One time, a few years ago, Stephen sneaked up on me, watched me go up them, then pushed them back in place once I was in the attic. No matter how hard I banged and shouted, he wouldn’t let me out. After a few minutes of laughing, he went back downstairs to the living room to listen to the radio. By the time dad got home, I was crying, curled into a ball on the cushionless couch stored up there, trying to make up happy stories to keep away the dreadful feeling that from that day on washed through me every time I even came near the attic stairs.

This time was no different, but I had to see if mom was in our attic, rotting, like auntie was in uncle’s. Brothers who will cover for each other like my dad and uncle had done couldn’t be trusted. You wouldn’t tell your son if you’d killed his mother, would you? I think he might have tried to hide her, like uncle did, and he’d figure, why not pick the same place? Worked for my brother, so why not for me? This isn’t dream logic, either, you know. This stuff really works.

But I love dad – even though he doesn’t love me quite how he should – so I hope I’m wrong. The air in the attic is always wet. Not just damp, but actually wet, like I’m breathing water. I switch the light on; it’s one of those old houses where everything’s wired really dumb, so the switch to the attic is down here in the hallway. I pull the stairs down, make sure Stephen’s not sneaking around anywhere, then climb up. I just need to take a quick look around to be satisfied.

When I reach the top step, the attic is still dark, so I need to pull the string dangling overhead. I notice that even the light seems wet. It ripples over the old couch in one corner, the paintings piled beside it, the dead bat in the other corner, the rotting card table no one ever used after dad bought it, and the stack of chairs lined up against the far wall, near the room’s only window. This window is the coolest thing about the attic. Everything else is covered in dust, grime, filth from the ages, but the window is always clean. Spotless.

I look back to the light ripples washing over the dead bat and wonder if someone locked him up in this attic, too, and because he’s just a small bat, he died from the terror. Sure, when you think of bats you think of Halloween and other scary stuff, but I think if something even scarier than they are came for them, they’d die of fright just like anyone else.

I stand at the top of the pull-down stairs and peer through the shadows and shifting pockets of watery light. Nothing on the couch. Nothing rotting beside the dead bat. Nothing stuffed under the chairs that I can see, and no legs poking out from behind the stack of paintings.

No body. No mom.

Then I hear someone coming up the third-floor stairs. If it’s Stephen he’ll –

The light goes out. My heart triple-kicks in my chest. Light fizzles above my head and the watery yellow filters away into the corners of the room.

Black.

And very quiet laughter inside the walls around me.

I turn around and the stairs are rising to meet me. They slam shut and I hear Stephen pull a chair across the hall, stand on it, and shove something in the slot near the pull cord to keep me from pushing the stairs down.

He did it again. I can’t believe I am this stupid. Why did I think he wouldn’t do it to me twice? Because I cried the first time? So what? Stephen doesn’t care. I’m a doofus. I will always be a doofus to him.

I’m already close to tears. I try to think the happy thoughts I tried to think last time I was up here, but nothing happy comes to mind, just like before.

And I know what’s doing it.

I turn to the window, the window that is somehow always clean without anyone ever coming up here to clean it, the window that refuses to get dirty, become forgotten. The last dribbles of sunlight squiggle out on the floor and the laughter in the walls thins out.

I realize I haven’t taken a breath since the light went out, so I do, and it’s like soft earth filtering down through my air pipe.

I know when I finally look away from the window, it will start. I can already feel it weighing on my mind, pushing on my chest. It’s what makes the walls laugh. It’s what cleans the window. Like a dream, I can’t do anything to stop it.

When I turn around, away from the window, it takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness in the corner where the couch is. It’s pushing on my back, pushing me closer to the couch; it makes me step a few more feet, then holds me there and steadies my head. At the same time I’m being held like this, I can feel it behind me, beside me, around me, but I know it won’t let me turn to see it because there would be nothing to see anyway. It’s not a thing – it’s the air around me. It coils around my legs and grips them, keeps my arms down by my side, opens my eyes wider to see whatever it wants me to see on that couch.

I see a bubble of white on one of the paintings near the arm of the couch. A hand. I follow the hand up to the arm, to the shoulder, to the floating face, and it’s my dead mother. Her other hand is in her lap, curled tightly around the fabric of her dress. The dress looks washed of colour. She is black and white, my mom. The walls tell me that she is not dead, just gone away somewhere, but they don’t say it in words, they just convey the emotion and I think it for myself because the walls are the air and the air is the thing that pushes me, holds me, lies to me, tries to make me see, make me know something I shouldn’t know, something that can’t be true: Mom is not dead. This isn’t her, only your idea of her. Let this go. Let it go, the lying walls say. And maybe I would, maybe I would try to let it go – if it weren’t for the fact that I see her right here, sitting on this old attic couch.

Leering at me.

She hates me. I can see it in her eyes. She relaxes her grip on her dress, then re-clamps her hand around the crumpled fabric, taps on the paintings, that white bubble of a hand so much like Hob’s, only not stretching but bubbling, and still tapping, and the leer splits her face like a busted jack o’lantern, and the air is thicker now and my lungs are filling up fast and I feel the grip on my body begin to crush my bones. This thing that grinds me knows me, knows me better than any brother or mother or father; it knows my name, it has dug holes and has thrown things inside that don’t belong, into everything that makes me who I am, just like everyone else in my life, and now mom is staggering to her feet, her hands fluttering at her sides like butterflies, butterflies caught in bubbles, caught and dead in bubbles, and now the bubbles reach out to me, but the hate is still in her face, leaking from her split lantern skull, and she’s saying, ‘I’m cold, I’m cold, where’s your father, I’m cold, Michael,’ and I can’t breathe, and she’s still coming, and I’m hitching in tiny gulps of air, too much soil, buried and drowning in it, too much and I can’t–

The light comes on and I’m only briefly able to close my eyes against it –one second, maybe two. Then they pop open again, shivers climb up my back, spread through my scalp, and mom is directly in front of me.

“I’m cold, Michael,” she hisses. “I’m cold. See?” And she touches me with three of her fingers. Touches my forearm. “Tell your father that I’m very, very cold in here.”

She pulls her fingers away from my skin, but the cold stays. I look down at the place on my forearm, then the next thing I know the stairs are pulled down and dad is coming up them. He asks me if I’m okay, what happened. It would be silly to think he can see mom, so I just pass on the message, even though mom’s right there watching. I say, “Mom’s cold, dad. Mom told me to tell you that she’s really cold. You should do something about that if you can.”