Ghosts I Have Known (II)

Outside my bedroom window ran a wooden staircase. It was a poky little bedroom that nine-year-old I shared with my sister. We had a set of bunk beds and I had the top one, which meant I was sleeping right alongside the window. The window was actually at the top of a door, but the door had been sealed to the outside, where the stairs ran past, passing from the back yard (which was a level below our ground floor apartment, due to the slope of the property), up to the first floor. My door would once have opened onto this staircase.

Walking up this staircase one day, I reached my window. Looking further up, I noticed another window above it, in line with the second floor. I was curious to see that the window was filthy on the inside, completely dusted up as though it hadn’t been cleaned in years. This was surprising given that one of the jobs that I helped with was cleaning the windows every so often, after guests had left rooms or intermittently in cleaning the rooms of the longer staying residents. I couldn’t work out how this window had escaped such a cleaning, or what had happened in the meantime if it had been cleaned.

I headed to the top of the stairs and went through the door. At this point there was no more house to the left, but a row of rooms that formed the front of the hose was directly in front. Turning right down the hall led back towards the middle of the home and the main set of stairs. Another right turn led down a long hall that had no doors off to the right, until you reached a bathroom at the end and another room that sat to its immediate right. This hall, I knew, was directly over the hall of which our own door came, leading to our handful of rooms. But if a wall ran the entire length of the hall, where was the window I had seen?

I retraced my steps back to the stairway to make sure I had worked out the right spot, and it was definitely right over my own window, and unmistakably a window. I returned to the hall and walked back down to the bathroom end. The room that was past the bathroom I knew we had only recently cleaned. Its doorway was a little around the corner and its window overlooked the back yard. Standing at that door, I looked at the wall that stood opposite. It was just wide enough that you could fit a doorway there, but there clearly wasn’t one.

I returned to my room and sketched out the floorplan that I knew of for our floor and the one above. The corner room with the window over the yard was right over our lounge room, while the bathroom would be over our kitchen. So what was over my room? It had never really occurred to me that there was anything amiss, until I saw the window.

That night, lying there in my top bunk bed, only a few feet from the ceiling, I gave it a knock. It echoed hollowly. A few minutes later, just as I was dropping off to sleep, I heard a faint knocking sound come back.

I didn’t sleep very well that night.

The next day I rustled through the bottom kitchen draw, finding a small screwdriver. Returning to my bunk, I unstuck a poster that I had pinned above the bed. Slowly spinning the screwdriver’s pointed end against a spot on my ceiling, I spun it bit by bit in the small divot until I felt it break through.

Placing my eye against the new hole, I could now see into the room above. It was quite well lit from the window off to the side, and was an enormous space. The paint was a light minty green, which confirmed that there was something strange going on, as my father had slowly repainted the entire (or se we’d thought) boarding house in a creamy tone.

Looking around the wall I saw a fireplace, then off to the left the bottom of a staircase. The stairs led halfway up the wall to a doorway, which explained why the ceiling seemed so far away – the room took up two storeys.

Covering the hole back over with the poster, I didn’t really think about the room much for the rest of the day. That night, however, I lifted the edge of the poster and took another look. The room was letting in quite a bit of light, seemingly from a lamp in the alley behind the home.

From the corner of my eye I caught a small movement. There, at the top of the short stairway, sat a girl, balancing on the top railing. It wasn’t light enough to make her out clearly, but it was possible to clearly see her shock of shoulder-length blonde curls, ruffled white dress and long white socks, at the end of legs she dangled over the rail, kicking restlessly back and forth. I watched as she sat; one hand on the railing and the other in her lap. Her swinging legs were all that was moving and she seemed to be staring ahead at the centre of the room, where a light fitting hung down from a length of wire.

I tacked the poster back in its place as quietly as I could, dived under the blankets and tried as best as I could to sleep, but all I could see was the girl sitting there, swinging her preternaturally white socks, almost directly above me.

All was quiet.