What the Shed Was Hiding

I guided Leo upstairs to his room on the second floor.

“Put your things in your backpack, okay?” I said, pulling the little blue bag from his closet. “Pajamas, toothbrush, and Mr. Bear.”

He gave a quiet nod and started collecting what he needed.

As he packed, I stepped back into the hallway.

My eyes went to the ceiling. Downstairs, Brenda had kept staring upward from the sofa. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

The house had an odd design. The previous owner had built it in the early nineties, and a central HVAC column rose from the basement to the roof. On this floor, it formed a bulky box in the middle of the hall, drywall hiding the ducts inside.

I crossed to it.

The painted surface felt chilly beneath my palm.

The man in the walls.

That was what Leo had called him. Not someone in the basement. Not someone in a tunnel. The walls.

I rapped on the drywall with my knuckles.

Thump. Solid.

I shifted a couple of feet and tried again.

Thump. Solid there, too.

Then I moved around to the narrow face, the side nearest Brenda’s bedroom.

I knocked.

Hollow.

My breath caught. I glanced toward the floor.

Where the column met the baseboard, the paint had been scraped away. Little marks scored the white trim, again and again, each one shaped like the front edge of a heavy boot.

I lowered myself to my knees. My heart beat so hard it seemed to fill the hallway.

A fine line showed in the drywall. It ran straight upward from the carpet, almost impossible to see—a cut so narrow it looked like a flaw in the paint.

This wasn’t an ordinary wall. Someone had made a panel.

I checked Leo’s room over my shoulder. He was fastening the zipper on his backpack, unaware of what I’d found.

I pressed my nails into the slim opening and tugged.

The panel gave way with a quiet, smooth click.

Stale air rolled out, thick and close, carrying the odors of sweat, wet soil, and bargain cologne.

Beyond it was no duct. A hollow shaft, roughly three feet across, plunged through the darkness toward the first floor and, I guessed, down to the basement passage.

A makeshift ladder had been fixed inside it, two-by-fours nailed straight into the support studs.

Then I saw what made my blood turn cold.

A small battery-powered baby-monitor screen was fastened to the inner face of the panel, level with my eyes.

It was on.

Green-tinted night vision filled the display. I knew the view: it came from the camera in the corner of Leo’s bedroom.

The man concealed in the walls hadn’t merely been staying there.

He’d been able to watch my little brother sleep, night after night, for nine months.

I reached into the opening to take the monitor. I wanted to tear it free and bring it to the police.

My fingers closed around its plastic casing, then touched something on the thin wooden ledge below it.

Paper. Thick and glossy.

I drew it out into the hall’s light.

An old Polaroid lay in my hand, its borders yellowed from time.

I stared at the picture, hoping my mind had mistaken what was there.

Brenda looked much younger, perhaps twenty, in a cheap waitress’s uniform. She leaned against a rusty pickup and smiled at the camera.

Beside her stood a man, his arm tight around her waist. A crooked scar crossed his chin, and his eyes looked cold and lifeless.

He held a baby, tiny beneath a blue hospital blanket.

Four words had been written across the photograph’s lower edge in faded black ink:

Our beautiful boy, Leo.

My lungs seemed to shut down. The hallway lurched around me.

Leo wasn’t my half-brother. He wasn’t Dad’s biological child. Dad had met Brenda when Leo was nearly a year old, and she’d told him the boy’s father was a deadbeat who disappeared before Leo was born.

The man in that picture—the scar at his chin, those empty eyes—

A board creaked overhead inside the shaft.

Slowly, dreadfully, I raised my eyes toward the darkness above the second-floor ceiling.

Dirty work boots rested on the ladder’s highest rung, hidden from the police below in the attic’s blackness.

The man from inside the walls hadn’t gone out through the tunnel.

He was still in the house.

I couldn’t draw a breath.

My fingers remained clamped around the edge of the open panel. The shaft breathed its stale, sweat-tainted air against my face.

The monitor painted the hollow with a weak green glow, catching the rough ladder nailed to the studs.

At its uppermost rung, in the darkness beyond the ceiling, the heavy boots waited.