Chapter 5 #3
Looking down at the table, Will wonders if maybe it didn’t all have to go somewhere .
If maybe Old Bill had put it all into his woodworking, all the affection he couldn’t show, all the things he couldn’t bring himself to say.
By all accounts, the original Bill had been that way about the farm—even when Will was a kid, generations later a town legend was still making the rounds about the night Old Bill was born.
The original Bill had, indeed, famously been up all night, but not at the hospital with his wife: He’d been out in the apple grove, trying to protect some young saplings from being nibbled to nothing by area wildlife.
Will wonders, knowing it’s too late to ask the answer, where his own father had put it all.
Sighing, he steps away, turns towards the stairs, and finds as he climbs them that his tension is mounting with each one.
He’s not sure what he’s expecting to find, or afraid that he’ll find, at the top; it’s hard to know which would feel worse.
If he finds his old bedroom changed, turned into an office or a sewing room or whatever, he thinks that might not be…
amazing, as an emotional experience. But the thought of it as a mausoleum, preserved forever as though Will died in a tragic prank-gone-wrong like that Gramlich kid did when Will was in middle school—that’s awful, too, in an equally disquieting way.
His was the first door at the top of the stairs growing up, and so it’s the first one he has to face. It’s closed, and Will takes a deep breath before gripping the knob, bracing himself for it to be locked. It turns, though, and on an exhale, Will pushes the door open…
Will pushes the door open …
Will struggles, in vain, to push the door open, getting it about half an inch off the frame before it’s caught against some heavy obstacle.
Annoyed, Will huffs, repositions, leans his shoulder against the door, and shoves , really putting his weight into it.
Something moves, and the door gives way; Will stumbles at the sudden shift and only barely doesn’t face-plant, jumping to straighten himself even though no one is here to see him.
He looks around. In spite of himself, he starts to laugh.
Will had feared an utterly changed room or an utterly unchanged one; what a foolish, laughable idea.
Either option would have required from his parents either a willingness to address a situation head-on or the ability to leave a thing alone, and that simply wasn’t in Bill’s or June’s cards.
What Will should have expected is exactly what he sees—his room is more or less as he left it, somewhere underneath many years of accumulated boxes, old clothes, extra tools, forgotten kitchen appliances, various manuals for an assortment of devices, and other detritus of the modern home.
Without Will here to defend the territory, this room had simply continued bearing on with its original purpose: containing things his parents had no idea what to do with, and would prefer didn’t clutter up the rest of the house.
He shakes his head and leaves, shutting the door behind him. There’s nothing in there he wants, at least not badly enough to go digging for it.
The next door is his parents’ room, and it’s open.
Will stops in the hallway before it and stares.
That is certainly…quite different. Upsettingly different.
Chillingly different, even. The bed doesn’t look like it’s been slept in for some time, but the decor is such a radical departure from Will’s memory that, feeling some shame, he pinches himself in hopes that it’s a nightmare, without luck.
In his childhood, this room had art on the walls.
It wasn’t tasteful art, of course—as Will recalls it had been framed illustrations of ducks wearing little hats and bonnets, and other things of that ilk—but there’d been something , anyway.
Will knows he isn’t imagining it, because he can see the ghostly outlines of their former places on the wallpaper, demarcated in the slightly altered fading.
That’s gone, now. The decorative throw pillows, gone, the cedar chest at the foot of the bed, gone, the porcelain figurines lining the shelves across the front window, gone.
The shelves themselves are gone, Will realizes, as he steps further into the room; he can see the grooves in the windowpane where they used to sit, if he squints.
Even the bedspread is gone, replaced with a thin white blanket that Will can tell, if he touches it, will be itchy.
He touches it. It’s itchy .
“What did I expect?” Will mutters, knowing there isn’t any point.
No one is here to answer him, and no one could tell him the answer to that particular question even if they were , and anyway, he’s only trying to distract himself.
He doesn’t really care about the texture of the blanket, or the missing paintings, or the lack of throw pillows.
Will cares about the Post-it notes.
The reason Will cares about the Post-it notes is that the room is covered in them.
Papered, really. Unable to help himself, he glances between a few of them, wincing; the messages they bear vary.
Some of them say things like, Get milk! or Don’t forget your glasses!
which, okay, normal enough for a man in his eighties.
But others say things like, 1971—New cable for pump 3? and Stolen mail—dates—6/7—7/19—4/22—5.
