Chapter 5: Lullaby for the Floorboards

The words stayed on the wall after sunrise.

Mara had spent the first ten minutes staring at them from the narrow guest bed, knees drawn to her chest beneath a quilt that smelled of mildew and cedar shavings. At some point in the night the rain had stopped. Gray morning light pressed itself flat against the windowpanes, and the room should have looked less alive without the storm breathing at the glass.

It did not.

The plaster beside the wardrobe bore the message in long, wounded strokes, each letter gouged through wallpaper into the chalky flesh beneath.

YOU LEFT ME HERE.

Not written. Scratched.

There were crescents of plaster on the floorboards below it, little pale moons scattered among the dust. Mara had touched one before she could stop herself and found it damp. Not with water. It had the tacky give of something that had only recently stopped bleeding.

She had told herself the same thing she had told herself when hospice patients whispered to corners, when families swore the dead had rung bells from empty rooms, when she woke in the staff bathroom with morphine missing from the locked cabinet and no memory of taking the key.

Stress.

Grief.

A house settling.

A hand, hers, doing things while her mind was elsewhere.

By noon, she had cleaned the plaster from the floor and covered the message with the wardrobe. The wardrobe was heavier than it looked, swollen in its joints from the sea air, and its claw feet screamed across the boards as she shoved it inch by inch until the carved oak back hid the accusation. Her shoulder burned. Her palms blistered. She tasted metal at the root of her tongue.

When the wardrobe finally stood in place, the room seemed to exhale.

“There,” Mara had said aloud, because silence had become too large to leave unchallenged. “Happy?”

The house answered with a faint tick from inside the wall.

After that she had kept moving.

She inventoried what she could bear to touch: tarnished candlesticks, cracked porcelain shepherdesses, moth-eaten velvet drapes, a hall tree whose mirror had gone black at the edges as if burned from behind. She filled three garbage bags with newspapers softened by damp, dead flies, and linens freckled with old brown stains that might have been rust if Blackrift House had not made every innocent explanation feel ridiculous.

The work gave her hands purpose. Purpose kept thoughts away.

Outside, Bellwether Point appeared and vanished in waves of fog. From the kitchen window she could see the downslope of thorn and wet grass, the crooked path to the road, the distant bruise of the harbor below. The ferry had not come in that day. She knew because, even inside the house, she heard the island notice its absence. No groan of engines through fog. No gulls rising in complaint. Only the wind combing the cliff grass and, from time to time, the low boom of waves striking the rocks beneath the foundation.

Beneath.

She tried not to think of the sea cave the attorney had mentioned in an apologetic murmur, as if damp geology were a family shame. She tried not to picture black water sliding under the house, licking stone, waiting in the dark with a patience older than wood.

At four in the afternoon, her phone found a single bar of service near the front parlor’s bay window. She stood there with one hand pressed to the glass and called the only person whose number she had not deleted after the hearing.

Cal answered on the fifth ring.

“Voss?” His voice carried exhaustion and hospital fluorescents, though he was three hundred miles away. “Tell me you’re not calling from jail.”

Mara almost laughed. The sound snagged in her chest and came out smaller. “Not jail.”

“That’s progress.” A pause. She could hear machines beeping somewhere behind him, the soft shoes of nurses, a cart rattling down a corridor. “You okay?”

The question was a trap. Cal asked it like he already knew the answer and was willing to let her lie anyway.

“I’m at the house.”

“The inheritance house.”

“Blackrift.”

“Christ, Mara. That sounds like a place where rich widows poison nephews.”

“Only if the nephews deserve it.”

“Do they?”

She leaned her forehead to the cold pane. Beyond her dim reflection, fog slid past the window so thickly it seemed to have fingers. “Probably.”

Cal’s voice changed. Less banter, more bedside. “You’re not sleeping.”

“I slept.”

“You sound like you spent the night under a freeway.”

“The walls moved.”

Silence.

Mara closed her eyes. She had not meant to say it. The house seemed to lean closer around her, every board listening.

Cal cleared his throat. “Moved how?”

“Forget it.”

“No, don’t do that. Moved how?”

She could have told him about antiseptic and roses, about waking to the room narrowing around her ribs, about her mother’s handwriting carved into plaster. She could have told him that every breath inside Blackrift felt borrowed. Instead she watched her reflection in the glass distort as fog thickened on the other side, turning her face into a pale smear with dark hollows for eyes.

“Old house,” she said. “Bad dreams.”

“Mara.”

“I’m fine.”

He sighed, not irritated. Worse. Sad. “You always say that right before something breaks.”

