Eleanor wasn’t sure exactly when she started to feel ill, or rather, when it distinguished itself from general feelings of unease. It was gradual, like the heat and light draining out of a room, and part of her thought it had been there all the time, from the day they moved in. Moving was inevitably exhausting and Rosie and Isobel’s sleep had been disrupted, so she expected to feel bedraggled and used up in the first few weeks. She didn’t think about it. But even as things started to settle down, the feeling that something wasn’t quite right intensified. It became articulated, insistent, unignorable.
She noticed the nausea first, the day she cleared out the upstairs room. She’d put the job off, concentrating instead on the rest of the house. She’d bleached and scoured its folds and creases – the insides of cupboards, underneath tables, door hinges, skirting boards, grouting. She baulked at the idea of getting quite so intimate with the house, but felt better when it was done, even though she knew it was never going to be quite enough. She’d thrown the blankets, the shower extension and the mousetrap into a black bag, quickly, as though they were scalding. A few things seemed too personal to throw away, like the quilts and the doll’s dress – in the end, she put them in a pile next to the suitcase in the upstairs room, now the only room they weren’t using.
She had no idea what to do about it. She stopped referring to the house as four-bedroom, and when she showed people round, she said the room was a storage cupboard. There was a sliding lock on the outside of the door and she considered keeping it shut, trying to forget it was there.
But she could feel it above her, pressing down on the house. They had been living there for six weeks and she knew if she put it off any longer, she would never do it; she got Richard to take the girls out on Saturday and went up by herself. As she opened the door, she felt a little resistance, as though something was pushing back from the other side. Then all at once it gave and she was inside.
It was now empty, apart from the suitcase in the corner. The writing and drawings on the walls still made her shiver, but looking again, she realized the work was more intricate and careful than she’d thought. Among the frantic scribbles and untethered relentless lettering spelling ‘Emily’, there was obsessive cross-hatching, elegant spirals, a face with hundreds of tiny lines emerging from the mouth. Mostly the faces were unmoored but sometimes they were placed in a careful row, like a chorus, diminishing in size, five or six sets of eyes staring intently. Among the faces were drawings of birds: some elaborate with thick, bold feathers and some so simple they were almost foetus-like symbols, repeated all over the walls. The more she looked, the more Eleanor was drawn in. It was fascinating, weirdly beautiful.
She shut the door behind her and noticed that the wood on the inside had been damaged, as though it had been attacked – there were scratch marks in the paint and the wood was splitting. Eleanor thought again about the lock on the outside. She tried to think of a benign explanation for it being there, but couldn’t.
She turned to the suitcase and the strange procession of objects on top. Its soft brown leather was concave; there was something inside it. It seemed wrong to throw it away without knowing what it was. Perhaps it was something precious, and if she were keeping the quilts . . . But she was afraid to open it, and still afraid of moving the objects.
It was then that she noticed she was feeling sick: mild waves of nausea, discreet but pronounced. There was a light dull ache in her head. She wanted, badly, to leave the room.
But she had promised herself she would deal with it, and time was short. She got a screwdriver and removed the lock. She tried to wash the walls, but it was no good; the ink was indelible. On Monday, she bought some cheap white paint and applied it during Isobel’s nap, as the mild ache in her head turned into a defined pain and nausea lurched in little choppy waves. She wondered if it was the paint fumes. Still the writing and drawing showed through. She tried again the next evening after work, and again the night after, but three coats later, the writing was still clear. They would have to wallpaper it, but Richard refused – it was madness to make a huge aesthetic decision like wallpaper when they hadn’t even decided how they were going to use the room. Eleanor gave up and went back downstairs, shutting the door behind her.
*
The following weekend, she found herself alone in the living room – Richard had taken Rosie to the supermarket and Isobel was sleeping. She had things to do – hundreds of things – but she sat still for a moment, luxuriating in the pause. It was a bright day and the sun was coming in through the bay window. Eleanor stretched in the light like a cat, marvelling at the way it fell on the walls, bleaching the paint until the green was almost pleasant. She began, cautiously, to enjoy the house, as though the sun was something it had created and was offering up to her. Then she noticed a mark at the bottom of the wall. She moved closer, breath quickening, as though she knew what she was about to find. There it was: the name ‘Emily’ in the corner of the living room. The writing was smaller, in pencil not ink, and it was discreet, lurking by the top of the skirting board, the letters shaky and small. Eleanor ran to the kitchen for a cloth and scrubbed until it was simply a mark, no longer legible. Then she sat back down, her heart alive in her chest.
The writing on the ground floor was obviously done in secrecy, but as Eleanor discovered, it was no less compulsive. Behind the door of the living room. Above a door frame. In an alcove. The scrawls were like vermin: Eleanor became alert, vigilant, every smudge leaping out at her. When she saw the familiar faded pencil, it made her jump, even though she had been looking for it.
Soon, they were swarming at her and she couldn’t understand how she hadn’t seen them before. She imagined them blooming on the wall; an imperceptible trace deepening until it was impossible to ignore. Some instinct propelled her to look behind the sofa and she found an infestation: scrawls, a face, ‘EMILY’ in capitals. As she ran to the kitchen for hot water and detergent, Eleanor wondered how Emily had managed to move the sofa by herself. An image of a giant child with unnatural strength came into her head. Maybe Emily was a disturbed adult. Maybe she had drawn on the walls and her parents had moved the sofa there to hide it. But they fitted the space covered by the sofa exactly. Eleanor wondered if she was the first person to see them. She found herself retching behind the sofa. She tasted vomit and swallowed.
She pushed back the sofa and knelt next to it, shaking. A headache engulfed her, a pulsing, living thing. She felt the strongest propulsion to leave the house, to get up and grab her coat. She told herself not to be melodramatic, and waited for it to subside.