The Woman in the Wall (8 page)

"What was that?" The man's voice was suddenly much closer to me.

"Nothing!" My mother's voice was also much closer. "I didn't hear a thing!"

I reeled in agony and clutched at my head.

"If you didn't hear anything, why are you shouting like that?"

"I am not shouting!"

They were standing inches away from me. I held my breath.

"Relax, darling. It's only a mouse or something behind the books. Here, I'll just—"

"Get away from that wall, Frank!"

"Elaine, what on earth—?"

"Put those books back on the shelf," my mother said in a voice of steel.

"Very well." Mr. Albright's voice was cold as well.

I smiled through my tears. They were quarrelling. All was not lost.

"I wish I knew what put you into such a panic, Elaine," Mr. Albright said grumpily. "You are—very odd about this house. And this, as I've said before and will no doubt say again, is an odd house.
Very
odd, in fact."

Mother was silent for a moment. Then she sighed deeply and said, "I'm sorry, Frank. I'm all on edge today. I'm sure you're right; it's nothing more than a mouse inside the walls."

"Well, for goodness' sake, woman, don't sound so tragic about it. We'll put down some poison and get rid of it."

"No!" she said sharply. "No, I don't want to do that, just in case."

"Just in case what?"

"Nothing. I'm sorry, Frank, I really am. About everything." Her voice faded out on 'everything,' and I concluded that she had left the room.

"Elaine?" he called after her, his voice sounding a little forlorn.

Ha! Let him suffer.

"We'll have dinner." Her voice came back to us from afar. "Wait while I dress."

I gnashed my teeth.

"Elaine?" he called. After several moments went by without a response, I heard him fling himself into an armchair, making a disgruntled noise that sounded something like a cross between gargling and growling.

"Aarrghh!"

I leaned back down and peered through my peephole. He was back sitting in my father's chair again. And as if in mimicry of my poor vanished father, he had barricaded himself behind a newspaper.

I crouched there staring at him, unblinking, until my eye teared with the strain and my limbs stiffened and creaked. I didn't care; I didn't feel it. A murderous rage sang in my blood and roared in my ears. I knew at last what it was to hate without fear or restraint.

So
this
was what had been brewing behind my back. How deceitful my family was, how sly!

They must, each and every one of them, be aware of this ... this conspiracy. If F, a mere visitor to the house, knew, my sisters must. When F said that Mother and Mr. Albright were getting serious, he meant that they were thinking of getting married.

And no one else had thought to mention it to me. I could not imagine a situation that more directly threatened my happiness and security. My mother feared my death by fire; how much more merciful that would be than this!

The fact that my mother had refused so firmly did not comfort me very much. I saw how quickly she gave in about going out to dinner and a movie with this interloper. How much longer would she hold out against marriage? She was saying no now; would she still be saying no tomorrow?

And there was something else about my mother's manner that disturbed me. When she agreed with Mr. Albright that the noise they had heard was nothing more than a mouse in the walls, she sounded like she meant it. Yet she must have known it was me; that was why she tried to steer Mr. Albright away from the walls and denied that there was anything to hear.

So why did she sound so sad when she finally conceded that my involuntary cry was only a rodent squeaking? And what did she mean by refusing to put down poison "just in case"? Just in case I was still here and might eat it by mistake? Why on earth
wouldn't I
still be here? Where else could I be?

I felt more and more uneasy as I thought about it. She had wasted no time in having my father presumed dead as soon as the law allowed. Just because no one had laid eyes on him for seven years, Mother and the District of Columbia, where he had disappeared, had been prepared to scratch him off the list of the living. That apparently put an end to any obligation Mother felt toward her husband. After all, here she was, a bare eleven years after his disappearance, being wined and dined by other men and listening to their marriage proposals.

I began gnawing nervously at my fingernails with my teeth. How many years did New York State require to elapse before death could be presumed? Would it be a longer or shorter time than Washington, D.C., I wondered? We had a book that would tell me, but it was on the library shelf, and that awful man was still in there.

