HAUNTINGS: The Disturbed Things

By Craig Bernardini

He awoke and, gazing around the room in the morning light, noticed things had moved. The chair was angled a little more toward the window. The desk was pulled slightly away from the wall, as if to retrieve a pencil fallen behind it. The picture, of a ship cocked and foundering in heavy swells, a little crooked the previous evening, hung straight. The bottom drawer of the dresser was open a hair.

Rising, he carefully restored the things to their original places.

The next morning, they were disturbed again, though not in exactly the same way.

Perhaps because nothing went missing, he thought little of it. He could have simply misremembered where things were. But eventually the feeling caught up with him: he wondered why he thought so little of it. Because they were not his things? He hardly used the chair, with its moldy cushions and worn-out springs. Or the desk, except to pile his few books. He didn’t even look at the picture very often.

His things—the books, change of clothes, coat, shoes (two pairs) and overshoes, framed photo of himself as a boy, marbled pebbles, sea-shell bits, Navy figurine (admiral), tea cups (two), wooden trunk with frayed handles—did not move, except insofar as they found themselves upon things that did.

 It would have been one thing had the things been disturbed in the daytime. The charwoman had a key. He tried to be in when she cleaned, irregular though she was. He would help her slide the trunk, and the iron frame of the bed; the charwoman, unlike the landlady, was petite. She would tease him about not trusting her with his things, saying, Do you think I don’t have a man to buy me all the things I want? You silly goose. But if the day was sufficiently overcast he would go to the park, to feed the pigeons the breadcrusts he had gathered off the other boarders’ plates before the cook could turn them into pudding; or to the library (but never to read).

The charwoman was much too diligent for the dust to accumulate to a degree that the disturbed things would leave a trace. He might pay her not to clean. But he was afraid of calling attention to himself. Instead, he bought a yardstick. Each morning, before going down to breakfast, he took measurements: from the top corners of the picture to the ceiling; from the front leg of the chair to a pencil mark on the baseboard, along a line parallel to the adjacent wall; and so on. Logging each day’s figures, perusing them while pigeons gamboled over him and vagrants snored in nearby chairs, he was able to verify that the disturbances were real—though so subtle, and so irregular (no direction; no determinable pattern, though he subjected the figures to endless mental algorithms) that he was unable to entirely remove the suspicion that his measurements had been taken in such a way as to validate his impressions.

What if the charwoman, or the landlady, or another boarder who had somehow gotten hold of his key, was creeping into his room to disturb things while he slept? Sitting down to breakfast one morning, in one of the slatted chairs that made his hips ache—there was not a comfortable chair in the whole place, he said to himself, though never aloud—while the cook was rattling the cutlery in the kitchen, he inquired, as discreetly as he could, of his fellow boarders. It’s funny, he began—and for one who was hardly known to speak at all, there was something momentous in so inauspicious a beginning—it’s funny, but some days I forget where things are. Stuff is just … out of place. Not quite where I thought it was. And then he scanned the other faces at the table for a meaningful look, a signal to arrange a clandestine meeting. Circumambulating the pond in the hollow at the park’s center, the one with all the toy sailboats, a secret would be divulged: about another boarder, or the charwoman (she occasionally smelled), or the landlady, or the landlady’s deceased husband, whose picture sat on the mantle beneath his ludicrously small rapier.

No one took his bait. Not Ong, mostly blind, who continued to squint at him expectantly through his thick glasses. Not Fitzgerald, who seemed to nourish himself entirely on his own fingernails. Not Czerny, “the Pole,” a philosopher, retired from the University of Sczrenzk (or so it was rumored), who spent all day on the bench in the corner of the foyer, where the light was poorest, reading; he even had a book open beside his plate. And not any of the salesmen stopping through, with their suitcases full of Bibles or brassieres or whatnot, whose names he never quite learned, or as quickly forgot, one of whom (that particular morning) had the most perfect teeth. Like him, they did not want to call attention to themselves. And so no one spoke at all, until one of the salesmen (the other one) began his pitch for the boarders, opening his briefcase on the table. The Pole did not even look up.