“I called to hear a human voice, not a postmortem.”

“Then hear this. Sell the place. Sleep in town while you do it. Don’t poke around alone in a collapsing mansion during a storm season.”

“The ferry’s not running.”

“There are people there, aren’t there? Neighbors?”

“Islanders.”

“So, neighbors with knives and chowder. Ask one for help.”

She glanced toward the hall. Somewhere above her, a floorboard gave a soft, deliberate creak.

“They don’t like the house.”

“Smart people.”

“They don’t like me either.”

“They don’t know you.”

Mara thought of Mrs. Pell at the general store crossing herself when Mara gave her last name, of the fisherman on the quay who had stopped talking when she walked by, of the little boy in a yellow raincoat who stared at her with grave recognition until his mother dragged him away.

“Maybe they do,” she said.

The line crackled. Cal’s voice broke apart, reassembled thinly. “—need you to promise—”

“Cal?”

“—if you’re seeing things again—”

“I never saw things.”

That came too sharp. She heard him hear it.

“Okay,” he said gently. “If the house is getting to you, call someone. Call me. Call emergency services. Hell, call a priest. Just don’t decide you deserve whatever’s happening.”

Her throat tightened. “I don’t.”

The lie lay between them, a patient on a bed no one wanted to pronounce.

“Good,” Cal said. “Keep saying it.”

The call dropped before she could answer.

She stood with the phone cooling in her hand until the screen went dark. Her reflection remained in the window, faint and watchful. Behind that reflection, down the hall in the deeper part of the house, something small and wooden rocked once.

Knock.

Mara turned.

The parlor behind her held only shrouded furniture and a piano with three missing keys. Dust drifted in the weak light. The hall beyond it gaped open, wallpaper peeling in strips like shed skin. Nothing moved.

Knock.

A softer sound this time. Wood against wood. Measured. Patient.

“No,” Mara said.

The house settled around the word.

She did not go looking. She had learned at least that much from every horror movie she claimed not to watch and every dying patient who reached toward unseen visitors at the foot of the bed. When a thing called from the dark, you did not answer just because it knew your name.

She went to the kitchen. She ate crackers standing at the sink, though each one turned to paste in her mouth. She drank tap water that came out cloudy and tasted faintly of salt. She found a bottle of whiskey in a cabinet above the icebox, old enough that the label had browned to the color of dried leaves. She uncorked it, sniffed, and nearly gagged.

“Of course,” she muttered. “Even the booze is haunted.”

She poured it anyway.

By dusk, rain returned. It began as a whisper against the roof and grew teeth by full dark, lashing the windows with renewed fury. The kitchen’s single bulb flickered in its porcelain socket. Shadows jumped and huddled. Mara sat at the scarred table with her notebook open and tried to make practical lists.

Call realtor.

Find breaker box.

Photograph damage.

Ask about ferry.

Do not go upstairs.

She underlined the last item until the pen tore through paper.

At nine, she dragged a chair beneath the kitchen doorknob, though she could not have said what she meant to keep out. At ten, she checked the back door twice and found it bolted both times. At eleven, she took the fireplace poker from the parlor and brought it with her to the guest room.

The wardrobe still covered the message.

But during the day, while she had been elsewhere, the house had pushed it back three inches.

Mara stared at the exposed strip of wall. Only the last two letters showed around the wardrobe’s edge.

ME

Just that.

She laughed then, because if she did not laugh she would take the poker and begin smashing walls until she found either wiring, rot, or God.

“Subtle,” she said.

The room gave no reply.

She slept badly, if it could be called sleep. She lay on top of the quilt in jeans and a sweater, boots on, poker along her side like a lover. The rain tapped fingernails along the glass. Somewhere deep in the house, pipes knocked in irregular rhythms. Each time she drifted close to unconsciousness, she jerked awake with the certain knowledge that someone had been standing beside the bed, bending over her face.

No one was there.

The third time, she woke with tears in her ears.

Not crying. Not exactly. Water had pooled there, cold and briny, as if the sea had whispered into her while she slept.

She sat up gasping and wiped at herself with the heel of her hand. The room smelled of wet wood, iron, and crushed roses. The wardrobe loomed against the wall. In the dark, its mirrored door held a dull oval that might have been her face.

Then the melody began.

It came so softly at first that she mistook it for wind moving through a cracked frame. Three notes, then four, rising and falling with the aching simplicity of something meant for a child too small to know fear. The sound threaded through the rain, delicate as a music box heard from beneath a pillow.

Mara stopped breathing.

The notes returned.

She knew them before memory did. Her body knew them. The hairs along her arms lifted. Her jaw loosened. A tremor passed through her sternum and down into her hands.

