The Linen Closet on the Landing

When I was six, we lived in a tall, narrow house on a street where the gas lamps hissed all night like impatient serpents. My room was at the top of the house, three floors above the kitchen, and the stairs were steep and crooked, worn smooth in the middle by generations of feet. The maid, Anya, a girl of nineteen with hands that smelled of lye and mint, slept on a cot in a cramped alcove beside the linen closet on the second-floor landing. That closet was a thing I avoided even in daylight; its door was always ajar, sighing open and shut in the drafts, and inside, the shelves were stacked with yellowed sheets that moved, just barely, as if something breathed beneath them.

That night, a hot August night, I woke to a voice saying my name—not Alina, but my full name, Alina Maria, the way my mother said it when I was in trouble. The voice was soft, almost tender, and it came from the direction of the door. My eyes were closed, but I could see the faint square of the window in my mind, the moon behind a veil of cloud. The voice said, “Come down, Alina Maria. Come see what I have made for you.” I did not want to go, but my body moved as if pulled by a thread. I slipped out of bed, my bare feet padding on the cool floorboards. I did not open my eyes. I felt the door handle, turned it, and stepped into the hall.

I walked, blind, guided by the voice. It murmured in my ear, warm and close, as if its lips were brushing my earlobe. It told me to mind the third step, the one that creaked, and I did. It told me to hold the banister, and I did. I could smell the dust of the stairwell, the faint sweetness of rotting wood, and beneath that, something else—like damp earth and copper, like the smell of the cellar where we kept the coal. Halfway down, the voice changed. It grew deeper, more resonant, and it no longer sounded like a person. It sounded like the house itself, the house speaking through its walls and stair treads, its voice a rumble that I felt in my chest. “Turn right,” it said, and I turned right, down the second-floor hall, past the doors of rooms I had never entered, rooms that were always locked. I stopped in front of the linen closet. The door was open wide, a black rectangle. The voice said, “Step inside.”

I hesitated. I had never been in the closet, not even to fetch a towel. But the voice was so compelling, so familiar, that I stepped over the threshold. My foot landed on something soft. The door clicked shut behind me. I opened my eyes then, and I saw—nothing. Absolute darkness. But I felt hands on my shoulders, cold and light, pressing me down. I sank onto a pile of sheets that were damp and smelled of mold. The hands pressed harder, urging me to lie down. I lay down, and the sheets folded over me, heavier than any blanket. The voice was all around me now, inside the closet, in the air, in my own skull. “Sleep,” it said. “You are home.” And I slept.

I woke to the sound of my mother’s scream. Light flooded the closet as the door was thrown open. My mother, my father, and Anya were all there, staring down at me. I was curled in the bottom of the linen closet, wrapped in a sheet that was embroidered with tiny flowers, a sheet I had never seen before. My mother pulled me out, sobbing, asking where I had been. I told them the truth: a voice called me, and I followed. Anya was pale, standing in the doorway. She said, “I was asleep the whole time. I never called you.” I looked past her, into her alcove, and I saw that her cot was empty, the blanket undisturbed. The group went quiet. My father walked to the closet and looked inside, but he saw nothing except shelves of old linen. He told me it was a night terror, that I must have walked in my sleep. But I remember the voice, and I remember the hands.

Years later, when I was twelve, I asked my mother about the house. She told me that before we moved in, a family had lived there, a family with a daughter my age. The daughter had died of a fever, and her mother had kept her body in the linen closet for three days, waiting for the husband to return from the war. The husband never came. When he finally did, months later, he found the mummy in the closet, the sheets wound tight around her like a cocoon. He went mad and hanged himself in the stairwell. My mother said this as if it were a cautionary tale, meant to keep me from wandering at night. She did not know that I had already visited that closet, that I had lain in the sheets of a dead girl.

Now I am twenty-six, and I live in a different city, in an apartment with no stairs, no linen closet, no maid. But every night, when I close my eyes, I hear the voice. It calls my name, softly, winsomely, as if from a great distance. I do not answer. I do not follow. I stay in bed, my eyes shut, my heart pounding. Sometimes, I feel a cold breath on my ear, and the voice whispers, “I am still there, Alina Maria. The sheets are still warm. Come home.” I do not know how many nights I can resist. The voice is patient. It has been waiting six years. It can wait a little longer.