Had he considered the possibility that the boarding-house was haunted? The lodgings were suspiciously cheap. The house was two centuries old. The history of the neighborhood was sanguinary (a suppressed meatpackers’ strike; potter’s field by the river). Perhaps he was sensitive to such things, and had never been in a situation to know. At first he thought it must be the spirit of some boarder who had died in the room; but eventually he settled on the deceased husband of the landlady as the most likely candidate. For a military man, he was quite frail-looking, at least at the time the picture had been taken. The landlady said so little about him, and her answers to the salesmen’s periodic questions were so equivocal, that one was left to invent what was likely a much more colorful character than had actually lived, and certainly than appeared in the picture. His death was a source of endless speculation—though all agreed that foul play was involved, and that the landlady was involved (inheritance, mistress, spite). Regardless, he never got the sense, from the subtle movements of the furniture, that a spirit was trying to communicate anything. Nor did he feel in any way threatened, as though the widowers and retirees who now occupied the house were suitors encroaching on the deceased husband’s one-time property. It hardly squared with the picture, or with the nutcracker-sized weapon hanging over the mantle. He himself had never imagined the landlady in this way. The charwoman was more his type. She would bend over to help him move his trunk; she would get down on her hands and knees to fish things out from behind the desk.

In the end, he could only conclude that the spirit spent its nights going in and out of rooms like his, looking for things that belonged to it. Perhaps, by moving things, it was simply acting on the memory of how they had used to be arranged. In fact, his very room might have belonged—might belong to the spirit; the room was no more his than the furniture. And he might have grown comfortable with this, except that the spirit, whose sympathy and companionship he sought, could never make up its mind from one night to the next. Over time, this indecision began to weigh on him. He grew impatient, and then contemptuous, leaping out of bed to slide the chair (for example) further than the spirit could have moved it in a month, and then sneering at it from his pillow.

Until the night came that he announced to the room that he did not believe in ghosts.

The very next morning, the things were more disturbed than ever.

Which is to say, hardly at all.

He began a series of experiments to try to discover the motive force behind the disturbed things. He still had not discarded the possibility of an intruding boarder, perhaps in cahoots with the thuggish landlady, or the lascivious charwoman, whom he imagined watching him sleep from the sagging chair with a calf on either armrest. First he had to rule himself out—the possibility, that is, that he was the spirit in question: the one rising in the middle of the night to disturb the things. Him, or some heretofore hidden part of him, buried so deep that it did not even surface in his dreams. It was for this reason he had never measured the bed: if he jerked or tossed, the bed might shift slightly—unlikely, given its mass, but not impossible—and then the only thing he would be measuring was the force of his own (involuntary) night-movements. But this was precisely what he set out to capture now. He filled his bedpan with cold water from the bathroom at the end of the hall, and, on successive nights, set it before the chair, the desk, the dresser, and the picture. On each following morning, he awoke to find the floor dry, the bedpan still full—and the things disturbed. He tried again, this time stringing wire around the room through eyehooks he screwed into the baseboard, in a criss-crossing spiderweb he unwove on each of three consecutive mornings. And then again with carpet tacks, distributed in a checkerboard pattern around the floor, and with identical results—which is to say, none—the only difference being that, the next morning, he managed to step on a tack.

He began sitting up after the lamp was out to peer around the room, his eyes slowly adjusting to the dark, listening, motionless, silent. To see the chair or the picture spin, the desk slide; to hear the groan of old legs against the floorboards, the cry of inertia violated …. The close attention soon exhausted him, and he nodded off to the too-familiar sounds of the other boarders going about their nightly business (Fitzgerald playing the piano in the parlor two floors below, sometimes accompanying the landlady; Ong’s tinny radio; the salesmen practicing their pitches, like preachers in their closets; the radiators; the bathroom pipes, running, always running; inebriates’ laughter; mattress springs), as well as some less-familiar noises, perhaps half-dreamed, and magnified by his awareness, until they almost seemed to be in the room with him. Some nights, he blew out the lamp and then re-lit it right away, murmuring an excuse to himself, as though to trick an invisible presence. But the changes never came so quickly. The things might have taken the whole night to accomplish their modest peregrinations; if so, they would have gone about their business slowly indeed—more slowly than he could hope to observe. Like the hour hand of a clock, process was a cipher; he could only tell difference, or believe he could tell the difference, between what was and what had been.

And yet, there were nights when he would rise and, groping his way around, become absolutely certain that things were in wildly different places than they had been when he had gone to sleep. Lighting the lamp (if he could find it; for how could he be certain the lamp would still be on the dresser, the dresser by the bed?), he would find everything just as it had been—or that things had suddenly returned to their places with the influx of light, like naughty children pretending to be asleep. As though the light itself had stitched the room back together. But then how to account for the difference, mornings, when the light, forgetful, did not always put things back just the way they had been? Was it the senility of the light he was witnessing? Perhaps the room in darkness was simply not the same room as the room in light. Each night, he passed over a gulf that could not be bridged; and each day, despite the apparent persistence of things, was entirely discontinuous from the one before.

