NIKKIA RIVERA - THOSE WHO DWELL BELOW

Nikkia Rivera is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She has previously been published in Thriller Magazine. 

Those Who Dwell Below 
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​I heard them. Late at night, the day after he died. Sounding as he said they would. Unruled and excited, buoyant and decrepit. And now, triumphant in their guilt, they mock me. Following me underfoot, room to room, so loud I cannot remember what it was to live without them. We killed him, the spirits sing from below the floorboards. We killed your father.
            My mother says she's never heard them. She said this to my father when he was alive and to me the morning after I told her the voices gathered at night below my room. There’s nothing there, she told me. You’re imagining things. Yet, the next week, she had every floorboard in the house covered with carpet. To muffle out the creaks and pipes, she said.
            Originally, my mother wanted carpeting as a preemptive plan. They–her and my father–argued about getting older. The week an AARP magazine was delivered to the house was the week my mother decided that having the house carpeted was their only salvation. She’d say to him, George, we’re getting old. What if we fall, what if we get hurt? And Dad would say, You’re being paranoid, cut that shit out, you’re not covering the floors.
We never had wood floors like we did at this house. They were mahogany, red in how brown they were, the pinpoint of my father’s unyielding adoration kept shiny and smooth for the eyes of everyone who came through our door. He’d wax them, make everyone take off their shoes before entering, and argued with my mother until he was breathless with rage in their defense. Then one day he fell forward-facing down the wooden stairs, hitting his neck to the jut of a step, snapping his windpipe like a carrot. Then he suffocated, twisted and splayed at the base of the foyer, dying atop what he most adored as the spirits dwelled beneath, exulted with victory, singing the songs they now sing to me.
If he’s watching over us, like my mother says he is, then the carpeting is a message. A post-mortem ‘I told you so’. Thick and beige it reminds me of the carpeting in our old apartments that used to burn my knees as a child. It covers everything, save the kitchen and bathroom tiles. The chorus of mourners saw it as reactionary re-decorating, a symptom of my mother’s grief, not knowing it’s simply another move made on a checkerboard with only her pieces left.
But the carpet doesn't dampen their sounds. They haven’t stopped their joy. She says she doesn’t believe in the spirits, not like he did, but I know she must be suspicious now. She sits up in the kitchen every night in silence, coffee cup in hand, and still hears nothing from their home in the crawl space below. But I too never heard them when my father did. He noticed what we didn’t. First, the small. Missing toothbrushes and razor heads. Sporadic knocks and ghostly groans. Then, the large. Doors locking behind him, cans moving on high shelves so they’d fall right when he was underneath. He raved about them constantly. Mad, enraged, and a few disconcerting times, laughing, about how they never bothered her nor I, how he was their favorite. And he’d say to me Your mother doesn’t understand, but you do, Roselly. He asked me, desperately, again and again to hear them with him, and I never could. Not until he died, tripped from a step with nothing on it, that I saw how they play their games. The coroner's report came back saying nothing had happened. No heart attack, aneurysm, seizure. Just a symptom of age, said the mourners. He must have gotten dizzy or faint, they said, not knowing the laughter he must have heard before the spirits pushed against him until he was at the bottom of the stairs, where I found him some time later, carrying in the groceries he asked me to pick up on my way home.
And still, she can’t hear them. No matter how many times I try to tell her, my mother still says she hears nothing. She gets angry now, angrier at me than she got with Dad when he told her the same thing. She says they’re not real. She says I have to stop. She says I need help. But why cover the floors if she can’t also hear them underneath? Why would she choose to sleep on the living room couch instead of upstairs in her bedroom if not for the fear that they too will catch her, walking down those steps.
If I could just show them to her, she’d believe me.
It’s at night, after hearing them laugh at me from the dark, that I know I must find them. I cannot go to their base in the night, when my mother sits up, awake, standing at the kitchen counter sipping her coffee. For as long as I can remember, she sleeps only at dawn. I wait until the sky begins to color before I go. The basement door is across from the living room where she lays sleeping, and creaks when opened too quickly. But I’m quiet, and neither the door nor I make a noise, and my mother doesn’t wake as I go down.
