Scritch, Scritch, Scritch

SCRITCH, SCRITCH, SCRITCH

Scritch, scritch, scritch.

I looked up at the ceiling. There was something in the attic. Moving around. I could hear it.  

“Leo!” I shout-whispered to my husband, shaking him violently. “Leo! There’s something in the attic.”

“Whaaa” was his response.

“Leo! Wake up! There’s something in the attic!”

Scritch, scritch, scritch.

“Leo!” I almost screamed, shaking him so hard I was worried I’d dislocated his shoulder. “WAKE UP!” I turned on the light.

He opened his eyes, blinking, with a look of complete disorientation, with a side of panic—that combination of confusion and worry that people get when they are jolted awake in the middle of the night.

“What?” he asked, his eyes darting around.

“There’s something in the attic,” I said in a low voice. “Listen!”

We listened. Nothing. Just the sound of our breathing.

He looked at me. “I don’t hear anything.”

“There was a scratching sound. It woke me up.” I looked from him to the ceiling. “Something’s up there! You need to go look.”

He sat up on one elbow. “Are you kidding me, Una? It’s—” he looked at his watch, “three fourteen in the morning, and you want me to get out of bed, go outside, get a ladder, open the ceiling hatch, climb up, and explore the attic in the dark because you think you heard something?” 

I was sitting up, heart hammering, eyes glued to the ceiling. “Yes.”

He shook his head. “If you’re so gung-ho to see what’s up there, you go.” He flopped down onto the bed, rolled over on his side, back towards me, punching his pillow. “I’m going back to sleep.”

So I sat there. Listening.  

“Can you turn off the light?” came his muffled voice.

“No.”

He sighed.  

So, I lay there looking at the ceiling, listening. It was quiet for the rest of the night. But I had heard something. I was sure of if.

I finally fell asleep when I could see the dawn breaking. 

Do monsters really disappear with the sun?

*****

When I got up, closer to noon, Leo wasn’t there. I walked around inside, then outside. I found him in the back, working on something in his shed.

“Are you going to go up into the attic?” I asked.  

He looked at me, frowning. “No ‘good morning?’ No ‘sorry for waking you up in the middle of the night?’ No ‘sorry for leaving the light on all night?’ Just ‘are you going to go up into the attic?’” he said, picking up a small tool and looking back down at his work bench and whatever it was he was working on.

I took a deep breath. The snark was strong with this one. “Look, I heard something. It woke me up.” He continued to fuss around with the project in front of him. “I’m not making this up, Leo. I heard something in the attic.”

“Uh huh.”

Now I was getting annoyed. I folded my arms across my chest. “Are you going to go up into the attic and look?”

He lifted his head, and looked at me. “I did. While you were sleeping. There’s nothing up there.”

“But I heard something!” I said.

Leo looked away, and then looked back at me. “I don’t know what to tell you. There was nothing up there except pink insulation.”

*****

Scritch, scritch, scritch.

My eyes flew open. It was there, again. The sound. In the attic. I swivelled my head towards Leo. I could see his bulk in the dark, soft snores wafting from his mouth.

Scritch, scritch, scritch.

I leaned over to shake him. Then stopped. Nope, I wasn’t going to do that again. Instead, I lay awake and listened. There were no other sounds—just the scratching. 

Why hadn’t Leo found anything in the attic?  

Unless he already knew what it was. And didn’t tell me.

My eyes darted towards my husband of forty-three years. I chided myself. My brain was doing middle-of-the-night nonsense.  But it didn’t explain—

Scritch, scritch, scritch.

I lay there frightened, staring at the ceiling.  

Why couldn’t Leo hear it? Two nights in a row.  

Scritch, scritch, scritch.

I sat up slowly, listening. It wasn’t moving. It was as if something was just above me, scratching at the floor, trying to get through.

Scritch, scritch, scritch.

There was nothing I could do—just wait.

Another night, listening to something in my attic, making my heart hammer.

Scritch, scritch, scritch.

*****

When I finally came down into the kitchen, Leo was sitting at the kitchen table, reading something on his tablet. He looked up, closed the tablet cover. “How was your sleep?” he asked, staring at me.

Time to lie. “Fine. How ‘bout you?”

His face changed—confused—just for a second, then snapped back to the concerned spouse. “Good, good.” He looked back down at his closed tablet, guilt oozing off of him. I caught him watching me when he thought I had turned away.

That rat bastard! Him! What the actual hell!

I got myself a tea, and went to sit outside on the front porch to think.

Son of a bitch! What the hell was he up to!

The sounds in the attic were not the first odd things that had happened in our house.  Things gone missing, moved. Important things—car keys, glasses. Unimportant things—my gardening hat, the cheese knife. I found the tv remote in the fridge and my phone under the bathroom sink. Once, at the mall, I was sure that I was losing my mind because my car was not where I remembered parking it—it was way at the back, at the farthest spot from the door.

All the while, Leo asking me if I’m okay. And if I got upset, he’d tell me I was over-reacting.  

To be honest, I had started second-guessing myself.  I never told anyone.  My biggest fear as I aged was the loss of my cognitive abilities. To me that was a fate worse than death.

Last week, without telling Leo—because I was ashamed, not because I suspected him of anything—I made an appointment with my doctor. She ran some tests and told me I was fine. In fact, better than fine. My memory was stronger than most people my age. I sighed a sigh of relief, but didn’t tell Leo. 

