The Woman in the Wall (2 page)

She stood up. "I must do what I think best," she said, and left the room.

"Gee, Anna," Kirsty said, clutching her doll to her, wide-eyed. "What are you gonna do?" but I didn't answer, because I had already crept back into hiding.

That night I started work on the secret room.

I didn't intend to defy my mother, not at first. I was an obedient child, anxious to win the approval of those I loved. I only wanted to hide from the
idea
of school. It hadn't occurred to me yet that I could hide from school itself.

The day after Mother informed me of her decision I heard her talking on the phone to someone named Mrs. Waltzhammer. Mrs. Waltzhammer, it seemed, was the school psychologist. She was to come to our house in two weeks to meet me and to Discuss The Situation.

"Now, Anna," Mother said when she got off the telephone, "it's very kind of Mrs. Waltzhammer to come to our house instead of seeing you in her office. So I'm expecting you to cooperate. I want you to speak up nice and loud so she can hear you. And maybe you should make yourself a new dress for the occasion. Something really bright and cheerful; something to give you a little color. What do you think?"

I fingered the mottled gray-brown material of my tunic and a tear ran down my cheek. I didn't want something bright and cheerful. I was proud of my clothing. I wore a loose overblouse that had been artfully cut and dyed to resemble a moth's wings, and underneath a pair of matching leggings. I have always admired the way moths can camouflage themselves against many backgrounds and have copied their coloration and outline in my dress as a tribute to their skill. I considered my outfit to be both graceful and practical.

"
I
think it'll be like watching the Invisible Man," said Andrea. "Mrs. Waltzhammer will just see this tiny little hot-pink dress floating around with nobody in it. No, I'm serious, Mom. I think a flashy outfit would make Anna fade out altogether."

"Well, Andrea," my mother said tartly, "what do you suggest, then?"

Andrea gave this some thought and then shrugged. "You could have a big flashing neon arrow that says 'ANNA' pointing at her chair, I guess. That's about the only thing that's going to do any good."

"Oh, Mommy, can we?" asked Kirsty, charmed with this idea. "I want one that says 'KIRSTY NEWLAND' over my chair. Anna, could you make one for me too?"

My mother threw up her hands in defeat. "Oh, wear what you like, Anna! I just thought that a brightly colored dress would help Mrs. Waltzhammer to ... to locate you. Anna? I don't want you to hide from Mrs. Waltzhammer. I mean it, now."

What would happen if I did? I pictured this Mrs. Waltzhammer rampaging through the house like a vengeful tornado, flinging open closet doors, jabbing under beds with a broom handle, upending laundry hampers, relentlessly hunting me down.

I speeded up the schedule for construction of my secret room.

Ours is an old house, a Queen Anne Victorian built in the 1880s with the expectation of housing a large family and a staff of servants. It is known locally as the Bloodgood Mansion and has twenty-two rooms, not counting halls, bathrooms, enclosed porches, attics, walk-in closets, and cavernous linen cupboards.

I created the secret room out of plasterboard, two-by-four planks of lumber, and empty space. Our house had thousands of square feet of unused, unnoticed, unneeded empty space. The space I took for my secret room (really, it was a room and a passageway) was of no importance to anyone but me. So you really couldn't call it stealing, could you?

This was the most ambitious project I had ever attempted, but I had no doubt that I could carry it out. I am not a modest person. In fact, in some ways I'm afraid I'm horribly conceited. This may sound odd to you, coming from the mouth of such a shy person.

Well, it
is
odd; I don't claim to understand it. The very thought of a stranger's eyes upon me makes me faint with fear. My heart pounds in my ears, my hands shake, and I see spots in front of my eyes. Yet whenever someone looks right past me without seeing me, I feel myself infinitely superior to him. I laugh in my secret heart at his stupidity and hug my own quick-wittedness to myself.

Now, I know as well as you do that this is wrong. A really nice person would not think or feel this way. So I do my best to subdue my vanity. For instance, whenever I do something that might be considered clever, I try to take no notice whatsoever. Or if I must think about it, I look for flaws. "
Not
top quality work," I say to myself. And whenever I do something wrong I point it out to myself very firmly. "Anna," I say, "you are a perfect fool." I am not really sure that this is working.

