The Night Nanny

The knock came at two in the morning. Three fast raps, then a pause, then three more. I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and did the math on whether I could ignore it.

Fourth knock round. Not a person who gives up, then.

I'm Viola Miyagi, thirty-four years old, and I watch a toddler named Lucy for a software engineer named Christian Shelton three floors up. It's a good gig. Quiet days, decent pay, and I've been single on purpose for eleven years, ever since a brief, intense thing with a fellow traveler in Lisbon when I was twenty-three. Nothing serious since. Nothing at all, really. I like it that way. Most of the time.

I pulled on a robe and opened the door.

The guy from 3B stood there in sweatpants and a hoodie, phone flashlight in hand. Seth. I knew that much from the mailboxes. Night shift guy at the data center on Diversey, I'd heard. We'd nodded at each other in the hallway maybe six times in two years.

"Hey. Sorry. Viola, right?" he said. "Did you hear that? In my wall. Please tell me you heard that too."

"Heard what? It's two a.m., Seth."

"The scratching. It's been going on for like a week and tonight it got loud. Really loud. Like something big dragging itself through the pipes." He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. "I work nights, I'm up anyway, but this is not a mouse. Mice don't sound like that."

"Like what?"

"Like something with a lot of fingers."

That word stayed with me. Fingers.

"Show me," I said, because apparently I'm the kind of person who says that at two a.m. instead of closing the door.

His apartment was the mirror of mine. Same cramped one bedroom, same radiator rattling under the same drafty window, same view of the L rumbling past every ten minutes. Prewar building, which around here is landlord code for falling apart slowly and charging you for the privilege.

He put his ear to the bedroom wall near the radiator. I did the same.

Silence. Then, faint, a dry dragging sound. Long. Deliberate. It moved from one end of the wall to the other, stopped, and did it again.

"Oh, hell no," I said.

"Yeah. That."

"That's not rats. I've had rats. Rats are fast and stupid."

"This is not fast," Seth agreed. "It's almost like it's listening."

We stood there like two idiots pressed against the wall of a stranger's bedroom at two a.m. The dragging sound did one more slow pass and quit, like it had gotten bored of us.

"Basement," I said. "Everything in this building goes through the basement. Pipes, radiators, all of it. If something's in the walls, it's coming up from down there."

"You want to go into the basement. At two a.m."

"You got a better idea?"

He got his coat and a bigger flashlight and I got mine, and we took the stairs down. The stairwell smelled like old radiator dust and somebody's ancient cigarette smoke soaked into the plaster. The basement door had the cheap push-button lock every building in Chicago has. Seth knew the code. Of course he did.

The basement was the usual. Boiler, water heater, a forest of pipes overhead, cardboard boxes of residents' stuff stacked against the far wall. One bare bulb at the middle of the ceiling and another at the far end, one of them flickering.

Seth swept the light along the back wall and stopped.

"There," he said.

There was a crack in the foundation wall. Not a hairline thing. A gap about a hand's width wide, running from floor to about chest height, and the edges of it were wrong. Smooth. Almost polished, like something had been passing through it a lot.

"Nobody reported that to the landlord?" I said.

"It wasn't there last month. I do laundry down here every Sunday. I would've noticed."

We got closer. I know. We should have left. You always say you'd leave. You don't.

And here's the part I still can't explain without sounding like I need medication. The crack breathed. The air coming out of it moved in a slow rhythm, in and out, and it was cold. Not basement cold. Under-the-street cold. January-under-the-sidewalk cold, in October.

Seth held his hand near it, not touching. "You feel that?"

"That's not a draft. Drafts don't breathe."

Then something brushed my ankle.

Cold. Dry. Light, like the back of knuckles, except there was nothing near my feet except my own slipper and about four feet of empty floor.

I screamed. Not a movie scream. A real one, ugly and loud, and I grabbed Seth's arm hard enough to leave marks. The flashlight swung everywhere and found nothing. Floor, boxes, pipes, nothing.

"What? What is it? What happened?"

