We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone E-Book

Ronald Malfi

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 457

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026

Beschreibung

Twenty haunting stories from the Bram Stoker Award nominated, and bestselling author of Come With Me. A man leaves rehab and tries to make a new life for himself, only to find the past closing in on him. A married couple on holiday have a bizarre encounter with a shiver of sharks. And, on Halloween night, a young boy learns the truth of the world from the strange and unsettling Mr Trueheart. From London to Baltimore and many places in between, these stories claw through reality to find the horror deep within. In Ronald Malfi's debut short story collection, the shadows in the dark are ever moving, ever hungry, and the darkness that lurks beneath the surface is never too far away…

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

The Dinner Party

Learned Children

Knocking

The Jumping Sharks of Dyer Island

The Glad Street Angel

Under the Tutelage of Mr. Trueheart

The House on Cottage Lane

Pembroke

In a Pet Shop

Couples Seeking Couples

The Good Father

The Housewarming

Chupacabra

All the Pretty Girls

Closing In

Underneath

All is Calm

Painstation

Discussions Concerning the Ingestion of Living Insects

Then There is Boston

Afterword: Liner Notes

About the Author

WE SHOULDHAVE LEFTWELL ENOUGHALONE

SELECTED STORIES

ALSO BY RONALD MALFIAND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

Come with MeBlack MouthGhostwrittenThey Lurk

Small Town HorrorSenselessThe NarrowsLittle Girls

The Hive (coming soon)

ALSO BY RONALD MALFI

Bone WhiteThe Night ParadeDecember ParkFloating StaircaseCradle LakeThe Ascent

SnowShamrock AlleyPassengerVia DolorosaThe Nature of MonstersThe Fall of Never

The Space Between

NOVELLAS

BorealisThe StrangerThe SeparationSkullbelly

After the FadeThe Mourning HouseA Shrill KeeningMr. Cables

RONALD

MALFI

WE SHOULDHAVE LEFTWELL ENOUGHALONE

SELECTED STORIES

TITAN BOOKS

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We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone: Selected Stories

Print edition ISBN: 9781835410608

E-book edition ISBN: 9781835410615

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: January 2026

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

“The Dinner Party,” originally published at the Horror Drive-In, © 2010

“Learned Children,” originally published at The Crow’s Caw, © 2010

“Knocking,” originally published at Horrorworld, © 2010

“The Jumping Sharks of Dyer Island,” originally published in Splatterpunk 2, © 2012

“The Glad Street Angel,” originally published in Bare Bone #7, © 2005

“Under the Tutelage of Mr.Trueheart,” originally published in Dark Hallows, © 2015

“The House on Cottage Lane,” originally published by Cemetery Dance Publications, © 2012

“Pembroke,” originally published in Dark Discoveries, © 2015

“In a Pet Shop” © 2017

“Couples Seeking Couples,” originally published in 24:7 Magazine, © 2003

“The Good Father,” originally published in LampLight, © 2013

“The Housewarming,” originally published in Shadow Masters, © 2013

“Chupacabra,” originally published in Bare Bone #11, © 2009

“All the Pretty Girls,” originally published in Bare Bone #8, © 2005

“Closing In,” originally published in Dark Discoveries, © 2010

“Underneath,” originally published in Lost Cause Quarterly, ©2007

“All is Calm,” originally published in Bare Bone #10, © 2007

“Painstation,” originally published in Peep Show #3, © 2002

“Discussions Concerning the Ingestion of Living Insects,” originally published in Sick: An Anthology of Illness, © 2003

“Then There is Boston” © 2017

Ronald Malfi asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of these works.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

EU RP (for authorities only)eucomply OÜ, Pärnu mnt. 139b-14, 11317 Tallinn, [email protected], [phone]

For Grandma,who showed me the truthinside a world of make-believe.

There was a café called le Sanglier near Paris and that was where many of the soldiers went to eat. It was a small café and rather dirty-looking, and the windows were grimy with soot from artillery fire. There were tiny wooden tables, circularly cut, placed about the cracked linoleum floor, and men crowded around these tables as if for air. Inside, nearing dark, it was always rowdy. If the weather cooperated, you could sit out back on the verandah and the waitresses would bring you French rum, which tasted old and distinctly of oak, and sometimes, if you were known to tip well, the waitresses would sit and talk with you for a while. Many of the soldiers did not know French and none of the girls knew English, but that did not matter, and it felt quite good just to have someone there and to look at someone pretty while sipping French rum.

THE DINNER PARTY

Two men in long black trench coats follow you into the supermarket. Aside from the coats, they wear wide-brimmed fedoras and mirrored sunglasses. They each have hockey stick sideburns that jet toward the corners of their mouths and black leather gloves on their hands. You don’t know how long they’ve been following you or where they picked you up, but you are suddenly, fully, completely aware of them. Your heart sinks.

The baby is strapped to your chest in a wrap sling yet you hug him tighter, covering his small white head with one hand. It is a warm, soft ball, and you can feel his pulse thudding vaguely in his temples as he sleeps. Your hand is bigger than his whole head. That is good. You don’t want the men in the trench coats to see him. Or you.

You lose them somewhere down the canned goods aisle. You know this because you can no longer hear their dry palm-slap footfalls, can no longer feel those mirrored sunglasses sizing you up behind your back. Absently, you continue to fill the grocery cart but you’re not really paying attention now.

You think, I have made a mistake.

