This evening as I was taking my daughter upstairs to bed, she froze outside her open bedroom door.
“What’s wrong?”
Staring into her room, she said “I just saw a cat or a dog or something on my bed. It looked up at me and then slid under the covers.”
I turned the lights on and we went in. Of course there was nothing there.
When I get home after work, my youngest daughter meets me at the door. I’m late and phoned ahead to say they should start dinner without me.
A plate of half-eaten food waits at my wife’s place at the same able. But she is nowhere to be seen.
“Mama went upstairs,” our daughter tells me.
After a few minutes, my wife comes downstairs. She takes me aside.
“Just before you came home, there was this huge crash from upstairs. But it wasn’t like the knocking from before. It was like someone just dumped an armful of books onto the floor right overhead. And it was fucking loud. ”
She is rattled, just a bit. I wait for her to go on.
“I went up and Vincent” — that’s one of our cats — “Was sitting on our bed, frozen. His eyes were fucking huge.”
She couldn’t find anything out of place in our room, nothing to explain the noise.
I go up to check and, yeah, there’s nothing.
Later, she notices that a framed photo on a high shelf behind our bed is laying flat on its face.
It’s a photo of the two of us.
My daughter an I are in my office when my wife calls from the TV room. I hear her but it doesn’t register until she calls again, a rising note of alarm in her voice.
“What’s wrong?”
She is pale, intense. I can’t tell if she’s angry or something else.
“I just heard…”
She stops, starts again.
“Someone just knocked on the ceiling in the family room.”
She looks at me, eyes wide. “It was like this: Bang bang bang… Bang bang… Bang bang bang. It was someone knocking on the floor of our room. Fucking loud.”
I head upstairs. One of the cats is sitting on our bed. He starts when I come into the room, but he doesn’t move.
There’s a little alcove off of our bedroom, directly above the TV room on the ground floor. My wife has an antique desk and vanity in the alcove. There are photos and mementos on the window sill. A large green crystal hangs from the archway leading into the alcove.
Even still, I have never liked that part of the room. It unsettles me, open like that. When I come to bed each night, I have to resist giving any of my imagination to the mental image of who or what might be standing there waiting in the dark.
While the cat watches, I look around. There’s nothing on the floor, nothing fell.
Nothing to explain the insistent, deliberate knocking my wife heard.