Sitting on the porch, I made a list of every odd thing that had been happening to me in the last six month. In a second column I listed Leo’s response. A pattern appeared. Every time something weird happened, Leo would ask me about it. He asked about the cheese knife, staring at the empty slot in the knife block, but he didn’t eat any cheese. He needed a phone number for a friend that I had in my contacts when my phone was AWOL, but never called them. I’d phoned him from the mall, saying that I thought that the car had been stolen. I wanted to call the police. Leo had said no, don’t call the cops, he’d be right there. He arrived much faster than he should have, and we drove around the parking lot until he “spotted” my car.

He said that he’d been up in the attic yesterday. But, had he? Did he go up and check, or did he already know what he would find up there?

Leo walked out the front door, saw me sitting there.

“I’m going to the store,” he said, walking towards the driveway.

I watched him. “What for?”

He stopped and looked at me. “Uh, batteries.”

“Can you pick up another bottle of wine, too? You know, that Pinotage that I like?”

He looked at me. “I thought you liked the French Pinot Noir?”

“I do, but the Pinotage is my current favourite.” I looked up and smiled. “You can only get it from the liquor store on Parliament.”

He nodded and he was gone.

I waited until I saw him turn the corner and drive away. Then I waited ten more minutes. I looked at my watch. I had about half an hour before he came back.  

I hustled myself out to the back yard, snatching up a flashlight on the way. I grabbed the step ladder and hauled it up to the hatch in the upstairs hallway. Climbing the eight steps to the top, I pushed up the hatch cover and stuck my head through the opening. I pulled out the flashlight and scanned the sea of pink insulation. Over the years Leo had laid a checkerboard of plywood to walk on. I silently thanked the bastard—how would I explain how I had fallen through the ceiling?—and made my way over to where our bedroom was. I swung the beam across the blanket of pink, looking for anything that shouldn’t be there. Like, perhaps, a recording device, or speaker. I was pretty sure that there would be no monster tracks, or scratch marks on the subfloor. At this point, I was almost certain the noise was Leo-driven, not something from the underworld. I checked my watch. I had about twelve minutes left. I had to hurry if I didn’t want Leo to catch me up here, snooping around in a space I had never before ventured to in the forty years we’d owned the house. I looked down at all the fibreglass—the scratchy, itchy, fibreglass. I snorted, picturing some monstrous being scratching like a dog with fleas because it was sitting in the insulation. 

But, I knew what I had to do—put my hand in the insulation. There was nothing sitting in the open. Just before I took the plunge, I shone my light one more time. Then I saw it—right beside the piece of plywood I was standing on. It was leaning against the joist—our Bose SoundLink Micro speaker. Actually, the same speaker I asked Leo about last week because I couldn’t find it.

I grabbed the speaker and hightailed it out of the attic, only whacking my head on the rafters once. Which really hurt. Now I knew why I avoided the attic.

I managed to get out and close the hatch, and drag the ladder outside. I was just walking back towards the house after returning the ladder to its home beside Leo’s shed when he pulled into the driveway. He lugged in a box of wine and set it on the island. There were nine bottles of wine—French wine. I looked at Leo.

“No Pinotage?”

He looked annoyed. “No. I got the French Pinot you asked for.”

“I said South African Pinotage.”

He took a big breath. “No, Una, you said to pick up a case of the French Pinot Noir,” looking at me with pity, sounding equal parts sad and worried.  

I walked away. What was that sixties song? By the Ugly Ducklings? Ah, yes, Gaslight.

***** 

I looked at my watch in the dark. It was just after three o’clock in the morning—the same time that I had heard all the scratching sounds the last two nights. We’d been in bed for hours, Leo sleeping the sleep of the guilty, me waiting.  

SCRITCH! SCRITCH! SCRITCH! blared the speaker at full volume.

Leo bolted straight up in bed. “What the hell!” he yelled, looking around.

I leaned over and turned on the light. Gone was the confusion from two nights ago. In its place sheer terror. Probably the very look I’d had on my face two nights ago.

I held up the speaker, saying nothing. He looked at the speaker, eyes bulging, then looked at me, realization dawning on his face.

I got out of bed. “I’ll be downstairs when you want to talk about it.”

I made a tea, and sat at the kitchen table. Leo came down a few minutes later. He sat down in a chair across from me, folded his hands on the table, and looked out the dark window.

“Why?” I asked.

He said nothing, just continued to look out the window.  

I waited.

Finally he spoke up. “I don’t know.”

I blinked. “Pardon?” I said, not sure I had heard him correctly.

“I don’t know,” he repeated, then turned to look at me.

Out of all the answers I expected, I don’t know wasn’t even on the list.

I took a sip of my tea, my hands shaking slightly.  

“Leo, you’ve been gaslighting me for weeks now. Why?”

 “It’s not what you think,” he said, focusing on the extremely fascinating table top.

I blinked, said nothing, and pushed the play button on my phone. Our conversation about the wine filled the air.

He had the temerity to look offended. “You taped me!”

I leaned in, fixing him with a cold stare. “Are you sure this is the hill you want to die on?”

He looked up at the ceiling. I could see he was trying to come up with a story that didn’t make him out to be the complete asshole he was. He sighed heavily, and scratched the stubble on his cheeks. He tapped his fingers on the tabletop, and blew the air through his lips. “You’re a lot of work, Una. I figured if I knocked you down a few pegs, you wouldn’t be so much.  

I’m tired of being your husband, Una. You act like you’re the centre of the universe, and I am nothing more than your sidekick. I figured if I destroyed your unshakable self-confidence, then maybe, it would be a bit easier for me.”.

*****

The divorce papers were signed six weeks later.