Within walls, across ceilings

or, a short story

Jenny had a tall house.

Not just on the outside but the inside too, each room with a ceiling so high it eclipsed anything I’d ever seen. Higher, even, than those in the Stately Homes I’d been dragged around as a child. Not that I paid much attention to the height of such walls, of course, my eyes back then too busy with locating as many objects as possible from the sheets of I-Spy held clutched in my hands, the game, I imagine, some vain attempt by the National Trust to prevent children from becoming bored to literal death, the printed A4 sheets handed out by the ancient staff found lurking in every corner.

It was an estate, is what I mean. Jenny Barrow’s house was an estate. I was too young back then to know what that meant and what it said about Jenny and her family—about the gulf that separated her own life and mine—but she was, by virtue of some peculiar series of events, my friend, and for whatever reason often invited me in to her house, be it at weekends or after school, where we would sprawl on her bed and chat and watch music videos on MTV or VH1 (her family having an antenna affixed to the side of the house that allowed hundreds of channels to be beamed in through the wall that I could scroll endlessly until told I must stop), and in the late afternoons we would watch movies she had recorded or rented, the VHS tapes scattered about her room like obsidian bricks. Jenny's parents, unlike my own, didn’t care about age ratings or warnings, and so films stamped with an 18 or that most alluring of capital R—films I otherwise never would have seen—were fed daily into the VCR’s hungry mouth and we'd scare ourselves silly as the last of the autumn sun fled below the windowsill and allowed the dark its turn inside. And sometimes, after a film finished or if we couldn’t decide what to watch, or simply when there was a good track on MTV we’d seen a hundred times, we’d roll over and stare up at the ceiling, its ornate pattern so far above us it was like we were floating on the surface of the ocean and gazing down on a type of coral the light could barely reach.

I remember those days clearly, as though they were yesterday, when in fact the distance of time travelled between then and now has observed more yesterdays than I care to know.

*

“How do the ceilings get cleaned?” I recall asking one day, realising I'd never thought about this before. “Does someone get up there on a ladder?”

A strange expression flashed across Jenny’s face, a hint of something that might have been fear. Then it was gone, replaced by her usual indifference.

“They do it,” she said.

“They? You mean the maids? I didn’t think you had any maids?”

This was, as far as I was aware, true, for I had never seen any in the house and it was Jenny’s mother, proud as she was, to be the one found vacuuming or dusting the halls, or more often than not in the kitchen, baking cakes or slices that she'd offer us on trays as she slid from room to room.

“They?” I asked again, probing.

“They do it,” she repeated, lowering her eyes. Then she rolled off the bed and stared blankly at the television, not saying a word until Money for Nothing completed its fifth showing for the day on VH1.

A week or so later I stayed over. It was the first time. It was also the last. When I think back on it, there was nothing there between us, nothing romantic or sexual—if anything, our friendship being more like that of siblings—and in any case my mind was keen on only one girl, an inescapable being who inhabited the school I spent so many of my years attending. If I'm honest (and why else would I be recounting this here?), I'd been nervous to let my parents know. Not because I was worried they'd refuse, or that I was somehow too embarrassed to be asking to stay at a friend’s house, a friend who just happened to be female … no, it was the opposite: I was worried that they'd be glad, that this would be a relief for them. That they’d want me to stay over. But all mum said was OK, that’s fine, I can pick you up in the morning, just let me know when. And that was that. It was a Friday, and in my bag I took a change of clothes and a toothbrush and when the final bell rang Jenny and I waited outside the school library to be picked up by her mother in her fancy car, the model or make something I can no longer recall, it possibly being a Rolls-Royce.

And so it was that that evening, the night I stayed in her house, I found out what they were and why Jenny’s face, in that moment when she answered my question, had contorted in such a manner so unlike its usual inexpressive self, answering with just three words something I could never hope to explain in more. They were a series of things that existed deep within the walls and that, at some point each evening or perhaps only once a month, slid out and moved up towards the ceiling, their bodies never completely extracted from the bricks and vents, great serpentine things, formless and without face or limbs and moving endless in the impossible night, things that worked their way across the plaster and paint as though seeking some hidden nutrients that remained invisible to the human eye.

I didn't sleep at all that night. I just watched as these creatures emerged and then retreated, secreting themselves once more within the walls. I didn’t sleep and in the morning I called my mum, Jenny knowing, I’m sure, of what I saw and that I would never return.

And now, all these years later, as I find myself in a house with ceilings so similarly high that I cannot reach them without a ladder, the action of changing a light bulb having become anything but trivial, and with vents not in the walls but set into the corners of each room, deep ducts that extend beneath the house to passageways unknown, I lie here listening, listening intently for the sound of something slow and silent, a dark and shadow-filled thing capable of working its way along the walls to suck at what it finds, unaware of the boy who is now a man who watches it move and then retreat before the break of day. I lie here and listen, the room so dark I cannot see, my ears attuned to all that we can never know.

---

A ceiling, yesterday.