chirp

 My house has very high ceilings.

I was married to a wannabe interior designer. She wanted a big place to decorate and dote on, practicing her skills. It was a particularly animous divorce. We're both spiteful creatures. I kept her house in the split, and she took my daughter.

Aside from the fact that I’d paid for it, I didn’t even really want the damn thing. It’s too big for me to live in by myself. People told me to get back on the market, that I was still young and deserved another chance. Fuck that. After ten miserable years and a nightmare divorce, I wasn't hopping at the chance to bring another woman into my life, even if it would fill the empty space. And christ does this place have empty spaces. The worst part is the ‘great room,’ a giant, vaulted, echoing dumpster with an overlooking balcony from the master suite. I used the balcony for my office space, when I used to go upstairs.

The smoke alarm wasn't reachable from the balcony, up on the slant of the ceiling next to the skylights. When the chirping started, a soft battery alert off to my left, I remembered for the first time in years where the thing even was. And, look. I was married to my ex for a decade. I can tolerate petty annoyances. It's not something to be proud of, but it just wasn't pressing to me; I didn't want to deal with it.

I only changed it the first time after my daughter came to visit. For me, it had already blended into the background, a basic part of living. It would beep every three minutes or so, not urgently but persistent. We were in the kitchen the first time it went off. She slapped her hands over her ears, and it must have really startled her because she looked suddenly drawn and terrified.

Obviously I asked her what was the matter. Instead of answering, she just asked what that noise was. Gina's young, but definitely old enough to know what a smoke alarm sounds like. I crouched down and tried to explain it to her. That it was just a little alarm that lets me know when to change the batteries, that the sound is there to keep us safe. I don't think she bought it.

It went off again and she flinched, wrenching away from me. She ran out of the house, and thank god her mother had already left or she would have seen our seven year old throw herself down on the welcome mat, fingers in her ears and anxiety prickling bright in her eyes. I caught her and tried to calm her down, but she kept squirming away until I promised her I would change the battery.

Pulling her hands down she asked, "Will that make them go away?"

I was rattled, but not as much as I should have been. Gina had always been a quirky child, and little kids react to things in ways you never expect. At that moment I was more concerned with nipping a meltdown in the bud. 

So I said, "Yeah, princess, of course," because I thought it would. Why wouldn't it?

I got the ladder out of the garage, unfolded it and climbed up with the fresh batteries in hand. Changed the old ones out. The noise stopped. The silence was so desolate, it was like the intermittent alarm had been taking up all the space in the room. Now in the vacuum, the air hadn't yet filled back in. I folded up the ladder again and put it back outside. Gina waited on the porch the whole time, looking dubious even when I told her it was fine to come in.

We weren't even planning on spending that much time at the house, since she was only here for me to take her out birthday shopping. Honestly, I was a little annoyed that I'd had to drop everything to fix the alarm, but I didn't want to be cross with her so I told myself begrudgingly that Gina had spared me from having to put up with it.

After shopping, arms laden, I tried to coax her back in so we could have lunch and wait for her mother. Sure, I could have dropped her off at home myself, but like I said. I'm spiteful. Gina wasn't having it. She stood on the porch, fidgeting with her shirt hem and giving me puppy eyes. She didn't want to budge. I promised ice cream, a sneaky treat her mother wouldn't find out about, and she still wouldn't open the door.

Hissing through my teeth, I set her presents down and swung the door open myself.

"See?" I said, trying and failing to sound like a good, patient parent. "Everything is fine."

She stiffened, white-knuckle gripping her clothes so tightly I heard a seam pop. I nearly scolded her, if not for the soft, distant chirp of an alarm.

"The fuck?" I mumbled. Gina bolted off the porch, made it all the way to the end of the drive before I caught up to her.

I scooped her up, and she started squirming and fussing like she hadn't since she was a toddler. That was how my ex found us. Gina flailing in my arms, almost worked to tears, door wide open and gifts abandoned on the porch. Parking at the drive's end, she sprang out of the car to interrogate me, chew me out. Gina reached for her so plaintively that I honestly couldn't blame my ex for the way she snatched her away.

I tried to explain to her about the smoke detector, but she never listens to me anyway. She only barely stayed long enough for me to get the gifts into her car. Then she tore out of there, and I was alone. Pressingly alone, it seemed, when I heard the chirp from inside.

It could have been a bad battery, or that I'd rushed and hadn't snapped them in right. The thing that unnerved me was really just how my daughter had reacted to it. I was worried for her more than anything else.

At first.

I tried to go back to ignoring it, put it out of my mind, whatever. But now when I would hear it, I would think: why did Gina run like that? What could have frightened her so badly? And one day, I wondered. Is it… getting louder?

I couldn't be sure if it was my imagination. It's the red car problem, how you're more likely to see one if you're already looking for it. Before, I could ignore the sound even when I was sitting right across the room from it, but now I could hear it from any room of the house. I even tried to move down to the basement when the incessant noise kept waking me up and distracting me during work; even there in the bowels of the house, the soft voice of the battery alarm cut through wall to reach me. I couldn't go anywhere, held hostage to my home office on weekdays.

Finally, I gave in. I got the ladder back out, climbed all the way up some fifteen feet, and replaced the batteries again. A brand new pack this time, absolutely no way they could already be used up. The alarm stopped for maybe an hour. When it returned, it was louder, faster. Beating urgently against the inside of the plastic casing.

