t can happen at any time.  

 

I’ll be in the kitchen, waiting for the toaster to pop up and I’ll hear the scrape of a metal spatula on a frying pan. As I floss my teeth at night, I can hear the roll of toilet paper being batted against the holder. While I lay in bed and scroll, he breathes heavily. She murmurs. No specific words I can make out. Just small, sleepy sighs. I assume she’s emptying her brain out before sleep.

 

When I first moved into the house, I thought it was mice. I unpacked my books on the shelves and I heard little noises, but I had lived in the city for eight years at that point. I knew mice were par for the course. So I set out some electric traps. But there were no zapped mice and the noises continued.

 

My mind moved on to rats. I called a guy my coworker had used and he pulled out my oven to check for cracks they might be slipping through. Checked in my basement. All the corners and crevices. He seemed annoyed that there was no obvious entry point and told me I’d have to get a sledge hammer and start knocking down walls if I really wanted to find them. His advice was to get a stereo.

 

So I did. I borrowed a Bluetooth speaker from my brother and set it up in the living room to drown out the little scratches and creaks. But the first night I turned it on and started making dinner (an Allison Roman recipe; cracked pepper and lemon on sardines. It wasn’t good.) it felt like the regular noises got even louder. Like they were dancing. Not swing dancing but doing a sort of shuffle like you would on the edge of the dance floor at a work event. Just waiting for someone else to really get things going but still enjoying the beat. The idea of rats in the walls dancing made me laugh but it somehow also sounded like they had shoes on. Hard heels. Distinct footfall.

 

Maybe a cat had fallen into the wall. Or a possum? I took a flashlight to the backyard and checked for holes along my roofline. I put on Frasier as I went to sleep, hoping Niles would distract me from the nocturnal stirrings of my own home.

 

In the morning it seemed obvious.

 

It was the neighbors. Obviously! I live in a rowhome, squeezed between other rowhomes, all with shared walls. Like a child too lazy to draw a full neighborhood and instead just filling the page with a rectangle then cutting it through with vertical lines to create separate houses.

 

It was embarrassing that I hadn’t introduced myself yet but I was still within a reasonable grace period. And besides, I don’t know that people even introduce themselves to neighbors anymore, unless you’re on a list that mandates it. Most people prefer the casual street run in  - they’re heading out with their bike, you’re walking in with a bag of groceries. You wave from your stoop and say your names, almost immediately forgotten, and that’s that. Head nods and hand flashes from that point on.

 

I knocked on the door of the house to my left. No response. I knocked again and an old man in a Hawaiian shirt appeared. He was moving pretty slowly – he probably started to answer the door after my first knock but only just made it to the front of the house. He was nice enough; a bit long winded if you asked any questions. But didn’t sound like he would have the energy to dance. And even as he stepped out onto his stoop, I noticed he wasn’t wearing any shoes. I wasn’t really hearing the noises from his side anyway.

 

At the house to my right, a woman named Judy answered the door. She asked if I was her 3 o’clock showing and I told her, no just the neighbor. She sighed and looked like she couldn’t think of way to politely ask me to leave so she’d just have to deal with me.

 

“How long has the property been vacant?”

 

“I got the listing in March but Harmon was handling it before that. From the MLS listing it looks like it’s the third time it’s been on the market in two years.”

 

“Is it a flip?”

 

“If it is, it’s not going well. Not really making a profit. It’s not in bad shape or anything but there aren’t really any new finishes – “

 

I looked around as she spoke. The house mirrored my own. Stairs to the side, a shed kitchen in the back. It looked well maintained if a little dusty.

 

“Is there any chance someone’s been staying in the house?”

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“Like maybe a family? Or at least a couple?”

 

She stared at me until mercifully, her phone rang and she turned to take the call.

 

Back at home, I sat around and listened. It sounded like shoes. Climbing up stairs, climbing down. Shuffling along. The creak of knees moving from a sitting to a standing position. Furniture being moved. The leg of a coffee table dragged along the floor.

 

There were never any distinct voices. No shouts or muffled tones. But the movement was there throughout the day.

 

Thankfully, whatever was making the sound seemed to have the same bedtime as me. Except once.

 

That time the sound didn’t come from the walls but from the ceiling of my bedroom; the floor of my third floor office. The feet ran back and forth as if pacing the length of the house and at times seemed to rush and trip. It went on and on for over an hour and stopped around 3:14am. I didn’t even turn the light on. I wasn’t sure if it would leak into the ceiling and disrupt the noise. I just listened in the dark, under my covers, going over all the possibilities of what it could be.

 

Back when I still thought it was mice, I had mentioned the noise a coworker before a Zoom meeting. In the awkward period before we actually got started, still waiting on my boss, he checked in.

