The Girl Below(61)

Before going to bed, I checked Caleb’s room for signs of his whereabouts, but found no appointment diaries or wall calendars, or evidence of any advance planning. At sixteen, as long as you knew what parties were happening on the weekend just ahead—and as long as you were invited to them—life was as organized as it needed to be. The same went for washing. In the corner of Caleb’s room was a pile of his clothing, and I started to sort it, until I came across a stash of crumpled, matted tissues. With a jolt, I realized what was gluing the tissues together and dropped them, along with the washing, vowing never again to set foot in his room.

I tried Caleb’s cell phone one more time before calling it a night and going upstairs to sleep in Pippa and Ari’s room. I slept okay at first—it was after one, and I was tired—but as the night wore on, I woke at regular intervals, imagining that the front door had opened and I’d heard Caleb staggering in. But always, straight after the initial noise woke me, the house was silent, and I realized I’d been tricked.

So preoccupied was I with the routines of insomnia that I failed, at first, to notice that the closet door was open about a foot. I was positive I had closed it before going to bed. I didn’t like leaving any cupboard doors open—not this one or the one in my room. Once the lights were off, that dark space always seemed to take on a life of its own.

I was about to succumb to the usual fit of anxiety when I remembered Caleb’s admonishment not to be such a wimp.

Feeling emboldened, I grabbed my glasses and got out of bed and strode to the closet to show the damn thing who was boss. I put my hand on the wardrobe door, near a simple wooden handle, and pushed, using a regular amount of force, not too violent, not too gentle. But the door stayed where it was. I pushed again, a little harder this time, and the door recoiled by a fraction, then settled back on its hinges. There was an odd springiness to the movement, unlike if the door had been jammed open by an object.

When I tried the other door, it swung open without obstacle, which only made its twin seem more perverse, more unchained from the laws of physics. If the door hadn’t been open in the first place, I wouldn’t have gotten out of bed, so I reasoned—if that was the correct term—that the closet had been trying to get my attention. That it wanted me to go in.

In the event that it should change its mind, I propped a chair against the wide-open wardrobe door, and walked two steps into the closet, far enough that I was really inside it, and not standing half in the bedroom. On either side of me, clothes hung on parallel steel rails, which pointed to the back of the closet. When I’d been in a few days earlier, I was sure a third rail had been there, positioned low against the back wall for suits and shirts, but I found this time that I couldn’t see that far, that the back of the closet was obscured by a heavy gray curtain.

Thinking that’s what it was, I put my hand straight out in front of me to determine what fabric it was made of, expecting it to feel like a kind of heavy velvet. And at first it did feel velvety, or perhaps a little softer, like the fur of a rabbit’s pelt, only the surface of it had no resistance. It allowed me to put my hand in it, then through it, until my arm was invisible below the wrist. I felt a pressure on the tips of my fingers, as though they’d been fitted with tiny suction cups. This tension was gentle but irresistible, slightly ticklish, and I let it pull my hand forward, reassured by the downy warmth of the substance it was passing through. At a certain point, when my arm had disappeared up to the elbow, the pulling sensation stopped, and I found I was able to move my hand around in an open space on the other side of the curtain. This hand then came into contact with something, a knot of fabric, and I toyed with it for a moment before a wave of recognition hit me. The knot of fabric was a bow, and whatever it was attached to was moving and very much alive.

As though bitten by something with very sharp teeth, my hand withdrew with such force that it sent me reeling backward into the wardrobe, where I lost my footing in a wreckage of sneakers and tennis rackets.

I fell sideways, grabbing a handful of dresses on the way down, and the sheer gracelessness of the movement snapped me out of whatever spell I’d been under just moments before. Flooding with adrenaline, I scrambled from the floor of the closet and didn’t stop running until I reached the kitchen, where I turned on every light and the wireless, to hear if the rest of the world was still there. First to escape from the tuner were atmospheric farm noises, a pastoral program about raising pigs. The broadcaster had gotten right inside the pen and held the microphone almost up the pig’s snout as it snuffled and rooted in a pile of rotting vegetables. He described the scene in great detail, but the more I listened to the program, the less like real life any of it sounded. I switched off the radio and tried the television, but that too was stuck on late-night filler, infomercials and Bible clowns talking about the end of the world, nothing that was reassuring. The loudness of it blocked my senses, and I worried that if anything crept up behind me, I wouldn’t hear it approaching. I thought of what was upstairs, and a quiver ran down my neck.