or a few months now, they'd been hearing sounds behind the walls, upstairs in their bedroom and bathroom. Kind of a scurrying, scratching, clawing sound. It never occurred to Jody to be frightened. Obviously some kind of rodent—mouse, squirrel, chipmunk—had gotten in through a hole or gap in the house from the outside and was probably making a nest for winter. The cats weren't too bothered by it, which was a bit surprising, since two of the three were mice killers. Even though they were probably Hantavirus-carrying vermin, they looked so Disney-cute when she saw them out on the deck or in the driveway, squirreling away pine cone seeds in the pouches of their little mouths in that stop-motion-animation style of theirs.

She'd never realized that chipmunks and squirrels had voices, high-pitched shrill little chirps that they weren't bashful to use with each other or against the hated bluejays they shared the grounds with (Tom called them flying rats and fondly recalled his boyhood days when he and Pat Trolan would liberally discharge the full force of their BB guns into the trees where they congregated). But like Jody, he recognized that the lot of the mountain rodents wasn't an easy one, especially in the winter, and tended to look the other way when a rabbit or squirrel made its home under the deck or out in the woodshed. And they were great fun for the cats to watch, who lived indoors and could only watch, impotent, as the small animals scampered by, preoccupied with the business of trying to stay alive. But inside the house, behind the walls, was a whole different ball game. They could cause an electrical fire, jeopardizing everything he loved—Jody, the cats, his gun collection. They had to go.

"I'm thinking about plugging back in that device my dad used to use to deter rodents."

Jody felt sick. She remembered coming to the house years ago when they were in college and hearing before they even got through the front door the pulsating ultra-high-frequency waves that weren't like anything heard in nature, like a plague of locusts but turned up on high. It reminded her of the soundtrack from some of the
B-horror movies she'd seen as a kid, movies like Empire of the Ants, and Frogs, starring people like Joan Collins and Ida Lupino and Ray Milland. Movies she'd found deeply, fundamentally disturbing, and watched over and over again.

Tom saw the look on her face and assumed it was the mention of his father that gave her that sick look, which was only partially true.

"There's no way you're plugging that thing back in. It's meant for unoccupied houses, Tom. It can't be good for the cats—you know they have sensitive ears—and now that I'm working at home, it'll drive me crazy. No."

He thought for a second. "Well, I think there are traps I could put up there."

"What, like mousetraps?"

"No, more like obstacles that block them from getting back out, so eventually they just die."

A few summers ago, it had been unusually hot and they'd had an influx of moths. Tom brought home a few of those long sticky strips that you hang from the ceiling and within a day, they were pulsing with stuck moths. She'd been surprised at how long some of the moths had survived; days or even a week later, she'd gingerly approached what looked like a concentration camp of moths. She couldn't help herself—she stuck out a finger and touched one of the lifeless bodies. One of its wings weakly fluttered and she wished she had the courage or compassion to smash it, just to put it out of its misery, but instead she walked away. After a week or two, the moths stopped coming as quickly as they'd appeared, and the throbbing sticky sheaths went still. Tom disposed of them all except one, which he'd needed a ladder to hang in the highest part of their A-frame, their bedroom, and so there it still was, the Sticky Strip of Shame that she tried never to look up at. Even if she never saw the traps behind the walls, she knew she'd be imagining the long slow boring death. A chipmunk wasn't a moth; chipmunks had families, made nests to keep them warm. But Tom kept coming back to the safety of her and the cats, until finally she had to agree with him there was no comparison.

A day or two after Tom crawled under the house and set the chipmunk/squirrel/mouse trap, she heard the scratching, scraping sounds again, first in their bathroom, then in their bedroom. She told Tom, who seemed surprised. He hadn't been home. "Really? Are you sure?" Yes, she was pretty sure. And then again the next day but this time at
night, when he was home but downstairs, with the TV on. This time she didn't say anything. What if she hadn't really heard anything but was just imagining the sounds, the result of too much solitude and a guilty conscience? It was hard to know. The scratching had sounded fainter than the previous times and didn't last as long.

