“Now I’ve discovered the damn thing, what do I do with it? Storage room up there, I bet. Well—” And she went away, vaguely troubled, feeling her mind slipping off out of the sun.
“To hell with that, Clara Peck!” she said, vacuuming the parlor. “You’re only fifty-seven. Not senile, yet, by God!”
But still, why hadn’t she noticed?
It was the quality of silence, that was it. Her roof had never leaked, so no water had ever tapped the ceilings; the high beams had never shifted in any wind, and there were no mice. If the rain had whispered, or the beams groaned, or the mice danced in her attic, she would have glanced up and found the trapdoor.
But the house had stayed silent, and she had stayed blind.
“Bosh!” she cried, at supper. She finished the dishes, read until ten, went to bed early.
It was during that night that she heard the first, feint, Morse-code tapping, the first graffiti-scratching above, behind the blank ceiling’s pale, lunar face.
Half-asleep, her lips whispered: Mouse?
And then it was dawn.
Going downstairs to fix breakfast, she fixed the trap door with her steady, small-girl’s stare and felt her skinny fingers twitch to go fetch the stepladder.
“Hell,” she muttered. “Why bother to look at an empty attic? Next week, maybe.”
For about three days after that, the trapdoor vanished.
That is, she forgot to look at it. So it might as well not have been there.
But around midnight on the third night, she heard the mouse sounds or the whatever-they-were sounds drifting across her bedroom ceiling like milkweed ghosts touching the lost surfaces of the moon.
From that odd thought she shifted to tumbleweeds or dandelion seeds or just plain dust shaken from an attic sill.
She thought of sleep, but the thought didn’t take.
Lying flat in her bed, she watched the ceiling so fixedly she felt she could x-ray whatever it was that cavorted behind the plaster.
A flea circus? A tribe of gypsy mice in exodus from a neighbor’s house? Several had been shrouded, recently, to look like dark circus tents, so that pest-killers could toss in killer bombs and run off to let the secret life in the places die.
That secret life had most probably packed its fur luggage and fled. Clara Peck’s boarding house attic, free meals, was their new home away from home.
And yet . . . .
As she stared, the sounds began again. They shaped themselves in patterns across the wide ceiling’s brow; long fingernails that, scraping, wandered to this corner and that of the shut-away chamber above.
Clara Peck held her breath.
The patterns increased. The soft prowlings began to cluster toward an area above and beyond her bedroom door. It was as if the tiny creatures, whatever they were, were nuzzling another secret door, above, wanting out.
Slowly, Clara Peck sat up in bed, and slowly put her weight to the floor, not wanting it to creak. Slowly she cracked her bedroom door. She peered out into a hall flooded with cold light from a full moon, which poured through the landing window to show her—
The trapdoor.
Now, as if summoned by her warmth, the sounds of the tiny lost ghost feet above rushed to cluster and fret at the trapdoor rim itself.
Christ! thought Clara Peck. They hear me. They want me to— The
trapdoor shuddered gently with the tiny rocking weights of whatever it was arustle there.
And more and more of the invisible spider feet or rodent feet of the blown curls of old and yellowed newspapers touched and rustled the wooden frame.
Louder, and still louder.