How difficult it is being human! Inanimate objects never have all these complicated emotions. Just think how simple and pleasant it would be to go through life as an object. An attractive little blue sugar bowl with a painted bird on the lid, for instance, sitting in a patch of sunlight on the breakfast table. How peaceful, how tranquil, that must be. And if a careless elbow knocked you over and you smashed to bits, you wouldn't care, why should you? Being brainless has its advantages.

I love things; they are so patient and good. They'll do anything you ask, anything at all, if only you understand their nature and treat them well. Things never make me nervous the way people do. Even I make myself nervous.

But back to the secret room. The library in our house shared a wall with the main staircase. It was a broad, impressive staircase with a curving mahogany banister, and underneath was a narrow, wedge-shaped cloakroom. Since this cloakroom tapered down to a point at the foot of the stairs, most of it went unused. There was a coat rack right by the door, with a jumble of hats and gloves and boots, but the dark recesses of the room were filled with nothing but dust and darkness.

I erected a thin plasterboard wall behind the coat rack. This gave me an enclosed area five feet by five feet with a steeply sloping roof. I carefully painted the new wall to look as though no wall was there; anyone pulling on a jacket or a pair of boots would see only the accustomed back of the closet, empty and dusty as usual.

The next step was a rather large-scale, noisy project. To distract my family's attention, I began work on a great number of repairs and improvements around the house all at once, at all hours of the day and night. I hammered and drilled and power-sanded here, there, and everywhere. I shut off the lights and water for hours and then turned them on again. I dismantled the bathroom sink and left it in pieces all over the upstairs hall.

The first few days, my family complained bitterly, shouting my name, banging on the pipes, and thumping on the ceiling with brooms. This was painful for me; angry people make my stomach hurt. However, gathering up my courage, I carried on. I took apart the table saw and brought it up from the basement. Then I reassembled it in the dining room and began cutting up a great stack of plywood.

This seemed to do the trick. They became resigned and lay on sofas in the front parlor with their heads wrapped in pillows, moaning softly. That was when I knew it was time to begin work in the library.

That night as they slept (or tried to), I erected a whole new wall in the library, parallel to the wall that backed on the cloakroom. The new wall was two feet closer to the center of the room than the old wall, leaving a narrow passage down the whole length of the room. I installed a trap door to the basement at one end of the passage, which gave me an entrance to my hidey-hole. No one but me ever goes down to the basement, so it would be much more secure than an entry on the first floor. Then I cut a door in the inner wall to connect the passage with the little chamber I had carved out of the cloakroom.

For those of you who are confused, or who skipped the last paragraph, feeling that it was too dull to follow, let me summarize: I now had a very small room under the stairs connected to a passageway through the library. This passageway could only be entered through the basement.

All that remained was to make the library look untouched. Working rapidly, I installed the built-in bookcases from the old wall onto the new wall and replaced the books in their proper order. Finally, as the sun rose in the eastern windows, I swept up the floor, re-laid the carpet, and put the furniture back in place. As I staggered off to sleep in the back of a clothes closet, I felt that I had put in a good night's work.

My family never noticed. There were so many rooms in that house, there simply wasn't time to sit in them all, let alone memorize their exact dimensions.

The next day I quickly finished up the various jobs I had begun all over the house and tidied things up again. My mother and sisters were cranky from lack of sleep and hot water, so I kept well out of their way. When everything was back to normal, I crept into my secret room. As it happened, my family chose to sit in the library (a favorite place for homework) that evening, and I found that I could hear them chatting and moving around the room with perfect clarity. Inside the wall I smiled. It was a small, secret smile; the smile of a snail curled up snug and safe in its shell.

It was pitch-black dark in there. I have good night vision, but it was too dark even for me, so I drilled tiny holes in the walls to let in some light. Later on, of course, I electrified my room, but back then I didn't mind the gloom. I didn't mean to live there, you see. All I wanted was a really secure hiding place.

