The Attic of Good and Evil

The babysitter fell asleep. Sometimes it’s opportunity, more than motive, that creates the crime. Halley didn’t particularly want to go into the attic. She wasn’t staying up late at night thinking about it. She didn’t obsess over what could be in there. She had a pretty good idea of what she’d find. Boxes, mostly. Dust. Probably spiders. Certainly nothing that would make her life any better, or even different. But look at that. The babysitter fell asleep.

Other kids are bad. They do bad things. They think bad thoughts. They have evil ideas, like seeing their babysitter fall asleep and immediately coming up with fifteen ways to make the babysitter miserable. Doing stuff to her purse or something. Halley didn’t know what ideas they’d be, because Halley wasn’t a bad kid.

That’s why the attic wasn’t locked. Her parents said, “You are not allowed in the attic under any circumstances,” and they knew that this would be as strong as any padlock. Halley would never disobey. Not without a very good reason, at least. And there was no good reason to go into the attic. Not even the faintest whiff of one.

Halley left the babysitter prone on the couch in the den and walked softly upstairs. She stood in front of the utility closet. Inside, there were two big boxes and a vacuum that had to be removed. Then she’d need to get the step stool from the bathroom so she could reach the cord that pulled the ladder down from the ceiling panel. That was the way into the attic. Inside this utility closet. Going into the attic would take a lot of work, lots of steps. For no good reason.

The vacuum was the only easy one, since it had wheels on it. Halley had to slide the heavy boxes out of the wood floor closet up onto the thick carpet of the upstairs hallway. She had to be quiet, to avoid waking the babysitter. She was being sneaky. Sneaky isn’t bad, but it’s a way to be bad, if you’re being bad. But Halley hadn’t gone in the attic yet. All she did was empty the closet.

Her bathroom was right next to the closet. She grabbed the stool and set it on the now empty floor, then stepped up and pulled down on the ladder cord. Nothing budged. She gave it a few more tugs, then noticed there was a latch on the ceiling panel the ladder came down from. Her dad could reach that. Maybe her mom, too, with a stool. But Halley could barely reach the end of the cord on her stool. To go into the attic, she’d need a ladder. From the garage. And she’d need to carry it through the den.

This is when Halley gave up. She didn’t really want to go into the attic anyway. It was just an idea. Maybe a bad idea? Maybe not. It depended. It depended on why her parents were so firm when they told her she couldn’t go in there. It was weird how they said it. What could be in the attic? Nothing up there ever made a noise. But it must be a secret. Secrets are usually quiet. Secrets are sneaky. Maybe it’s bad for her parents to keep a secret. Maybe her parents are bad parents.

Halley shuddered all over at this new and unwelcome thought. A good child does not think their parents are bad. Can a good child even have bad parents? No, because bad parents make bad children. Good parents make good children. So her parents weren’t being sneaky. Unless one parent was bad and one was good? Would that still make a good child? Possibly. Halley remembered learning about eye colors. It was complicated, and she didn’t remember exactly how it worked, but she remembered that even with one parent who had brown eyes and one parent who had blue eyes, you were still going to probably have brown eyes. Is being good like brown eyes or blue eyes? And if her parents were bad and good, how did they agree about the attic. In her memory, she remembered her dad saying not to go into the attic while her mom stood by and made eye contact with her and frowned. She thought it was the frown of “this is serious and you need to listen to your father” but maybe she was frowning because she disagreed? And her mom had brown eyes and her dad had blue eyes. So her mom could be good and Halley could be good but her dad could be sneaky with a secret.

By this time Halley had the ladder upstairs and was on its top step, unhooking the little brass latch. She stepped down the ladder and pulled it out of the closet, setting it to the side with the boxes and the vacuum. Then she listened for a little while to make sure the babysitter wasn’t awake. No noise. So she put the stool in again and tugged on the cord.

