I’ll begin with what I am not. Recalcitrant is what I am not. I’ve never had a taste for angst or bad behaviour. I’m a good kid, full of propriety and reason, a straight-A student, an intellect, a future physicist, I have no doubt. And yet my claims are met with blank, dubious stares, my actions disqualified as hysterics, my own science teacher, Mr. Dunbar, whose respect I have achieved through my honest passion and lauded work-ethic, by my restraints for logic; he, even he thinks me a liar. Science. It all comes down to science. It must.

I have locked myself in the room my aunt has given me so that I could write this to you. The woman is exasperating! She has knocked and knocked and knocked. She has tried to fit a plate of food under my door. The crease was less than an inch tall, what was she thinking? Oh, but she believes that I am in the grips of a mental breakdown. She thinks that my so called “marbles” are loose. She worries dearly for my sanity. Well, I can assure you that I am completely sound of mind. I am a straight-A student, top of the class. And when I graduate high school I will ace my way through college, university; I will attain my Masters, my PhD; I will be Dr. Calvin Willoughby, quantum physicist. That is my angle, that is my goal, and I will reach it. Bullies, do your best. You are nothing but obstacles in my way. I understand that it is natural for a person that is lacking in something as important and fundamental as the ability for knowledge to, instead, facilitate their shrinking sense of purpose by displaying their brutish sense of power. I do not blame these bullies for the short sticks they have drawn in life, but I do feel pity for them. They are primal creatures, like dogs that bite. We must forgive them.

I will never have time for social indulgences such as team sports, or parties, or getting high in sheds, or attending dances with the pretty girls at school. Those things do not fit me well. Believe me when I say that a true genius is born every single day. Someone that can enlighten the world on a scale tipped to the weight of Darwin, Newton, Hawking. . . but universal circumstances prevent these would-be geniuses from ever achieving their potential. Most of these are born into countries where knowledge cannot be properly cultivated, and many more that are lucky enough to be born in the first world simply succumb to the adverse behaviours of humankind and smother their potential willingly. I will not allow that to happen to me. Pardon, I’m digressing in conceit.

Okay, I’ll tell you the problem. My parents went missing two days ago. I’m Calvin Willoughby, a fifteen year old whiz kid from Indiana who is currently irritated to his wit’s end by his seven year old cousin who will not stop banging on the bloody door — “What! Susan, what do you want?”

“Mommy wants you to let me in so that you could watch over me while she does her work out.”

I’m not falling for that one. Classic espionage move. She wants Susan in here so that she can know what I’m doing. Well, I have nothing to hide, I’ll show her this when it’s done. But I will not suffer through the tireless needs of Susan all day, not even for an hour, when what I need is to focus.

“Susan, for the love of God—not that there is one—leave me alone.”

“Calvin,” this was my aunt’s voice. “Calvin, honey, I know that you’re upset and worried about your parents. I am too. But please come out of the room. You’re scaring me.”

I should be writing what I mean to be writing, but instead I am forced to interrupt you all with this lousy transcript of my woeful dialogue with my extended family. Bear with me.

“Auntie Laura,” I said. “I do not mean to frighten you. I can assure you that I am collected and all-together. I need to focus right now. I am writing my account. You can read it when it’s done.”

“Is it about what you told the police officers? That your parents are under the floorboards?”

Oh. My. God. Not that there is one.

“They are not under the floorboards! Go away! Please!”

I heard a small whimper and then the withdrawal of their footsteps.

Right, so my parents and I live in an old, old house. It’s a Victorian, how cliché? My father was an extremely successful lottery winner twelve years ago, and my mother had coerced him into spending a small fortune on her dream home, a 19th century Victorian estate. Complete with creepy ghost story attached. My father hired an accountant to handle the rest of the money, and they never really had to work another day in their lives. But they did. And I’m glad they did, because children need role models growing up, and I would have turned out differently, more wasted potential, if my parents had decided to live the stagnant lifestyle of the lazy recluse. No, my father opened up a sports bar with his best friend, Uncle Ron, and it has become sort of a staple of the town. My mother was an editor for an online poetry magazine, and she would sift through hundreds of submissions per day. She writes her own as well, and although I don’t have much of a palate for the arts, her poems are fairly good. My parents were by no means geniuses, but they were respectable contributors to this rancid cesspool we call society, and their aptitude in their desired fields has always been an admirable trait. I needed parents like that. But my true lode star, my guiding light, the man with whom I would walk for days upon the celestial plains—not that such a place exists—to bicker and contemplate and theorize with, well that would be none other than Max Planck; the father of energy quanta. Again, I digress in conceit.

