Chapter 2 — The First Night

They slept on air mattresses their first night because the furniture truck wasn't coming until Monday. David and Nora in the master bedroom, Owen in the room he'd claimed at the front of the house, Lily in the smaller room next to it.The house was noisy in the way old houses are noisy — the particular grammar of settling wood and contracting pipes that every old house develops over a century of breathing. Nora had grown up in an old house; she knew the language. She lay awake anyway.The upstairs hallway was directly accessible from the master bedroom. The attic door was at its far end.She knew this because she had walked the hallway that afternoon, learning the house. The attic door was at the end — a plain white door, narrower than the others, with a round brass knob and a simple latch. Nothing remarkable about it. Except that she had stood in front of it for a long moment and felt something she could only describe as pressure — not physical, not exactly — more like the sensation of a room on the other side that was paying attention.She had not touched the knob. She had turned around and gone back downstairs.Now, at 2:14 AM according to her phone, she lay on the air mattress and listened to the house.David was asleep. He slept the deep, untroubled sleep of a man who had gotten everything he wanted that day.She listened.There were footsteps above.She sat up. Slow and deliberate, moving across the ceiling — the attic floor. Back and forth, a short distance, like a pendulum. Or like a person pacing.Her first thought was: animal. Raccoon, possum, squirrel. Old houses got things in the attic. The inspection would have noted a serious infestation but might have missed a single animal.She lay back down. Listened.The footsteps stopped.Then, very softly, from above:Scratching.Low and rhythmic, like something drawing a finger along the underside of the floorboards. Back and forth. Patient.Definitely an animal, she told herself.She closed her eyes. The scratching continued for approximately ten minutes, and then it stopped, and then there was nothing but the house breathing, and sometime after that she fell asleep.In the morning she did not mention it to David.She was not sure why.