Entry #24
November 23, 2023 — 10:00 AM
Last night I pulled the last of the staples from the stair runner. The treads under it are a patchwork of old varnish and clean scars where the carpet chewed the grain. The middle of each one dips slightly, a shallow path worn into oak. Dust clipped to my socks in a pale cuff. The house had that woolly smell that floats up when you lift something that’s sat too long—felt and adhesive, dry wood, a damp thread I can’t place.
I left the work light on the floor below, pointed up, so the risers caught in shallow angles. The balusters threw narrow bars of shadow across themselves. The handrail, stripped two days ago, felt cool and a little sticky where the last of the solvent hadn’t flashed off. Underneath the curve of the rail there are two shallow cuts I uncovered when the paint sloughed away—an S that curls into itself, and beside it something that might be the start of an E or just a slip of the chisel. I meant to sand them out today.
I was ready to go up. I put my hand on the rail and set my foot to the first tread, and then I didn’t move. No noise. No draft I could point to. Only a change in my own awareness. I hate the phrase “felt watched.” It’s lazy and it invites the wrong picture. I won’t give it that. But something about the black square of the landing and the cutouts of the doorways made my back surface all at once—shoulders, the small muscles along the spine, the space between me and the wall across the hall that I couldn’t see from where I was.
I stood there longer than I meant to. The house seemed to press in a notch, not louder, not quieter, but closer. The light hummed. The refrigerator knocked once in the kitchen and then settled. Somewhere a pipe ticked like cooling tin. Air on my shins felt cooler than the air at my face, though that could have been the solvent. My breath came back at me in the stairwell and made a low noise in my own ears. The shadows made a ladder of their own on the risers, misaligned by a fraction that nagged at my eye.
I tried to give it a shape I could hold. The upstairs is unlit; the light from below reaches only the first five steps. The landing makes a neat frame of dark wood and plaster. It’s a simple geometry. Things seem like presences because there are too many edges stacked together. That’s all. Still, my hand tightened on the rail and stayed there. My heel lifted, hung, found the tread again without weight. I became aware of the sound of my shirt against my back. It is strange how a house can do nothing at all and still narrow you to a point.
Nothing appeared. No change in the lines. No shift in the dark. Nothing to lay a finger on. I listened for a person’s weight, or the lag of a floorboard, and got only the soft, even thrum of the furnace through the returns. The landings at the top are ordinary rectangles. I know that. I built my day around that. I don’t like that my body asked for confirmation.
After a while—the word is right, it was a while—I moved. Not because I figured anything out, or because something announced itself, but because standing there had begun to feel like answering to a thing I won’t name. I finally moved only because staying still felt worse.
— Thomas Hale