It came to him at last: the room. There was no other possible remaining explanation. He would take advantage of the next vacancy to request a move. When it came, the landlady was immediately suspicious. Was there a problem with his room? Oh, no, it was fine, he assured her. He just wanted a change. She said nothing for a time, though from the way she looked at him he began to wish he had invented a problem, or at least a preference: the view, say—this though the newly-vacated room was on the floor below, and he was not much for looking out of windows anyway. The landlady rose and began to attend to random business around her office. It was as if she were awaiting a confession. And he was just beginning to wonder if the interview was over when she lifted the keyring big as a jailer’s from the nail under the mailboxes and said, without looking at him, Well, come along, then. Rather than leading him to the vacancy, she took him back to his own room, which she opened with her own key; and she proceeded to carry out an inspection more meticulous than ever the charwoman had, while he stood nakedly at the door. With her there, lifting up the corner of the mattress, opening the dresser drawers, peering under the furniture and the window curtain, even nudging the trunk with her foot—with her there, everything seemed out of place. The inspection, which might have lasted five minutes, seemed to take much longer; the charwoman even poked her head in at one point, and he had to suffer hearing his request relayed to her in the most ridiculous and unfavorable terms. If she noticed either the eyeholes or the pencil marks, she gave no indication. In the end, she withdrew without a word, and he followed her back to her office, where she handed him a new key, reminding him to return the old one as soon as he was finished transferring his things.

An indescribable sadness came over him when he beheld his new lodgings. The chair was the same—mold-blossom on the cushions, exhausted springs—just upholstered in a different pattern. The desk was identical. Even the picture had a maritime theme, one similarly ominous. As for the view: it was true he could no longer look out (as he seldom did) over tarred beaches, with their broken chimneys and steaming vents and hanging wash. The sawtooth roofs of the row-houses across the street did present a physically different scene. But it was identical, he thought, in character. And here the landlady had led him to believe that the rooms for transients were somehow more attractive than those for so-called residents, and as such that she was potentially sacrificing business to a whim of his. Drawing the curtain and sitting down on the edge of the bed, he could only wonder if she hadn’t been right.

It took him less time to carry down most of his things than it had taken the landlady to perform her inspection. His books made up the first load; the second, a single dresser drawer’s worth of clothes, shoes, and overshoes (the other was empty); then his toilet items and knick-knacks, arranged in the desk drawer (the picture of himself as a boy, dwarfed by its pewter frame; the admiral, tall as a salt-shaker, the paint chipping from his cap; pebbles and sea shells and tea cups). That left only the trunk. It was heavier than he remembered. He went for the Pole. His reasons were several: he knew exactly where to find him; he distrusted him less than anyone else in the house; and (this related to the second reason) he sensed a total indifference to anything outside the world of his books. About the last, however, he proved to be mistaken. “Vhat inside?” the Pole asked, after they had slid the trunk under the nearly-identical bed of the nearly-identical room. He confessed he did not know, or perhaps did not remember. (It amounted to the same thing.) He could not know, he explained, because the trunk was locked, and he did not have the key. In fact, he could not even remember how he had acquired the trunk in the first place. The Pole seemed incredulous, or perhaps only confused; it was possible he had not understood. Then he asked, sensibly enough, “Vhere is key?” Again, he confessed not to know. The Pole pondered this for a time, gnawing on his white mustache with his lower teeth, as he often did over his books. He seemed on the point of saying something. Then he shrugged and, measuring the room with one quick glance, departed.

Before returning the key, he went back and took a last look at his old room, at the old things that seemed newly lifeless, before locking the door.

The new bed received him just as the old one had: with the embrace of a corpse.

The next morning, he awoke to find the new things disturbed: chair pulled out a little from the wall, desk at an angle, picture crooked (the ship was almost vertical now; the sea, crooked), top dresser drawer open a hair. At first he blamed the unfamiliarity of the space—or rather, its strange mixture of familiarity and unfamiliarity. Disoriented, he had simply tried to map the arrangement of the new things onto the old—a natural enough response to his long tenancy in the other room. It was nothing of the sort. Rather, it was as though the old things had followed him here, clamoring, and us? Or as though he had only imagined he had moved. He was afraid to look out the window and see the tarred beaches again.

