What Eli Sees – Chapter 5
“Ruth Hears Something”
Ruth Crane was a woman who believed in rational explanations. She had grown up Methodist in a small Rhode Island town, which meant she believed in God and the soul and the general principle that the universe was not random but also meant that she drew a sharp line between genuine faith and what she called superstitious nonsense. Old houses creaked. Mice scratched inside walls. Dreams were just dreams. The cold in the northeast corner was a drafty window that needed caulking, which she had added to the list.
She heard it for the first time on October twelfth.
Robert was at a faculty meeting. Claire was at a friend’s house. Eli was in bed — she had checked, he was asleep with the lamp on as was his current insistence, a regression she was gently trying to address by leaving the lamp and picking her battles. Ruth was at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and the Dunmore Gazette and the house was quiet around her in the way old houses are quiet, which is to say not quiet at all but filled with the constant low conversation of settling wood and pipe-hiss and the particular creak of the third stair which sounded, if you weren’t used to it, like a footstep.
She was used to it.
What she heard was not the third stair.
It came from above — from the second floor — and it was not a creak or a settle or any of the ordinary domestic sounds she had catalogued in her two weeks in the house. It was a voice. Low, indistinct, the words not separable from each other, but clearly and unmistakably a voice. A woman’s voice, she thought. Speaking slowly, steadily, the rhythm of someone reading aloud or reciting something from memory.
Ruth put down her tea.
She sat very still and listened.
The voice went on for perhaps thirty seconds. Then stopped.
She went to the foot of the stairs and looked up. The hall was dark except for the thin line of yellow light under Eli’s door.
“Eli?” she called.
Nothing.
She went up. She checked Eli — asleep, genuinely, deeply, his chest rising and falling and his Hobbit fallen shut on the nightstand. She checked every other room. Empty. She stood at the end of the hall, three feet from the northeast corner, and the cold came off it like standing near an open freezer and she thought: drafty window, and turned away, and did not look at the botanical wallpaper, and went back downstairs.
She did not hear it again that night.
She heard it on October fifteenth. October nineteenth. October twenty-third, twice, and the second time she went upstairs and the voice was clearly coming from the northeast corner and she stood outside it and listened and the words began to separate from each other and she heard — she was certain she heard — a name. Her name. Ruth. Spoken in a tone she could not characterise, a tone that was neither threatening nor welcoming but that carried, in its modulation, a knowledge of her that no disembodied voice should have.
She went downstairs and poured a glass of wine and sat at the kitchen table and thought about drafts and acoustics and the way sound traveled in old buildings.
She did not tell Robert.
She did not tell Eli.
But that night, for the first time in twenty years of adult, rational, superstition-free life, she left the bedroom lamp on while she slept.
At three in the morning she woke from a dream she couldn’t remember and in the yellow lamplight she saw, standing at the foot of her bed, a woman in a dark dress with her face turned away. The woman stood perfectly still, her hands at her sides, and the room was cold — the whole room now, not just the corner — and Ruth opened her mouth to scream and the woman turned and she had no face at all, just smooth unmarked skin from hairline to chin, and Ruth’s scream died in her throat and the lamp flickered and the woman was gone. Ruth sat in the yellow light until dawn, her knees pulled to her chest, telling herself it was a dream. Telling herself it was a dream. Telling herself.
In the morning she was at the kitchen table when Eli came down for breakfast. She looked at her son — at the circles under his eyes, at the way he checked the corners of the room before sitting down, at the expression on his eight-year-old face that was older than eight — and she thought about asking him something.
She thought about it for a long time.
She poured his cereal.
“Sleep well?” she said.
“Fine,” Eli said.
They ate in silence, both of them keeping their secrets, the house creaking around them in the October morning as if listening to both.