"Something touched me. My ankle. There was a hand, Seth, there was a fucking hand on my ankle and there's nothing there."

He swept the light across the floor again, twice, three times. Nothing. My heart was doing a drum solo and my voice had gone up an octave and stayed there.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. Okay. New rule. Nobody touches the creepy breathing wall crack."

"Agreed. So agreed. Take me upstairs."

We went up. We ended up in his kitchen because his apartment was the crime scene and mine suddenly felt too far away, and he made coffee at two thirty in the morning like someone who has given up on the night going any other way. He had decent coffee, which I did not expect.

"Here's what I keep coming back to," he said, turning his mug in circles on the table. "It started scratching last Tuesday. Right? It's been a week. So what changed a week ago?"

"How would I know? I don't know your life."

"Nothing changed. That's the point. Same shifts, same routine, same everything. Except, huh." He stopped turning the mug.

"Except what?"

"Except my girlfriend moved out. Well, ex-girlfriend. Two years, ended fine, she took a job in Denver six months ago and we did the long distance thing and it just, you know. Ran out. She finished moving her last boxes out of storage last week. That's it. That's the only thing that changed."

I looked at him. Thirty-six years old, night shift, sweatpants, decent coffee, and the loneliest apartment I had ever stood in, and I don't mean messy. I mean the walls had that quiet.

"You're saying the thing in your wall waited for you to be lonely," I said.

"I'm saying the timeline lines up and it's freaking me out."

"It waited for the last person to leave. Like it smelled it."

Seth put his head in his hands. "Great. Love that."

Then he lifted his head and gave me the look of a man about to say something insane, which was fair, because I'd felt an invisible hand ten minutes earlier.

"Okay, hear me out," he said. "If it's feeding on loneliness. On, like, attention. Then we test it. You and me. We pretend to be a couple."

"Come again?"

"Hear me out. Hear me out. We hang out. Together. Loudly. It hears two people instead of one lonely guy. If the scratching stops or slows, we know we're right. It's an experiment."

"That is the dumbest scientific method I have ever heard."

"You got a better hypothesis? It touched your ankle, Vi. It knows we're onto it. We should know what we're dealing with too."

I drank my terrible-hour coffee and thought about it. My life was fine. Genuinely fine. Quiet on purpose. But I'd be lying if I said standing in a creepy basement next to a person who made me feel less alone hadn't felt like something. Something I hadn't felt in a while.

"Fine," I said. "But if we're fake dating for a wall monster, we're doing it right. Dinners. Board games. Talking loud enough for the pipes to hear. Full commitment."

"Deal," he said, and he almost smiled, and it was a good smile, and I noticed that in a way I filed away for later.

The scratching started again before we finished the coffee. But this time it wasn't in his bedroom wall.

It was coming through the wall of the kitchen. Closer to where we were sitting.

Seth and I looked at each other.

"It moved," he said.

"I noticed."

The dragging sound did one long, slow pass, right behind my chair, and stopped directly behind my head. The radiator ticked. The L rumbled past outside, shaking the windows the way it always did, and under all of it, patient and dry, something scratched once.

Like a knock.

Seth turned around slowly in his chair. "It's saying hi."

"It's saying something," I said. "And I don't love its tone."

We did it right, like I said. Tuesday night, takeout from the Thai place on the corner, eaten in Seth's apartment with the radio on and both of us talking at full volume like people who had never once been lonely.

"Tell me about your day," Seth said, way too loud, like a sitcom husband. "Honey. Sweetheart. Darling."

"Don't overdo it," I said. "It's suspicious."

"It's a performance. It needs commitment."

"Fine. My day. Lucy ate a crayon. Blue. Christian handled it very calmly for a man who checks the smoke detector battery every month. Then the L was delayed and a guy on the platform explained the whole plot of a show I've never seen to me unasked. That was my day."

"Thrilling stuff. The wall is gonna eat this up."

Not sad single. On purpose single. So sitting across a folding table from a stranger I'd nodded at maybe six times in two years, pretending to date him for the benefit of a crack in a basement wall, should have felt ridiculous.

