The Curious Case of the Boy in the Bedroom
There is a boy who does not sleep. Instead, he wanders the halls of the old Victorian he haunts,
silent and pale as a wraith. He isn’t sure if he’s still alive. He doesn’t ever feel tired anymore, but the
bags under his eyes grow (and grow and grow). He can feel his heartbeat, fluttery and arrhythmic in his
throat.
Today, five seasons after he stopped sleeping, he grows tired of not knowing (instead of not
sleeping). The uncertainty is a sore on his mind, open and weeping so he – decides. He wants to know –
what? If he’s alive? That too. He clears a cracked and desert dry throat, tries to draw moisture to a stiff
and idle tongue.
“The dead don’t breathe,” he tries to say, but the air in his lungs is long since stale, his lips too
parched to form words, and it comes out as a dry wheeze. He sighs and continues to wander, his feet
gliding without sound over the dull hardwood floor. He hesitates in front of a mirror, trying to find his
face, but the glass is foggy and dull and the silver has tarnish extending in tendrils throughout. The only
thing he can see in the warped glass is a bulbous segment of peeling wallpaper from the other side of the
hall.
His mouth twitches in displeasure (he wants to break it, shatter it, why is it still here when he –)
and he breathes against the glass, telling himself he wants to write his name (what is his name?) in the
steam. The air buffets the glass, but it’s cool and the glass remains exactly the same. He turns and glides
away, just a whisper of fabric on wood to show his passing.
He hears the floor boards creak far away. He rushes to the entryway, a dusty place with grinning
goblins engraved in the swirls of ornate woodwork. Just inside the front door stands a girl. She is the
first person he has seen in a long, long time, and there is a sound like a sigh, not because she is beautiful,
but because something about her vibrates on the edge of his mind. She thrums with suppressed energy,
as if at any second she might explode into motion. Her clothing, too, stands out, electric blue tights and a
bright yellow tunic, colors that glow in the gloom of his house. Even her hair crackles with movement,
wide copper curls standing out from her head, ineffectually pulled back with a wide green headband. He
feels even more pale and sickly than before, standing next to this brightly colored child-woman. She is
so different – from him, from the house, from everything he knows. It hurts.
“Phew!” she says, waving a hand in front of her face, as if to shoo the dust away. He trembles
and watches as she drops a heavy carpetbag on the floor, the THUMP throwing up another storm of dust.
“Been a while since someone’s cleaned THIS place. Well, time to get to work!”
The boy draws back into the shadows, hands shaking. She passes by him without noticing,
leaving the dust in swirls and eddies in her wake. The first thing she does is yank open every window
she sees, even the ones whose wood has warped so badly that they scream and keen and struggle against
her. The fresh air rushes in like a conquering army, blowing stiff old drapes into new and different
shapes, shapes they haven’t taken for five seasons. He flinches as the light stabs in, bright spears that
cut at him.
Swallowing hard past an ever present lump, the boy follows after her, trailing her like an
abandoned child, equally unnoticed and unwanted. When she walks into the kitchen, he tries to call
attention to himself, standing in front of her, trying to talk. Nothing comes out, just the gasp of the
breeze. She frowns in his direction, rubs her arms, and looks around the room.
There's a sturdy wood table dominating the floor, a dripping faucet, and broken dishes in the
cracks and corners where he couldn’t clean them up. He can't understand why she's taking so long in
there, dragging a finger through the thick coat of dust covering the table, looking through each and every
cabinet, even though they all hold the same assortment of dusty crockery and spider webs. The spiders
are the only ones other than him that have really stuck around the place for more than a week or two, so
he's slightly disgruntled when she scowls and swipes them out with a rag pulled from her bag.
The boy goes to sit (and sulk) in the highest room of the house, a cramped attic with a slanted
ceiling and windows so grimy that the light comes through ochre. He sits in the middle of the scratched
floor, surrounded by dust-cover draped furniture, graceful chairs, beautiful couches, even an armoire or
two. Even before he stopped sleeping they sat up here, lonely and abandoned, with only the mice for
company.
Just barely, he remembers that he used to come up and look through the chests hidden at the
back, riffle through aging letters and photos in black and white, or sepia. He hasn't looked at them since.
The child-woman is moving around downstairs. She grunts as she moves furniture and wrestles
with windows, cursing when something falls to the floor. He grows increasingly agitated. What is she
doing here?
He hates her, suddenly. It makes his hands shake and his vision blur. How dare she! he thinks, as
he clenches one hand in the hem of his shirt (never slept a wink in these pajamas, isn't that funny?). How
dare she!
Down the stairs he rushes in a way that promises, and fails, to bring thunder from the floor
boards and complaints from the rusty hinges and searches her out, increasingly angry as he paces
through one room after another and fails to locate her, a phantom breeze popping up in his wake.
He finds her in the master bedroom, standing in front of a sprawling vanity, examining the
myriad small bottles spread across it. He stands behind her, glowering, and her eyes skid across where
he would reflect, had he a reflection. After a second they dart back and she jerks, a bottle of perfume
juddering from her hands. She whirls. Seeing nothing, she whirls back.