My parents and I lived in that house for twelve years. There was a ghost story attached to it. My parents kept this macabre tale from me for many years, so as not to place a scar on the imaginative and vulnerable mind of a child. When I came of age, my father and his business partner, who had also been his best friend, and who was also someone I called Uncle Ron, had taken me and Uncle Ron’s son, Logan, camping up in Leer Valley. Logan was one year older than me, but only half as intelligent, if that. I didn’t blame him for this unlucky stroke of nature, he was a nice enough kid, and we got along well enough. And so by the crackle and pop of the bonfire we took turns telling each other stories of ghosts, and urban legends, and close encounters of the vehicular kind. Yes, Logan decided that his scary story would be about the time that he had almost got struck by a vehicle because he had forgotten to look both ways before crossing an intersection, which, as off-brand as it was in context, I sort of admired because it was realistically the scariest story of the night. In any case, with the fire dancing between us, and my father’s bespectacled eyes ablaze in its volatile light, he touched his fingers together and recounted the tale of the squeaky floorboard.

After much introductory nonsense, he started the tale.

“According to Jim Talbot,” he began, “our acclaimed real estate agent, and a man whose word was not one to be dismissed easily, for he knew the history of our town better than the very men who had built it, the place we call our home was built well over a century ago. Ron, I know you’ve heard this before, so keep your opinions to yourself,” he added, playfully snarky. “Although our home is older than any man or woman walking the earth today, not very much of it has been renovated since it was built all those decades ago. It’s bones are the same. A long time ago there was a nice family living there. A young couple named, for the sake of this story, John and Diane. Their child, a toddler girl, was named Wendy. They lived quietly and kept to themselves. Wendy was not yet old enough for schooling, so her mother was the stay-at-home type, which was common for women back then, while John was the daily bread winner.

"One languid day, Wendy complained to her mother that the house was speaking to her, telling her mean things. Diane immediately dismissed this as her daughter’s wild imagination, and placated little Wendy’s woes with a peanut butter sandwich. Not long after, on a cold autumn night, while in their bedroom with the lights off and their heads laid down, John told Diane something that kept her up most of the night. He said that there was a squeaky floorboard behind the landing of the staircase on the main floor. He said that he went back there that evening to assess the condition of the dumbwaiter, which had not been in working order since they had purchased the place, and boys, let me tell you that to this day it remains unfixed, probably unfixable. Not that we would have any use for it anyhow. Anyway, John said to his wife that he had stepped on a squeaky floorboard behind the landing, but it didn’t exactly squeak. It groaned. He said that it sounded to him like he had accidentally stepped on a sleeping person, that the floorboard reacted negatively to his weight. He tested it again and it groaned once more. When he tested it a third time, it told him to stop.

“His wife questioned him. ‘How could a floorboard tell you to stop?’ she had said. She had turned on the bedside lamp at this point and was watching her husband with loving concern.”

I chimed in at this point. I said, “Hey, Dad, how do you know exactly what they were doing? Like, how would you know that she turned on the lamp at that point in the conversation, and that she was staring at him with loving concern? You can’t possibly know those things.”

“Calvin,” my father said with a patience he has mustered up infinite times before and since, when it came to my inquisitive and argumentative nature. “I tell it this way for effect. It adds to the story, whether it happened that exact way or not. Those details do not interfere with the story, therefore I can have fun with it. Now can I finish?”

I nodded and let it go. He was right.

“John told his wife, in a soft voice like a whisper,” my father eyeballed me when he said this and I shook my head in disbelief. “He said that when he stepped on the floorboard, it wouldn’t squeak, but speak!”

“The speaky floorboard!” Logan exclaimed, exuberant.

Uncle Ron patted him on the back with approval.

“His wife wanted to know what it had said,” my father went on, “and he told her plainly that it had wanted him to stop stepping on it. She wanted to know if it had said anything else, and he said that it did, but he would not speak about it, because it scared him so.

