Entry #5
July 17, 2023 — 3:00 PM
The rain started before lunch and never cleared. By three the sky had folded down and the house wore evening. The upstairs hall felt damp through the drywall dust. I set a fan at the far bedroom to move air and went back to the linen cupboard door, which has been swelling against the jamb since I pulled the carpet. A few tight passes with the block plane. The shavings curled up like pale ribbons and stuck to my forearm.
That was when I noticed it—light, a touch sweet, like cooled beeswax or old polish left too long in a drawer. Not the oily sweetness of mold starting, not the carrion sweet you get when a mouse dies in the wall. This was clean, thin, and old. It was only there when I stood with one boot on the strip of floor between the cupboard and the hall rail. Move two steps toward the stairs and it was gone. Come back and there it was again, riding the air just above the baseboard.
I set the plane on the top step and crouched. Ran my fingers along the baseboard seam. Chalky paint, a little grit. No damp to it. The plaster above showed hairlines from settling—nothing new—no yellow tides you get from an old leak creeping back. I took a reading with the moisture meter out of habit. Nine on the plaster. Ten on the lower trim. Normal, given the weather.
I opened the cupboard proper and checked the shelves one by one. Empty, dusty pine boards with a faint cotton smell, like the inside of a trunk. No candle stubs, no tins of wax polish left by someone decades ago. I knocked at the back and the sound came back hollow. The toe kick had a loose piece of quarter round; I eased it away and looked into the dark with my light. Spiderweb, a film of lint, some husks where a mouse had nested, and droppings dried to hard seeds. No carcass. No shine that would be wax. I sniffed the gap and got only dust and the sour metal of old nails.
I checked the hall runner I’d rolled and leaned by the banister—nothing but wet wool. I looked along the rail for drips. The rain came slant from the west windows, ticking the glass. No inside wet. I checked the ceiling for any ringed edge that would tell a slow leak. White all the way across. The smell held steady in that one strip, like it had been folded into the air there and nowhere else.
For a minute I wondered if it was me—soap, or something I’d handled. I smelled my gloves: rust, pine, rain. I took a scrap bag from the landing and emptied it on a tarp: bent staples, carpet tack, splinters. Nothing that would carry sweetness.
A gust pushed rain against the far bedroom sash and it rattled. I left the hall and went to wedge a rag in the gap. On the way back I flipped the fan to low; the hallway felt colder with that wet breeze drawing through.
I stepped into the strip by the cupboard again. Just rain, and dust, and planed wood. The sweet note was gone as if I had imagined it. I stood there long enough to be sure, then marked the place in my notebook: upstairs hall, linen cupboard, west side. Beeswax, faint. Check again later.
— Thomas Hale