Nature abhors a vacuum.
Who said that? He didn't know. And his phone was downstairs in the kitchen.
His aunt's old room on the second floor looked … well, occupied. That's how it looked. But it couldn't be. He had removed the four poster bed and walnut wardrobe and bureau after her funeral a month ago. There should be nothing but bare hardwood and plasterboard. And the white lace curtains. He had forgotten to take those down.
Instead, in a reminiscent mood, he had wandered up to the darkened second floor of the three-story Victorian and into his aunt's room to find it cluttered. A weathered steamer trunk, replete with luggage tags, stood open in one corner. Beside it a cheval mirror caught the moonlight that peeked through the curtains. A leather satchel, a pair of boots, one boot collapsed on its side, the other stiffly upright, were placed – by whom he didn't know and couldn't imagine – before the trunk, next to a dark umbrella that leaned against the wall. And was that a puddle of water gathering beneath the umbrella? He couldn't remember the last time it had rained.
In the other corner a new wardrobe stood open. A suit of clothes, some shirts, hung there, the white of the shirts shiny with moonlight. Two pairs of dress shoes awaited their owner in the bottom of the wardrobe.
On the other side of the room a mattress and bed frame leaned against the wall, with its head- and footboard laid out for assembly on the floor. A straight-back armchair, night stand and lamp were arranged in the corner. On the nightstand, a book opened facedown to mark the reader's place showed that someone had already been relaxing in the room.
As he stood agape at the clutter, wondering especially how on earth someone had dragged a full bed – and that wardrobe, which looked to be oak – up the uncarpeted stairs without him noticing, the lamp clicked on, throwing the shadow of a person against the plasterboard.
**
Mickey had lived with his Aunt Cordelia in the decrepit Victorian on the outskirts of Scarborough, North Carolina, almost his entire life. His mother had abandoned him to that fate when he was just two years old – according to his aunt. He couldn't even remember his mother; his aunt's grey and grooved face was the only maternal face he knew.
Of his father, he knew nothing; while his aunt had told stories of her and his mother growing up in the old house, she had rarely even acknowledged that he had a father. Not that he hadn't asked; he had pestered his aunt with questions about his father from the age of six on – and met a stone wall of silence.
Only once did she say anything about him. When he had turned 13 years old, she had stood – wearing her everyday black tea dress – in the archway between the living room and the kitchen, one hand escorting a cigarette to her lips as he scarfed down his Wheaties, and said simply, “Your father's spitting image.”
He froze over his bowl, for once not caring that his cereal would turn soggy. He couldn't believe what he had heard, and it took him a minute to recover, to seize on the opportunity and press for more. He asked her what his father's name was. But she had returned to silence, her face a hard set blank.
After that morning, whenever he passed by a mirror he paused, trying to see himself as older so he could decipher what his father looked like, at least.
**
The shadow stood out on the wall as though sketched in ink. It looked for all the world like someone was sitting in the armchair. Mickey stepped forward into the room, trying to see how some part of the chair was forming the shadow – and realized it couldn't. There was no way the simple wooden arms and straight padded back could be make that shadow. He crept forward until he stood just a step from the chair.
“Where is Cordelia?” he heard a man's voice say.
He jumped back a foot, his hand leaping to his skittering heart. His mind wanted him to look behind the chair; it wouldn't accept that the shadow – or the invisible man who cast the shadow – had spoken to him.
But there was nothing in the lamplit corner behind the chair. Something moved. He whirled and pressed back against the door frame. It was just the lace curtains, waving in a draft.
“Mickey. You're losing your mind,” he whispered, and from the chair he heard a dry laugh. Fear like an icicle ran down his spine; he could move only his head to stare at the empty chair.
When nothing followed the laughter, after he didn't know how long, he dared to take his gaze away. The open wardrobe and steamer trunk tempted him to go look inside them – perhaps he would find the ventriloquist playing tricks on him – but then he looked in the mirror that stood beside the trunk.
In the mirror he saw the armchair, and sitting in the chair, a man in a fedora who looked exactly like Mickey.
**
In the coming days – after he looked in the mirror and bolted from the room – he avoided the second floor of the house completely. Of late, he had been spending the daytime hours outside the empty house, writing his stories and poems from the stone porch instead of his study. He continued this practice now, writing what little he could, and at night he stole inside and set every room of the downstairs ablaze.
He would sit in the kitchen, where he could watch the stairs through the twisted balusters, all the way up to a portion of the hallway past the upstairs landing. He didn't know what he expected to see – another shadow on the wall, perhaps. Mostly he just listened, to hear mostly the usual creaks and groans of the old house, the drips from iron faucets, the tapping of branches on single pane windows.
Then there were the nights when it sounded like the furniture in his aunt's room – furniture which wasn't really there, his mind told him, it was just his insane imagination – was being rearranged. He heard the gravelly scrape of the trunk being pulled from one corner to the next; the clumping of the wardrobe being crabwalked across to the room; the screeching of the bedposts. Only the reading corner, with the armchair and night stand and lamp, seemed to go untouched.
He didn't dare go see what was happening at night. But one morning, after a particularly loud, sleepless night, when the room had been silent for several hours, he crept up the stairs to look in the doorway. Daylight fell through the lace curtains in blocks on the bare hardwood – and there was absolutely nothing in the room.
“Of course,” he whispered to himself. “There's no one here. I'm just crazy.” But that day he set up a bed of blankets and a sleeping bag outside in the garden shed, and slept there until he could restart his vigil in the evening.
This became his new routine. His writing was completely suspended. A week passed, then ten days; he didn't bother returning to the room in daylight – he knew then it would be empty – and he couldn't make himself to go upstairs at night.
One night in the second week of his vigil it rained. The rush of drops on the slate roof covered the background sounds of the house, so he didn't hear the front door from his kitchen seat; he only realized it had opened when a cool breeze wafted under the table. The breeze cut off as soon as it had started, and then the man with the fedora, wearing a black trench coat and suit, stood at the foot of the stairs shaking rain off his dark umbrella.
The man looked to be his age, and Mickey had deja vu: he felt like he was looking in a mirror, though he could see now that the man did not look exactly like him. More like his spitting image. “Good evening, son,” the man said, as he folded his umbrella.
Mickey sat frozen to his seat, his hands braced and sweating on the table. The man hung his umbrella on the banister post and started up the stairs. “Tell your mother that I'm here,” he said.
His mother? The man was halfway up the stairs before he could blurt out, “My mother isn't here. Was never here.”
The man paused, one hand on the banister, and looked at him with grinning eyes. “I mean Cordelia,” he said. “Cordelia is your mother.”
The man continued up the stairs. In the hallway above, at the threshold of light from downstairs fading to shadow, he disappeared. Mickey bolted from his chair so fast he knocked it to the linoleum. He ran to the foot of the stairs, where he could see a ways down the hall to his aunt's room. Within a few seconds, lamplight spilled out into the hallway.
His mind insisted he was insane. But Mickey lifted a foot, and gripping the banister with his fist, pulled himself into motion up the stairs.
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