The Tenant Below

 

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The first time I heard it, I thought it was the pipes.

We'd just moved into the bottom floor of a converted house on Ellard Street, me and Cole, my brother, splitting rent because neither of us could afford to live alone after Dad died. Old house. The kind that breathes when the weather turns. Radiators that tick. Floorboards that settle at night like an old man easing into a chair. You learn to ignore it. You have to, or you never sleep.

But the knocking wasn't the house. The house had a rhythm, and the knocking didn't fit it.

It came from below us.

We were the bottom floor. There was nothing below us but the crawlspace, and you couldn't even stand up down there, Cole had checked it the first week, looking for the water shutoff. He came back up pale and said it was just dirt and cobwebs and a smell he didn't like. We laughed about it. Old house, old smell.

The knocking started in October.

Three knocks. Always three. Slow, patient, spaced out like someone counting between them. The first night I figured I'd dreamed it. The second night Cole heard it too, and we both sat up in the dark living room, listening, while it came up through the floor right under our feet.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

"Settling," Cole said. But he didn't believe it. I could tell by how quiet he got.

I want to tell you we called someone. A plumber, a landlord, anyone. We did call the landlord, an old woman named Mrs. Petrosyan who lived two streets over and answered the phone like she'd been waiting for it to ring. When I told her about the knocking from the crawlspace, the line went silent for a long time.

Then she said, "Don't answer it."

I laughed, because what else do you do. "Answer what? It's the pipes, right? Or animals?"

"Don't go down there," she said. "And don't knock back."

She hung up.

We should have moved out that night. I know that now. But rent was paid through the year and we had nowhere to go and grief makes you stupid and slow, like wading through water. So we stayed. And the knocking kept coming, every night, a little louder, a little closer to the surface of the floor.

By November, Cole started knocking back.

I begged him not to. I reminded him what Mrs. Petrosyan said. But Cole had always been the one who poked the dead animal with a stick, who climbed the fence with the dog behind it, who needed to know. He sat on the floor one night with his ear pressed to the boards and when the three knocks came, he rapped his knuckles three times in answer.

The house went very still.

And then, from below, not three knocks.

Four.

Cole looked up at me and grinned, this awful excited grin, and knocked four times back.

Five came up through the floor.

It became a game to him. Every night, the counting. Every night, the number climbing, the two of them trading knocks like a conversation in a language with only one word. I'd lie awake listening to my brother talking to the thing under the house, and I'd tell myself it was nothing, it was settling, it was pipes, it was a raccoon, it was anything but what it was.

The night it reached forty, Cole stopped knocking back.

I came home late from a double shift and the apartment was dark and the knocking was going , forty, I counted, forty exactly and Cole was sitting on the floor in the middle of the room with his back to me, perfectly still.

"You're letting it win," I said. Trying to make a joke of it.

He didn't move.

"Cole."

He didn't move.

I crossed the room and put my hand on his shoulder and he was cold, so cold, and when I turned him toward me his face was wrong. Slack. Empty. His eyes were open and looking at nothing and his mouth hung loose and there was dirt, fresh dirt, dark and damp, packed under every one of his fingernails.

The knocking stopped.

I stood there in the silence with my dead brother and I heard, for the first time in two months, the house go truly quiet. No ticking. No settling. Nothing.

And then a voice came up through the floorboards, soft and patient and very close, like someone with their lips pressed to the underside of the wood.

It said: "Your turn."

The police said Cole had a heart condition none of us knew about. The dirt under his nails, they couldn't explain, but they didn't try very hard. I moved out the next week. I left almost everything. I sleep on a mattress in a studio across town now, third floor, nothing below me but other people, and I tell myself I'm fine.

But last night I woke at three in the morning to a sound I hadn't heard since Ellard Street.

It came from under the bed.

Three knocks. Slow. Patient.

I haven't answered it yet.

I don't know how long I can hold out.