“The following day, Diane investigated the scene herself. Of course, she thought that her husband must have been mistaken or had some sort of hallucinatory experience, because she couldn’t bring herself to believe that a floorboard could talk. The idea was ludicrous. But when she tested the floorboards behind the landing, one of them did indeed groan. Curious and afraid, she spent the next several hours under the stairs speaking to the floor. It told her many cruel things, enticing things, marvellous things. The last thing it told her was that if she ever wanted to escape her pain that all she needed to do was put her ear to the ground and listen. ‘What pain?’ she’d asked. ‘I have no pain.’ She stepped on the floorboard for a response. ‘It will come,’ it said.

“Diane kept this knowledge to herself, but she pleaded with John to hire a contractor to put up a wall beside the landing, with a door that had a hasp so that it could be pad-locked. She confessed that she was terrified of Wendy falling down the dumbwaiter well. John had given her a look that said he knew the truth, but he acquiesced to her pleas. Though before plans could be put into action, it was already too late.

“A single week had gone by, and one afternoon, while John was at work, Diane had come down the stairs to find Wendy on the ground behind the landing. At first, she had thought Wendy was hurt, but when Diane came around the bend, Wendy’s wide, wonderous eyes moved to address her mother. She put a small finger to her lips and shushed her. Her ear was planted on the ground, and some ominous voice was whispering low.

“Before Diane could even begin to open her mouth in protest, Wendy started to get smaller. Jim Talbot described it like this: that her features didn’t distort, that it was not gruesome or shocking. She just got smaller and smaller until she became no more than a particle of dust, or nothing at all. All that remained of her were a pile of clothes.”

That part of the story got me interested. She couldn’t have simply vanished, because there would be physical consequences to that. So she shrunk, that’s a lot of matter misplaced. Would there have been a sound? A smell? Big questions, but I didn’t think my father would have known. I knew though. I knew that she couldn’t have just vanished.

“Diane screamed. It was all she could do. She asked the floorboard where her daughter had gone. She stepped on it over and over, but it kept silent. Not a squeak, not a groan.

“When John arrived home from work that evening, he found his wife behind the stairs wearing a mask of tears and mascara. She was jumping up and down and calling out for Wendy. John grabbed her in a bear hug and she cried into his shoulder and told him of the day’s events.

“In the following weeks, the house was searched thoroughly by professionals. The floorboards behind the landing were lifted as per John and Diane’s request, but nothing was found beneath them besides cobwebs and the filthy litter of crates and empty bottles that lined the stone walls of the unused crawlspace below. The floorboards were eventually replaced in the exact same order, Diane made sure of this, because she seemed to believe that her daughter’s soul resided in the squeaky floorboard, imprisoned like a djinn in a bottle.

“Diane’s story soon became the talk of the town, and many of the locals had their own ideas about her sanity. John became an outcast at work because he would not relent when the topic of discussion shifted to the mental wellness of his wife. He had defended her to the very end.

“One night, when John arrived home from a desultory shift, he found his wife behind the stairs again. A wall had never been put up, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Diane was lying prone, her eyes red with despair, an ominous whisper coming from nowhere and everywhere. She noticed her husband standing there and apologized to him. She said that she just wanted to escape her pain. To be with Wendy again. He called her name and reached for her, but she began to shrink before his eyes and this made him flinch away. Later, he held her empty blouse in clenched fists. There was nothing left of her that he could see.

“Heartbroken, lost, confused, John did not show up for work the next day. Or the next week. He studied the floorboard. He peered at it through a dingy microscope kit he’d purchased from a thrift shop in town. The lens did not focus properly, but he swore to his few remaining friends that through the blur he could see faces in the wood. Each knot was composed of a hundred faces. He swore that whoever had built the house had brought that floorboard with them, that cursed piece of wood, that parasite, but he did not know why. Perhaps the original owner had an enemy.

“John lived the rest of his life in that house, alone and without a friend, because despite the ridicule of the town, he never once renounced his story. He grew old in that house, and one day when the newspapers started to pile up on the porch, and the neighbours grew concerned, the house was searched, but there was no sign of John.” My father paused just long enough to raise a finger at us. “Except, that is, for a pile of clothing behind the landing.”