It kind of did. But it also felt like a Tuesday with a person in it.

"So the scratching," I said. "It's been quiet since the basement."

"Completely quiet. Which I don't trust."

"Of course you don't."

"I work nights at a data center on Diversey. I trust logs. Logs don't go silent and then move to a different wall."

"You're taking this well."

"I found a hand print's worth of nothing in my basement with a flashlight, Vi. I'm taking this exactly as well as I am."

We ate. He told me about laundry, his every Sunday ritual, how the machine on our floor eats quarters. I told him about Christian's daughter Lucy and how she calls every man under forty "da." It was easy. That was the part I kept not saying out loud. It was easy, and the easy was doing something to me.

Then the voice came.

I heard my own voice say, clear as a phone call, from the kitchen wall: "Seth. Seth. Seth."

The noodles went somewhere. I don't remember where. I was standing.

"That's me," I said. "That's my voice."

"I know."

"It's doing my voice."

"I KNOW." He was up too, holding a spatula like a sword, which under other circumstances would have been funny.

The wall did it again. My voice, but wrong. Slower. Stretched. "Seth. Seth. Come here. Come here."

"Okay," Seth said, very calm, the way people are calm right before they panic. "Okay. It heard you say my name. Tonight. Multiple times. It's playing them back."

"It's LEARNING."

"New game," my voice said from the wall. "New game. New game."

I grabbed Seth's hand. I don't remember deciding to. My hand just went and got it. We stood in his kitchen, thirty-four and thirty-six years old, holding hands like two people at a haunted house, except there was no house. The house was the haunted thing.

"Say something," he whispered.

"Like what?"

"Anything. See if it takes it."

"Stop it," I said to the wall. Firm. Nanny voice. The one that works on toddlers and grown men.

The wall considered this. Then, in my voice, slower and flatter than I had ever said it: "Stop. It. Stop. It. Stop. It."

"Okay, that's enough," Seth said. "That's officially enough."

"It's mimicking tone now. It got the tone."

"Vi. Look at me."

I looked at him.

"We need to make it stop doing that. I cannot have that thing learning your voice. I can't. It's one thing when it scratches. The voice is a whole different tier."

"So what do we do?"

"Louder. Talk over it. It feeds on attention, right? Flood it. Fill the room with actual two people talking until it can't get a word in."

"That's your plan? Drown it out?"

"Do you have a better one?"

I did not have a better one. So we talked. Loud, fast, over each other. He asked me about Lisbon. I actually told him about Lisbon, the traveler, the whole story, at a volume I'd never used in that apartment. He told me about Denver and how the breakup was fine and how fine it was, in great detail, suspiciously fine. We were both talking a lot and neither of us was talking about the thing we were actually not talking about.

The wall got quiet. Genuinely quiet. Relief might be the word, but mostly it was just the two of us, out of breath from performing a relationship, standing close because the kitchen was small.

"It worked," I said, normal volume.

"It worked."

"Good job, babe."

"Don't."

"Sorry. Habit. Five minutes of fake dating."

"Sure. Five minutes." He was looking at me. Not the wall. Me. "Can I say something?"

"You've been saying things all night."

"This one's different. I'd like to kiss you. For real. Not for the wall. Or, I mean, the wall can watch, whatever, but it's not for the wall."

Eleven years of on purpose single. And the thing I noticed was that my heart rate did not go up at all. It had already been up. Since the basement. Since the voice. He was just the first honest thing in the room.

"Yes," I said. "Yeah. Okay."

He kissed me and it was not a fake dating kiss. Fake dating kisses are quick and performative and angled for imaginary cameras. This was slow and he tasted like Thai food and I made a choice against my own long standing policy and then made it again. When we pulled apart, my hand was up in his shirt collar and I hadn't felt him put it there.

"Well," he said.

"Well."

"That was, uh. That wasn't for the experiment."

"No kidding."

"Do you want to," he started, and then stopped, and I watched him decide to say it right. "Do you want to keep going?