At breakfast he scanned the faces of his fellow boarders with a silent intensity that had been absent from the innocent query of a few weeks before. He watched the cook, and the charwoman as she bustled through, and the landlady when she entered to bid her boarders good-morning, as she occasionally did—and then to ask him, oh! most insidiously, how he found his new lodgings! His eyes dropped to his plate; he felt all the other eyes at the table upon him. She left before he could think how to answer. Then the prattle of the salesmen began again, and the clink of silverware, and he slowly resumed eating.

He spent the remainder of the morning sitting on his trunk, staring at his big toe through a hole in his sock. Not the room, then: the things themselves. The things themselves were disturbed. Not an action; a condition. This did not bother him. What bothered him was that they would target him in this way. Could they sense he did not love them? He had never abused them—carved his initials into a desk, say, or spilled hot tea on the upholstery, or worn the springs of the saddled mattresses yet further. But he supposed he had neglected them. The god of things had grown offended by his lack of attention. And yet, they were not his things; he felt the need to stress this again, hoping the god was listening. They did not share his past; they were as alien to him as the other boarders. It was not his fault that the chair was broken, the desk useless, the picture depressing, the mattress saddled. In fact, he was the one who had to deal with the ache in his hips and back, who had to stare at that image of imminent maritime doom every day. If anyone had the right to be aggrieved, it was him.

“If you have a problem,” he said to the chair, “I suggest you take it up with the landlady. You are not my responsibility.”

The chair did not reply, just sat there at its harumphing angle to the wall, conspiring, in its silent way, with the rest of the furniture about where to go next.

And yet, he was on the most intimate terms with them—wasn’t he? They were the last things he saw before he blew out the lamp each night, the first things to greet him when he opened his eyes each morning. He might spurn them, curse them inwardly, but that did not alter the fact of their marriage. The thought troubled him. For his few things—the things he liked to think of as his; the things he had carried from one room to another—had never participated in these nightly revolutions, except unwittingly. What little he did have was nothing if not well-loved (he wriggled his toe at this thought). Or would the true lover of things have mended the sock? Perhaps the time was coming when they would join the mutiny, like conflicted crewmembers who at last decide to risk the yardarm.

It was too strong a word, mutiny. It was not as though, awaking, he found these unloved things encroaching upon him, like malevolent figures in wax. He did not have nightmares about the chair swinging down and cracking open his skull, or the bed overturning like a swamped dory. But he did, in the coming days, begin to dream their movements more grand and ludic: cloistering together at the center of the room, or amassing in a single corner, the desk pushed up behind the chair, the latter’s legs in the air, revealing, perhaps, engraved initials (his?), or a wad of dried chewing gum (his?); the picture hanging sideways, or upside-down, the troubled ocean a sky, the ailing ship a crooked chandelier—and, in the grub-white rectangle where it had hung, a hole, with a rolled-up letter stuffed inside (his?), or a tooth swaddled in fabric (his?)—or nothing, except a tunnel-view into another’s room (his?), someone he did not know, or did not recognize—someone, anyway, who did not belong there. In his dreams even his own things joined the melee, if more sheepishly than the rest: his shoes chose a partner from the other pair, and of the same foot; his slacks, which he habitually hung with the cuffs toward him, turned so that he could see the waist instead; his pebbles and shells arranged themselves into scant constellations; the admiral comandeered one or another of the tea cups. But the dreams faded as soon as he opened his eyes, and saw the things again in their slightly-out-of-place places. It was a mutiny of sorts: this is what the dreams were trying to tell him. They whittled dully at him, bored holes in him so small he did not bleed, peeled away the rind that was, finally, all of him.

He gathered his own things to him before they could go the way of his dreams: his change of clothes, which he wore along with his coat, and a hostage shoe from either pair, together with his overshoes. He filled his pockets with the pebbles and shells, admiring their ballast; the admiral he held before him like a crucifix. And he watched, from his trunk, the desk and chair and dresser and bed—the bed!—as they floated a hair’s-breadth above the floor. Unmoored, yes. But it was more than that. They had become weirdly … fungible. He could not think of a better word. They were not altogether there.

They said the same about him: the other boarders; the charwoman; the salesmen; the landlady, eventually. He had not been to the park or library in weeks, despite the pleasant overcast of days. He had stopped coming down to breakfast. They said he had lost weight, that he looked pale, unkempt. The cook even prepared a draught for him. He told them he was not sleeping well. It was true. How could he sleep, curled up on a trunk half as long as he was and hardly wider than his shoulders, on uneven wood slats, nail-heads, and metal braces?