They frown at the same time, drawing similar creases across their brows.
“What the hell?” she says succinctly after a few moments of staring at each other through the
mirror.
“Why are you here?” he hisses through cracked and bloodless lips.
The furrow between her brows grows, then fades. “Why are you?” she asks, wide-eyed, openfaced. She asks with no intonation of anger, just bald curiosity, yet the three simple words send a shard
of icy doubt through him. Why is he here? He flees, then, because that is what he always does (he fled
Death, after all, so who is this child-woman to catch him?).
She starts again as his reflection disappears without a sound, and turns and looks for the sad, pale
boy she saw in the mirror. She leans against the vanity, and waits.
The boy hides in his most secret of places. Not the attic but the place no one (not even his
mother) ever found. It’s simple, and fiendishly clever. He wedges himself up the chimney, the huge one
in the living room, just before it slants too small for even a ghost-thin boy. He crouches there, his feet
braced on the lips of metal, his back pressed against sooty stone, his head far too close to a rotting bird.
For once, he is happy he can no longer smell.
He hears her pottering around, whistling a jaunty tune, apparently over the shock of a face not
her own reflecting back at her. Her footsteps draw close and he can see the black flats she is wearing and
an expanse of electric blue tights. He freezes, even though he knows she cannot see him. Her face comes
into view as she ducks down to peer into the chimney.
“So that’s what the smell was,” she says, holding her nose and staring right at him. He flinches,
tries to melt into the stone.
She reaches toward him and he jerks away, his feet slipping from the lip. He lands hard on the
andirons, drifts through the floor an inch or two before he remembers himself. She pulls out the dead
bird with index finger and thumb alone, an expression of extreme distaste spread over her face. He feels
his frantically fluttering heart withdraw back to his chest, going back to the slow, uneven pulse he’s
gotten used to. It’s almost like it’s trying to remember what a rhythm is, but without blood to push it
can’t come to a steady metronome beat.
***
Tonight she goes to a small bedroom (his) instead of the master bedroom. He follows, reluctantly,
because she’s new and interesting, and what else can he do? He gets there in time to see her slide under
new covers that she must have brought to the house. He stands in front of the mirror, jaw firmed (girding
his loins for battle, as it were), and when she rolls over to get comfortable, she sees him.
She gets up, dancing on the cold floor and drops into a perfect pretzel in front of the mirror.
“Hello,” she says solemnly.
He matches her pose, sitting behind her so she can see his face. His eyes flick to hers and away,
then back. “Hello,” he tries to say.
She frowns, concentrating on his lips. “You can’t speak?” she asks.
He shrugs. “No.” The stale air has entirely left his lungs now and he has to concentrate to bring
in new to inflate them. Force of habit demands the useless inhalation, not his body. And still, his larynx
does not move.
“Good thing I can read lips then, huh?” she says and smiles.
“What?” he asks, taken aback.
“Oh, my sister’s deaf. She taught me. I’m Phoebe,” she says. “Who are you?”
“I’m-” he starts to say, but he can’t remember. He shrugs helplessly, already worn out by the
energy of the living.
“Were you the boy who died here?” she asks carelessly, like that’s the sort of thing you drop in
regular conversation. “Suffocated, right? By your mother?”
He starts and stands and turns away from the floor length mirror, his chest heaving, uselessly, in
a mimicry of sobbing.
“Wait!” she cries, stumbling to her feet. “I’m sorry, that was the rudest, most tactless thing ever,
wasn’t it? It’s just, if you were, I know your name.”
He turns back, certain his eyes are glittering with tears, but the pillow five seasons ago took all
moisture from his body. “Yes,” he says, and sits once more.
“Then your name is Max,” she says, sitting herself. “Maxwell Evans.”
He doesn't remember the name, at least no more than he remembers anything, but it feels right to
him, like an old, worn shoe, comfortably broken in. He can imagine answering to the name Max quite
easily.
“Max,” he mouths, feeling the way his lips move, tasting the word as best he can. “Yes,” he says,
and a smile spreads across his face.
“Well, hello, Max,” she says, smiling back at him. He realizes she has a dimple in her left cheek
and he moves to touch it. She shivers at the cool breeze on her skin, watching in the mirror as he drags
his fingers across her face like a blind man. Touch is one of many senses denied him, but when he
touches her he can almost, almost feel the heat of her body. It makes him ache, suddenly, for the times
when warmth was not so rare. When he stops and sits back, chest tight with memory, she leans forward
and traces his reflection. He is thin and pale, silvery blond hair over sickly pale skin and every bone in
his body is articulated and clearly visible. He is no more than twelve years old. He looks far older. It's
the eyes that age him, sunken and dark and sad.
“I bought this place. I was planning on fixing it up,” she says when she finishes her examination
of the cool glass. “I hope you don't mind.”
Her voice is expressive, dipping and rising like a dancer and he feels himself listening intently to
every word. He dislikes the idea of someone else permanently in this, his, house, changing it.