“Ma’am?” He is a teenager—brown-skinned, pimply, bespectacled—and he smiles with oversize teeth while he bags your groceries. His nametag says BYRON. “Help bring these to your car, ma’am?”

You shake your head. You can manage on your own.

Thinking, When did I become a “ma’am”?

Thinking, Byron. Bad name.

The woman ringing you up at the register smiles broadly and looks instantly like something out of a fairytale about distrustful cats. “What a little darling,” she purrs. “Boy or girl?”

“Boy,” you say.

“How old?”

Instinctively, you hug him tighter to your breast. Again, you’re thinking of the men in the coats. “Three months.”

The woman’s smile widens. Inwardly, you cringe. “What’s the sweetie’s name?”

You tell her.

“That,” says the woman, “is a beautiful name.”

Before leaving, you glance around one last time for the men in the black coats. They are no longer there. Suddenly you are overcome by embarrassment, by the shame of paranoia. You nearly laugh, you are so relieved. Because you were wrong. Because no one was there to begin with.

I have made a mistake.

You strap the baby in his car seat in the back of the van. He wakes only briefly to work his mouth around soundless cries, his gray eyes blinking like castanets. You slide the door shut and dig through your purse for your car keys. But you can’t find them. Panic slides a cold barb around your heart. Ridiculous conspiracy theories threaten to tear you apart. You rush to the door and tug on it, expecting it to be locked, horrible images of asphyxiation and blinking colorless eyes shuttling through your mind, but it slides open with a groan.

Gray eyes peep out at you. Pink fists jut through Oshkosh sleeves. There are giraffes on the sleeves, pandas on the plush insert of the car seat. You smile and think, It’s a jungle in there, kiddo. You say, “Hey there.” Say, “Hey there, big boy.” Say, “Who’s mommy’s big boy?”

Thinking, This is the funniest thing in the world. Michael would be laughing his head off right now. Michael would be calling me his paranoid pretty and would be laughing his head off. Nice one, girl.

And there they are, in your hand: the car keys.

Back home, you breastfeed while the TV sits on mute. Michael said to expect them around seven, and it’s still early, but you’re not the greatest cook in the world and this is a big dinner. Promotion at work. Michael works hard. His boss, his boss’s wife. Michael promised to bring a bottle of wine. A nice wine. You don’t know the difference between nice wines and not nice wines except to watch the faces of those who drink the wine, but you’re not worried about Michael and his wine. You are thinking of his boss and his boss’s wife—their names. You wrote them down on the back of an envelope but now you can’t remember where you put it.

The baby finishes suckling and begins to whine. You pick him up, dress him over one shoulder, thump his back with an open hand. You go into the kitchen, eyes darting about the countertop. The groceries are still splayed out, the grocery bags on the floor. No envelope. No names.

The baby burps. It’s like a ghost vacating his tiny body. You kiss his head, holding him close to you. You are suddenly so close to tears you’re frightened. The envelope, the fucking envelope—

Is on the refrigerator. Strawberry magnet.

“There we go,” you whisper into your baby’s ear. “See that? There we go. No sweat.”

Tony and Eliza Sanderson. Great block letters, all capitals, in felt marker. You wrote it last night in the bathroom after Michael told you. Because you didn’t want to forget. This is important to Michael, this dinner.

It’s now three o’clock and you put the baby down for his nap. He goes willingly, already asleep before you set him in his crib. Cartoon lions with bushy brown manes caper on the spread and there is a mobile above the crib with colorful felt airplanes hanging from it. The room smells of baby powder, Desitin, ammoniac wet-wipes. In the crib, those pink fists uncurl, the baby snores his tiny snores, and you’re already fretting about dinner.

You’ve done this before, though you’re not the greatest cook. You prep the roast, adorn it with spices and cloves, set it in the pan, preheat the oven. You decide to do scalloped potatoes but, fuck it all, they come out looking like grimaces and you can’t stand to look at them. So you smash them up in a ceramic dish and, voilà, they’re mashed potatoes. You use your mother’s recipe for green bean casserole, following the instructions like someone assembling a rocket, reading every line three or four times because you’re terrified of getting it wrong. Twenty-nine minutes.

Behind you, the oven buzzes. Opens. Food goes in. You’re sweating, but feeling good. Things are cooking now, ha ha.

Thinking, Tony and Eliza, Tony and Eliza, Tony and Eliza, Tony and Eliza. . .

Outside, a shape passes before one of the kitchen windows.

You freeze, your first thought, Those men from the grocery store. Your second thought: The baby!

You rush to the baby’s room but he has not been disturbed. The shades are drawn over the nursery windows so you can’t see out. . . but some instinct inside you tells you they are out there, walking around the house, trying to find a way in.

Suddenly, you wonder if you locked the front door.

Racing to the foyer, you make enough noise to wake the dead. You even utter a weak groan when you strike the front door and find that it’s locked. It’s been locked all along. Sweating, you listen, one ear against the door, but cannot hear anything. If there are men in trench coats circumnavigating the house, they are very good at remaining very good.

Or. . .

Or I made a mistake, you think.

You bring your hands up to rub the sweat out of your eyes, but when you look down, you are terrified to see fine silver hairs sprouting from your palms, so much it looks like you are grasping balls of very fine wire.

You scream.

But there is nothing there. Your hands are fine. A trick of the light, a trick of the eye. Michael’s paranoid pretty, indeed.

Something smells. It’s bad.

In the kitchen, something burns.

