Hettie’s porch board was still lying against the step when Bram reached her house. She had pried it loose cleanly. The nails remained straight, and the wood showed no split or rot. A shallow, deliberate gap now ran along the porch corner.
He’d come to ask why. Seeing the board made the question harder to dress up as curiosity.
Hettie opened the door before he knocked twice. Her palm was wrapped in a strip of white cloth, with a rusty patch showing through near the thumb. “You should be keeping that hand dry,” he said.
“I’m keeping it clean.” She glanced past him toward the road. “Come in, if you’ve come to talk.”
“I came to ask about the board.”
“I thought you might.”
He pointed at the porch corner. “It was sound.”
“Yes.”
“You pulled it up anyway.”
“Yes.”
Her answers came without excuse. Bram looked from the empty corner to the bandage. He had watched her go at the porch with a pry bar after the threshold board hit her. At the time, it had seemed like fear finding a place to land. Now the board looked too neatly removed for that.
“Why?”
Hettie rested her good hand on the doorframe. “Every house in Sallow Ridge keeps something unfinished.”
Bram waited for the rest. She didn’t offer it.
“Every house?”
“As far as I know.”
“Why?”
Her gaze moved to his hands, still marked with pencil and dust. “You’ve got your answer about the board. What you do with it is yours.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s what I can give you.”
He could have asked whether she believed the gap would keep anything out. He could have asked what she thought had been standing in his room. Instead, he looked at the clean cut of her bandage and thought of the splintered threshold, the way she’d snatched her hand back too late.
“You saw it,” he said.
“I did.”
“And you still won’t tell me what it is.”
“I don’t know what it is.” Hettie’s voice stayed level. “I know what I was taught to leave alone.”
“That sounds like a rule people repeat when they don’t know the reason.”
“Sometimes that’s how people keep a rule.”
Next
Bram has proof the room’s presence has reached the hall, and he must decide whether to widen the unfinished seam or find another way to keep the figure from advancing.
The porch board shifted in the breeze and tapped the step. Hettie reached down and turned it flat so the cut edge faced the house. It was a small, ordinary adjustment. Bram found himself watching to see if she would put it back.
She didn’t.
He walked home with no more than he’d arrived with, except for the shape of the answer: the defect was deliberate, and it belonged to the town, not just to Hettie. He could work with a shared custom. He could ask what it prevented, look at where the gaps were, find a pattern. He couldn’t test any of that from the road.
The unfinished room waited at the end of the upstairs hall. Bram stopped where the floorboards changed color at its entrance. The loose threshold board had been forced upward, leaving a jagged split beside the screw he’d driven into it. He’d inspected the frame twice since Hettie left. The wood was still sound. The screw was still straight.
He set his tool pouch down outside the room and took out a stub of chalk. First he marked the board’s position against the jamb. Then he measured the exposed gap and wrote the number on the back of an envelope. If the board shifted again, he wanted a reference point.
The room held the same smells: dry timber, old dust, and the faint sourness of plaster tucked away in the walls. Nothing moved. The pale shape at the far end had been harder to see since the day’s light went, but it had not gone. Bram could make out the line of a shoulder and the slight tilt of a head. His mind supplied clothing, height, even an angle of the jaw. He told himself the framing produced those shapes. He didn’t believe it as firmly as he had yesterday.
He took a screwdriver from his pouch and set its tip into the screw’s head. If the threshold repair had drawn the figure nearer, backing it out was the only test that made sense. The board had been loose before he fastened it. He could return it to that state without adding anything.
A knock sounded from the marked stud.
Bram’s hand stopped. The knock was a single blunt tap, like a small hammer striking wood from inside the wall.
He eased the screw counterclockwise.
The sound came again, from the same place. The screw turned a fraction, then bound. Bram changed his grip and pressed down just enough to keep the driver seated. He could feel the fastener giving through the tool: threads resisting, then releasing, one by one.
The figure’s shoulder sharpened against the dark stud behind it.
Bram looked at the screw. It had backed out only a few millimeters. He kept turning.
The board lifted against his palm. Its edge pressed hard into the soft part beneath his thumb, and he shifted his weight to keep it from snapping up. The chalk mark he’d made slipped out of alignment by a hair. He held the board down and gave the screw another turn.
Behind him, the hallway floor creaked.
He looked back. The hall was empty. The door to the stairs stood open. Nothing blocked the view down to the first floor, where a lamp cast a dull oval across the entryway.
When Bram turned to the room again, the figure had moved. It stood nearer the doorway, close enough that the empty framing no longer broke its outline into pieces. Its head was angled toward him. He couldn’t see a face, but there was a pale interval where one ought to be.
He pulled the screwdriver free.
The threshold board settled against the floor with a small wooden crack. Bram stepped into the hall and looked down. A single footprint pressed into the dust beside the board. It pointed away from the room.
He crouched. The print was longer than his hand, with a deep hollow at the heel and separate impressions where the toes had sunk. The hall floorboards were bare except for the dust he’d tracked there himself. No second print followed it. No trail led back.
Bram had measured the hallway that morning. The mark was beyond the line of the room, past the jamb. He checked the footprint against the chalk marks on the threshold. It wasn’t a blur or a scuff from the loose board. The floor had taken a weight.
The screwdriver remained in his hand. He could finish backing the fastener out and see whether the board fell free. He could also leave the board loose, as it had been before, and find out whether making the opening wider changed anything. Hettie had widened her own gap. She had done it after the figure appeared. Bram’s first instinct was to make the conditions match hers.
Then he saw the pale shape beyond the threshold, still watching him.
He put the screwdriver in his pouch and backed away. At the top of the stairs, he picked up the pouch and brought it down with him. The screw stayed half-drawn, the board crooked in its opening. He left the upstairs hall light on, though the room remained dark.
In the kitchen, he washed the pencil and dust from his hands. A black line remained beneath one thumbnail. The envelope with his measurements sat on the counter, the figures neat and useful and now inadequate. He folded it once and set it aside.
The house made a small settling sound overhead. Bram kept his eyes on the kitchen doorway. He didn’t go back up.
The town had left its flaws in place. He had spent one afternoon making his smaller. The footprint in his hall pointed toward the stairs.