No matter where I was in the house, there was no escaping it. I tried earplugs, headphones, but the more I tried to block it out, the more sharply it cut through any barrier. It started to make my fucking teeth itch. It took me less than a day to crack, hauling the ladder up after an agonized dinner and scrambling to the top. I swear, when I grabbed the smoke detector, it felt like I was holding something living. A beating heart under my hands as I yanked it open.

I didn't bother with new batteries now. I threw the ones inside of it on the floor, one of them leaving a fat dent in the hardwood. Who cared? I hated those floors. I hated the alarm. I left it dangling there, spilling its guts out. Proof I'd vanquished this stupid thing once and for all.

Once I climbed back down, the exhaustion hit me like a truck. It was so quiet and I'd slept so badly. My brain was starving. I didn't even have the energy to carry the ladder back or fold it up or anything, so I just left it there and threw myself down on the couch.

A scream woke me. It was like a nailgun to the eardrum. I had to clap my hands over my ears and roll my head around, looking for where it must have come from. The ceiling screamed again in a short burst. I lay there on my back for a few moments, trying to process what I was hearing. This had to be a hallucination or a dream, sleep deprivation catching up to me. But I've never had a dream that hurt before. Each scream, and they were coming with maybe ten seconds between them, they sent hot poker pain through my body.

I rolled off the couch and into the kitchen, clipping the wall with my elbow. My body was uncoordinated and unwieldy. Too drained to think, now boiling with adrenaline demanding that I fight or flee. The screaming followed me as I yanked down the kitchen smoke detector. The one in the basement, the one in the upstairs hallway. Even as I was doing it, I knew I was in denial. The sound didn't come from here, though it was as loud as ever.

I crouched in the stairwell, teeth grit and arms wrapped around my head. "Shut up, shut up!" 

I couldn't fucking hear my own voice even in the increasingly brief hiccups between noise because my ears were numb and my brain was on fire. Blood smeared on the sleeves of my shirt. Jesus, I was bleeding, and all I could think about was that sound and how to make it go away.

Stumbling out of the house, I made my way barefoot to the garage. I don't know how my neighbors didn't wake up and start joining in, it was so loud even outside. Maybe they were. I probably wouldn't have noticed. I banged into the garage door and pawed around in the dark, too fucked to even hit the lightswitch. All I could see by were the streetlamps through the window, and I knocked over a few toolboxes as I careened around the place. One of them broke my toe and I didn't even feel it until later. But I got my hands on what I came for.

I don't know why I went back to the house. I could have just left. I'd be crawling down the street, bleeding, and maybe I could never have gone back, but I would be free. I think in the moment I was convinced, possessed by the notion that the noise would follow me even if I ran.

So rather than do the sensible thing, I dragged a mallet back with me. Dragged it through the kitchen and the great room, dragged it up the ladder one-handed. I was swaying so much, it's a wonder I didn't fall and crack my head open. When I got to the top, I started screaming back at it, hollering at the ceiling until my throat hurt.

Grabbing the mallet, I braced myself on the ladder and swung for the smoke detector. I knocked it off the ceiling with one good strike, sending it flying with chunks of plaster. I hadn't gotten even a breath in before the ceiling screamed back at me. I swung again. Bits of ceiling came down around me. In my hair, in my mouth, sticking to the tacky half-dried blood running down my neck.

It stopped. I held my breath, thinking maybe I'd just finally gone deaf, but no- I couldn't feel it in my body anymore either, it wasn't rending the air around me. I tilted my head back. Around the mallet and the still falling debris, shafts of light began to cut through.

That wasn't possible. It was the middle of the night, my backyard was nothing but trees, there was no room above my house. I could see the dark sky from the window just beside me. I swung the mallet until I'd put a hole in my ceiling big enough to crawl through.

I looked into the great room. I mean, when I looked in, it was a mirror of the same room. Not like it was a mirror, but, literally mirrored. Upside down from here. Empty the way it had been when we moved in. Another whole fifteen feet down- up?- from where I stood, there were bits of ceiling plaster on the opposite hardwood floor. The only other thing in the empty room was a ladder, like mine, standing right where mine stood.

Looking up at the other room was giving me vertigo. Or maybe it was the rupture in my inner ears. I climbed down as steadily as I could and walked out of the house. I put the mallet back. Just to be sure, I stood outside, all the way at the end of the drive, and looked up. I couldn't see the hole from that side of the house, but I couldn't see another massive room above it either.

Staring up at my roof, I almost missed it. The front door opened. My head snapped down just in time to see a silhouette, the size and shape of a man, running out the door and away.

I ran across the yard before I even knew what I was doing. But he was fast, and I was barely on my feet. He ran down through the yard of another neighbor, and into the woods. I tried to follow him. Halfway into their drive, I collapsed to my knees, sobbing so hard I thought I would puke. I must have been so loud. I couldn't hear myself.

When I got back inside, wet and covered in grass clippings and mud, I stood at the bottom of the ladder and looked up. Through the hole in the ceiling, I could see his ladder. Whoever he was. It lay on the floor of that opposite-room, unreachable. Whether he'd kicked it down as he left, or knocked it to the ground with a desperate leap to make it to my side, I have no way to know.

I think the room is still there. I got someone to come in and patch the hole over, and by the look in his eyes when he left, he saw it too. I don't have any answers. Hell, I don't even have questions. What I have is partial deafness in both ears and a profound fear of heights.

I know something happened in my home. I can live with not knowing any more.