“Goddamn it.” You rush in and it’s the potatoes. Stupidly, you left a piece of paper towel stuck to the bottom of the ceramic dish. It burns as you fan pillars of smoke away from the mouth of the oven.

At the sink, you wash your hands, examining them for fine silver hairs, but you are okay. You are not a monster.

You cook. Check baby. Check windows for swarthy figures. You’re able to do this calmly and simply now because you think of it as a routine. You think, Lather, wash, repeat, and try to keep from giggling. You think, Tony and Eliza, and you make a little song out of it in your head to the tune of “Frankie and Johnny.”

The food is cooking now. Really cooking. With Michael’s wine, it promises to be a fine evening. You set the table and actually feel good about how it looks. Outside, the stoop has darkened as the sun sinks below the distant trees. You go into the bathroom and begin to take a shower. . . but midway through the process—

(lather wash repeat)

—you panic about leaving the baby in his crib with those strange men outside. Naked, wet, soapy, you grab the baby from the crib, wrap him in his blue moose blanket and set him on the bathroom rug. You shower with the shower curtain open so you can keep an eye on him, keeping the water cold so the steam won’t make it difficult for him to breathe. He has tiny lungs.

“There,” you say in his ear when you are done. “Mommy’s all done. She’s going to dress now. Dress and look pretty.”

And you feel his heartbeat echoing in his tiny skull.

In the bedroom, a man stands just beyond the window looking in. It is dark out now but you can see him clearly. He’s dressed all in black, his white ghost-face seeming to hover in the air just beyond the windowpane.

“No,” you say, holding the baby against your wet nakedness. “What do you want?”

The figure says nothing. Does not move.

“Leave us alone.”

The figure does not leave you alone.

It takes all your strength but you manage to cross the bedroom to the window and pull the curtain closed. You can almost hear the stranger’s heartbeat on the other side of the glass. Still clutching the baby to your body, you go to the nightstand and pick up the phone. You dial 911, listen to the rings. But when a woman’s voice answers, you hang up. Because you’re overreacting. Because, okay, maybe you’re jealous of Michael a little, too, and jealous of his taste in wine and his promotion and his Tony and Eliza, and 911 is your sabotage to the dinner party. But that’s not true, either. Not really. Jealousy is just what you told the doctor. Because you had to tell him something.

You dress, put your makeup on, examine yourself in the mirror. Your breasts have gotten so big. . . but so have your hips. Your skin looks. . . grayer, somehow. You think of old photos of Jewish corpses stacked like cured meats. Could just be the lousy bathroom lighting. Briefly, you contemplate changing out all the light bulbs but don’t think you’d have enough time before Michael comes home with your guests.

Still wrapped in his blue moose blanket, you set the baby back in the crib and smooth the fine hairs off his forehead. Soft, warm ball. Chest rises with respiration. . . and you are suddenly overwhelmed by your love for this little creature, this amalgam of you and Michael, of the successful attorney and the paranoid pretty.

Something stinks.

“Oh,” you whisper over the baby, eyes wide.

The kitchen.

Stricken, you rush into the kitchen fearing the worst. . . but the food looks fine and it’s almost done. It’s just the smell—it seems to curdle in your nose and turn into solid waste in your lungs. You rush to the kitchen sink and gag into the basin. A foamy snake spirals out of your throat. After catching your breath, you run the water and wait as your hot, prickling skin goes back to normal.

When Michael comes home, you are sitting in the living room in the dark, sick to your stomach. The doorknob jiggles and you can hear people talking on the stoop, and the first thing you think of is the man with the ghost-face looking in your bedroom window.

“Hi, hon,” Michael says. He’s beaming, looking handsome in a camelhair suit and a shimmering red tie. He clutches a bottle of what you assume is nice wine. “Oh, you look beautiful.”

You greet him with a kiss on his cheek as his boss and boss’s wife file into the house. They are much younger and handsomer than you pictured them, Tony and Eliza, like a couple straight out of a glamour magazine. You think of horrible light bulbs and sallow, graying skin and are suddenly intimidated by these beautiful people.

“Tony and Eliza brought the wine,” Michael says, carrying the bottle over to the wine bar at the far end of the room. “Dark in here.” He flicks on a light switch as he goes. “Fix you folks a drink?”

The Sandersons agree that a glass of wine would be nice. Tony shakes your hand and Eliza smiles and looks suddenly hideous. How did you think this woman was beautiful only moments ago?

“Food smells wonderful,” Eliza says. Her teeth are like the dented grille of a truck.

“It does,” Tony says. He has silver hair at his temples and you quickly hide your hands behind your back in case that silver hair is contagious.

Michael returns with a glass of wine for Tony and Eliza. “You guys make yourselves at home,” Michael tells them, motioning toward the loveseat. To you, Michael says, “Where’s my little munchkin?”

“In the crib,” you say.

“I’ll wake him and introduce you,” Michael says to the Sandersons.

“Oh,” says Eliza Sanderson, “I’ve been dying to see him.” And when Michael leaves, Eliza turns to you and says, “Is there anything I can help with, dear?”

You say no.

“You look wonderful,” says Eliza. “That’s a gorgeous dress.” She winks, this aging medusa. “I can’t believe you’ve just had a baby.”

Tony just smiles and enjoys his wine.

Your stomach curdles. The smells from the kitchen are making you sick again. You think, I made a mistake. Think, Byron. Bad name.