He bowed his head, indicating the end of the story and we all clapped and laughed and asked follow up questions, but I’ll be honest with you. That story scared me. I was still just a kid then, and I actually had to live in that house! I had not yet grown into the man of reason that is speaking to you today. Here’s another truth though. Now that I’m a teenager I’m still afraid, but I’ll hold that fear at an arm’s length until I get to the bottom of this.

On the drive home from Leer Valley, I asked my dad if he believed the story to be true. He shrugged and told me that Jim Talbot had a bit of a dark sense of humour, and that Jim thought he might scare my mother out of purchasing the house with such a tale. My father confessed that he had expressed to Jim that he wasn’t too keen on raising a kid in a gothic mansion, and that Jim might have only been trying to do him a solid. My mother was not so easily swayed. She thought that the story added rich and romantic context to the house.

“Is there a squeaky floorboard back there?” I asked him, almost too nervous to hear the answer.

“Oh yes,” he said. “It squeaks all right. But that’s all it does, Cal. It’s squeaky, not speaky.”

I guess I was relieved for the moment, but when I got home from that trip I immediately went back there and stepped on every floorboard by the dumbwaiter. One particular board, with many knots and twists, did in fact squeak. It looked deformed compared to the rest, like it was older and of a different kind of wood. It looked out of place. Perhaps that’s why it squeaks, I thought, and when I went to my room later and opened up my computer, I did a quick Google search. The story my dad had told us was out there. Just an urban legend, but John, who was actually called Paul Lancaster, was real, and his wife and daughter did disappear all those years ago, as well as himself. This made me break out in a cold sweat despite the assurance that the squeaky floorboard story had since been debunked as a hoax of sorts. It was now speculated that Paul had murdered his wife and child and hid their bodies beneath the packed earth of the crawlspace. That he used the story of the squeaky floorboard as a security blanket in case he were ever really charged for the murders. A plea bargain for insanity and a life in the nuthouse was often better than death row. But he was never charged and after a lifetime of guilt, it was said that he stripped from his clothes, piled them behind the stairs, and walked naked through the woods never to be seen again. The most popular theory was that he hurled himself into the Spring swell of the rushing Hardwick River which ran only five miles North of his house. My house.

Upon further reflection, it didn’t make sense. There were loopholes. Why would Mrs. Lancaster have made up the story of the squeaky floorboard? It wasn’t Paul’s story, he just supported it. It later became his story, but originally it was hers. Did they murder their daughter together? These were my thoughts back then. Now I know better.

Okay, okay, okay. Oh, God—not that there is one—Susan. Susan is knocking again and she’s calling my name. Bear with me.

“Susan, please! I’m very busy.”

“Calvin,” she says through the door, and she’s pouting, I could hear it in her voice. “Calvin, I miss Auntie Candace and Uncle Charlie. Will they ever come back?”

Fine. Fine, fine, fine. I’ll be back.

Okay, I’m back. I opened the door for her, she was weeping and her mouth was trembling. I told her that I was working on the case. That I was doing everything I could to get them back, because I knew where they went. She asked me where it was that I knew they went, and I told her the story. It amazed her and frightened her, but mostly just amazed her. I think I could use her. I think I could use Susan to get them back.

My parents went missing two days ago, or so they say. I was there, though, and I know what happened. They did not simply go missing. They all think that I’m suffering from post-traumatic delusions, they think I’m unwell in the head, like Mrs. Lancaster. I can assure you that I am completely sound of mind.

So here’s how it happened. Here’s the goo in the center of the muffin.

I got home from school at fifteen-hundred hours. My mail had arrived, it was sitting right there on the porch. You see, I make a pretty penny tutoring Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and I had saved enough money to buy myself an RTX 4090 for my gaming PC. I opened the front door and called out that I was home before charging for the stairs. It was quiet, no response, but I didn’t notice it at that moment, because my mind was focused on where I might have left my micro-tool kit, something I needed to install the GPU. When I reached the landing I stopped dead in my tracks. My father was on the floor back there, by the dumbwaiter.

