Entry #45
April 13, 2024 — 8:30 AM
I worked late again. The light goes wrong in here after ten — narrow, yellow, and sharp where the work lamp hits, then everything else flattened to a dark pane. I was stripping paint from the front parlor baseboards, a heat gun in one hand, putty knife in the other, the cord dragging a long tail behind me over the oak. The radio was off. It’s faster without the chatter.
The first time it was only a weight to the left, a hold in the air. I was kneeling in the corner by the parlor doorway, lamp pointed at the wall. The hall behind me was a black rectangle. I had the clear sense — not a thought — that someone had just taken their place there. I turned and stood. Nothing. The hall was only the hall: plaster seams, a broom leaned against the runner, the return vent like a mouth with its grille missing. I checked the front door. Still latched. I went back to the board.
Five minutes later, the same hold, closer, now as if it had come up behind my right shoulder and then retreated a half inch when I turned. I moved the lamp so it bled out past me into the opening. My own shadow shaped a hard wedge into the hallway, cutting it. No person. No motion except dust lifting in the heat I’d left in the air. I felt ridiculous and kept scraping.
There’s a rhythm to this: heat until it bubbles, lift with the knife, slide the slough into a grocery bag, repeat. The room filled with the smell of cooked linseed and old sugar. The cord kept tapping the threshold as I shifted. Each time it tapped, I imagined a footstep answering. I told myself to stop making a metronome out of it.
I moved to the kitchen for a different problem: the jagged hole someone left when they swapped the switch box, edges broken back to lath. The doorway to the mudroom is opposite that wall, just a standing absence. I mixed compound and cut a patch. Behind me, from that absence, a small give from a plank, the sound something makes when weight leaves it. I turned with the knife still raised. No weight. No one. Just the cool rectangle and the scent that blows in from there — wet wood and bleach from an old spill that won’t leave. I stepped to the jamb and put the light on the grain. Two shallow scratches at hip height, crossed. Could be a child’s tally. Could be initials — an E and something that wanted to be more but stopped. I ran my thumb over it and felt only fibers.
Back at the switch, applying mesh, I kept myself facing the room, tools laid out so I wouldn’t have to turn much. The feeling didn’t go away; it adjusted. The sense of it took up a defined place now: just beyond each doorway when I made myself forget to watch them, or directly at my back when I wedged into a corner to reach a high spot. I checked three more times. Nothing but pale rectangles and the kinds of noises a house makes when you’re listening in pieces. A hinge ticked once by itself. The sack of peeled paint settled with a soft inward sigh.
The doorways kept demanding my eyes like a bad habit, and each look was empty enough to make the next one feel necessary. I don’t like giving the house that much of my neck. So I changed one thing. I left the hall light on behind me while I worked.
— Thomas Hale