Maybe there are men outside, maybe there aren’t. Maybe you are jealous of Michael, just like you told the doctor, or maybe that’s not true, either. You don’t know. You wish Michael had never turned on the light switch and that you knew what wine was nice wine and that it didn’t take you twenty-nine minutes to read the six lines on the casserole recipe because you had to make sure you got it right, got it right, got it right.

This is new to you. All of it. Three months new.

Michael comes up behind you but doesn’t come down into the living room. You don’t look at him; you feel him at your back like mirrored sunglasses. Eliza Sanderson cocks her head at a strange angle and stares past you, up at Michael. Tony Sanderson looks as well, and the expression on his face convinces you he smells how awful the food is, too.

You turn. Michael stands there with a quizzical look on his face—a mixture of confusion and bemusement, like someone who knows a joke has been told though he’s missed the punch line. He stands there with the blue moose blanket in one hand and what can only be an uncooked pot roast in the other, and says, “Is this. . . hon? Some kind of. . . uh, hon?”

“I made a mistake,” you say.

“Hon? Honey?”

You sit on the couch and smile politely at the Sandersons. In the kitchen, the oven’s buzzer goes off.

LEARNED CHILDREN

Soon after, he began to question his sanity.

Holes, Paul Marcus thought. Craters. A few more months of this and it’ll look like a blitzkrieg.

It was about the missing girl, of course. The scarecrow was a dream—he couldn’t think of it otherwise without compromising his sanity—and he wondered how much of the actual digging had been done in some sort of fugue state, for he could only recall what he had done on the mornings that followed, waking in bed with mud dried to his feet. Once, he’d awoken in the field, his skin gritty with hours’ old perspiration, his arms and shoulders sore from digging.

Digging holes, he thought. Craters. Trembling.

He was what the townspeople called “a distant”—a person from elsewhere who’d come to roost among them. A drafty old farmhouse with more bedrooms than he would ever need and a position of schoolteacher that needed filling were the things that brought him here. A distant, he supposed, was better than intruder, was better than trespasser. Nonetheless, he felt his own intrusion in his bones. His students did not make him feel any more welcome, either. Blank, moonfaced dullards, he often felt like he was preaching to a classroom of earthworms. Even creepier was when their slack disinterest turned to brazen effrontery.

“Can anyone tell me what Blake is trying to say in this passage?”

Ignoring the question, one of the piggish little gnomes toward the back of the classroom said, “They talk about you in church.”

The comment caught Paul Marcus with his guard down. “I’m sorry?” He still did not know all their names, mainly because they refused to sit in their assigned seats. “Someone has been talking about me?”

“In church,” repeated the boy.

“I don’t understand,” Paul said.

“Your car has a broken headlight,” said one of the girls.

“Your shoes are funny,” chided another.

And so on. . .

It was his students who first brought the missing girl to his attention. They kept her empty desk at the back of the classroom like a shrine; sometimes, after recess, some of the girls would bring flowers in with them from the schoolyard to decorate it. Hardened fingers of bubble gum hung like stalactites from the underside of the desk and someone had carved JANNA IS DED on the desktop.

Of course, since she was never found, no one knew for sure that she was dead.

“Who’s Janna?” he asked upon first noticing the inscription. “What happened to her?”

“Someone got her.”

“What does that mean?”

“She was here one day,” said a boy as he dug around in one nostril, “and the next day, she was gone.”

“When?”

“Month ago.”

“Who took her?”

The boy shrugged. “Why is your hair gray on the sides but black up top?”

The students snickered.

There was no Janna on his roster. Were the little cretins messing with him? He didn’t put it past them. There had been frogs in his desk and, disturbingly, a baby bird with its neck broken in his coffee mug one morning.

But they were not messing with him.

“It’s true,” said George Julliard one afternoon in the teacher’s lounge. He was working around a mouthful of peanut butter and jelly. “Abduction is the sheriff’s best guess.”

“She isn’t on my roster.”

But he found out why later on: his roster had been carefully rewritten to exclude Janna’s name. His roster was not the original. The original was found crumpled in a ball in Janna’s desk, her name clearly legible. When Paul brought this to the principal’s attention—a middle-aged woman with thinning silver hair—she only laughed and said kids will be kids.

“Did any of you change my roster?” he asked his students the following day.

“What’s your favorite color?” asked one of the girls.

“Do you like cats?” asked a boy.

Holes, he thought. And the scarecrow.

It was a dream, surely. The scarecrow was just a slapdash thing strung to a post in the east field, its clothes tatters of flannel, its face a featureless burlap sack. Something so innocuous even the crows nested on its shoulders and pecked at it. Yet at night, in Paul’s dreams—for surely they were only dreams—it would appear framed in Paul’s bedroom window, its respiration—respiration!—impossibly fogging up the glass.

In a state of near-somnambulism, Paul would climb out of bed and, barefoot, follow the lumbering dark shape around the side of the house. That first night there was a shovel leaning against the porch. Paul took it as a weapon. The scarecrow—nothing more than a smudge of darkness—moved onward through the stalks of corn.

It wasn’t until Paul reached a sparse clearing in the corn did he realize the scarecrow had disappeared. Something about the softness of the ground troubled him. The shovel, it seemed, was all too conveniently in his hands.

He dug, thinking of the missing girl, thinking, Janna is ded.

In the end, he found only an empty hole in the earth. And in the morning, despite the filth on his feet, he wondered if it had all been a dream.

