Ronald Malfi - Floating Staircase

Jodie was propped up in bed, reading a Louis L’Amour paperback illuminated by a reading lamp over the headboard.

Kicking off my shoes and crawling into bed on top of her, I kissed up her neck and chin to her lips.

“Quit keeping me in suspense,” she said. “What’s it all about?”

“I don’t know how much I’m actually supposed to say.”

“Just tell me.”

“I think they arrested David and Veronica Dentman,” I said.

“Did they find out what happened to the little boy?”

“No.” My head on her chest, I was talking to her breasts.

“What did they need your help with?”

“Information.” I couldn’t go into it all now, not now. Out of nowhere, exhaustion had clunked me smartly over the head. “Details. Stuff I’d uncovered in my research.”

“My smart writer.” She kissed the top of my head. “Wow. My stinky writer, too.”

“I’ll shower.”

In the bathroom, I peeled off my clothes and stood beneath the hot spray until it turned cold. Back in the bedroom, the reading lamp had been extinguished, and Jodie’s light snores could be heard over the ticking of the clock in the hallway.

The figure of a small boy stood in the doorway of our bedroom. It was too dark to make out any details, but I knew it was Elijah.

“What is it?” I whispered. “What else do you want?”

The shape drifted soundlessly out of the doorway.

I went out into the hall, the staircase to the first floor empty except for the puddles of moonlight coming in through the far windows. Standing at the top of the stairs, I peered down into the well of shadows that made up the foyer. The hallway clock ticked louder, louder.

Elijah moved through the depths of the foyer, a black shape against a background of black shapes.

I descended the stairs, the floorboards cold under my bare feet. I was wearing only a pair of sweatpants, my body still wet from the shower, and my chest broke out in goose bumps.

“Elijah!” It was a shouted whisper through clenched teeth—the way a stern parent might reprimand a child in church. “Where are you?”

The boy had vanished among the sofa and end table, the lamps and television and armchairs. Upstairs, the hallway clock still ticked, the only sound available to mingle with my hesitant respiration.

But no . . . not the clock . . .

It was the sound of the wooden blocks being stacked on the coffee table. It was too dark to see them but I could hear them, less than five feet in front of me— clack, clack, clack. Slow and precise.

Crouching down so that I was able to frame the coffee table against the curtained glow of the front windows, my breath caught in my throat. The blocks formed a pyramid, its silhouette solid and black against the windows, and as I looked on, I could make out one of the blocks settling down on top of the others, as if having floated there from the ceiling.

I was unafraid. Instead, a liquid calm filtered through me, causing my joints to tingle and my legs to go wobbly. I sat down hard on the floor. Beside me, one of the heating vents whirred to life: the sound of a foghorn out at sea.

The definitive shape of a child moved across the front windows: there and then gone.

My heartbeat caught in my throat. Althea yammered on in my head— One afternoon I was out playing in the palmetto grove when I saw a little girl —and the memory of her words caused me to spring to my feet.

I could hear him now, moving behind the sofa, the highboy, the swooshing of his bare little feet on the shag carpet. He was moving fast.

I called his name in rapid fire, my breath rasping through clenched teeth. Blind, I lurched forward in the dark toward the sounds, but each time I reached the spot where I’d heard him, he made a noise in another part of the room. He flitted like a tormented bird that had gotten trapped in the room, desperate and panicked to find a way to the outside world.

There’s no outside world, I thought. We’re all underwater.

Suddenly paralyzed by uncertainty, I remained with my back against one wall as I listened to the shuffling across the room. A moment later, I was accosted by what felt like a twinge of electricity sparking to life in my right shoulder, then tracing down my arm until, like strands of gossamer, the electrical current radiated from my fingertips and dispersed into the blackness of the room.

He just touched me, I thought and shivered.

Then there were the footsteps at the other end of the hall. Still frozen in a combination of fear and perplexity, I listened. The basement door opened with such force, I expected to hear the hinges wrenching out of the frame. This was followed by the distinctive sounds of human footfalls descending the basement steps: I heard each step creak under imaginary weight, my heartbeat echoing the sentiment. And when the sounds vanished from the other end of the hall, the heating vent in the floor by my feet picked them up: the rattling and commotion of someone moving around down there. A deep, resonant clanging began emanating through the vent, probably coming from the belly of the furnace.

All went quiet. It happened so quickly it was like someone had stuffed cotton in my ears, like stepping off a battlefield into a silent bunker.

I stood there for a very long time before I was able to regain control of my muscles. Once I had, I went down into the basement, my bare feet padding on the freezing concrete floor. I turned on the ceiling light and shielded my eyes with one arm as I pressed on toward the furnace. With magnanimous certainty, I approached the furnace and undid the brackets that held the metal facing in place. Beneath, a black cauldron of steel faced me. An iron lid hung down on a hinge. I lifted the lid and peered into the dark maw. It was like looking into the belly of an ancient robot.

If the body were burned in this furnace, I thought, it would have to have been chopped up into smaller pieces to fit through the hole. If the body were burned in this furnace, there’s probably nothing left inside.

Or was there?

By the time the early stirrings of sunlight had crept into the sky, I had shoveled out what amounted to several handfuls of gummy soot from the unit. It sat on a mat of newspapers, reeking like oil and resembling the evacuated matter of a fevered horse. Once I started scooping the gunk out of the furnace, a part of me had hoped to find bits of bone or something in the drippy, fetid mass. But once I’d laid everything out on the sections of newspaper, I knew all the movies I’d seen and books I’d read had been wrong: there was nothing left except carbon detritus and wet ash.

Exhausted and dejected, I went upstairs where the bedroom alarm clock read 6:09 a.m. Crawling into bed, I curled up beside Jodie and hoped that the sound of her breathing would carry me back to sleep.

It didn’t.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

At noon the telephone rang. “We need your help,” Adam said, nearly breathless.

“What is it?”

“Dentman said he’d give us a statement on one condition.” He paused, possibly for dramatic effect. “He said he wants to talk to you first.”

“I’ll be there in ten,” I said and hung up the phone.

“This,” exclaimed Paul Strohman, “is complete bullshit.”

We were in his cramped little office, Strohman behind his desk, Adam seated beside me in one of the two chairs facing the chief of police. Strohman’s big feet were propped on the desk, creating a slight but obvious bend in the desktop.

“There’s no harm in it,” Adam said.

“Other than this entire department looking like a school bus full of stooges.”

“He requested Travis by name. After that, he promised to give us a statement.”