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.