The Crayon in the Baseboard

My childhood was a patchwork of military housing and my grandmother’s cramped row house in Ashwood, a mill town outside of Pittsburgh. I was the seventh of ten, and my youngest sister, Lila, arrived in the spring of 1969. Dad shipped out to Okinawa that winter, and Mom, stubborn as a rusted bolt, refused to uproot us again. So we stayed in Grandma’s house, a narrow, creaking structure that smelled of boiled cabbage and mothballs, always bustling with uncles, aunts, and cousins drifting through.

Lila was the only baby in that chaos, and she had an odd habit from the moment she could talk. She’d point to a corner of the living room, where the floral wallpaper peeled like old skin, and say, ‘The tall man is standing there.’ We’d glance, see nothing, and shrug. Sometimes she’d toddle toward that empty space and say, ‘Excuse me, tall man,’ as if she were navigating around an invisible ghost in a crowded aisle. We humored her, even moved the coffee table when she claimed he was in the way. It became a family joke, the invisible resident we called ‘Uncle Gerald’ after a long-lost relative we’d never met.

In August 1972, Dad returned, and we packed our lives into a beat-up station wagon, bound for Fort Wainwright, a sprawling base in the Alaskan interior. The house we were assigned was a squat, prefab structure, identical to its neighbors, with pale green siding and a porch that sagged like a tired horse. Mom began unpacking, laying out our frayed photo albums and a worn-out box of crayons that Lila had never let go. As she slid a framed picture of Grandma onto the mantel, she noticed a crack in the baseboard, just below the window. A single crayon, burnt orange, was wedged inside, as if someone had pushed it there years ago and forgotten.

That night, Lila, now three, sat on the living room floor, mumbling to herself. I was reading a comic, half-listening, when she looked up and said, ‘The tall man is here again. He followed us.’ I felt a cold draft that had nothing to do with the Alaska wind leaking through the windows. Mom froze, a stack of plates in her hands. ‘Don’t be silly, honey,’ she said, but her voice was thin. Lila pointed to the corner, and I swear I saw the wall ripple, like heat off a stove, but there was no heat. It was a shadow that didn’t match anything in the room, too tall, too still.

Over the next weeks, the tall man became more than a game. Lila would talk to him for hours in a low, sing-song voice. She told us his name was ‘Mister Crayon,’ because he’d come from the wall, and he was sad because he’d been left behind. Objects began to move. Small things, at first, like a set of keys migrating from the kitchen counter to the bathroom sink. Then, a family portrait turned to face the wall. I’d wake up with my pillow at the foot of the bed, though I hadn’t moved. Mom found a second crayon, a deep purple, in the laundry hamper, and a third, a sickly green, in the pantry behind the canned beans.

I started having dreams. In the dreams, I was in the baseboard, a narrow, dusty tunnel lined with crayons, thousands of them, all melted and fused together. At the end was a door made of pressed wood, and behind it, something breathed. It whispered in a language that tasted like copper, and it was always counting, always one short. When I’d wake, I’d find Lila standing over my bed, her face pale, her eyes wide. ‘He wants you to find the right crayon,’ she’d say. ‘He’s been waiting since the house was built. He lost his finger.’

One evening, after the sun had set and the aurora bled green across the sky, I decided to pry open the baseboard in the living room. I used a butter knife, and the wood splintered easily, revealing a hollow cavity that smelled of dust and old rot. Inside, there was a child’s mitten, small and gray, and a pile of crayon stubs, all chewed and broken. At the very back, a single, unopened crayon, the color of dried blood. I picked it up, and the entire house shuddered, a low groan that came from the floorboards themselves. The lights flickered. Lila let out a cry that was not a cry, but a laugh.

In that moment, I understood. The tall man wasn’t a man. He was a memory, a fragment of a child who had been sealed in these walls when the base was built, a child who had been forgotten when the builders moved on. He didn’t want the crayon. He wanted to be drawn out, to be given a new shape, a new life. But as I held the crayon, my hand moved on its own, and I scrawled a figure on the living room wall: a tall, black shape with long arms and no face, with a single, gaping mouth. The wall swallowed the drawing, and the crayon crumbled to dust in my palm.

Lila slept soundly that night for the first time in weeks. But the next morning, when I went to the kitchen, I found a new crayon, bright yellow, placed neatly on the counter next to the cereal box. And from the living room, I heard a faint, scratching sound, like a child writing on paper. I didn’t go in. I never went in again. But I heard Lila’s voice, soft and patient, as she said, ‘No, that’s wrong. Draw me a friend.’ And the scratching continued, slow and deliberate, for the rest of my life, even after we moved, even after Lila grew up and stopped talking about the tall man, even after I realized the crayon was still in my pocket, and the wall in every house we ever lived in was listening.