But it was no dream. And it continued for the first month. When he tried to stay awake, the scarecrow did not appear. It was only on those nights where, bested by exhaustion, he would slump over in a chair only to awaken at the sound of the creaking porch as someone circumnavigated the farmhouse. A shape would lumber past the windows.

Scarecrow, he thought, shuddering.

He was supposed to find the girl—that much was clear to him. Each night, the scarecrow led him to a different part of the field. Often, Paul could discern patches of barren earth between the stalks, and he would commence digging. Other times, he found himself uprooting stalks to cultivate his craters. By the end of the month, and with the harvest moon now full in the sky, the field was pockmarked by his obsession.

“She lived in your house, you know,” said one of his students. . . and how simple was he that he hadn’t already come to this realization? It gave his obsession a heart and a soul.

“You’re getting warmer,” said another student, and this caused the hairs on the back of Paul’s neck to rise. As if they were watching him at night while he dug like a grave robber in the cornfield.

He wanted to ask them, Is the scarecrow real? He wanted to say, Is that what got Janna? But he didn’t. He would be driven out of a job for being a madman.

Again, night came. The scarecrow appeared shifting through the corn at the edge of the field. This night, Paul waited for it, sitting on the porch with the shovel across his lap. Again, he followed it into the field. When he lost sight of the creature, he began digging.

Janna is ded.

There was nothing beneath the ground.

Above, ravens cawed.

On a Tuesday, someone put a rotten apple on his desk. Someone else had stuck used flypaper in X formations across the windowpanes in the classroom. Again, the principal laughed and said kids will be kids.

“No one handed in their homework,” he said to the class. This wasn’t totally accurate—someone had handed in a ream of paper on which they’d pasted cutout photos from glamour magazines. Paul found this alarmingly sociopathic.

At the end of the day, as they filed out of the classroom, one of the girls smiled at him. Her front teeth were blackened and there was a bruise on her left cheekbone. “Tick tock goes the clock,” she said to him.

“What?”

She smiled horridly then fled from the classroom.

He no longer waited for the scarecrow to make its appearance; he spent his evenings digging trenches in the cornfield. By the second month in the farmhouse, there was very little corn left.

Exhausted, sore, he dragged the shovel behind him back toward the house, stopping only when he saw the scarecrow hanging from its post in the east field. Its form was slumped under the weight of countless black crows. Despite his tiredness, he went to it. The crows were bold and did not fly off immediately. Paul scared them off eventually by swinging the shovel.

“Get,” he said. “Go on.”

It hung like wet laundry, its pant legs sprouting straw, its flannel shirt tattered. The featureless burlap sack of its face seemed to sag under the weight of its existence.

It does not exist. Not like that.

He reached up and pressed a hand to its straw-filled flannel shirt.

Not straw-filled.

Paul went cold. He dropped the shovel in the dirt.

Reaching up, he peeled the burlap face away to reveal a second face: a head turned funny on its neck, reminding Paul Marcus of the dead baby bird left in his coffee mug.

The next Monday, after a weekend spent at the sheriff’s office filling out paperwork, he stood before his classroom. The earthworms were suspiciously quiet this morning. Nothing had been left on or in his desk. The flypaper had been removed from the cracked windowpanes.

“I want. . .” And his voice cracked. “I want you all to turn to chapter five in your texts,” he continued, trying hard to sound in control. He was sweating through his tweed coat and his throat felt constricted. “I want—”

“Dogs can sense fear,” said the boy toward the back, picking his nose.

“My mother had an abortion when she was a teenager,” said one of the girls.

Paul Marcus offered them a wan smile and wondered, not for the first time, whatever happened to the schoolteacher he had replaced.

KNOCKING

Picture it: a squalid, self-deprecating little bungalow wedged like a rotting tooth in a mouthful of rotting teeth along the poorest side street of North London. Skies terminally gray, where the textured hues of an early morning are practically indistinguishable from those of a premature dusk, this little bungalow sat, undaunted, unfettered, deprived of everything yet feeling nothing in such depravity. On the outside the building looked like a construct stretched out of shape to resemble something from some child’s fleeting nightmare. It looked gray and tired, the exterior stucco sheathing overcome by corded veins of ivy and ginseng where, in the springtime, sparrows nested. Despite the previous occupants’ insistence to the contrary, the entire building canted slightly to the left. While ample space was provided for one to traverse the ivy-encrusted alleyway that separated our home from the building to our left, upon looking up while standing in this very alley, the proximity of our roof to the neighboring roof appeared to be less than six inches apart. Surely, following the passage of a few more years, the two roofs would eventually touch, the buildings bowing together like united lovers over an abyss. The listing was even more noticeable when glasses of water or bottles of wine were abandoned on tabletops, countertops, coffee tables throughout the place: it did not take much scrutiny to observe the not-so-subtle tilt to the surface of the given liquid. It was not something you felt, although both Tara and I found it difficult to fall asleep the first month of our occupancy, and after some casual discussion, we both decided our insomnia was due to our bodies acclimating themselves to the structural misalignment.

The interior of the bungalow was shabby and colorless, the atmosphere at times overtaken by a sort of chronic fatigue. The windows were too small, like the portholes in a ship, the panes dulled to cataract opaqueness. Standing in the center of the foyer and looking up revealed a gutted hollow that yawned to the second floor and, beyond that, the cathedral ceiling. It was like living in the gullet of some prehistoric reptile. The walls were an ancient alabaster, the woodwork and molding so old and arthritic, it seemed almost criminal to attempt any restoration, lest we upset some divine plan.

