The Night Visitors

Chapter Twenty-Two Mattie

I’D FORGOTTEN ABOUT the drop. It’s been thirty-four years since I used the sliding panel under Caleb’s bed that leads to the closed-off back stairs. Before the stairs were blocked off I asked my father what the panel was for and he told me it was a laundry chute to make it easier for the housemaid to collect laundry from upstairs. There would have been a wicker hamper underneath it. Now there’s a three-foot drop to hardwood floor.

I hear Alice’s aggrieved curses as she hits the floor. I scramble down to put my hand over her mouth and shush her. “Do you want to give away where we are?” I hiss. I feel her head shake no. When she’s still, I reach up and slide the panel shut as slowly and carefully as I can. Then I crouch next to Alice and listen.

The breaking glass sounded like it came from directly under Caleb’s room, which means it came from my father’s study. Even after all these years I feel a shock at the violation of the sanctity of that space. Sancta sanctorum, Frank, an ex–altar boy, jokingly called it when we snuck up the back stairs, past the now blocked-off door that led to the study.

The intruder is in the study. Thank God I took the gun out of the desk drawer. And thank God the study door locks from the outside . . .

Assuming I remembered to lock it. Did I? I’d been upset about seeing that pattern in the dust. Could I have forgotten to lock the door from the outside, like I forgot to let Dulcie in? I strain my memory, but while I remember dropping the key in the crystal bowl, I don’t remember locking the study door. At least I have a gun. I reach to feel its comforting cold bulk in my pocket, but before I can touch it Alice grabs my hand.

“What is this place?” she whispers. Her voice sounds much younger.

It’s creepy, Frank had said when I showed it to him.

“It’s just the back staircase,” I whisper. “My parents had it blocked off when I was fourteen.”

“Why?” Alice whispers back.

I sigh. This is not a story I want to tell, but at least it might take Alice’s mind off her murderous ex (Could it be? I wonder. Did Davis have time to get here from New Jersey?) rifling through my father’s study. “I used to use the stairs to sneak out at night—and then I got in trouble and was sent away.”

“Where to?” She’s not letting anything go.

“To juvenile detention,” I reply, glad it’s too dark to see Alice’s expression. This is not something I often tell people. Doreen once said I should own what happened to me, that I was a survivor of the antiquated juvenile corrections system and that by sharing my story I would empower other survivors.

That was the only time I ever told Doreen to fuck off. No matter how enlightened people think they are (woke, the interns call it), they look at you differently when they know you were in JD. But I don’t have to see how Alice is looking at me. Her voice is awed when she asks, “JD? A judge’s daughter?”

“Yeah, I know, ironic, huh? But my father had this idea that if he went easy on me people would call him a hypocrite. He had a reputation as a judge who was tough on juvenile delinquents. He thought the world was going to hell in a handbasket because parents were too permissive and kids didn’t have to face up to the consequences of their actions. So when I got picked up for making out in a parked car—”

“That’s a crime?”

“‘Public indecency,’ my father decreed.” Slutting around, my mother called it. “He thought he had to treat me the same as any other miscreant. I got sent to the New York Training School for Girls in Hudson.”

Alice is silent for a moment. “I’ve never heard of that place,” she says at last.

“They shut it down in 1975, two years after I finished my time there. It . . . It wasn’t a very nice place.” And just like that the black hole we’re sitting in becomes the windowless basement cell used for solitary confinement, Hudson’s preferred method of punishment. I can hear even now the drip, drip, drip from the leaky faucet in the hall and the tread of the guard’s footsteps on the stairs.

“Shit,” Alice says in a tone of commiseration.

“Yeah,” I agree. “When I came home the back stairs were boarded up. My mother said it was because of the new baby—Caleb—that she was afraid of him falling down the stairs, but I knew it was a message to me. There’d be no more sneaking out at night.” It had felt, when I came back, like a piece of me was gone too, like that rebellious girl who would sneak out to meet Frank Barnes down in the hollow had been erased. I had thought I might find her again when I saw Frank, but Frank had been sent straight from boot camp to a military school, and then he joined the army. Although I’d caught glimpses of him on holidays, it was another ten years before I really talked to him again.

“Wow,” Alice says, “what a weird-assed thing to do.”