“Dad?” I had said, growing a little uneasy. Flashes of his campfire story raced through my mind, and I began to sweat a little. I have sensitive sweat glands, and I break out pretty easily. I took a deep breath and went around to see what he was doing. I could hear a whispering, like two old carpets rubbing together. The sound hit my ears like a bad taste, I refused it, I regurgitated, I denied its access to my brain. Eventually, though, it battered through the mental blockade and I knew the sound for what it was. I stared at my father with stunned disbelief. I stared at my father with fear and worry. My father, a good man, a good role model. No genius, but adequate. He had his ear pressed to the ground and a few tears fell sideways off his face and I watched in slow motion as those drops hit the warped, squeaky floorboard, so full of knots and cracks and whispers. They didn’t splash and wet the ground, no. They were drank up hungrily and gone.

I could keep my silence no longer. I screamed for my mother at the top of my lungs. She had been sick with a bad flu for weeks, so the last thing I wanted to do was startle her into a panic, but I didn’t know what else to do. I was panicking myself.

My father smiled wanly at me, it was weak and sad. He shook his head and pointed to the floorboard. “I’m going to get her,” he said, his final words, and then he began to shrink. That’s when I noticed my mother’s pyjamas piled in the corner. In an instant my father was gone, his clothes just a bunch of rags on the floor, and that detestable whispering was gone just as quickly. Was there a sound? No. A smell? No. But my ears did pop like I was in a plane gaining altitude. There was a momentary pressure, and that was all.

I spent the rest of that evening formulating a plan, but nothing solid ever formed. I tried to make the floorboard speak to me, but it would only squeak. It had my parents and it didn’t care! I called it names. I felt especially silly when I called it a coward. I excised it from the floor and brought it to the kitchen. I placed it on the counter and fetched a flashlight. Back behind the stairs, and curious as all hell, I pointed the beam into the hole where the floorboard had been. It was a crawlspace below, just like in the story, with boxes and bottles and crates littering and lining the stone walls. The ground, packed soil, looked red in the light, like it was a dried composite of blood and earth. I went back to the kitchen and examined the floorboard. It did not make a sound. I wondered if I would be able to see faces in the knots if I watched it through a microscope. What was this made of? What material, what chemical compound, what element, what nuclides and isotopes? Perhaps it was radioactive?

The following day, after very little sleep, I went to school only to steal some equipment from the science lab. I would return it, of course, and it wasn’t particularly difficult to nick since I was head of the Science Club. The secretary at the front desk actually smiled at me when I left the building holding a microscope and lab dishes. I then reluctantly traded my RTX 4090 for a working Geiger counter that I found on an online marketplace. It was a scam, I could have purchased a less expensive radiation detector at the hardware store for forty bucks. But I had just spent all my savings on the GPU, so it was all the loot I had. I could have, of course, taken my father’s credit card from his wallet and used that, but it just felt wrong and unearned, like robbing a grave.

Back at the kitchen counter I tried the Geiger counter and came up short. So it wasn’t radioactive. I grieved for my RTX 4090 and set the Geiger counter on the counter beside the sink. Next, I put a coping saw to the edge of the floorboard, meaning to slice myself off a sliver to examine. Although before I could begin, the floorboard spoke to me. The sound was like a whisper coming out of a mouth that held the breath of December, cold and sticky.

“Please,” it said, and I froze in the chill of its voice. “If you do that you will hurt me. I do not hurt people so why would you hurt me?”

I stood up straight, some of the ice melting off my bones. “If you didn’t have my parents captive, I’d throw you in the coals of a large fire, so you’ll find no mercy from me.”

I resumed my sawing position.

“Please,” it repeated. “If you do this, you will hurt some of the people that reside here. Good people. People like your parents. People who just wanted an end to their suffering.”

“My parents were not suffering!” I yelled indignantly. “Probably not until you took something from them!”

“Your mother was not ill with a common flu, Calvin,” it said and there was poison in that voice, something manipulative and enticing, like how I would imagine a glass of whiskey might seem to a recovering alcoholic. “She was sick. Terminally. She knew it. Your father knew it. I only offered her a place away from that pain. She came here willingly.”

I decided that I wouldn’t feed into its lies. I ignored all protests and sawed a one inch sliver off of the floorboard. I would need some ear plugs next time I try anything like that. The screams were layered and terrible.

I placed the sliver in a lab dish and brought it over to the windowsill, where I had placed the microscope. Sunlight fell through the window in a clean ray of light. I placed the dish here, below the microscope and peered into the ocular lens. What I saw next was extremely disturbing. I saw dead faces, eyes shut in agony, mouths drawn down in painful frowns. I saw a little girl’s face, maybe the same little girl from the campfire story. I am a murderer.