I would have to wait him out. I climbed into my armchair and wrapped the quilt tightly around my body until I resembled a butterfly's cocoon. How long, I asked myself with rising dread, had it been since anyone had last seen
me?

Five years. That was all the time New York deemed necessary before death could be presumed.

The hateful man and my mother had gone out together alone and unchaperoned to eat, drink, and be merry, leaving me to read the law and reflect upon my fate.

After five measly little years of non-appearance, the good people of New York State would decide you were no longer among the living and issue a death certificate with your name on it. The legal system seemed to me to be positively panting for the opportunity to start shovelling dirt onto your grave.

Let this be a warning to you not to retire to the privacy of your room for a spell of meditation and self-communion, or the next thing you know you'll be reading your obituary in the newspaper.

My mother and my oldest sister had not seen me for seven years.

Kirsty had seen me now and then, but not for at least three years. All of those sightings were extremely brief, and none occurred after she was over nine years old. Would the law take the word of a twelve-year-old who wasn't really sure but who thought she
might
have seen her sister out of the corner of her eye three years ago?

The book in which I read about presumption of death also volunteered the information that a diligent search must be made for the missing person before he or she can be declared deceased. I tried to imagine what it would be like, being diligently sought after by the authorities.

I squeezed my eyes shut and curled up into a ball, whimpering softly to myself.

They would tear down my walls and lay bare my secret life.

Of course they would. My family might not be certain, but they must suspect that I had retreated into the walls, and they would tell that to the people who came to look for me.

The authorities, whom I now pictured as large beefy men with tattoos, leather jackets, and chains, could not possibly fit into my passageways, the big apes, even if they could find the entrance. No, they would have to smash their way in. They'd come after me with sledgehammers and crowbars and great, gleaming axes.

After a few moments of whining, snivelling panic, I regained control. Stop it, I commanded myself. Don't be ridiculous! Maybe my family hadn't been seeing much of me recently, but they had plenty of evidence of my presence, didn't they? Think of all the things I did for them: the snacks prepared, the clothing sewed, the repairs made to our mutual home.

But then I thought uncomfortably of how little I had been doing for the last few years. Immediately after the onset of adolescence, I was too depressed to do anything but feel sorry for myself and then, once I snapped out of my dejection, the house was too full of Andrea's friends for me to make much progress on repairs.

Frantically I tried to recall something, anything I had done lately that would prove my existence. Nothing. There was nothing. I had been angry with my family, believing that they had chased F away. The tuxedo I started for Andrea lay in ruins in a corner. The only gifts I had made for anyone in years were the cookies and western shirt presented to F.

F! F could tell them I was here! F could...

No, he couldn't. F thought I was Andrea.

I burst into tears. At first, out of force of habit, I wept silently, but then, in the extremity of my misery, I began to sob aloud, then to wail, a thin, keening sound like the wind in the chimney. What did I care who heard me? They didn't even believe that I existed anymore.

Even if my family didn't get the authorities to tear down my walls, they were going to move away and leave me. Mother would marry that Frank Albright. And then they would SELL THE HOUSE. With me in it.

Such a horrible possibility had never occurred to me before. I knew, of course, that people did buy and sell houses. After all, Father had bought this house before I was born (no doubt the reason why the terrible Mr. Albright wanted to remove my mother from it). But it had never occurred to me that anyone in the family would consider
selling
our home.

What would I do if they did? I would be alone in the world. Even worse, I
wouldn't
be alone; I would have a whole new set of people moving in. I wept louder. I wanted my own people—Mother and Andrea and Kirsty—not some alien family with whom I had nothing in common.

And F. I would certainly lose him as well. The new family probably wouldn't even be acquainted with him; they'd never ask him to visit. I would be cut off from everyone and everything I held dear.

