The Span

Bram stood in the hall with his hand on the doorframe and watched the foot in the room.

It rested just inside the gap, heel lifted, toes angled toward him. Dust had gathered over the skin in a gray film. The exposed threshold separated it from the hall by less than an inch of missing board.

Bram checked the gap with his folding rule. Seven-eighths of an inch at the narrow end, a little over an inch at the other. The cut edges were rough but sound. No splinter or loose shaving connected them.

The figure held its position while he measured. Bram kept his eyes on the rule, then looked again. The foot had not moved.

He set the rule down on the hallway floor. A gap was a gap. It might interrupt a path, catch a foot, or change the way boards transferred vibration. He had no useful explanation for why a human shape appeared to respect it. That didn’t make the measurement less useful.

He fetched a length of thin pine lath from the kitchen. It was left over from a temporary brace, straight and light enough to lift with one hand. He carried it to the doorway and crouched.

“What are you doing?” Hettie asked from the porch.

Bram turned. She stood outside the open front door, a canvas shopping bag on her arm. He had left it unlatched after she’d said she might come by. She was looking past him toward the room.

“Checking whether the gap is doing anything.”

“Leave it open.”

“I am leaving it open.” He held up the lath. “This comes back out.”

Hettie set her bag down beside the door. Her gaze stayed on the foot. “You can’t know what it will do once you give it a way across.”

“That’s what I’m checking.”

She started to answer, then stopped. Bram could see her choosing whether to argue with him or watch. She came down the hall and stood several feet behind him.

Bram put one end of the lath on the hall side of the doorway. The other end rested on the room’s floorboards, spanning the gap without touching the foot. He had not nailed it or even pressed it down. It lay flat, a temporary bridge between two sound surfaces.

For several seconds, nothing changed. Bram watched the lath for movement, then the floor around it. The boards held their shape. No hidden spring, no settling.

The foot lowered.

The toes pressed against the wood. Dust shifted in a small line along the lath. Bram’s fingers tightened around its near end.

The foot moved forward. The lath bowed under it, though the figure’s weight had no business bending that stiff a strip. Bram heard the pine fibers complain. The figure placed its heel on the hall side.