That was when a knock came at the door. It was Mr. Dunbar, my high school science teacher.

“Hello, Calvin,” he said.

“Hello, Mr. Dunbar,” I said and feigned a cough.

“We missed you in school today.”

“Yeah, I—” I coughed again, “—I’m not feeling so well. My mother is sick with the flu, and I think I might have caught it.”

“Calvin, you know that it’s uncommon for a teacher to make a house-call. I’m not here because of your absence from school today, which I think we both know isn’t true. Mrs. Farr mentioned that she saw you absconding with certain equipment from the science lab this morning.”

“I was going to return it tomorrow, Mr. Dunbar, I swear!”

“Are your parents home? I’d like to speak with them.”

“Like I said, my mother is sick, she’s resting, and my father is at work.”

“Calvin, what’s going on? Stealing lab equipment? This is unlike you.”

I changed my method. I figured that maybe, as a man of science, he would be interested in my findings.

“Mr. Dunbar, hear me out,” I said, maybe a little too zealously. “I’ve experienced something that contradicts every piece of science you’ve ever taught me. It is science, it has to be, because everything can be explained through science, can it not? But this particular item I speak of is seemingly supernatural. Listen to me carefully. My parents aren’t home, my father isn’t at work. They’ve disappeared before my very own eyes!”

He eyed me with wary incredulity. He was calculating each word with precise concern, but he respectfully let me finish.

I continued. “There’s a floorboard in my home that squeaks when you step on it. It’s warped and out of place, and my father told me a ghost story about it when I was younger, about how it spoke to the old residents of the house and captured their souls promising them an existence without pain. That story really shook me as a kid, but upon my subsequent investigations, it has only squeaked, never spoke. Yesterday, I found my father on the floor, the floorboard whispering to him, I heard it, it was oppressive to my ears, I hated it. My mother’s pyjamas were piled in the corner and my father said that he was going to get her, and then he just shrunk! Poof! Gone! So I took the microscope because I knew nobody would believe me, and I needed to see what this floorboard was made of, I needed to—”

Mr. Dunbar held up a hand and finally interrupted. “Calvin, enough. I’ve heard many excuses in my years as a teacher, and I’ll give credit to your imagination, but it’s not getting past me.”

“Mr Dunbar, you don’t understand.”

“Calvin, I want you to go inside and bring me the stolen equipment. I’ll speak with Principal Ackerman tomorrow, but there will be consequences for this. You may get off with a warning, because your student behaviour has been pristine, but this is a serious thing you did today. You may be suspended.”

“My parents are gone, Mr. Dunbar. Come in and see for yourself. And once you see the truth you can take the equipment back.”

Mr. Dunbar apprehensively followed me inside and I led him behind the stairs, near the dumbwaiter and the hole that I had made. He acknowledged the piles of clothes and called out for my parents. When they didn’t respond he looked out the window where both of their cars were parked neatly in the driveway.

“Calvin, if your parents are missing we need to inform the police. This isn’t the time to play games.”

“Mr. Dunbar, I want you to look through the lens of the microscope for me and tell me what you see.”

I led him toward the kitchen window where the sunlight was now slanted at a sharper angle. The microscope sat in that light like an artifact on display in a museum. He gave me a final look and I nodded to him. He bent over the microscope.

I waited with breath held. When he lifted his head he gave me a level look.

“I see a splinter of wood. Ordinary wood, maybe oak, I’m not sure. What does this prove?”

“What?” I nudged past him and looked for myself. He was right. The dead faces were gone. It was just a splinter, nothing else. “Impossible.”

When I looked up, Mr. Dunbar was already on the phone.

“Hello, I’d like to make a missing persons report,” he said. He waited. “Yes, it is the parents of a student of mine. His name is Calvin Willoughby, his parents are Charlie and Candace Willoughby.” There was a pause. “Yes, Charlie Willoughby, proprietor of Willoughby’s Sports Bar. We are at 188 Hamlet Drive. I’ll keep him company until you arrive, he seems to be in slight distress.” He waited. “Thank you, see you shortly.”