It’d be a mistake, to assume they lie at the deepest bend of the house, in the basement, living along the rusted bicycles and dried out cans of paint. And yes, I’ve heard them, reveling in celebration amongst the boxes upon boxes upon boxes of my dead father’s things in the dead of the night, but that’s not where they live. I go to the only other door in the basement, and open it with both hands on the door knob because it sticks. It opens, and I go in. It’s small, but still I slip into the crease between the boiler and the wall, burning the points of my shoulder blades as I force myself behind the boiler. Body and hands splayed flat against the wall as I raise my arms until my fingers catch and bend over the edge. I lift, arms spread wide, feet against the boiler, then spread across the wall. This space was never meant to fit me, so I contort to fit it. Twisting, my spine arches as I hook my knees onto the landing, ripping the skin at the tips of my fingers, palms, knees, and cheeks until I roll into the dusty darkness, coughing and breathing heavily.
But they’re here, oh God, they’re here just as he said they were. Crowded in, wall to wall, I feel them alive and buzzing in the darkness. I see nothing, but they press against my body, my clothes, my smile, my teeth, startled at my presence but alive. The ceiling only brushes against my hair as I raise myself to my hands and knees, and as I crawl in different directions I find I can only go so far until finding myself at a wall. The crawl space only exists underneath the kitchen and part of the dining room, a relic left behind from the house’s original structure. And though I see nothing but nothingness itself, the space is filled with sound. I can hear them titter and squirm against the breath of the house, pipes spurring and clinking against their touches above my head. Here is where they seep into the floors of the house to find me. They crawl under my hands and grasp at my forearms. All-encompassing is their joy to have someone of the living finally join them.
After some time, above me, are footsteps. I don’t know when my mother woke up or whether she ever really slept at all, but I hear her move, clear steps on the kitchen tiles. I’m enthralled with proof. I move with her, crawling beneath her steps. Knowing that I am right and she was wrong. And even when her footsteps fade into the carpet of the house, places I cannot follow, I am heavy with enthrallment. I feel the need to cough, but I don’t want her to hear me yet. I want to laze in my victory, allow it to last.
Though I can’t hear her now, I listen to the water rushing over my head, from what can only be the shower, until it abates. The crawl space used to spread the house's entirety before we lived here. The previous owners dug beneath the house to make the basement, but only completed half of it. Never closing the opening to the untouched crawl space, it now peeks through the three-quarter wall behind the boiler. It’s small, squat, and damp down here. But the spirits seem to like it.
Above the sounds of the spirits I hear the whine of my clouded breath. The air down here is dirty, and the spirits make a game of rushing in and out of my lungs with each wheeze. What they take with them from inside me I do not know. Assuredly, they caress the bare skin of my arms. Above me is movement, steps layered atop one another. My mother yells out the first words I can hear clearly–my name. After the fourth call she stops, and I can no longer make out what she's saying. Someone is with her, and their indistinct sound of chatter rings muffled above.
I don’t know who is there, and I cannot clearly hear, but I know the scene. People come, family, friends, some I know and others I don’t, to give their condolences still a month past the funeral. My mother and the mourners reminisce. Before, she was never one to dwell, but death has made her nostalgic. Recently she’d come to think of my father as a saint. Such a good man, a good husband, a good father. It was a mantra she asserted daily, a mid-day prayer prayed to the congregation of visitors she’d bowed heads with as I walked along the edges, buying her groceries, writing her checks, throwing out my father’s mail. But that hadn’t always been so. Before his death, they’d argue. He laughed with food in his mouth and never took out the garbage. At family parties his jokes mocked her. He’d drink, sometimes, and sleep drunk on the stoop when she refused to let him in at 3 am, pushing the bureau against the door so he couldn’t break through. She’d scream I hope you fucking freeze when he called her a Cunt of a woman while the neighborhood listened. The neighbors who joined my mother’s mourning knew not to mention this when they sat in her kitchen, chanting, he was such a good man, a good husband, a good father.