And for a while, it was perfect.

“This works, yeah?”

“It works,” Tara said. “It all works.”

“Tell me one thing you love about living here.”

“One thing?”

“Just one.”

She considered. “I love the way everyone says ‘bloody.’ It’s very British.”

I laughed. “All right,” I said. “Now tell me one thing you hate.”

She said, “I hate the bloody weather.”

We moved to London from the States near the end of May, on our one-year wedding anniversary. It was different and new, all of it. I’d grown up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., while Tara had spent her youth with a family of seven in the sun-baked scrublands of the Midwest. We had a good life in the States, but we were young and anxious and ready to take on as much of the world as we could. So we found the decrepit little flat in North London, and despite its ugliness (or maybe because of it), we loved it. We suffered the expected tribulations associated with any relocation—a missing box of dishes, a busted table leg, the discovery of items previously thought lost weeks after taking up residency—but in all, it went off without a hitch. Tara knew nothing about London but proved a quick study. She made it a point to venture into Camden, to patronize the neighboring shops and cafés and pubs in order to soak up the local custom. The discrepancy between U.S. dollars and British pounds was a cause for some mild frustration, but she soon got the hang of that as well. For the most part, we found the people to be mutually polite and reserved, displaying a sense of propriety and a respect for personal space that would have been mistaken back home for haughtiness or, in the least, some form of social maladjustment. I took a job teaching English at the university and Tara studied for her doctorate in child psychology while working part-time as a waitress at the Algerian.

Summer, the smell of the Thames was unrelenting. We would sleep with the bedroom windows open, falling asleep to the scent of the city. (This routine was abandoned, however, after a series of seemingly unrelated murders in the Heath transformed this humble pleasure into an act of recklessness.) We had a washer and dryer, but Tara took to hanging the clothes across a stretch of clothesline from the patio windows to the deck railing at the rear of the bungalow. One warm afternoon, we picnicked at Highgate Ponds and got drunk on cheap red wine. We laughed ourselves into stomach cramps when a group of middle-aged male locals appeared and stripped out of their clothing to sun themselves in the open quarter. Their nudity was severe and white, all ribs, stomachs, and wiry pepper-colored pubic hair.

The bungalow sustained two bedrooms off the ground floor, a foyer that communicated with a den that, in turn, fashioned off into a quaint kitchenette. The second floor contained the bathroom and another room that could have been forged into a cramped bedroom or an equally cramped study. At her pleading, I awarded the second-floor room to Tara, which she fashioned into a handsome little study of obsessive-compulsive neatness.

Once we’d settled into our respective roles, with North London starting to not feel so alien, I quickly immersed myself into the mix at the university. Tara attended her classes during the day, leaving the bungalow brooding and empty in our absence. On the nights she worked at the Algerian, I would sometimes visit for a pint; other times, I would stay home alone and listen to the encroaching silence of the bungalow while invisible clocks ticked in shadowed background.

One evening toward the close of summer, a soft rain falling in the streets, Tara appeared in the doorway to my home office door. I was perched over my desk, grading papers from my summer school class.

“Hon,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“There’s something upstairs.”

“Hold on.”

I scribbled a note in the margin of the paper I was reading then turned to face her. “There’s what?”

“I don’t know. Just come look.”

I followed her up the winding staircase to the second floor. Through the slats in the balustrade, I looked directly down the gaping maw of the narrow little house, straight down to the foyer below. A soft rain pattered against the windows. I could hear a dog barking far off in the distance.

“Where?” I said.

“In the study.”

We entered her study. The room was brightly lit and there was a Paul Desmond CD playing low on the stereo. Against one wall was Tara’s desk, stacks of papers filed neatly on top. A spare bed, in case we ever found ourselves entertaining guests from far away who would require spending the night (though we could not see this happening any time soon), was pushed against another wall. Above the bed, twin windows glared at us like eyes.

“In the closet,” she said.

“What is?”

“The noise.”

“What noise?”

“The noise,” she repeated with more emphasis, as if this would clarify anything. When I looked at her, she only shrugged. She’d dropped her voice to a whisper now, too.

I turned off the stereo and we stood together in the silence, unmoving. All I could hear was the fall of the rain against the roof. As if part of the conspiracy, the dog had ceased barking outside, too.

“I don’t hear anything,” I said.

“Harold, it was in the closet.”

So I went to the closet and pulled the door open. Two file cabinets were tucked away here, as well as a plastic garbage bag full of winter clothes we had no room for in any other part of the house. But that was all.

“What did it sound like?”

“Like there was someone in the closet,” Tara said. “Someone moving around in there.”

“Who would be in the closet?”

“I’m just telling you what I heard.”

“Well there’s obviously no one here,” I said, backing away.

Back downstairs, I poured what was left of the coffee into my mug and reheated it in the microwave. Standing in the darkened kitchenette, I watched the rain sluice against the window over the sink. The dog had resumed its tune, sounding closer now than it had before. When the microwave finally chimed, I carried my steaming mug back through the kitchenette and down the corridor toward my office.

Tara stood in the hallway, staring at me.

I paused. “What?” I said.

“Don’t give me what,” she said. “I know it’s you.”

“Me?”

“Cut it out.”

“What?” I said.

“You’re trying to scare me.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Liar.”

“I swear it. I was making coffee.” And I took a long, noisy sip to bolster my innocence.

