May 23
Janice sagged, wiping sweat from her face back into her hairline, and glared at the wall. There had to be six layers of paper here, while everywhere else, two layers apparently sufficed. And the bruises on her palms, the aching in her hands, hadn’t even yielded the clean, white plaster she’d been anticipating. Scoring, drenching, scraping the sodden bits away - only to reveal scatters of what had to be black mold. Perseverance rewarded solely by a great blob of the stain with little satellite molds launching themselves from the mothership.
With a final look of disgust, she plunked into the camp chair she kept around for break times. She was getting too heavy for it, and hoped vaguely the work she was doing on this place would reverse that trend. She felt like she’d run a marathon, after a day dedicated to restoring her home’s original splendor. But the scale - and her pants - told a different story, and she suspected it was actually her nightmare-riddled “sleep” doing her in.
Sighing, she tipped a water bottle to her lips. There was no making sense of her new-old home. Along with a hodge-podge of loose fireplace mantels, furniture, books, bottles, and baubles, she’d found a stack of over twenty doors in the attic loft, and a row of as many windows, none of which fit any openings in the structure. Sometimes it was as though this place had simply devoured another and she was discovering that victim-house’s bone fragments within.
No find had been quite so odd as the ancient lace handkerchief she uncovered crammed between two bricks. It was in the rear wall of the original American Foursquare structure, and as this had been an exterior wall before the servants’ quarters were added, she had at first thought it was stuffed there to keep out a draft.
Two things worked against that theory. The first was the reality of the full thirty inches of brick and mortar behind the teensy crevice from which the bit of cotton dripped. The brick itself got cold in the winter, yes, but there were no drafts coming through it. The second was even more bizarre, and Janice couldn’t help mulling it over as she hoisted herself out of the chair and went back to scraping.
She would never have found the thing had she not been determined to run her own electrical. Using an oscillating saw with a mortar-rated blade, she had carefully sliced a rectangle into the plaster beside the door connecting the main house to the kitchen and servants’ quarters. Her goal was to laboriously fish wiring down the walls through the shallow empty space between the lath and brick, to small openings like this one, for a light switch. It meant cutting away some plaster and she hated to do it, but it was repairable - unlike the “gut all the walls” recommendation every electrician had made.
Savages.
Once she’d carefully chipped out the piece of plaster, revealing the brick behind, she saw the handkerchief and felt completely flummoxed. She had photos of this house, courtesy of the Historical Society. Photos taken the day James McDougan brought his bride home to the manse he had built for her, and the plaster – that very dining room wall she had cut - was already installed.
June 16
A bedroom. Janice almost couldn’t believe it was done, but here it was in all its glory. Gone was the battered linoleum some “remuddler” had stuck to the hardwood at least six decades ago when the house was last occupied. Gone was the single bare bulb that had hung from the ceiling by an old, black, fabric stretch of wiring. Gone was the hideous, brown-black mold patch. Gone was the silvery, drooping paper that had hung from the ceiling like -
Peeling flesh
As the memory of the previous night’s dream surfaced, Janice shivered, suddenly cold even in the second-floor heat. The breeze - drifting in from the six-foot arched windows that penetrated two walls of the room - felt clammy where moments ago it had been refreshing. Peeling flesh. She couldn’t get that image out of her head. Never before had she experienced a dream simultaneously so obscure, and yet so vivid. Thrashing toward wakefulness, as she hovered in that twilight realm between oblivion and awareness, the sheets had felt like sandpaper on an open wound; her own skin raw and tender to her touch.
More disturbing still was the sense that she had awakened somehow satiated. Try as she might, there was no denying the feeling of post-coital fullness, as if she’d been well laid and enjoyed it immensely.
