She came into the bedroom of the new house and said, “Do you hear that?”
“It sounds like scratching,” he said, swinging his long legs out of bed, their new bed, for a new house.
Downstairs, he put his ear to the living room wall. “It sounds like it’s coming from here,” he said. She had her ear to the other wall and said, “No, here.”
He stepped back and turned his head to the side and squinted his eyes. She got down on her knees and put her ear to the floor and began to crawl across the soft smooth wood. “Lost it,” she said, sitting up.
Then the sound seemed to diminish and diminish and evaporate like a vapor.
He raised his eyebrows. She shrugged and took his hand and just as she began to lead him up the stairs to bed, they heard the sound again, a soft but insistent scratching, this time from the kitchen.
They went into the kitchen and turned on the lights. With the light on, the scratching reduced in volume but in the quiet of the house could still be heard, small and grating. He opened the cabinet where they’d stored the cans and closed his eyes, the better to hear. She kneeled at the island and cocked her head. He went to a bare wall and put his ear to a place where he thought he’d hang a calendar and closed his eyes yet again.
She had her head above the counter, her short fingers spread as she watched the surface like a carpenter checking for level. “It’s like it’s nearby but not nearby,” she said.
“Like the motor of a refrigerator, it shifts when you turn your head,” he said. Then he said, “But you hear it, right?”
“I do,” she said. “You’d think it was coming from the basement but we don’t have a basement.”
“Or the ceiling. It sounds like it might be coming from the ceiling, just above us.”
They walked together under the ceiling, sometimes holding hands sometimes not, pausing to listen and then tracking once again. They were drawn to the fridge, which was new, new for their new house. They put their ears to the base of the great silver machine and listened. Sometimes they heard the scratching just under the door. She followed the scratching around the base and looked into the gap between the refrigerator and the wall and heard the fan come on, which momentarily drowned out the noise of scratching, but she knew that behind the sound of the fan, something was scratching.
Soon, as it had in the living room, the scratching grew smaller as an audible phenomenon and smaller and then it went away and the house was left in silence.
Irritably, she said, “It’s past two in the morning. We should get to bed. Whatever it was, its gone now.”
With equal irritability, he said, “I’m exhausted. But this reminds me of that story about the man who tore up his walls, his floors, and everything else, searching for a sound he could never find. It drove him crazy. When they finally checked, they found him staring at his gutted walls.”
“I remember that story,” she said, yawning.
They went up the stairs. They nestled together in bed and turned off their lights. It would be a great case, a great joke, for the scratching to suddenly return just when they turned out their lights, as this couple nestled in bed, drawing them out on a new and pointless search. But in this case, it was the opposite that happened but the effect was the came.
Each on his and her side, with their eyes on the dark ceiling, they waited for the scratching sound in a state of remorseless insomnia, knowing that just when they closed their eyes, just when the heaviness of sleep crept into their eyes, the scratching would return, and so they waited through the night with their eyes open until the sun rose.
