I bullet point them all in my mind. All the things I should’ve done.
The silence and the blackness of the room become suddenly suffocating and I feel like I can’t breathe. I’m drowning in silence. Being asphyxiated by it.
I turn to my knees and peel the shade back, gazing outside. The world tonight is dark, a carbon gray. Not quite black, but close enough. Little by little, my eyes adapt to it, and though it’s dark outside, I can see. Not perfectly, but I can see something. A halo of light from a streetlamp, a half a block away. Orion the hunter, brightening the sky. His shield is aimed at me as he hovers, light-years above the greystone, club hoisted above his head with a dog at his feet. For whatever reason, the light makes me feel less alone and less scared.
And then, as the moonlight slips out from behind a cloud, it settles on the greystone. As my eyes adjust to it, the house begins to slowly take shape. My eyes rise up from ground level, grazing over the kitchen’s sliding glass door, an enclosed porch, up the home’s rear facade, and there they make out an amorphous shape standing in the open window of the third floor. The very same window, which, for the last two nights, radiated light.
Except that tonight it’s dark. There is no light, but rather a pair of eyes.
The bile in my stomach begins to rise. I feel like I could be sick. I press a hand to my mouth to silence my own scream.
The moonlight reflects off the eyes, making them glint in the darkness of night. They’re undeniable. They’rethere. I’m not just making them up.
But beyond the eyes I see little else. Just a formless, shadowy shape to let me know that someone is standing in the window, watching me.
I let the shade go and it falls closed.
I grab Mom and her urn from a bedside table and slip to the floor, thinking that I don’t want to be here in this carriage home, that I want to leave. That I’d rather be anywhere else in the world but here. But also realizing that I have nowhere to go. I press Mom to me and hold her tight because with her in my arms, I feel less alone. I scoot to a wall and press my back to it, heart beating hard. I try to defuse my fears, to make myself feel better, by telling myself that it’s only Ms. Geissler. That it’s only Ms. Geissler watching me.
And yet it doesn’t make me feel better. Because Ms. Geissler is a stranger to me. We’ve hardly met. I don’t know a single thing about her, other than she lied about the squirrels inside her home, but for what reason, I don’t know.
My heart pounds. My hands are moist. They sweat and again I’m sure that I am dying. That the perspiration is a symptom of fatal familial insomnia, which has stolen my sleep from me and is now coming to take my life.
I want to get out of here. I want to leave. And yet I paid nearly everything I have to be here. I can’t get out of here, I can’t leave. I have nowhere to go.
I pull my knees into my chest. I drop my head to them and close my eyes. I pray to sleep, over and over I say it.Please just let me sleep. Please just let me sleep. Please just let me sleep.I beg for morning to come, for the sun to rise higher and higher in the sky, chasing the nighttime away.
For eight days now it’s gone like this. Eight nights.
How many more days and nights can I go on without sleep?
And then I hear something. Just a murmur, faint at first like the sound of a piano playing from some other room. A gentle melody. But, of course, that can’t be because there’s no piano in the next room, and no one here to play it but me. And I’m not playing a piano.
My ears stand at attention. My head tips. I listen, and though I want to stay, firmly anchored to the wall where I can see through the darkness to know what’s coming for me, I lift my body from the floor, carrying Mom’s ashes with me. It’s unintentional when I press a single palm down on the ground to hoist myself up. The other clutches tightly to Mom, pressing her to my chest like a newborn baby. I stand to an almost-upright position, bent at the shoulders so I don’t hit my head on the low ceiling. And still I do hit my head, crashing into a low-lying wooden beam, so hard that when I press my fingers to it I feel the undeniably sticky texture of blood.
I tiptoe down the steps, one tread at a time, so slowly that it’s almost as if I’m not moving at all. As I descend, voices surface. Not just one, but two or three or four. One lead and a host of background singers to accompany the piano. It makes me gasp for breath. My legs become weak, incapacitated; they start to give as I clutch the stair railing for support, squeezing so tightly the muscles of my hands cramp.
I can’t go on. I don’t want to go on. But I do because I have to. Because there’s nothing there, because there’s some reasonable explanation for the sound. A car stereo playing outside the carriage home, maybe, the tune getting carried in through an open window.
But I won’t know what it is unless I go see.
I force myself to creep down the steps. I edge across the floorboards, willing myself forward, creeping, one step at a time. Following the sound, which comes from a wall and not the window at all because the window is closed tight.
The song isn’t coming from the stereo of a car parked somewhere outside.
It’s coming from inside the carriage home.
I go after the sound, and it leads me to an old vintage pie safe pressed flush against a wall, a petite bookshelf with a couple of shelves and a door. It’s one of the few pieces of furniture that came with the carriage home.
I grab a hold of the knob and pull the door open swiftly, dropping to my knees. As I gaze inside, I find that it’s empty, which makes no sense because the song is in there. It’s coming from the pie safe. I feel blindly with my hands, moving them up and down the edges of the shelves, feeling for something, though what I don’t know.
And then a thought comes to me.
What if the sound isn’t coming from the pie safe? What if it’s coming from somewhere behind?
I don’t think twice. I shove the pie safe out of the way. It isn’t heavy, but it isn’t light either. I press a shoulder into it. It takes some jostling as it skids across the floor.
And there, on the wall behind where the pie safe was placed, I discover a cast-iron air return grille. One of those wall-mounted vents that leads into the duct system. It’s an air return, one that sucks stale air from the room and cycles it back through the home’s ductwork, leading, I have to assume, to the floor register upstairs where I heard the undeniable ping the other night. Ping, and then nothing. Ping, and then nothing.
