stayed there. Instead of radio and skrinking
forks, there was only the foyer's far scratching.
Feeling pressed to speak, Sarah said,
"The stairs are bleeding."
Her family did not answer.
"And the scratching. There's still
scratching ..." She trailed off upon realizing there was no food, on the table
or stove or anywhere, the kitchen empty like her family's eyes.
A countertop dish held apples and bananas.
Sarah grabbed one of each, and her family's gaze did not falter. They were
still at the table when she left.
Sarah ate disinterestedly while awaiting
the bus.
***
Thursday
and Friday were bad; the weekend, worse. The stairs continued scratching and
hemorrhaging, and Sarah's family sunk into a sort of psychosis. Dad wandered
the house and muttered of rabbits, drinking stinky liquor from the bottle. Mom
and the twins stayed together, spending long periods of time in the twins'
bedroom. Mom stopped cooking and cleaning, like Dad and the twins stopped
working. The home's noises were no longer, the scratching having replaced them
all.
After the weekend, Sarah went to her
school's guidance counselor, on the grounds of a problem at home. However, when
the time came, Sarah couldn't say a word. Next was Betty Hollers, and this
resulted in a similar silence. The police said that her family acting funny
wasn't a crime, nor was a noisy staircase. Sarah spent her days in her room,
the earmuffs seeing perpetual use.
She eventually stopped going to school,
thinking it would snap her parents out of it; but it didn't. Dad kept drinking,
and grumbling about "the rabbits." Other than pal around with her
twin sons, the only thing Janice Barclay did was mop up the blood.
The hammering started Tuesday afternoon,
and Sarah traced it to her parents' bedroom, where her father was busy nailing
dead rabbits to the walls. Furry cruciform shapes hung like pictures or shelves,
a box of them on the bed, obtained from God knows where. Toiling over his
latest crucifixion, Sarah's father didn't notice her.
Sarah screamed and ran, and again phoned
the police. The dispatcher was the same as before, and said that pranking 911
could get you in jail. The shock sent Sarah to the twins' room, for Mom, but
she found Mom and the twins unclothed on the floor, in a three-person train,
their hips and mouths working at one another. They too seemed immune to Sarah's
presence.
Sarah shut herself in her room, propping a
chair to the door like she'd seen on TV.
***
The
time following was filled with hammerings and incestuous commotion and the
unending scratching, these the new sounds of the Barclay home. Sarah's day was
interrupted by brief, involuntary bouts of sleep, in which dreams of the stairs
played star.
Sarah barely noticed when the hammering
stopped. The other noises did also, by consequence or coincidence, she wasn't
sure. It lured her from her room, with the same minefield steps reserved for
the stairs. She looked left and right, and the other bedrooms were open, one decorated
with dead rabbits, the other shed clothing. She could hear a new noise, out
here, one she couldn't immediately place. It was coming from the foyer, like
the scratching.
She crept along the balcony hallway, just
cresting the ledge. Her family was huddled around the floor's reservoir of
gore, doglike, their rear ends raised high, Dad's the only one clothed. Mom's
was facing Sarah, seeming to stare. The noise was their lapping the blood,
strawlike suckings intermixed. Clownish red smears surrounded their lips, the chins
dripping liberally.
It shocked Sarah, but she was already shocked.
She only retreated to her room, the chair going back under the knob.
***
It
felt like night when Sarah ventured to the garage, but only because the others were
back in their rooms, with hammerings and fuck-noises instead of snores. The
scratching had gained intensity, great purposeful strokes that made the door
jump.
The garage was outfitted with a wall of
hung tools, including her pick of screwdrivers. She chose one and took it down,
gingerly, with only a vague knowledge of her intent.
Then she was at the stairs' little door,
the screwdriver in the hasp and prying. Her knees slipped in the ooze of blood,
sweat weeping from her. She put her weight into the screwdriver, grunting, but
the hasp was strong. She collapsed backward and the screwdriver fell from her,
spattering the blood.
She then went away again, becoming a
detached sprawl in the floor, time stripped of all meaning. She returned to
herself some time later, with the slow silence of a ghost, her eyes flickering
sharp. She noticed, vacantly, how the screws in the hasp were the X
kind. The screwdriver was the X kind.
The scratching resumed as if in answer, the
door stuttering as to jingle the lock.
The screws were in tight, but she honed her
technique and again put her scant weight into it, and the first screw budged.
She fought with it, struggling because the door wouldn't stay still, and soon a
screw clinked the floor, sticking in the blood there.
Sarah toiled bodily at the remaining
screws, growling and moaning like her mother and brothers lately. So involved
was Sarah that she didn't see her family assemble along the balcony, bloodstained
and zombie-faced, standing abreast as if about to bow. They watched, unspeaking.
The four remained so as Sarah freed the
hasp's last screw, loosing that which dwelt under the stairs.
***
Betty
was worried when her best friend Sarah wasn't in school for three days. Worse,
Betty and her parents had been hearing things from their next-door neighbors,
and the Barclays' cars hadn't left the driveway. When another day passed, Betty
decided to visit.
As it turned out, however, Sarah was
waiting for her, on Betty's front step as she disembarked the bus.
Betty was happy; then alarmed. Sarah looked
terrible, covered in red as if she'd spilled jam, her face filthy and her hair
all over the place. "Sarah?" Betty said, at distance.
"Come here," Sarah said, moving
only her mouth.
Betty was a long time joining Sarah on the
stoop. Up close, Sarah looked even worse, her eyes all starey and wild, head
lowered so her chin touched her chest. The redness continued up to her mouth
and cheeks, like she'd been eating whatever she'd spilled.
"What happened, Sarah?"
Sarah answered by raising a small mason
jar, a dark, sultry liquid inside. She extended the jar as if it explained
everything.
Betty took it tentatively, holding it away
from her. "What is it?"
Sarah nodded to the jar, only slightly, due
to her lowered head. "Grape juice. Try it."
Betty undid the jar and sniffed. Her head
jumped a little. "It don't smell like grape juice."
Sarah stared. "Try it."
Betty didn't want the juice ... but Sarah's
appearance brooked no argument. She put the jar to her lips and threw it back, at
once tasting copper.
###
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