Then there was the fact that I had, over the years, taken over so much of the house. The new people might notice that the interior dimensions of the house did not match the exterior dimensions and decide to investigate. When they realized that nearly half the square footage of the building was inaccessible to them, they might quite reasonably resent the fact.

And they probably wouldn't much care for my eating their food. My appetite was still unfortunately rather hearty. Unless they had numerous children or flocks of visitors (as we had), they would be bound to realize before long that someone else was sharing the groceries. Or unless I went on a rather drastic diet. I sighed.
That
wouldn't last long. I was feeling rather empty right now.

So it amounted to this: even if the State of New York didn't try to hunt me down, once the new owners found that they had an unwelcome guest, they would probably hire an exterminator to evict me. One morning I would wake up dead; gassed, trapped, poisoned, I would be entombed within the walls. And who would there be to grieve for me?

At this pathetic picture I howled aloud with rage and self-pity. I flung myself down on the floor and drummed my heels against the walls of the house, careless of who might hear. I
wanted
them to hear. I wanted them to know that I, Anna, was taking this very personally. How
dare
they treat me like this? After everything I'd done for them!

"I hate you!" I shouted at the top of my lungs, "I hate all of you! Selfish
pigs!
" I shrieked. I screamed every insult I could think of until the words began to run together. Finally the power of speech failed me and I simply howled. There seemed to be an almost limitless fund of fury in me; more anger than one would think that a small person like myself could possibly hold. It came streaming out of me in a steady, hot ribbon of sound.

After a time I quieted a little. For one thing, with all this uninhibited thrashing around, I was a mass of slivers, bumps, and bruises. My head throbbed. It was still sore from where I had banged it earlier as well as from emotion. I ached in every joint. Life between the walls didn't afford enough space for this sort of behavior.

Great shuddering sobs convulsed my body, and the floor became wet with tears, but I stopped shouting and kicking. I felt tired and ill, as though I was coming down with the flu. Gradually my crying slowed; my chest stopped heaving, my breath stilled. My nose was completely stuffed up, but I had neither the energy to blow it nor the handkerchief to blow it on. I closed my hot, swollen eyelids and, breathing noisily through my mouth, lay inert for a long time, not thinking, not moving. Very slowly I drifted off into an exhausted slumber.

I slept. And as I slept I dreamt that the house was on fire.

In my dream, I awakened into a queer yellowish-gray half-light. The air around me was thick and heavy and bitter to taste. When I gasped for breath, I began coughing weakly. I tried to get up but fell back again, dizzy and nauseous.
What's the matter with you, Anna?
I scolded myself, and with an enormous effort of will, I sat up. The murky air swirled thickly about me. Far off I heard a vast roaring, sucking sound.

Suddenly I was standing, not in any of my passageways or rooms, but in the main entrance hall of the house. The great oak doors were thrown wide open, and out on the lawn stood a great crowd of people. I saw Kirsty and Mother, and Andrea with a flock of friends clustering about her. Mrs. Waltzhammer was there, and Mr. Albright and all the neighbors. And there—that sad, gray man lurking behind the lilac bush—wasn't that my father? And F. His features were hazy, but I knew instinctively that that was F smiling and beckoning to me.

Anna!
I knew it was F speaking, though I had never heard his voice before.

Anna!
Kirsty was calling me now, with love and anxiety in her voice.
Anna, come out! The house is on fire!

I turned around to look behind me and stared into the face of an inferno. It was white-hot and ravenous, like the hungry sun I had glimpsed from under the shrubbery all those years ago. I put up a hand to shield my face. I could see nothing but a blinding radiance.

I whimpered in my sleep and woke with my heart thumping in my ears. The blinding light was still there.

And so was someone else.

Someone was behind the light, someone was
here
inside my secret room. I could hear the rasp of labored breathing, the floors and walls creaking with an unaccustomed bulk. I could
smell
an alien presence: some sort of deodorant or shampoo, I suppose.