The house was forty thousand dollars under market and nobody could tell us why.
Not the agent, who said the words “motivated seller” so many times in one afternoon that they stopped meaning anything. Not the inspector, who found a soft patch of subfloor in the downstairs bathroom and a furnace with maybe four years left in it and otherwise shrugged. Not the neighbours, who were friendly in the particular way people are friendly when they have decided in advance not to tell you something.
Dan said we were overthinking it. Dan is an optimist, which is a lovely quality in a husband and a dangerous one in a buyer. He walked through the empty rooms on Mercer Street with our daughter on his shoulders and he said, Claire, look at the light in here, and he was right, the light was extraordinary, and we bought it eleven days later.
I want to be honest about that. We bought it fast. We bought it because it was cheap and because Ellie was starting kindergarten in September and because renting had been eating us alive for six years. Everyone who has heard this story since has asked me some version of but didn’t you wonder, and the answer is yes. I wondered the entire time. I wondered and I signed anyway.
The first two weeks were ordinary in the way that moving is ordinary — boxes, takeout, the specific exhaustion of not knowing where anything is. Ellie claimed the small bedroom at the back because it had a window seat. Dan started stripping wallpaper in the dining room and gave up somewhere around the second wall, which is also very Dan.
The noises started on a Tuesday.
I was awake at 2:40 in the morning because I am always awake at 2:40 in the morning, and I heard what I assumed was the house settling. A long, slow creak from somewhere above the hallway ceiling. Then nothing. Then, maybe forty seconds later, another one, further along.
Old houses make noise. This is the first thing anybody says to you. Old houses expand and contract, joists dry out, pipes tick as they cool. I know all of that. I said all of that to myself, lying in the dark with my eyes open, and I went back to sleep eventually, and in the morning it seemed like nothing at all.
It happened again Thursday. Then Friday. Then most nights.
What bothered me — and I could not explain this to Dan in a way that did not sound unhinged — was that the creaks had a pattern. Not a random settling. A sequence. Long pause, creak, shorter pause, creak, then a run of three or four close together, then nothing for the rest of the night. It sounded, if I let myself think it, like weight being shifted carefully from one point to another by someone who did not want to be heard.
I did not let myself think it. Not for another nine days.
Here is the part where I tell you about the attic, so you understand why we did not simply go and look.
There isn’t one. Not a real one. The house on Mercer Street was built in 1961 with a shallow roof and no attic access from inside — no hatch in a ceiling, no pull-down ladder, nothing. The only way into the roof space is a small vent panel on the outside of the gable end, and to reach it you need an extension ladder, which we did not own.
So when I said to Dan, I think there’s something living up there, and he said, like a raccoon?, and I said, maybe, what I was really saying was: I would like you to go up and look, and I know you cannot.
He called an exterminator instead. A calm man named Ray who has probably had this conversation nine hundred times. Ray walked the perimeter, looked at the soffits, looked at the gable vent through a pair of binoculars, and told us the screening was intact and there was no droppings-trail on the exterior, no grease-marks at any entry point, no smell. Raccoons and squirrels, he said, are filthy. If you have got them, you know.
Then he said something I have thought about every day since.
He said: If you’re hearing movement and there’s no mess, that’s usually not wildlife.
I asked him what it usually was.
He looked at me for a second longer than was comfortable, and he said the word “structural,” and he wrote us an invoice for eighty-five dollars, and he left.
On the twenty-second night, I stopped pretending.
I had gone downstairs for water at some point after two. The kitchen was dark and I did not turn the light on, because turning a light on at that hour makes the rest of the house feel darker. I stood at the sink and drank and looked at nothing.
And directly above me — above the kitchen ceiling, in a space that according to every drawing we had been given was eleven inches of joist and insulation and nothing else — something coughed.
Not a creak. Not a settling. A short, muffled, human cough, the kind you make when you are trying very hard not to.
I did not move for a long time. Long enough that my hand went numb around the glass.
Then, very slowly, above the ceiling, the weight began to shift away from me — creak, pause, creak — towards the back of the house. Towards the small bedroom with the window seat.
Towards Ellie.