Chapter Two

TWO

Things don’t happen all at once, of course. They start gradually, changes occurring imperceptibly. You barely notice the differences, and once they make themselves known, they seem so small that you easily accept them, adjust your life in a minuscule way. Everyone can make minuscule adjustments. Then there’s another change, a bigger one, but you can still adjust so easily. No problem, really. Then another change, another adjustment, and so on and so on, and before you know it, you’re living a life that by all accounts should be unrecognizable but to you is just normal. Your life is that of a stranger’s, but it doesn’t bother you at all.

That is to say, of course the pranksters didn’t show their faces immediately after Hal and I moved in. I wouldn’t have stayed.

It started with things moving around when I wasn’t looking. This might have been going on longer than I thought before I noticed it; since we were still unpacking, it was easy to lose track of where things were. Once we were settled in, we each assumed the other person had moved things without mentioning it. We became snippy with each other. Why the hell do you keep moving the chair in my office? Hal would yell down to me from the second floor. You didn’t need to change the sheets in the guest room. You saw me put fresh ones on yesterday, I would yell back at him. Eventually the things we yelled at each other became somewhat strange, like Why did you open every cabinet door in the kitchen? and What in God’s name is going on with all the dead birds in the yard? It became hard for me to believe Hal was the culprit. Hal found it a bit easier to carry on believing it was me, but that was his way.

There was also that sense of unease I felt in different parts of the house. I didn’t admit to it initially, but sometimes rooms just felt wrong. It wasn’t every room, and it wasn’t constant, but from time to time, I would walk into a room and feel as if I had just interrupted two people in the middle of a fight. The air would seem angry, and there would be a distinct sense that I shouldn’t be there. This happened sometimes in the dining room, as well as in Hal’s office (Elias’ former playroom or death room, whichever). And of course, the feeling was perpetually present in the basement. The immediate dislike I felt for the basement during the tour of the house only intensified after we moved in, and I certainly never got around to my plans of making the space any nicer. Hal, in his obstinacy, never fully admitted to it, but he avoided the place just as much as I did. We would find excuses not to go down there, or we’d send each other down on errands in our stead. If boxes needed to be moved downstairs, I would play the damsel in distress and appeal to Hal’s manly strength to carry them. If something needed to be retrieved from the basement, Hal would claim that he was too busy and ask me to make the trek. Of course, once we’d learned more about the basement, we both overtly avoided it and both understood why. That, however, happened much later, right before the boards went up.

Eventually, the pranksters started to show themselves, but timidly. I would hear things: objects shuffling in the dining room when neither of us was in there, footsteps upstairs while we both sat in the living room. A quiet voice asking me if I wanted sugar in my tea. Figures spied out of the corners of my eyes, flickering out of sight once I turned my head. It was enough to make a person think they were losing their mind.

“I’m not sure we’re alone here,” I said to Hal. Hal was having similar suspicions, but of course would never admit them to me. What rational person would? Instead, he told me that I was letting my imagination get the best of me and that I needed a hobby.

After weeks of this, the whole process started to grow tiresome. The next time I thought I saw a shadow lingering to my side while I was in the dining room, I stood still, patiently keeping my eyes pointed forward, waiting for something to happen. The shadow remained visible in the corner of my eye, barely existing. I waited it out. It took several minutes, but the shadow appeared to be slowly shifting into a humanoid form—a head, a torso, and legs. It was tall, a full-grown person, and a large presence, from what I could tell. I felt my heart pounding in my ears, but not so much from fear as from triumph. These things that I thought were happening were real. I would tell Hal as soon as I could (and he would tell me I was crazy), but at that moment I had no idea how to act now that I had this information. So I continued standing there, eyes fixed on the center of the dining room table, the shadow—clearly a human figure now—getting closer and closer. I could hear myself breathing.

A voice, quiet and wavering—as if blown in by the wind—sounded in my ear. Tea, ma’am?

This was the first time one of the pranksters ever talked to me, and it took me by surprise. I whipped my head around to see my new companion.

The room, of course, was empty.

When I was a teenager, there had been a feral cat that lived in our neighborhood. For the longest time, I caught only glimpses of him scampering between bushes or out from underneath a parked car. I didn’t get a good look at him until I came upon him lounging in a tree, and even then he was in the neighbors’ yard. For reasons unknown to me, I embarked upon a mission of befriending this cat. I set a dish of canned tuna out for him and waited, but he never came. I left the tuna and went back inside. A few days later, the tuna disappeared. I left more, and we followed the pattern of me leaving food to be eaten by a seemingly invisible cat at an undetermined time. One day, I opened the door to catch him hunkered over the dish, munching away. He looked up at me and scurried off. I started interrupting him during his meals more and more, and eventually he allowed himself to remain in my presence while he ate, choosing food over fear of contact. He still ran away when I got too close, but over time his boundaries shrank, until I was able to scratch behind his ears as he ate. Once, I thought I heard him purr. One day, I opened the back door to find a dead chipmunk on the doorstep, a mangled and bloody mess of fur. I have never been so moved as I was by that horror show. It was a sign that the cat had finally come to accept me as a friendly presence in his life. He had left me a gift.

The first gift Fredricka left me was a cup of tea on my bedside table. I awoke and saw the cup, still steaming and with the correct ratio of sugar to milk, and immediately knew who was responsible. In all our years together, Hal had never once made me tea without being asked, and even then he usually did it wrong.

I tested my theory, anyway. I walked down to his office and sipped at the cup in the doorway. “Thanks for the tea,” I said.

He didn’t look up from his computer. “What tea?”

I smiled. “Never mind.” It seemed that I had made a friend.