Creak . . . crack . . . stir. Not a single active sound. Just tiny noises such as a house makes at night. Not even that much. Less noise than a house makes at night. As little noise as a house might make if it were holding itself tensely awake in the dark, listening.
“Cut it out,” I said to myself. “You’ll be going utsnay, too.”
Creak . . . crack . . . settle . . . stir. A whole house lying awake in stealth, waiting, listening. Listening, waiting.
For what? For stealthy feet creeping, for stealthy hands groping . . .
I sat up with a jerk and pushed the light button by the head of the studio couch I slept on. Of all the silly nonsense! I’d never gone in for ideas such as this before.
I’d left a pile of magazines on the floor; I padded over for one on my bare feet, padded back to bed, pulled my bathrobe around my April-chilled shoulders.
I hadn’t any more than begun on a story than there were three little ghost raps on my door. That had me sitting up, breathless.
“Who is it?” I asked hoarsely.
“It’s me, Mrs. Garr,” the whisper came back. “You sick or anything?”
My breath came back with such a rush it knocked me limp. This really was the limit.
“No, I’m not,” I said loudly and clearly. “I woke up, couldn’t sleep, felt like reading. Isn’t that all right?”
“It’s near two o’clock,” she muttered, receding. I heard her slithering back into the room under the stairs where she slept; I’d seen a cot there.
I was so jumpy, I read down into the middle of the story without knowing who the characters were or what they were doing. I started over and was maybe three paragraphs along when I heard the house front door open and heavy steps in the hall.
“It’s me, Mrs. Garr,” a man’s voice said thickly. He wasn’t steering well, because he bumped against the wall before stumbling upstairs.
Just a good old-fashioned drunk, but even that was reassuring. I got up, reinspected my doors, and said to myself, “No one can get in here. And if the house is listening, let it listen. There’s no harm in a house listening if it wants to. You’re going to think this damn silly in the morning.”
I calmed down finally and went to sleep.
But I was sure the house or something was listening to every breath I took.
—
I WOKE UP EXPECTING to laugh, but all I got out was a feeble grin.
After I was up and about, my imaginings of the night before did seem a bit ridiculous, but while I was still in bed, with the house quiet and the sunlight streaming in, I could still feel the house listening. Walter de la Mare, who wrote that poem called “The Listeners,” should have slept in that house once. He’d have had something to write about.
I heard, finally, sounds of people stirring above me. Perhaps it was a house so well, so heavily built that it deadened sound, but even now, thinking back, I can’t remember ever having heard a loud, sharp sound in that house; I can’t remember anyone or anything that succeeded in filling that house with sound. It was a subduing house; it muffled steps and voices, it muffled even the roaring voices of policemen.
But on that morning, I still did not know any policemen.
I got out of bed as quickly as everyone else in the house seemed to be getting out of bed, unhooked my chairs, flung open my doors. There wasn’t a soul in the hall.
After I’d had toast and coffee I kept close to those double doors while I worked about the living room. I was going to look over the inhabitants of that house. If they were suspicious, I’d move. I didn’t want to get into anything.
I saw all the boarders through the morning.
My first catch was a thin woman with dyed black hair and a thin, rouged face; a woman with the pitifully well-pressed afternoon dress, the tired, artificial sprightliness of a saleswoman straining at her job.
It was easy to place her as Miss Sands. I knew that type well enough, at Tellier’s.
She hurried past me without nodding, although I said, “Good morning,” at her pleasantly and clearly.
Sounds in the room under the stairs announced that Mrs. Garr was rising. Barks and cat cries below announced that she was joining pets in the cellar. Mrs. Garr’s voice soon rose from there, too. She was berating someone soundly as a lazy good-for-nothing. She could get up early in the morning, but not Mrs. Tewman, oh no, not Mrs. Tewman; Mrs. Tewman had to lie abed while the gentlemen didn’t get their rooms done. Mrs. Tewman, oh no, not Mrs. Tewman; Mrs. Tewman had stayed dirty; here it was Friday with all the halls to be done, and all the stairs to be done, and what was Mrs. Tewman doing? She was looking at pitchers in the paper. The shrill old voice went on and on.
Well, toward nine a mousey old gentleman in a gray suit slipped quietly down from upstairs.
“Good morning,” I said.
He stopped, as if startled.
“Good morning, good morning,” he replied in a dry, brisk voice before hurrying on as if I were chasing him out.
I couldn’t imagine a policeman being that small; that would have to be the other retired gentleman: Mr. Grant. Heaven knew, he looked innocuous enough.
At midmorning a sullen, black-haired woman—French Canadian, I guessed—slumped up the cellar stairs and on to the second floor, a pail, scouring powder, brushes, and very dirty cleaning rags in tow; that, I guessed, was Mrs. Tewman, finally released to her work from the scolding below.
She stared straight at me but, like Miss Sands, did not reply to my greeting. On the stairs she passed another woman who was coming down; a dark woman with a faint, silky black mustache, a woman so fat she lunged a little from side