The ladder came down with a loud rattling noise and hit the floor with a thud, only missing Halley’s head because she wasn’t tall enough to get bonked. It was a staircase ladder that folded up, and you walked up it at an angle like a staircase. She’d only seen it once, on the day she was forbidden to go into the attic. It was strange and wonderful. She wanted to study how it folded into itself and slid into the little attic ceiling space. But the noise!

Halley went downstairs to look at the babysitter. Still sleeping, though in a slightly different position, with her arm up instead of down and her head facing the ceiling instead of the television, which was still on and still playing cartoons.

Was the babysitter bad? Halley spent some time thinking about it with all her new thoughts on goodness and badness. It was hard to tell. She seemed good. They played together and talked together and she was almost never on her phone instead of paying attention. Those all seemed like good babysitter things. Sleeping wasn’t good, though. But Halley knew that good people could do bad things by accident or as an experiment and still be good people as long as they were sorry. Being sorry meant not making that accident or experiment again. And now you knew why the bad thing was bad. And if you were good, that would make you not want to do the bad thing again, so it actually made you more good in the end. Halley decided, as she walked back upstairs to the attic ladder, that the babysitter was probably good. And since doing this bad thing meant that Halley was doing a bad thing, the babysitter would be more good after waking up and finding that out, so Halley was doing a good thing for the babysitter even though it was a bad thing for her dad who maybe was bad but anyway Halley could be sorry about the experiment and be good again.

The wood from the stairs smelled good. Not like a Christmas tree, but close. The hole in the ceiling was dark. Halley didn’t know if there would be any light switches in the attic. She wondered if the attic was forbidden because it was dark and dangerous. That would make sense. She climbed the ladder to find out.

When she reached the top and stood up in the attic, the ladder retracted itself and the door slammed shut and the latch fell back into place. Halley screamed, but there was a lot of insulation in the attic. The scream was muffled.

There was one muffled scream, then no more.

The Sandersons returned from their dinner date to find Elizabeth asleep on the couch. They smiled at each other, assuming Halley had been put to bed. But when they went upstairs to check on her, they found the vacuum and junk boxes in the hall, plus the garage ladder, plus the utility closet door open. Jim Sanderson immediately knew what happened. He darted into the closet and reached up to feel the brass latch. It was warm.

“Too soon,” Alice Sanderson said, her eyes welling up.

“Obviously not,” said Jim, trying to control his anger.

“Oh, Jim, what are we going to do?”

Jim frowned at the floor. “It can’t have been too long. We could make a trade.”

“A trade? But how?” And Alice met Jim’s eyes and understood.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth woke up. She quickly turned off the TV and looked around with alarm. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep. She felt terrible. It was the worst thing you could do as a babysitter, the one rule you couldn’t break besides just leaving altogether. She looked at her watch, hoping she’d woken up before the Sandersons got home, but then she heard footsteps on the staircase, and looked over the back of the couch to see them both coming toward her with grim expressions.

“I’m so sorry!” she said. “I swore I’d never fall asleep while watching Halley, and I … I must have dozed a little. I’m so sorry!”

“Come with us,” Mr. Sanderson said. “We need to show you something.”

Elizabeth’s heart raced as she followed them. Surely Halley was in bed and maybe just still in her day clothes? Surely nothing seriously bad had happened. The kid was too old to drown in a bathtub or accidentally electrocute herself or something. The whole time Elizabeth babbled her apologies, saying over and over again she swore she’d never fall asleep.

They stopped at the closet in the hall. There were things emptied out of it. Mr. Sanderson went in and did something to the ceiling, then pulled down a retractable ladder. They seemed to be waiting for her.

“We need to show you something,” he repeated.

Elizabeth looked at Mrs. Sanderson, who only said, “You go in first.”

Elizabeth felt more and more baffled with every step up the ladder. “Is there a light switch up here? It’s really dark.”

“Just a few more steps and you’ll see it,” replied Mr. Sanderson.

And Elizabeth reached the top, at which point the ladder retracted and the hole slammed shut. What happened next, she could only respond to with a scream.