The Spectrum of November

The room had always been a stubborn sort of cold, the kind that seeped into your bones no matter how many blankets you piled on. When I moved into my sister’s old bedroom after she left for university, I thought the chill was just her having left the window cracked, or the heating vent being poorly aligned. But even after I sealed the window and stuffed towels under the door, the air remained a stagnant, biting frost. I woke each morning shivering, my breath visible in the pale light, and the clock on my nightstand read an unholy hour, as if the cold itself was trying to whisper something to me in the dark.

I had always been the artistic one. My side of the room, now thoroughly colonized with my supplies, was a chaotic landscape of crumpled sketches, paint-splattered rags, and markers rolling across the floor like lost soldiers. That particular afternoon, I was exhausted from a long day at school, my mind a fog of algebra and stress. I flopped onto my bed, flipped open my sketchbook to the last page, and uncapped my favorite deep-sea blue marker. I pressed the tip to the paper, waiting for inspiration to strike.

But instead of my hand moving, the marker began to slide across the page on its own, as if guided by an invisible hand. The strokes were smooth and deliberate, forming letters in an elegant, looping script. ‘Bonjour,’ it wrote. My heart lurched. I looked around the room, half-expecting my sister to pop out from behind the curtains, but I was alone. I was taking French that year, and the word rolled out of my mouth before I could stop it: ‘Bonjour.’ A pause. The marker hovered, then wrote again, in the same perfect cursive: ‘Comment t’appelle tu?’ My name is Alex. I said it out loud, my voice trembling. The marker answered, ‘Je m’appelle Turquoise.’ I swallowed. ‘Quel âge as-tu?’ I asked. ‘Onze,’ it wrote. Eleven. I was about to slam the book shut, but my hand froze. The marker was already moving again, faster now, the letters becoming jagged, desperate. ‘AIDE MOI’ — Help me. And then, as if the entity had mustered all its strength, it wrote one final word: ‘DESSOUS’ — Under. A chill that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature crawled up my spine.

I stared at the page, my mind racing. Under? Under what? The only thing beneath me was the bed. But the bed was solid, a wooden frame with drawers underneath. I had never really looked under there. I dropped to my knees, pulled up the dust ruffle, and peered into the gloom. There, pushed against the back wall, was a battered cardboard box, its corners worn, a faded label reading ‘M. E.’ in my sister’s handwriting. I pulled it out, my hands shaking. Inside, nestled among old photographs and trinkets, was a small, unassuming notebook. Its cover was a deep turquoise, the color of a shallow sea. I opened it.

The pages were filled with a child’s drawings — crude, crayon scribbles of stick figures and houses. But as I flipped further, the drawings became more intricate, darker. The same turquoise marker had been used to write names, dates, and phrases in a looping hand that matched the writing in my sketchbook. On the last page, there was a message: ‘I am eleven. They took me. I live in the walls. I am always cold.’

I slammed the notebook shut, my breath ragged. The room was colder than ever, the air thick with an unease that made my skin prickle. I looked up at the walls — the walls that had always felt wrong, the walls that seemed to breathe. And then I heard it: a faint, rhythmic scratching, coming from within the plaster, just behind my bed. Like fingernails dragging slowly, deliberately. And a muffled, childlike voice whispered, ‘Dessous… dessous…’ I dropped the notebook, scrambled to my feet, and ran out of the room, down the stairs, out the front door, into the gray afternoon. I didn’t stop until my lungs burned and my legs gave out. But I knew, deep in my bones, that the cold and the scratching would follow me wherever I went, and that Turquoise was still waiting, somewhere under the floorboards, for someone to finally listen.