The Crick in the Floorboards

The rain hammered the tin roof of the old farmhouse like a relentless drummer, and the wind moaned through the eaves. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of wet wool and kerosene from the lanterns. My sister Lena and I had brought our niece, little Mabel, to stay with us while our brother and his wife dealt with a family emergency in the city. The house was our grandmother’s, and it had stood for over a century, its bones creaking with every gust.

Mabel was in the room that used to be our grandmother’s sewing room, now a nursery with a faded crib and a rocking chair that had seen better days. We’d put her to bed early, but the storm had roused her. Lena and I were in the kitchen, nursing cups of chicory coffee, when we heard her voice, a soft, high patter floating down the hall. It wasn’t crying; it was the singsong cadence of a child talking to a playmate.

We exchanged a glance and set down our cups. The floorboards complained under our steps as we made our way to her door. It was ajar, and through the gap, we saw Mabel sitting up in her crib, her small hand extended toward the far corner of the room, palm up, as if offering something invisible to a guest. Her other hand grasped the crib rail, her little fingers white-knuckled.

We pushed the door open fully, and the lantern light from the hall spilled in, casting long, dancing shadows. Mabel didn’t flinch. She turned her head, and a wide, unearthly smile spread across her face. ‘Hi, Mommy and Auntie Lena,’ she said, her voice calm and sweet, as if we were the intruders.

I stepped closer, my heart thudding against my ribs. ‘Who are you talking to, sweetheart?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.

Mabel’s brow furrowed, her gaze dropping to the corner as if the answer were obvious. ‘I’m talking to the crickets,’ she said, and her tone was tinged with a child’s impatience. ‘Don’t you see them? They’re right there. They stand on my bed with their shoes on. They’re right there, Auntie Lena, see?’

We looked. The corner was empty. The shadow of the old armoire pooled there, but nothing moved. The floorboards just beyond the crib were bare. I felt a cold draft seep through the window frame, and the lantern flame guttered.

‘Crickets, sweetie?’ Lena said, crouching to Mabel’s level. ‘You mean, like the bug?’

‘No, silly,’ Mabel giggled, a sound that was too sharp, too knowing. ‘The men. The neekers. They came with the storm. They stand on my bed with their shoes on, and they’re all wet.’ She wiggled her toes and pulled her knees up, hugging the worn quilt to her chest. ‘They want me to go with them, but I said I have to wait for grandma Seatsy Pie.’

My blood went cold. Grandma Seatsy Pie was our grandmother’s pet name for her own mother, who had died long before we were born. Lena and I had only heard stories of her, a stern woman who had lived in this very house and who, according to family lore, had been ‘touched’ by something before her death.

We tried to soothe Mabel, to convince her it was just the storm and the shadows. But she insisted, pointing and describing their ‘shoes’ — thick, black boots with mud on them, she said, and their faces were ‘so pale and their eyes were like the moon.’ Then she whispered, ‘They’re not nice, Auntie Lena. They’re scratching the floor.’

And we heard it. A faint, rhythmic scratch, like fingernails on the wood, coming from the corner. The sound was so out of place that Lena grabbed my arm, her nails digging in. The scratching grew louder, more insistent, as if something was trying to claw its way up from beneath the floorboards.

I rushed to the crib and scooped Mabel up, her small body trembling. She wasn’t scared; she was laughing, a bubbly, eerie laugh. ‘Grandma said, ‘The neekers like little ones. They want to take you to the dark place where the floor won’t keep them out.”

Lena and I backed out of the room, slamming the door shut. We ran to the living room, where the grandfather clock struck eleven, its chime drowned by the thunder. We sat on the sofa, Mabel between us, and she continued to babble about the ‘neekers’ and ‘grandma Seatsy Pie’ as if they were dear friends. She kept looking toward the hallway, her eyes wide, and at one point she said, ‘Grandma says the neekers can come out of the walls tonight. The rain’s making them mad.’

We stayed up the rest of the night, huddled in the kitchen, the lantern hissing. The scratching continued, moving from the nursery to the walls, to the ceiling, then fading. Mabel eventually fell asleep in my arms, but her face was etched with a smile that didn’t look like a sleeping child’s.

In the morning, the storm had passed. The sun streamed through the windows, and the house seemed normal. But when Lena and I went to the nursery, we found the crib pushed against the wall, and the floorboards in the corner were warped, as if water had soaked them overnight. And there, in the dust, were impressions of small, bare feet — but they were angled oddly, like they’d been standing on tiptoes, facing the wall.

We never told anyone what Mabel said. We moved out of that house a month later, selling it to a young couple. But last week, I received a letter from the wife. She said their three-year-old son had started talking to ‘the men with wet shoes,’ and he’d mentioned a ‘grandma Seatsy Pie.’ The letter ended with a question: ‘Who is she? And why does she tell him to come with her?’

I haven’t replied. I’m writing this now, sitting in my new apartment, listening to the hum of the refrigerator. But tonight, I heard a scratching from under the floorboards. And Mabel — who is now five and living with us, because her parents were lost in the storm that night — came into my room, her face pale, and whispered, ‘Auntie Lena, the neekers have new shoes.’