 

“How are those mice?”

 

I told him that they likely weren’t mice. That they likely weren’t neighbors either.

 

“This is probably just one of those urban legend things people share around, but a buddy of mine told me a story once about a guy who kept noticing things going missing, so he checked the security footage in his house and apparently there was some sort of feral woman living in his basement. In the crawl space or something. And she’d sneak up when he was sleeping and eat his food, watch TV stuff like that.”

 

“I mean, I’m mostly hearing them during the day.”

 

“You got a crawl space?”

 

After the meeting I fished a flashlight from under the sink and stood at the top of my stairs thinking about what my coworker had told me. It was absurd. It was definitely an urban legend. But I did have a crawl space. And the middle of the night noises could have been someone pacing around my third floor.

 

What was my plan anyway? Shine a flashlight in the small dirt sliver at the back seam of my house? And what if I saw a face? What if the light hit eyes? Then I…tell them to leave? Say hello? Call the cops? Should I have someone on speed dial? Should I have someone with me in person? It would be safe to assume that a person living in a crawl space was already in a more desperate situation than I was; they might be more willing to take extreme measures to eliminate a threat to their life. But I needed to rule out the possibility.

 

I texted my brother before walking down the basement stairs. At least so someone knew where I was. He could help the authorities better time stamp my death, worst case scenario.

 

The back of my basement is mostly wall but there’s a twelve inch gap on the upper lefthand side. Holding my breath, I directed my flashlight to the space.

 

Nothing.

 

Cement blocks, old bricks. Plastic trash left over from when they added on the shed kitchen.  

 

I texted my brother again to let him off the hook.

 

That night I took out a few frames I’d been meaning to hang. Arranged them on the floor before starting to put them up on the wall. After the second 5x7 I heard the noise. From the wall with my fresh frames. It was a slow step. Tentative, easy – like someone taking their time across a slippery part of the trail. I stuck my hand up to the wall not sure what I was expecting. Heat? Pressure?

 

It felt cool. But still hard. Still a wall.

 

From behind my hand, a sigh.

 

The next morning I moved my table up against the wall, as if inviting the noises to breakfast. I heated up an extra croissant and put in on a plate near the wall side while it was still hot and it smelled extra delicious. The slow step was back. I heard it move – one, two, three, four, five. Then stop. I popped open a new jar of strawberry jam and buttered the croissant, the knife dragging across the flakey bottom. Nothing. I poured coffee into a mug then added a splash of creamer, just a “tint” as my grandma would say.  At the end of the meal, I used my hand to scrap the crumbs off the table into my other hand. Nothing. I pushed my chair back to leave the table and I heard it –

 

One, two , three, four, five slow steps.

 

At night I played some new music my brother had recommended. I stood up to dance in my living room and the noises danced too. This time, fast steps and more than just one pair of feet. When I was running late for a dentist appointment, I sprinted up the steps to grab a scarf and on my way down, I heard footsteps sprinting alongside me behind the wall. When I got back from my appointment I tried it again and found the little footsteps hopping along right in time. We raced up and down and up and down.  I streamed a yoga workout on YouTube one afternoon and heard bare feet sticking to laminate, squeaking along and moving slowly with me.

 

If they were really in walls, they weren’t intruders. They lived there as much as I did. They seemed to hold no sinister motives, no plots to overtake the main house and put me in the walls. Their only goal seemed to be living their own lives, within earshot of my own through some accident. They kept me company. I wondered what they looked like. What they wore. (Sneakers, certainly.) How many there were. (Sounded like a family of four, but sometimes maybe just three, or even seven.) How old they were. (Some children definitely, but I heard the crackle of rice crispy knees too.) I knew they could hear me and I wondered if they thought the same things. Did they worry about me being alone? Did they think I wasn’t alone? Did they grow worried when I went away for the weekend?

 

A Sunday in spring, I found movers outside, carrying boxes into the house next door.

 

That night I listened against the wall. I would have to tell the new owners. It would be something we shared. And maybe if I told them about it with the right tone, they would see it was a good thing, a fine thing. Just more neighbors. Nothing to be worried about. I worried that they would be spooked and do something. I don’t know what – what can you do? Call a priest? Rip a hole in the wall?

 

But it never needed to be discussed. The walls were quiet that first night after they moved in. And the next night. And the next. And forever. The new neighbors were nice. They were quiet too.

 

Across town, I didn’t know it, but another home’s walls had gone quiet. The small children pressed their ears against their bedroom wall to listen for the lady making toast, shifting into downward dog, padding barefoot through her kitchen. Their parents told them to go to bed, it was never anything to begin with. But they wondered too. If the people who moved in next door had scared away the single resident of their walls.