Mothmeal

I dictate this statement six months after Grange Close, because paper feels too eager to keep what is written upon it. My recorder sits on the kitchen table in my new apartment. I have turned it toward the wall. Prudence is not cowardice; it is merely experience with better tailoring.

Grange Close presents itself as a Pennsylvania cul-de-sac for people who alphabetize their spices and wave at delivery vans. Every house is cream or pale blue. Every lawn is cropped close enough to make a man suspect coercion. At Number Eight, Maribel Crane, forty-nine, has vanished beneath her own staircase. Her shoes remain on the porch: sensible brown pumps, heels aligned toward the door.

Sheriff Percy Voss meets me there. He is forty-two, square-built, courteous, and dressed in the practical uniform of a man who has learned that a badge does not prevent absurdity.

“You are Beryl Noll,” he says.

“I am, regrettably, all of her.”

He does not laugh, though his mouth considers it. “Mrs. Crane’s husband reports knocking beneath the stairs. Something answered.”

“Something verbal?”

“Something hungry.”

Inside, the house smells of lemon polish and new paint. Percy removes his shoes at the foot of the staircase. I do likewise. His socks are dark blue; mine have tiny gold keys on them, a professional choice I immediately regret.

“There is a rule,” I say.

“There are several.”

Beneath the stairs, a white-painted door has been sealed with six brass screws. Percy removes them from his pocket as though this were ordinary equipment, beside cuffs and ammunition. Beyond lies a narrow chamber, its floor split by hairline cracks packed with gray meal. Not flour. Not ash. It has the soft, dry look of ground paper left too long in a locked drawer.

A map covers the far wall. It depicts every staircase on Grange Close: eleven homes, eleven flights, each drawn in black ink. Lines run beneath them, joining landings that cannot touch. Number Eight descends through Number Three, rises into Number Eleven, then curls beneath the street in a spiral that has no bottom.

“Who made this?” I ask.

“The homeowners’ association,” Percy says.

“Of course. Evil always finds a committee.”

He watches the map rather than me. “They call the meal maintenance. Every month, somebody feeds the cracks. It has been going on since before my father bought his house here.”

“And you permitted it?”

“I left before they could make me take part.” His jaw sets. “I was nineteen. They brought me down to the old chamber and told me I would inherit a stair. I ran.”

The gray meal shifts in a crack. Not much. Enough.

Percy steps nearer. “Mrs. Crane was not taken by a person. The stairs are rebuilding themselves inside occupied houses. If they finish, Grange Close will not be a neighborhood anymore.”

On the map, a fresh black line begins drawing itself beneath my bare feet.

I follow it to Number One, the oldest house on Grange Close, unless Althea’s brochure lies about masonry as readily as it lies about annual dues. By dusk, every resident stands upon a trimmed lawn with a silver bowl in hand. Althea proceeds among them in lilac wool, portioning mothmeal with the solemn thrift of a woman serving cake at a funeral.

“Final feeding,” Percy says. “They will fill every stair crack at seven.”

“Then we have the period customarily allotted to bad decisions.”

Althea’s front door is unlocked. We remove our shoes on the porch, setting them among a tidy parade of loafers, pumps, and orthopedic sandals. In the locked utility room, Percy brings out a ring of keys. The fourth one yields. Inside, the foundation wall bears a map painted in black, larger than the one at Number Eight. Eleven staircases run into one another, then descend into a central coil. Two new marks wait at its rim, shaped exactly like bare feet.

“It knows we came,” I say.

“It knows everyone who comes,” he says.

Percy shuts the door and turns the bolt. I face him.

“Do you want me?”

“Yes.”

“Not because a house is trying to eat us.”

“No.” His hand rests at my waist. “Because I want you.”

“Either of us says stop, and it stops.”

“Agreed.”

His mouth closes over mine. I unbutton his shirt, and he lifts my skirt with an efficiency that makes me laugh once, then not at all. His hand slips beneath my underwear; I am wet already, impatient enough to resent my own biology. He produces a condom from his wallet, which is either splendid foresight or standard police equipment. I tear the packet; he rolls it on.

He sets me against the concrete wall, raises one thigh, and guides himself to me. He waits at my entrance.

“Still yes?”

“Yes. More than yes.”

He enters slowly, filling me, then moves with deliberate force. I clutch his shoulders and meet each thrust. Pleasure tightens low in me until I come against him with my teeth at his collar. He follows, calling my name into my hair. When we separate, we are damp, unsteady only in the ordinary physical sense, and entirely awake.

I set my bare foot over one black mark. Percy places his beside mine on the other. Our soles leave damp prints on the ink.

“It wants payment,” I say. “Let it learn the difference between an offering and a choice.”

The central coil opens. Behind the water heater, a staircase makes itself from black boards and descends farther than any house has business descending.

The utility-room door bangs. Althea calls, “Sheriff Voss, do not be childish.”

Percy presses a road flare into my hand. “The ledger is below.”

“And you?”

“I keep the committee occupied.”

The stair delivers me to a shaft vast enough to contain every basement in Pennsylvania. At its base, upon a brass stand, rests a leather ledger dusted gray. Names fill its pages: households, staircases, portions, dates. I strike the flare against the rail and lay its red fire across the book.

Above, Percy bars the residents from the descent. Althea reaches for him. He does not move.

“I learned it from the adults here,” he tells her.

The ledger burns. Names curl black. The staircase shudders and begins to fold.

I run upward. Behind me, boards snap shut one beneath another. I burst from Number One into dusk as the cul-de-sac turns inward: porches meet roofs, roofs meet foundations, each house folding around its private stair. Percy remains visible for one final instant at the utility-room door, one arm barring Althea and her bowls.

Then Number One closes like a book that dislikes its reader.

No body comes out. The county calls him missing. The county calls most things by names that allow sleep.

Six months later, I complete this statement in a rented apartment three counties away. The recorder’s red light dies. Yet the landlord reports a pipe failure beneath the ground-floor stair, and I go because I have not cured myself of answers.

At the landing, I remove my shoes.

Beneath the lowest step lies a neat crescent of gray meal. A black line appears in it, drawing itself toward my bare feet.