Footsteps Overhead
頭上の足音
The footsteps began on the third night, and by the fourth I could no longer pretend I had imagined them.
They came from the third floor, which the solicitor had assured me was empty and had been for years.
Each night, a little after one, a slow and even crossed the ceiling above my bedroom.
It was not the random settling of old wood; it had the deliberate rhythm of a person with somewhere to go.
Surely, I told myself, it was only a bird trapped beneath the , or a branch against the slates.
No doubt the mind, left alone in a large house, manufactures company out of ordinary sounds.
I catalogued every rational cause, as a lawyer might list defences, and found each one thinner than the last.
Birds do not pace in straight lines, back and forth, with the patience of a on duty.
On the fifth night I lit a candle and climbed the stairs, ashamed of my own heartbeat.
The third-floor corridor was exactly as abandoned as I had been promised, and colder than the rest.
Dust lay thick and , unmarked by any foot, my own the only prints I could find.
And yet, standing there, I heard the footsteps continue in the room directly to my right.
I did not open that door, and I have never been able to forgive myself the I felt.
Back in bed, I reasoned that sound travels strangely in old houses, that echoes can seem to come from anywhere.
It was merely , I insisted, the innocent geometry of beams and and empty space.
The words comforted me for as long as it takes to say them, and no longer.
Sleep, when it came, arrived like a guest who does not trust the host and keeps one eye open.
By day I was a woman who did not believe the dead had errands to run.
By night I lay counting a stranger's steps and wondering where, in an empty house, they were going.
The distance between those two women grew a little wider with each passing night.
I began to leave lamps burning in rooms I did not use, as though light itself were a kind of witness.
I told no one, for there was no one to tell, and the telling would have made it true.
A secret kept alone, I found, does not stay still; it paces, like the thing above my head.
On the seventh night the footsteps stopped directly over my bed and, for a long while, did not move.
I lay beneath that silence as one lies beneath a held breath, waiting for it to be released.
Then, very softly, from a floor I had proven to be empty, someone began to the stairs.