The charwoman brought him soup and crustless bread to sop it with. He slurped quietly, hardly daring to steal a glance at her. He understood he might be evicted for illness; to have a boarder die here would cast a pall over the whole establishment. It was a terrible place to think of haunting. Frowning at his pallor, the charwoman told him he looked a mite better. She took the half-empty bowl with her, while he settled in to await the landlady’s heavy knock, her knuckles like brass couplings. She would come, he was sure, with the evidence of breadcrusts stolen, a murdered pigeon, a befouled yardstick and drowned book of figures, and a toy sailboat with its pencil-thin mast snapped off, a mouse’s nest on its deck.

He awoke and, gazing around the room in the morning light, realized things were just where they were supposed to be: the desk pushed up firmly against the wall, the chair at its proper angle, the drawers of the dresser firmly shut, the picture nearly straight.

And so was he: in bed, although he could not recollect moving. He sat up weakly, stared at his stocking feet—he could not recollect removing his shoes, either. None of his toes were visible, for none of the holes between the two pairs of socks he wore were aligned. Holding to the nearest bedpost, he slowly pulled himself erect, the mattress-springs groaning with him. He felt, he thought, what an animal must feel emerging from hibernation.

He removed the coat, and then the rest of the change of clothes, smoothing them as best he could, folding the slacks over his chair, waist toward him, and the shirt and socks into his dresser drawer, which he did not close entirely.

There: he could see the toe again. It did not wriggle.

From the coat pockets he took the picture and the cups, and then the admiral, lay them on his desk one piece at a time, and then emptied the pebbles and shells by the handful onto the trunk. They made an unfamiliar sound. He leaned in close and knocked on the lid, making the pebbles and shells jump; he pulled up on one of the frayed handles, so that the pebbles and shells skittered to the other end. Even in his wasted condition, the trunk lifted easily.

It was empty. He would not need the Pole to help him move it now.

Someone had removed the mirror from the bathroom. It wasn’t the first time; it was small enough to conceal. The salesmen, he thought.

He splashed the face he could not see, expectorated into the sink. Then he went down to breakfast.

They all noticed him, of course. Even the Pole looked up. He looked at each of them in turn. He would make sure to look the landlady in the eye, too, when she poked in her head to sing good-morning. He would stare boldly at the charwoman’s bosom and legs as she flitted through, though she would pretend not to notice. And as he went to take his customary place at the table, he paused, and then—moved his chair ever so slightly to the left. Or was it the right? Theirs, his, it hardly mattered. He looked up to see if anyone had noticed. Surely they would notice once he was sitting? The daring new angle at which his chair stood to the table, at which he stood to them? He was like the admiral in his teacup, braving the swells.

  The problem was that no one looked directly at him. Oh, they spoke to him, they addressed their words to him, wished him well, told him they were glad to see he was feeling better, that he was looking like his old self again. They even toasted his health with their tea or juice. But whenever they looked in his direction, he got the sense they were looking somewhere else: at some entity standing directly behind him, say, and ever so slightly to one side.

When the cook put the soft-boiled egg in front of him, it was shifted to one side, as if for some other boarder; as if, should he attempt to eat it, his knife would slide down the shell, again and again, like a pigeon skittering off a cupola.

He dropped his knife, threw his napkin down, and rose so quickly his knees banged the underside of the table. The others clearly noticed, because they all looked at one another, and then interrupted their own breakfasts as well. Even the salesmen came along; and when the charwoman appeared, they silently but emphatically motioned for her to join them. As a group they pursued him into the foyer, first watching as he tottered up to the landing to wrestle with the grandfather clock, grunting; and then as he tottered back down to the foyer, to the bench where the Pole would sit to read, and the sewing chest with its vase of dying flowers. They stood in the door of the parlor, watching him rearrange the furniture—or at least seeming to; for each time he stepped away from something—the settee, the piano and bench, the coffee table, the tassle-shaded lamp—and despite his obvious efforts, they could not quite detect any difference. He paused before the picture of the landlady’s deceased husband, holding the edges of the frame; but when he stepped away, it was no less crooked.

When the landlady arrived, calling his name from the parlor door, he had taken her dead husband’s rapier down from the mantle and was leaping back and forth with it, thrusting and parrying with an invisible enemy; and all the other boarders had begun to applaud.

—

Craig Bernardini’s fiction has appeared most recently in Conjunctions, Craft, and Puerto del Sol. He teaches English at Hostos Community College, a City University of New York school in the Bronx, and blogs about music at Helldriver’s Pit Stop, on the CUNY Academic Commons. He lives in the beautiful mid-Hudson valley with partner, dogs, cats, and chickens, some of whom occasionally try to eat each other.