So: dementia, then. Will could waffle about it with himself, could try to pretend it was something else.
A psychotic break, or a spike in paranoia due to a medication mix-up—after so many years in the cloisters of academia, socializing only with other people deep in the recesses of a scientific pursuit, Will’s imagination on this front is vast. He could come up with enough explanations for this horrible wall to rival the writers of House, M.D. , if he wanted to.
There just wouldn’t be any point. Old Bill died of Alzheimer’s, after all; the original Bill Robertson had died of it, too, or at least everyone assumed, in retrospect, that he had.
According to family lore, he’d refused to see a doctor, but certainly by all accounts, he’d exhibited the classic signs.
It’s genetic, and highly heritable, and Will watched his grandfather trickle away like rainwater from a slowly leaking bucket, less and less of him left each day.
He’s known since he was a teenager that it would probably kill his father, and, eventually, him.
There was a day, sometime in his late twenties, where that had really hit home for Will, the weight of it.
It probably would have been sooner if he hadn’t kept himself so busy, always buried in some research project or another.
But he’d graduated, and he’d taken a weekend off, and he was sitting on a park bench staring at some pigeons splashing in a fountain when he thought, Someday, I’m going to forget what this feels like .
It was a clear blue day, bracingly cold for the time of year—still pristine in Will’s memory for now.
At the time, it had made him feel an uncomfortable rush of sympathy for his father, and the years he, too, had spent waiting for the axe to fall.
Will realizes abruptly that his eyes are filled with tears, that standing in the middle of this room is starting to make him feel profoundly like screaming.
He backs out quickly, trying to walk the fine line between not letting himself absorb any other details without wishing to forget any of what he’s already noticed.
Once Will is back out in the hallway, in spite of feeling a bit foolish about it, he allows himself a moment to slump slightly against a wall.
He wants a second to let his heart calm down, to feel less like he’s in a horror movie.
For God’s sake, his mind is playing such aggressive tricks on him that he almost thinks he hears the back door shutting!
He needs to take a few nice deep breaths and then…
Hell . It wasn’t Will’s mind playing tricks on him after all; the sound of unfamiliar footsteps across the first-floor vestibule is too loud and unmistakable to be memory messing him around.
Will glances wildly around him, trying to decide his best move.
He knows a dozen ways out of this house, but every workable exit from this floor is through one of his bedroom windows, and there’s no way Will could get to any of them right now without displacing the junk and making an enormous racket.
If he could get to the bathroom, down at the end of the hall, he might still be able to shimmy his way out of the little window over the shower, but it’s only a maybe.
It was a tight fit when he was sixteen, and that was a long time ago.
He hears the footsteps approaching the stairs, and someone—burglar, intruder, whoever they are—whistling softly.
Panicking, Will decides the bathroom is his best move and takes two hesitant steps towards the other side of the hall before the old house betrays him: a loud creak emanates up from the ancient pine floorboards, mockingly louder for Will’s slow, hesitant footfall.
The whistling and the footsteps downstairs both abruptly cut off. Will swallows.
He glances around wildly for something to use as a weapon, now that confrontation seems all but inevitable.
The framed photographs on the little wooden side table are too small, not heavy enough to do any real damage; the table itself is too large to be easily wielded; the lamp atop the table, too, is a bit too heavy to be workable, and anyway his mother would kill him if it broke?—
Aaaand she’s dead , Will reminds himself, somewhat hysterically, as he hears a single, ominous creak from below.
Nearly a decade now, isn’t it? Focus! His eyes light upon a broom leaned up against the corner of the hall, and he hurries over as quietly as he can and snatches it.
It’s not particularly heavy, but it will have to do, and after an awkward second of wrangling, Will lifts it in a two-handed grip, bristles up over his head, ready to attack.
He creeps over to the top of the stairs and peers down; he can’t see anyone on the landing, but the turn beyond that is blind. Nothing to do but press forward.
He moves down one stair…
…and then the next…
…and as he goes, he tries to tell himself that he doesn’t hear the softest, faintest creaks every time he moves his foot, or the equally soft creaks filtering back in re ply from below…
…until he is, after what feels like hours, on the last stair left before the landing.
Will takes a huge breath, tightens his grip on the broom, and, with a slightly strangled war-cry that he would never have expected himself to release, jumps down onto the landing.
He crashes immediately into Casey, who has chosen this moment to do the exact same thing from the other side.