Their talk, undoubtedly about him, excites the spirits. They fill the floors between my mother, her visitor, and I until I hear nothing more than their shrieked songs and my ragged breath. My knees hurt, and my eyes stay closed to keep the dust out. If I call out to my mother now, it’d scare both her and her guest so I keep quiet for a little while longer. I try, a few times, to lay down, but the ground pebbles against my face, and my breath roughens even more. The ground runs a constant chill, yet through the thin of my shirt I can feel I am covered in sweat.
Maybe time passes. I don’t fall asleep, but I awake several times, again and again to the sound of her pacing above. I need to show her what I found, that they’re here, they’re here with me. She pretends to not know we’re beneath her, but I know she’s known for a while. My father saw them, one night, drunk he came home to find my mother had locked every door and window on the ground floor. He called her, alternating between his phone and screams, but she would not answer. Back then, the boiler room had a small window, level with the concrete parking space on the side of the house, and he thought it smart to climb through. He broke the lock with the knell of his hand, climbing in headfirst until the bulk of him stuck into the frame. Levitating between ground and ceiling, obstructing all light, he used his phone to look around, and saw for the first time the opening to the crawl space hidden just above the boiler. Then he screamed, seeing the spirits for the first time, dormant in their home. This brought down my mother who had been sitting awake in the kitchen to find him in the dark, ghostly pale and levitating. She used to say how she never felt a fright like that, how she thought something terrible had happened and how, for a few moments, she thought to leave him there for the rest of the night, in atonement for how scared he had made her. Instead, she pushed him back out into the driveway, allowed him back in the house, and in the morning called her cousin to board up the window. It was nothing but a story, for a while, until my father realized that that night they saw him too, and had taken it upon themselves to get closer to him. Mom told me not to listen to him when he started telling us about the spirits. But sometimes, when he and I sat together eating breakfast at the kitchen table as my mother slept upstairs, he’d hold onto my forearm as though we were moving apart before telling me that I needed to believe him.
If he knew what I knew now, what would he have felt? Justified? Angry? Even more scared? Though the spirits taunted me too, I do not fear them, not anymore, not now that they got what they wanted. My attention. Company. Benevolence. His life. They reward me with their glee. Yet, I know their acceptance is fickle, balanced on a pin that any wrong move from myself could collapse. That’s why I need her to know. I need her to bear them along with me.
But how do you show what cannot be seen? I cannot bring my mother to them, so she must come to us. See us for herself. Join us in our space. Above, again, I hear the pads of her feet on the kitchen tiles. For a moment, there is only us.
Then, along the nape of my neck, naked between the part of my hair, a stranger, neither I nor the spirits, touches me. Heavy and fat, it is larger than any insect I can imagine and my spine and heart and breath and legs jolt upwards and before I know to stop myself, my head shoots straight into the ceiling. Or the floor. Wherever it is I am and suddenly I feel them on me crawling everywhere I could not feel until now. My head pounds and I can't breathe anymore. I can’t remember if I had ever been breathing at all. The air down here is liquid. I stay suspended as I drum my fist against the ceiling. I try to yell, to beg, to call my Mom, but all that comes out of my mouth is dust and dirt and lazy spirits who made a home in my chest.
Inches above me I hear a firework of broken glass followed by a fall that seems to shake everything for just a single moment. The impact is loud and weighed and for the first time in my life I learn what it is to hear my mother wail in terrible agony. Then, all too sudden, it stops, and there is no more noise. I don’t breath, and neither does she. And I think, horribly horribly, I wonder if this is what the spirits heard beneath my father as he died. Maybe they didn’t cheer. Maybe their victory wasn’t clear. Perhaps they pressed their ears to the ceiling as I do, with their heartbeats clawing at their chests the only noise they could hear, because it was always just a game to them, and they did not realize how it would end. And then, shaking and quiet, but beautifully clear, my mother whispers to us below. 
“George?”