“Well,” she said, “I don’t know what you’re doing, or how you’re doing it, but cut it out. I’m trying to study.”

Back upstairs, I stood before her open closet door, peering inside. “I don’t understand,” I said. “What does it sound like?”

“Shuffling around. Sometimes like a knock, too. Like someone moving against the door from the inside.”

“Well, then leave the door open.”

“But that doesn’t make whatever is doing it disappear, does it?”

“Maybe it’s outside,” I suggested. “Maybe it’s the storm.”

“It’s not outside and it’s not the storm.” She was seated on the edge of the spare bed, looking past me and into the closet. “I heard it. It was right inside the closet, Harold.”

I leaned forward and rapped the old shave-and-a-haircut on the doorframe. “Wait for it,” I said. “Wait. . .”

“Don’t make fun,” Tara said.

I sighed. “What would you like me to do, Tara? I don’t hear anything.”

“Do you promise you’re not trying to scare me?”

“Of course I’m not.”

“Because if it’s you, just stop.”

“It’s not me.”

“Swear it,” she said.

“I already have.”

“Swear it again.”

“I swear it’s not me,” I promised.

“Harold?”

“Yeah?”

She said, “I feel funny.”

*   *   *

As it will, time passed. Somehow, despite our hectic schedules, we managed to celebrate a reclusive yet cozy Thanksgiving together, fielding the customary telephone calls from our respective families overseas, and prepared for Christmas with the giddy excitement of two children set loose in a toy store. We were saving money—that was our promise to each other that year—and would keep gifts to a minimum. Pleased with myself, I managed to locate a well-made but inexpensive gold locket on a slender chain which I outfitted with a tiny photograph of Tara and me, taken back in the heyday of our courtship. I wrapped this gift in my pedestrian way (for the life of me, I could not wrap a gift) and decided to stow it in the attic of our little bungalow—a place, I was certain, Tara would never venture voluntarily.

I climbed the stairs and entered the dark maw of the attic. I had left Tara downstairs, busy decorating the Christmas tree; the house was drafty, the walls and floorboards thin, and the din of her soft, cheerful humming could be heard even against the whine of the wind in the eaves and the sigh of the cold winter’s night against the framework of the house.

Scrambling for the dangling pull-cord that hung from the light fixture in the ceiling, my right hand swatted blindly in the dark. I managed a step forward. The pull-cord brushed by my face, sending tremors down my spine. I yanked the light on.

The whistling wind was a constant. I could hear the house groaning and creaking and rocking in its foundation. Fleetingly, I wondered if this would be the year our roof decided to crumble into our neighbor’s.

I heard something move behind me. Spinning around, my eyes still adjusting to the gloom, I peered down the shadowy length of the attic, the ceiling low, the beams crisscrossing before me like the rank of raised swords in a military wedding. I could see nothing.

Yet unlike in the movies, where the protagonist must turn away from the noise before he hears it again, I heard it again: a labored, breathy sound, very much like respiration.

My own breath seized in my throat.

Then another sound: a dull thud. A knock. This was it—this was the sound Tara had heard coming from behind the closet door in her study. Quickly, I unfolded a mental blueprint of the bungalow and, sure enough, that section of the attic was positioned directly above Tara’s second-floor study.

With mounting desperation, I was suddenly trying to recall whether or not the police had ever arrested anyone in connection with those unsolved murders in the Heath, and I was coming up blank.

Steeling myself, I walked along the floor beams toward the opposite end of the attic, toward the noise. The shadows deepened as I approached, but I no longer heard anything—

Something tittered and I caught a glimpse of a fleeting shadow swim across the far wall. This was not my imagination. I was certain of it.

Taking a deep breath, I reached the far wall and hunkered down to examine what appeared to be a narrow abyss in the attic floor, where the floor should have met the far wall. My fingers digging into the beam above my head for balance, I peered down into that narrow cut of darkness in the floor.

Poor construction. That’s what I was looking at. Poor construction and, no doubt, the tilting of the house had caused the beams to split, to come apart, leaving a narrow little arroyo in the floor that just happened to drop down behind the wall of the closet in Tara’s study.

The respiratory sound was undoubtedly the wind shuttling against the eaves. With such a separation in the framework, sound was bound to echo. That evening in bed, I explained what I had discovered to Tara, though she did not seem comforted by my revelation.

“I don’t like that room,” she said. “I don’t like the noises that come from it, Harold.”

*   *   *

Christmas came. I gave Tara the gold locket and she presented me with a handsome leather briefcase. We had a quiet dinner together in the drafty house then watched television until Tara went upstairs to shower before bed. My own eyelids growing heavy, I pulled an afghan up over my body and muted the television.

When Tara appeared staring down at me several moments later, I thought I was dreaming at first.

“What?” I muttered. “What is it?”

“It’s back. Upstairs. Come listen.”

Once again in the second-floor study, we both stood before the open closet doors, peering in at nothing but a couple of metal filing cabinets.

“That’s the wind,” I explained again. “If you’d seen the gap in the attic boards. . .”

“That isn’t the sound I heard before.” Tara looked frightened. “It was like something moving around on the other side of the drywall.”

“Darling, there’s nothing there.”

“What if it’s an animal come in from the cold? Living in the walls? A raccoon, maybe?”

“There’s nothing up there, Tara.”

She shivered beside me. “I feel funny. Strange. Like something is trying to get at me.”

“Get at you?”