Oh God. She thought of another horror movie that she had seen on one of the movie channels when she was a teenager—The Exorcist. Early on in the film, Linda Blair's mother begins hearing what one of her house servants assures her are simply mice in the attic of the house she is currently renting. Because Ellen Burstyn's character is a white woman of some intelligence and means, and because this is a movie, she of course journeys up into the attic to see for herself and of course discovers nothing. The audience never does learn what, if anything, was up there, but the implication is clear: There could be some connection between whatever is possessing her daughter and the sounds coming from the attic. The not knowing and not seeing were what stayed with Jody from the movie, more than the eventual over-the-top, almost comical demonic body-grab that everyone talked about. Now Jody wonders, could Regan have been afflicted with rabies? That would explain a lot. She's not sure what's the more frightening proposition: Satanic possession, or an acute viral disease of the nervous system typically characterized by increased salivation, abnormal behavior, and eventual paralysis and death.

Still, there were other explanations, of course. She knew that. The house was old and drafty and made from wood, and the high beams criss-crossing the ceiling were layered with cobwebs. Layers of grime and dust and insect carcasses and piss from long-dead pets shrouded the interior. It shouldn't be surprising that the house itself was groaning
under the weight of years of neglect, she thought. The house was never really occupied full-time; when Tom was a teenager, he and his father lived there for a year or two, but that had been a long time ago. Some of the closets still held clothes from long-past girlfriends of his father, remnants of a time when his father still aspired to joy. (I wonder what happened to all of those girlfriends? she now thought.)

By the time Tom and Jody descended on the house, it was used maybe once a year at the most, but that didn't stop Tom's father from begrudging their presence there, and she didn't doubt the power of his disapproval to physically manifest itself. She was reminded of the old Eddie Murphy bit in "Raw," the one where he compares a white family with a black family in a house that is haunted. The white family stays and stays and stays, long past the point of rationality; the black family tours the house, hears Get Out! and the patriarch turns to his family and says, "Nice place—too bad we can't stay." She hated the implication that she and Tom and the cats were that clueless white family, but she didn’t think she believed in ghosts or mad ex-girlfriends in the attic or even in signs from the dead. Her own father died several years ago and she'd long ago given up on hearing from him, even though she'd explicitly asked him on his deathbed to send her a sign he was still around.

Scratch, scratch, scratch. This time the scraping was so faint she took off her glasses and put down her book to hear better. Tom had fallen asleep downstairs on the couch and she wished she could silence his snoring without waking him up. Nothing. Had she really heard anything? Yes, because the thought Whatever it is has long nails was still in her head, and where had that come from? And where were the cats—weren't they supposed to possess superhero powers of hearing? Still nothing but the tell-tale beating of her heart.

In the last eight hours of her father's life, his breathing had taken on a gurgling quality. It's the death rattle, the hospice nurses told them. It was painful to hear, and before they went to bed that night, her mother had cried. "Oh, this is awful." It was hard to go to sleep to, and Jody had gotten up before dawn to go to the bathroom. She went back to her room and laid down on the bed and thought, It sounds like he's drowning, how can he go on like this? She started keeping track of the time between labored breaths, like trying to gauge how close the lightning was by counting between thunderclaps. The thunder got fainter and fainter; the lightning was moving away, not getting closer. She must have started to drift off until she was awakened by the absence of sound. Nothing. Had the storm passed? In the darkened living room that was just beginning to show glimmers of light, she thought she saw his lips locked around that last breath, barely fluttering, like those moths. Her mother had been wrong; what was awful was the silence. It meant that the struggle had been lost.

She hoped she hadn't been wrong—the silence had gone on too long. She resolved not to tell Tom if she heard the sounds again. Besides, he never heard them. They were meant for her alone. She’d take her chances: she chose not-silence, and it didn’t even matter if it was something trying to get out, or to get in.

Michelle Filippini is currently the Senior Development Writer at Sierra Nevada College in Incline Village, Nevada. Previously she was a project editor at the University of Nevada Press. Since graduating from California State University, Chico, with a B.A. in English (focus on creative writing), Filippini has worked in scholarly and textbook publishing as a production editor, freelance project manager, and copy editor. Her poetry and nonfiction have been published in Kanilehua, The Sierra Nevada Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, Language and Culture, Suss, Eclectic Flash, Glint Literary Journal, Moonshine Ink, and Quiet Mountain Essays.