And I had one. Was there ever such a wonderful little room! So long as I was enclosed in those four walls, I was strong and secure; I could do anything. No one could harm me, no one even knew where I was.

While I spent my time fitting out the room and making it comfortable, I could forget about the psychologist, about school, about the future. With much pushing and shoving, I managed to wrestle a big squashy armchair down to the basement and up through the trap door, down the passageway and into the room. Once I had added a footstool, a big cozy quilt, and a small but sturdy table, my little room was as neatly filled as an egg.

I spent as much time there as I could, contentedly sewing by candlelight. Often I would pause and look about me, smiling a little at my own world within the walls of my own beloved house. Some nights I even slept there, curled up in the quilt in the big old armchair.

In my room I almost felt that I had become a part of the house. I could hear its heartbeat, the rumble of its pipes, the creak of its timbers. Sometimes an overwhelming love for the house would well up inside of me so that I wanted to cry. It loved me too, I could tell. We were necessary to each other; I protected it against the ravages of time and creeping dry-rot, and it sheltered me and gave me strength.

I loved it because it was strong, but I also loved it because it was blind and mute and deaf. It had no eyes to see me or ears to hear me or tongue to scold me. It did not judge me, it only held me close in its arms and rocked me gently to sleep through the long silent nights.

The day the psychologist was to come arrived.

"Anna, where are you?" my mother called, her voice sharp with anxiety. When I appeared she caught me by the arm and gripped me firmly, as though she thought I might run away.

"Now, Anna, I want you to stay right here where I can keep an eye on you. Sit in this chair by me ... no, maybe you would be better off in the red chair. We want to get some contrast between you and your surroundings."

Unhappily I hoisted myself up onto the red armchair.

"Looks like somebody left an old dustrag lying around," Andrea observed critically. "Mrs. Waltzhammer'll think we think she's the new cleaning lady."

Both Mother and Kirsty turned on her.

"Don't you call Anna an old dustrag!" Kirsty shouted.

"Andrea! That will be quite enough out of you," said Mother sternly.

"You wait," Andrea said ominously. "You'll see. Mrs. Waltzhammer is going to wipe up the floor with her."

"Don't worry, Anna.
I'll
protect you," Kirsty said. "Nobody's going to use
my
sister for a dustrag," and she waved her fist belligerently at an imaginary Mrs. Waltzhammer. This encouraged me a little, but only a very little. I was stiff with terror.

"Maybe I should tie a ribbon in your hair," my mother worried. At that moment the doorbell rang. We all froze and stared at each other.

Mother recovered first. "Well," she said in an artificial voice, "that must be Mrs. Waltzhammer," and she hurried off to answer the door.

"Here," Kirsty whispered, thrusting her doll at me. "You can hold Bethany. Whenever I'm scared, Bethany makes me feel better."

I took Bethany onto my lap rather reluctantly. She was a large doll, really quite as large as I was. I couldn't help but feel that I must look a little foolish. Still, it was kindly meant, and I couldn't afford to reject any possible source of comfort.

We heard voices from the front hall. First Mother's voice and then another woman's voice, a powerful contralto that cut through walls like a chain saw. Kirsty glanced at me nervously. She looked as if she were about to ask for Bethany back.

Footsteps approached. The woman was talking, her words rolling and rumbling around the halls like boulders in a landslide.

"Great house!" she shouted. "I love these old houses! I'll bet the upkeep just about kills you, though, on a place this big."

"The girls help out, especially Anna. She's very talented that way," Mother said.

"Oh?"

"I know I shouldn't say so, Mrs. Waltzhammer, but Anna really is quite an exceptional child. In
many
ways."

Mother opened the door to the front parlor. "Mrs. Waltzhammer, I'd like you to meet my family," she said. "This is my eldest, Andrea, and my youngest, Kirsty. Kirsty will be starting at Bitter Creek Elementary this fall."

"Pleased to meet you," bellowed the woman. I cringed. Mrs. Waltzhammer was at least ten feet tall and six feet wide. She had an enormous bush of flaming red hair, and she carried the largest purse I had ever seen.

"And this, of course, is Anna. Right there on the red chair." Mother pointed helpfully.