“Eat me.”

“Tara, honey, there are no wild animals up in the attic.”

“Harold, please. . .”

I sighed and promised her I would check again first thing in the morning.

But morning brings with it a breed of clarity that night disallows, and it took the passage of several more evenings before I agreed to once again climb up into the attic. Armed with a flashlight, a hammer and nails, and a few planks of wood, I promised Tara I’d chase out any animal intruder then board up the narrow gap in the floor, putting an end to this nonsense once and for all.

In the attic, I traversed the narrow beams until I reached the gap where the floor met the outer wall. Setting my implements down, I clicked on the flashlight and dumped the beam down into the open shaft.

Things twinkled at me from below.

The distance was too great to make out what they were, or to simply reach down and scoop them up. My curiosity mounting, I decided to climb down there and see what those items were. It was a tight squeeze, and I utilized the exposed beams as hand-and footholds on my way down. The dry smell of insulation caused me to sneeze. When I touched my feet down on solid flooring again, I was packed firmly behind the closet wall of Tara’s second-floor study.

I trailed the flashlight’s beam along the floor, illuminating those twinkling objects scattered about my feet. . .

Some items were easily identifiable as jewelry—necklaces, earrings, what appeared to be a collegiate ring with the jewel missing from the setting—while others were as enigmatic to me as matter floated down from space. There were also a few screws and things that resembled hammered ball bearings. I gathered up all these items and stowed them away in the pockets of my trousers. Then, climbing back up out of the gap, I covered the opening with the planks of wood. If any animal had sought refuge in this crevice, there would be no more re-entry.

*   *   *

For whatever unexplained reason, I felt compelled to hide the items I’d found in the gap from my wife. I put them all in a gym sock, which I stuffed toward the back of my underwear drawer.

*   *   *

It was very early morning, the sun not yet fully up, when I awoke in bed alone. Tara’s side of the mattress was cool. I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, awaiting her return from the bathroom. But she never returned. And when I checked the bathroom, I found it empty and unused.

I searched the bungalow, calling her name. When the clock on the landing struck 5:15 AM, a dreadful panic had already set in. Hastily, I checked the windows and the doors—all of which were locked—and once again began thinking of last year’s murders in the Heath. It was still an ungodly hour of the morning when I found myself pounding on neighbors’ doors, asking if they had seen my wife. They all scowled and assured me they had not. Trembling, I returned home to call the police.

Two uniformed officers came, took notes, and conducted a cursory and disinterested scan of the bungalow. “Maybe,” one of the officers suggested before leaving, “she just got bored, mate.”

I called out of classes for the day and sat on the sofa for most of the afternoon, anticipating—hoping—that Tara would walk through the front door at any minute. By late afternoon, with a gray rain falling in the streets, I contemplated driving around town to see if I could spot her. I even pulled on my clothes without the benefit of showering and was in the process of lacing up my sneakers when I heard a banging sound echo down the stairwell from the second-floor landing.

“Tara!” It leapt from my throat in a strangled cry.

Racing up the stairs, I entered Tara’s study to find the room empty. I listened again for the banging noise but heard nothing. My respiration was shuddery, my vision beginning to fragment. The closet doors stood open, the twin filing cabinets leering at me.

And then I heard it—a muted thump, like someone on the other side of the closet wall, pounding a fist. I pressed my ear against the drywall and listened, holding my breath. Nothing. Again, I called my wife’s name. No response.

I grabbed the flashlight from the kitchen drawer then climbed up into the attic. When I turned the flashlight on, the beam shook in my unsteady hand. The attic appeared empty. Again, I called out Tara’s name and received no answer. Crossing the catwalk of two-by-fours to the far wall, I wondered if somehow Tara had fallen down the gap between the walls. It was ridiculous, of course—what would she have been doing up here after all?—but what other explanation was there?

But no: the planks of wood were still nailed down over the opening.

I stood there, my heart slamming in my chest.

And thought I heard movement down below, in the gap.

“Tara!”

I dropped to my knees and began wrenching the planks of wood loose with my bare hands. Once I’d made a large enough opening, I directed the flashlight beam into the gap while holding my breath.

Of course, the space was empty. Had I really expected to find Tara down there?

My hands quaked. The flashlight’s beam vibrated across the flooring at the bottom of the gap.

Again, something twinkled up at me.

After prying away more boards, I descended the gap as I had done once before, and crouched down to retrieve what I had seen from above.

Tara’s locket. The one I’d given her for Christmas.

A terrible sickness overtook me. I thought I would pass out. Nothing made sense.

There were other things on the floor as well. Things similar to the hammered ball bearings I’d found previously. . .

*   *   *

I sit now on the spare bed in Tara’s study, facing the open closet. In my lap is this notebook, in which I have detailed all that has happened, no matter how bizarre. Beside me is Tara’s locket. The picture is no longer inside it; where it has gone, I have no idea. It’s been three days since Tara’s disappearance, and I am hearing the knocking behind the wall regularly now, much as Tara had.

What had she said? I feel funny. Strange. Like something is trying to get at me. But not just get at her. Eat me, she had said.

I’m done writing now. I’ll sit and wait and see what happens. Tara was right—there is something here. Maybe not something behind the walls. Maybe it is the walls. The bungalow itself.

I don’t know.

What I know is that I am scared I will never see my wife again.

What I know is that I am terrified of what is making that knocking sound.

What I know is that those hammered ball bearings I found are actually fillings from teeth.