Entry #97
January 6, 2025 — 9:45 PM
Rain started at dusk and settled in like someone dragging a heavy coat across the roof, slow and inevitable. The downspouts took it hard, gulping and rattling against their straps. Inside, the baseboards ticked as the heat worked against the cold. I was priming trim in the back hall, brush held too long in the air, listening because something had tucked itself into that general noise and stayed.
It wasn’t volume. If anything, it hid under the wash. Three light snaps, a pause, then two. Not a rhythm you get from water, not wind-blown branches. The first set came through the north wall, or that’s where it sat in the room, then it traveled the moment I moved. Sound in this place recoils when you go at it.
I set the brush down, wiped my hands, and stood still enough to feel the damp work through my shirt. I closed my eyes like I do when matching tones in a hiss—gutter chain makes a bright, tinny clatter; plaster flexes deep and soft. This was neither. A high, dry crackle, almost like teeth on a pencil or a finger running the length of a thin reed.
Back hall to kitchen, the floor cold through my socks, rain-breath leaking at the window sash. The refrigerator’s motor cut off and the house exhaled. Three, pause, two—behind the pantry wall this time. The small door to the old dumbwaiter is there, the one I oiled last month until the pulley would roll without complaint. I put my ear to the panel. The wood held a soft chill from the shaft.
Rope against wood. Not a saw, not a rub from settling. A light, coaxing pull, then nothing. I eased the panel up. Air came out, stale and wet-metal, carrying old dust. The cab hadn’t moved. The rope trembled once and stilled. The rain shouldered in again and what I was waiting for disappeared under it entirely.
I stood in that doorway longer than made sense, hand on the lintel. When the gutters emptied a little, I heard it again, far above—same sequence, thinner, like the sound of a crack traced with a nail. The back stair goes up from here to the third-floor landing and the little door I still haven’t gotten open; the jamb swells when it’s damp and gives enough resistance to make me cautious. I went anyway.
The stair has that dry, unpainted feel under fingers, old grain like corduroy. On the second landing there’s a riser with letters abraded into it, long-ago pencil, mostly gone—an E and part of a second mark, a downstroke cut off. The rain made a halo on the hall light, fine mist breathing from the cracked window at the turn. Up another flight, counting slowly, matching the pattern without meaning to.
At the third-floor door the sound sat just the other side. I could feel the damp in the jamb. I pressed my thumb into the swollen edge and it gave a little then held. The cadence came when the downspout paused and vanished the moment the wind shifted. Close, then far. I tried to map it and it slid away. I took out the putty knife I keep in my pocket and worked it into the seam, stopped myself before I made more of a job of it than I can finish in the dark.
Standing there, what became clear was not the source but the way of it. Any time the house had cover, it took it. When the rain traveled the siding, something else traveled behind it. I am getting better at unbraiding those strands—shutting off the appliances, waiting through the gusts, catching the small things that only occur in the gaps. But that only gets me to a door that doesn’t want to open on wet nights.
It occurred to me, heading back down with paint still uncapped on the counter, that it wasn’t trying to be heard over the noise at all. It talked because there was noise to take the blame.
— Thomas Hale