Hush now, hush now, under the foam…

No words had been sung, yet the line opened inside her with the smell of warm skin and candle smoke, with the sensation of a hand smoothing her hair back from a fevered forehead.

Her mother’s lullaby.

Not remembered clearly. Never clearly. All her life it had been a scrap caught in the brambles of sleep, surfacing when anesthesia thinned her patients’ voices or when a child cried two rooms away. Sometimes she hummed it without meaning to. Once, in the hospice ward, an old woman with no family had gripped Mara’s wrist and whispered, “Don’t sing that. It brings the tide in.”

Now it floated through Blackrift House, sweet and impossible.

Mara clamped both hands over her ears.

The melody continued inside her palms.

She should have stayed in bed. She should have turned on every light, called Cal until signal returned, recited medication dosages, tax forms, state board regulations, anything with edges. Instead she found herself standing. Her boots touched the floorboards without a sound. The poker slid into her grip.

“No,” she whispered.

The lullaby paused.

For one irrational heartbeat, relief flooded her.

Then the song resumed from the hallway just beyond her door.

Closer.

Mara opened the door.

The upstairs corridor lay in darkness except for the pale wash of rainlight from the window at the far end. The wallpaper’s faded roses climbed the walls in tangled columns, their blooms gone brown as old bruises. Doors stood shut along both sides. At the corridor’s end, where the red door should have waited in the memory she did not trust, there was only shadow.

The melody drifted left.

Not toward the end of the hall. Toward the back staircase, the narrow servant’s steps she had avoided because half the banister spindles were missing and the smell rising from below reminded her of wet animal fur.

Mara stepped into the hall. The boards flexed under her weight with a sigh.

“Mom?” The word escaped before pride could stop it.

The house listened.

Rain hammered the roof. The lullaby answered with another phrase.

Sleep now, sleep now, deep in the stone…

A woman’s voice. Not from any one direction. It seemed to come through the walls themselves, carried in the pipes, in the swollen studs, in the teeth of nails buried under paint. It was low and soft and frayed by distance.

Mara’s grip tightened on the poker until the metal bit cold into her blistered palm. “You’re dead.”

A floorboard creaked at the head of the back stairs.

She moved toward it.

Each step down narrowed the world. The staircase was steep, meant for servants’ quick feet and lowered eyes, not for a grown woman with a weapon and whiskey warming sourly in her empty stomach. The walls leaned close. Old handprints darkened the plaster at child height, overlapping smudges as if generations of small fingers had dragged themselves down in the dark.

Halfway down, the lullaby changed key.

Mara nearly missed a step.

A memory struck without warning: her cheek pressed to someone’s shoulder; a nightgown damp at the collar; the taste of blood on her lip where she had bitten through it; her mother’s voice singing too close to her ear while, somewhere below, wood rocked and rocked and rocked.

Then it was gone.

She reached the landing with breath rasping in her throat.

The back staircase opened not into the kitchen, as it should have, but into a hall she had not seen before.

Mara stopped.

By daylight, she had traced Blackrift’s ground floor twice. Kitchen, pantry, dining room, parlor, library, front hall, a shut conservatory choked with dead vines. There had been no corridor here, no long passage running deeper into the cliff side of the house.

This hall was narrow and low-ceilinged, its walls paneled in dark wood that glistened as if varnish had never dried. A runner rug stretched down its length, patterned with waves and small white shapes that she realized, after a sickened second, were not shells but curled infants.

The air was warmer here.

Wetter.

The lullaby floated from the far end, where a seam of amber light showed beneath a door.

Mara looked back up the stairs.

The way behind her had gone black. Not simply unlit. Absent. The staircase vanished into darkness so thick her flashlight, when she fumbled it from her pocket and clicked it on, seemed to strike a wall of ink ten feet above her head.

“Fine,” she said, though no part of her was fine. “Subtle and petty.”

She walked.

The rug swallowed her footsteps. Along the paneled walls, framed photographs hung in uneven rows. At first she kept her eyes forward, but faces drew at the edges of vision. Infants in christening gowns. Toddlers on porches. Schoolchildren with wind-chapped cheeks. Black-and-white. Sepia. Color faded to green. Digital prints curling at the corners. Generations of island children stared out from the frames, all with the solemn, startled look of creatures photographed immediately after being pulled from deep water.

Names had been written beneath each image in careful script.

ELIAS PELL, 1902.

RUTH ANKER, 1919.

SIMON VALE, 1937.

LOUISA BELL, 1944.

CALEB NORR, 1968.