He doesn't want to say so though, because she's pretty and nice and she let him feel her soul. “I
suppose,” he says grudgingly, crossing his arms.
“Good!” she says. “I'll put up a few more mirrors, then, so it'll be easier to talk. I don't want to
upset you.”
Uncomfortable with the sudden new feelings clogging his throat, he nods stiffly and leaves.
***
They continue in this mockery of a dance for months. Mirrors make their way into almost every
room, but leave the bathroom. Max isn't sure why she thinks that'll keep him from going into the
bathroom, instead of just keeping her from seeing him in the bathroom, but he respects her unspoken
wishes and stays out.
She has friends over sometimes, and when she does, she puts away most of the smaller mirrors
so they'll be less likely to see him, and they stay in the kitchen or the living room while he hides in the
attic, trying unsuccessfully to open the chest in the back.
After one party, she comes up. She's slightly tipsy, and has a little trouble balancing on the stairs
but when she sees an ornate mirror covered with a dust cloth she pulls it off and angles it around the
room until she sees him kneeling at the chest. She sighs, because he's staring at his hands accusingly and
she's learned that when he's upset, the house gets about ten degrees colder.
She walks over, only stumbling once, and opens the chest for him. She sees the breeze ruffle a
stack of old letters and she pulls them out, opens one, and begins to read it aloud.
“Dearest Andrew, I'm so very sorry you couldn't be home to see this, but Maxie took his first
steps today. I'm sure he'll be more trouble than he's worth, soon, but at the moment he just looks so
confused when he falls down that I can't bring myself to care. I hope . . .”
The boy falls asleep, his head resting in her lap. He doesn't notice when she gets up and goes to
bed, and wakes the next morning in a panic. He rushes to her room and stands in front of the mirror, but
she’s asleep, and he can't wake her.
He bites his fingernails for the next hour. When she wakes up and smiles sleepily at him, he
mouths (shouts), “You have to put them away!”
She frowns, then her face clears. “Oh,” she says, groggily. “Sorry. I'll go do that.”
She shoves her feet into her fuzzy bunny slippers and tromps up to the attic, Max fluttering
behind her. She puts the letters away carefully, tying the ribbon into the same bow it was before, then
goes to have breakfast.
Max doesn't go near her the rest of the day.
***
Four months after Phoebe moves in, he realizes that he no longer thinks of her as an intruder. He
is discomfited by this realization and resolves to become a poltergeist and drive her out.
She catches him in the kitchen at two in the morning, trying desperately to pick up the pot she
left in the sink after she made spaghetti and failing horribly. She laughs sleepily at him and tells him,
“Oh, too late now. You're stuck with me.”
He's even more disturbed by the fact that he doesn't find this a bad thing.
***
Five months after she moves in, she gets a cat. She says nothing about it, but one day, when she
comes home from a long day at work, she has an orange cat hunkering in a cat carrier.
They're immediate enemies – the cat hisses and “ffft”s every time he enters the room and he
doesn't like that she can touch it and not him. So, he sticks his tongue out at it, and pretends it it’s a
glorified ghost finder, an easier way for her to locate him than lugging a mirror around and not a friend,
a companion, a source of the warmth he can’t provide.
***
Six months after Phoebe moves in, on a snowy day, he emerges from the house for the first time
since he stopped sleeping. He can't feel the cold on his skin (he's the cold on her skin), but he wriggles
delighted toes in the mounds of snow by the front porch. The snowflakes dance in a spiral around him
and he smiles and he smiles and he smiles.
Phoebe sits on the steps behind him, bundled up securely with a mug of hot chocolate, and
watches as flurries of snow swarm up in a line across the lawn, not footsteps by any means, but close
enough.
He finds he doesn't remember the feel of pressure on his face as much anymore. Instead, he looks
at copper colored curls and a wide smile. It's a nice change, he thinks in the back of his mind.
***
He is standing in her room, eight months after Phoebe moved in. He's alone, because he only
came to look for her reading glasses while she’s downstairs. But he isn't looking at the dresser where she
always forgets them. He's looking at the bed. Over the rumpled blankets and slobbered on pillow,
because Phoebe is the messiest sleeper he knows (and the only sleeper), there is a beam of light.
Tump – his heart beats, the sudden strength of the blow making his chest ache. T-tump. For the
first time since his death, saliva rushes to his mouth and he stares at the beam of light falling over his old
bed. It isn't a sunbeam, not this late in the day, but it dances with the natural light of the sun anyway.
It's beautiful.
Tump. His stomach gurgles. T-tump. The beat of his heart is still irregular, but sliding into a
steady rhythm. Tump. He takes a wavering step forward. T-tump.
Phoebe comes into the room, gasps and drops the glass of water she was carrying. “I can see
you,” she says in wonder.
He turns and smiles and touches her cheek. “Yes,” he says, he actually says, the words strong and
clear in his boy's voice. He steps forward, into the light. For one single, crystalline second, he is alive
again, his heartbeat steady and strong, breath coming easily. Then – nothing, everything, all things in
between.