He put his phone away and took a seat at a stool by the counter, right in front of where the squeaky floorboard rested. He seemed to be gauging my behaviour with the experience of a veteran. After all, had he not gone through his own form of loss all those years ago?

“Calvin, you’re going to have to tell the police the truth. None of the nonsense you’ve been feeding me. Stress and anxiety can cause a lot of mental strain, and what you’re experiencing is completely normal, but you have to snap out of it. I’d like to know when you last saw your parents.”

I matched his level stare, determined to sound as compiled as, well, as my parents’ clothes behind the stairs. “Yesterday,” I said. “I saw my parents yesterday. I came home from school and there was my father, ear pressed to the floor, listening to the cursed words of the floorboard. My mother I saw yesterday morning before I left for school. She was very sick and barely conscious. That is the truth, Mr. Dunbar.”

His face grew compassionate and he nodded. He stood up and gathered the lab equipment. He emptied the loose splinter of wood into the garbage bin beneath the sink, and I lamented for such an ill fitted grave amongst the rotten bits of food and grease. He rinsed the dish.

Nothing much happened until the police arrived. I wanted so badly to convince him, I wanted the floorboard to come to life and speak to us, I wanted his perspective on the matter. He was truly a brilliant man, with knowledge that far exceeded his occupation. He used to be a professor at Stanford. He has written papers that have been deemed critical by contemporaries in the field of chemical cosmology. He regretfully stepped down after his son committed suicide. His son had been a victim of bullying in school, those primal dogs, and so Mr. Dunbar decided that he could make the most significant impact if he shaped the minds of emotionally volatile adolescents instead of the surefooted minds of young adults. He became a sort of guardian of the nerds. His opinion of me mattered greatly, and I hated the way he looked at me in my kitchen with those sad misunderstanding eyes. He thought me a thief and a liar. He thought me confused and upset. And he forgave me for it through his deep-seeded empathy. And I, in turn, forgave him for his misunderstanding. It wasn’t his fault, or mine. It was the floorboard. That was the true menace.

When the police arrived shortly after, I gave them the same story. They gave me the same look that Mr. Dunbar gave me. I felt what Paul Lancaster must have felt all those years ago. I showed the police the floorboard and they inspected it with no real interest. They had asked me if I had any close family they could contact, and I gave them Aunt Laura’s number. Arrangements were made for me to stay with her and Susan until the case of my parents was resolved and she picked me up immediately. In the passenger seat of her car, after a lengthy conversation between Mr. Dunbar, Aunt Laura, and the police, I watched Mr. Dunbar pack the lab equipment into the trunk of his vehicle and drive off. The police remained at my house even as we drove away.

That was yesterday evening. I have locked myself away in this room since then, trying to collect my thoughts, trying to solve the puzzle. I’ll show this to my aunt, I will, I swear to God—not that there is one—I will. Susan is sad, she’s suffering. She’s a scared little girl with rollercoaster emotions. She misses her aunt and uncle. I’ll have to bring her with me to the house. I think it will speak to her, and when it does I’ll make sure that I’m recording it all on my phone. I’ll capture a video of Susan shrinking into the thing and then I’ll show it to Mr. Dunbar and he’d have to help me. I’ll show it to Aunt Laura, and say I told-ya-so, and then I’ll show her this document and she’ll understand that we need to work together with science to get them back. I can’t do it alone, I don’t have the means to. Susan, the poor girl, will sadly become a necessary sacrifice, an unsung hero, but when we get them back I will make sure that she understands the worth of her actions, and she will live the rest of her life proudly for it.

“Susan!”

She’s coming up the stairs now. She’s at the door. She’s entering the room which I had unlocked. She’s standing next to me watching me type.

“Susan, it’s time to go.”

“Where are we going?”

“We’re going to find Auntie Candace and Uncle Charlie. You want to see them again don’t you?”

“Yaaa.”

“Great. You’ll be the first to see them. I promise. But we have to be quiet. Your mom can’t know where we’re going or she’ll try to stop us, okay?”

“I don’t know. . .”

“Do you believe me? You’re the only one who has believed me so far, and I’m counting on you to hold onto that faith. I would never lie to you,” I lied.

“Okay. . .”

We’re off. Vigilantes on a quest. Susan is going down the rabbit hole, and I’m going to make sure that everyone sees her crawl in. After that, the rescue mission.