Flushing a little and shaking off the memory, Janice refocused her attention on the now smooth, emerald green walls, the gleaming eggshell tone of the glossy trim paint, the rich golden hue of the cedar-plank floor, and the lovingly arranged antique bedroom suite. This was what she needed: real, visible progress. No more camping out in the slightly-less-decrepit than everywhere else dining room. Tonight she would sleep in her bedroom. Yes, the furniture had belonged to the house, but the mattress was new, the dust had been polished away, and this was exactly why she had bought a restoration project in the first place: To become the latest addition to a long line of lives that had passed through these rooms before her.
Dancing a little with delight, Janice opened the cherry armoire and pulled out a clean set of pajamas. She was going to shower, nuke some food, and eat here in the midst of her triumph. Seeing this one room come back to life made the entire undertaking feel possible in a way it hadn’t since she spent that very first week doing nothing but ripping out faux paneling and bleaching mold. This room practically screamed, “You can do this!” She might even have a bowl of popcorn and watch some Netflix. Her labors were finally paying dividends to her ass, and down twenty-three pounds, she could afford a treat. With that happy thought in mind, she headed for the makeshift bathroom downstairs.
There were some things Janice was willing to live with and some she was not. So while the shower enclosure consisted of a rust-pocked cast-iron tub with cheap, clear curtains hanging from a D-ring assembly, the showerhead was a top-of the line rainfall model. As she luxuriated beneath the water, scrubbing away century-old filth and humming to herself, the light began to flicker.
Janice froze. In the guttering illumination, the shower felt ominously loud. The echoing pelt of water against the thin plastic seemed determined to drown out all other sounds. Though the door remained closed, the air felt heavy with another presence.
Ridiculous.
She fought the urge to cover herself as though someone could see her through the cheap shroud. Chest tightening, legs quivering, she fumbled for the shut-off; eyes peering desperately around her, anxious – in the now terrifyingly infrequent spates of light - to catch sight of what she knew could not be there.
There!
A figure - or maybe just a whirl in the steam? Close enough to touch through the plastic if she pressed her hand against it. Fear fled; the shut-off forgotten as she raised her hand to the thin veil separating her from what she was now certain stood beyond, hidden by the fog. Her breathing quickened not with fear, but with desire. Her body was suffused with a need that seemed somehow to come from both outside of herself and from the deepest part of her being. The water cascading down her like the caress of a thousand fingers. The presence barely glimpsed, but heavy in the air around her. Pressing. Stroking. A voice in her ear or in her head.
Mine.
She heard herself moan as though from a long way away, and as her release came – agonizing in its intensity – she sank to her knees in the chipped tub. Panting, confused, ashamed.
What is happening to me?
Suddenly, the light went off again - this time with a pop of finality - and the fear flooded back, threatening to engulf her.
Calm down. Keep it together. You’re ok. There’s no one there.
Determined to have her hearing if not her sight, she frantically patted at the knobs mounted to the tub edge behind her, sliding her wet hand around until she had hold of the shut-off and twisted it, stopping both the water and its attendant cacophony. She opened her mouth, breathing slowly, trying to make as little noise as possible. She didn’t want to miss a single –
Creak, Creak – CRASH!
The sound of someone walking through the room above – her bedroom – was punctuated by an explosion like a gunshot right in the room with her. The floor shook and the tub with it. Janice screamed long and loud. The kind of Hollywood shriek that would have brought the neighbors running if they hadn’t been octogenarians housed a good four hundred yards away.
As if the scream had broken some spell, Janice realized the air felt lighter. She had no sense whatsoever of anyone else in the room. And in the aftermath of her shout, she began to laugh at herself because she knew exactly what that crash had been: falling plaster. All of the work on the bedroom above was bound to unsettle things. The rest was just her imagination running on “spooky old house” and hormones.
Stop getting worked up over nothing. Nothing is wrong. You're just over-tired.
Author's Note
I took the photo accompanying this piece while running electrical for the home in which my family and I now reside. The confusion was real: What on earth was a handkerchief doing stuffed into the brick behind a finished plaster wall? This story is the result of my wild ponderings of that question. The handkerchief remains untouched.
Just in case...
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