The Fourth Stair Sighs
四段目のため息
It began, as such things always begin, with a sound too small to justify the fear it eventually commanded.
The fourth stair from the bottom sighed each night at an hour I came, dreadfully, to anticipate.
Not a precisely, nor a groan, but a long , as though the wood were unburdening itself.
Timber contracts as the temperature falls; I recited this fact nightly, the way frightened children recite prayers.
Yet the sound arrived at the same minute, with a regularity that physics alone seemed disinclined to supply.
On the first night I dismissed it; on the second I listened; by the third I was waiting.
Waiting, I have since concluded, is the precise activity by which a rational mind rehearses its own undoing.
I lay in the great cold bed while the house composed itself into the silence that precedes a confession.
Then the stair would sigh, and the sigh seemed to carry, faintly, the of a human breath.
I told myself it was the settling, the of draughts finding their old accustomed channels.
But a does not pause, and this sound paused, as if gathering resolve to be heard again.
By the fourth night my reasoning had thinned into the transparent, sort that shatters at a touch.
I resolved to catch the stair in its dishonesty, and descended by candlelight to stand upon it myself.
The wood was cold beneath my bare foot, and it held its silence with the patience of the guilty.
I pressed my weight upon it, once, twice, and coaxed from it only an honest, ordinary .
The sigh, whatever authored it, would not perform for me; it kept its hour and its privacy.
Back in bed, I caught my own reflection in the black window, my lending me the look of a ghost.
It occurred to me, unpleasantly, that a house cannot sigh unless something within it has learned to grieve.
And grief, I knew better than most, is a that pays its rent in sounds at night.
I had come to Ellenmoor precisely to escape a grief I had not permitted myself to name.
Perhaps the stair sighed because I would not; perhaps it had assumed the office I had abandoned.
The thought was absurd, and I clung to its absurdity as a drowning hand clings to any passing thing.
Each night thereafter I counted the stairs as I climbed, and each night I flinched upon the fourth.
The obsession, I understood even then, said more of me than any tally of sounds could.
A rational woman does not interrogate a staircase; a haunted one cannot, in the end, refrain.
I began to wonder which of us, the house or I, was truly the one that would not rest.
On the ninth night the sigh came twice, the second an answer to the first, or so it seemed.
And in the pause between them, unmistakably, I heard the fourth stair take a slow step downward, unweighted by any foot.