I almost laugh. Weird-assed, indeed. It’s like we’re two teenagers on a sleepover, cuddled in a closet, telling each other ghost stories. “Yeah, but then Caleb found the sliding door underneath his bed the summer he was ten. The house inside the house, he called it. I didn’t know what he was talking about at first. I’d forgotten about the stairs. But then he took me here and I thought, yeah, this is what he needs: a house inside the house, another place with a different family where he could be a normal little boy without my parents carping at him every minute. It became our place.”

I listen for a moment and hear a step and the creak of casters—my father’s chair being moved. The intruder’s still in the study. Then I turn on the flashlight, aiming it at the ceiling. It’s still here: a night sky and a million stars and tiny spaceships hanging from invisible fishing lines. A galaxy far, far away that I made for Caleb a lifetime ago. I don’t know what I thought would have happened to it—I’ve barely let myself think of it in the decades since Caleb’s death—but it feels like a miracle that it has survived.

I hear a clunk from the study below us. We have to find Oren. I sweep the beam of my flashlight across the landing from the stairs that lead up to the attic to the ones that lead down to the first floor and basement. The light comes to rest on a figure standing on the newel post of the downward stairs. It’s Princess Leia, holding her hands up, as she does in the first movie when she appears as a hologram begging for help from Obi-Wan Kenobi, only here she’s holding a Post-it note. Alice grabs it and shines the flashlight on it.

“You’re our only hope, Obi-Wan Kenobi,” it reads. “Return to Dagobah for more information.”

“Dagobah is the planet Yoda lives on,” Alice says.

“When we were playing in the house, Dagobah meant the basement. There’s a crawl space there that reminded Caleb of the cave Yoda lives in.”

“Can we get to the basement from here?” Alice asks. I notice that she doesn’t question why Oren would know something that Caleb knew. Earlier she accused me of bringing Oren back here so that he could communicate with Caleb, and she wasn’t wrong. But the idea that he is actually doing that now is not something I want to dwell on.

“Maybe. My parents didn’t wall that door up, they just stacked boxes in front of it. I moved them just enough so I could get by when Caleb and I started using the stairs again and I haven’t moved them since.” I sense Alice staring at me, but if she thinks it’s odd that I haven’t touched the boxes in my basement for thirty-four years she refrains from commenting, so I go on. “The stairs go by the study, though, so we’ll have to be really, really quiet. And we’d better turn off our flashlights.”

I turn off my flashlight and Alice follows suit. When we’re plunged into darkness, for a moment I can’t move. Once Caleb found these stairs again I used them regularly to sneak out. At twenty-five, home from graduate school, I shouldn’t have had to sneak out, but my parents never trusted me after I got back from Hudson. It was as if, having consigned me to that hellhole, they blamed me for what happened to me there. I was tainted. And the worst thing was that a part of me agreed with them. When I ran into Frank again—back from military school and two years in the army—I sensed that same whiff of damage in him.

I told Caleb I’d come back for him the next summer, when I’d gotten my MSW and could get a job. My mother was carping and shrewish, so consumed by her own anxieties that she had to control everything—and everyone—around her. I knew she squelched every boyish desire in Caleb’s heart, but he had such a big heart I thought it would remain intact. My father was strict, but his punishments were always impartial and cold. No dinner. Extra chores. Time-outs. Carefully calibrated punishments that left you feeling ashamed.

I thought that Caleb could survive them both for another year. At least that’s what I told myself. Really, I wanted that year to myself. I wanted to answer that siren cry of the train whistle calling me to New York City. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, Doreen tells me. You wanted what any young woman would want. And you did come back.

I could have come back after college.

And worked at Stewart’s? You wanted a good job so you could take care of him. You were going to take him with you once you graduated.

I hadn’t counted on my father’s own sense of shame.

I feel Alice’s breath on the back of my neck and her hand on my elbow, ready to be led into the darkness. Trusting me. As Oren has. As Caleb did.

And then I see something glowing faintly on the first step. I look closer and see that it’s a plastic Day-Glo star. There’s one on each step going down, a trail to follow. A lifeline, like the one we’d used in Lava to navigate the treacherous terrain of our own home.

It unfreezes me now. Only, as I step forward, I can’t help thinking that a lifeline tossed by a ghost might be anything but.