“The Attic of Empty Fears”
By E. H. Amos

The house I was renting was small, almost unfurnished, but affordable. The faceless online form that I made my monthly payments to only bothered me when I had a few days before rent was due, so I didn’t have to pretend to be friends with my landlord. It had a front porch with wooden railings, the steps leading down to the sidewalk flanked by two pillars, all of it painted white years ago with paint that didn’t last. I liked it, though. It was home. And it was surrounded by police cars and an ambulance.

“Mr. McLeod?” The woman pronounced my last name mac-lee-ode.

“It’s mick-loud,” I said. “Callum McLeod, just use my first name.”

“Mr. Callum-”

“No ‘mister,’ please.”

“Alright.” The stranger took a second to recompose herself. “Callum, can I have a moment of your time?”

The words “you just did” floated at the front of my mind, but never made it past my lips. Instead, I said nothing and only nodded my head.

“My name is Sheridan, I work with the Gaffney Palantir. Have you heard of us?”

“Paranormal journalist?” I asked.

“I prefer investigative journalist, but sure.”

I turned to look at her but it was late at night and the strobing lights from the police cruisers were my only source of light. I stared at her through the red and blue metronomic flashes, the colors making her look almost like two different people. In the blue glow I could see the worry and sadness in her eyes and an apologetic smile at the corner of her mouth. It was the face of someone who was excited by a story but shared sympathetic regret that I was the one who it happened to. The red glow that lapped against her pushed away the blue like a tide rising over the sand. There was a ferocity in her stare, just underneath the sympathy, and her lips had pressed together in a tight line. She had a face of restraint, of trying to mask a savage determination.

“And they just let you over here?” I asked, giving a lethargic wave towards the EMTs and police officers gathered around the front porch of my yard.

“Did Liam Dunn kill himself?” she asked.

I let a short moment pass before I sighed, closed my eyes, and bobbed my head once.

“No,” she said. “I mean, did he kill himself… or did something make him?”

My thoughts in the darkness of concentration swung in a nauseating pendulum to the tune of the police cruiser’s lights as they penetrated the lids of my closed eyes. Red, blue; kindness, ferocity; left, right; answers, truth. My lips parted, and nothing came out but a vaporous cloud of hot breath.

“Just tell me what happened,” she said. Her voice softened from investigator to protector. “I don’t need to know how sane you are or aren’t, I don’t even need your opinion, I just need to know the facts. Don’t explain anything unexplainable, just… talk. Out loud. Not even to me if it's easier that way. Just tell me what you saw, and you alone.”

I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. Here we go. “There’s… there’s a scuttle to the attic that can’t be passed. Just… because. I mean, I took a ladder to it one day, but climbing inside is like trying to surface from a winter lake through thick sheets of ice. You just get this unexplainable… feeling. You get scared, but not just regular scared.” My thoughts hitched as I thought about the first time - the only time - I tried to go in. “Does that make sense?”

“Scared how?” Sheridan asked.

I thought about that hallway where so little had happened. And then so much had happened. The beige walls probably had drying blood on them. The cream-colored carpet was probably ruined, but it was nylon so it wouldn’t be too expensive to clean or replace. The attic, though… it would always be there. And I would always remember how it felt to try going up.

“No, never mind,” I said. “That’s not a good word. It isn’t just being scared, it’s…”

In my memory I step on the stepladder’s first rung, one of six, and a wave of chills flows through me. “Fear.”

I’m on the second rung and my stomach twists into a painful knot. “Nausea.”

Third, and I can’t breathe anymore. “The air gets thinner.”

Fourth rung, my arm is always stretching further for the hatch but never reaching it. “Distance stops making sense.”

Fifth, I finally make contact with the drywall panel and ice flows from my fingertips down through the veins in my arm, speeding towards my heart. “You feel yourself dying.”

Sixth rung, the last one on the little stepladder. I push. “It pushes back.” That was as close as I got. I  remember swallowing, but the lining of my throat is too dry and it feels like I’m trying to swallow sand. I take an involuntary step down the ladder, and never go back again. “It’s terror. Pure terror.”

“Of what? Is something inside?”

“Hell if I know,” I said. “I can’t get in. No one can. Or, I guess, maybe… maybe no one can get out. Maybe it keeps something in.” It sounded ominous in my head, but when I said the words out loud I just felt stupid, hysterical. “It doesn’t really matter. The bottom line is that we can never know what's in there because no one can… ‘pass the threshold,’ I guess.” An image flashed through my mind, a picture of Liam, of how he looked the last time I saw him alive. I started to get nauseous. “Except Liam. But it’s not like you can ask him what was in there.”

“How do you know no one can get in?” Sheridan asked. “How many people tried?”

I looked up at the reporter again, but she wasn’t looking at me anymore. Her face was pointed down, transfixed on a pad of paper as she scribbled notes in some undecipherable shorthand. She glanced up once, but not at me. She was keeping an eye on the officers, the ones who probably don’t want her here.

“Not sure about the exact number,” I said. “Probably around forty? I, uhm… I charged people to try.”

The scribble of pencil against paper paused. She bobbed her head to the side and back in a quick motion, as if she had dislodged a thought from it. “Gotta make ends meet,” she said. “Did you advertise?”

“No. I threw an evening party and when everyone was drunk, or at least getting there, I made an announcement. ‘Everyone who wants to get into the attic gives me twenty to try. If you get in, I give you one hundred, if you don’t then I keep the twenty.’

“The first guy, Adrian, was a professional weight lifter. He was ripped, so much that he almost looked fake, you know? Like those people on the front of weight loss ads. He thought the attic was just blocked by something heavy. I set the ladder up, and he couldn’t do it. The others asked him why. Adrian is a good man - proud, but not arrogant - he admitted that he was too scared. That drew some interest. Then… Well, I made almost twelve-hundred dollars that night, most of it from people who needed to try more than once.”

“Is Mr. Dunn one of the people you charged to try?” Sheridan asked. “One of the people who went more than once?”

“Liam was my best customer,” I said. Using that word, customer, I almost gagged. I felt disgusting, deranged, as if I had killed him with my own two hands. I could have tried harder to stop him, but instead I just took his money.

“How many times did he try that night?”

“None,” I said. “He wasn’t there; couldn’t make it. He’s a huge skeptic, so when Adrian ended up telling him the story, Liam came to my house the next weekend asking if he could try. He paid, couldn’t make it, and asked me to wait until he got back. He left and came back with a stack of twenties and a duffel bag of gadgets.”

“Gadgets?” Sheridan asked.

“I don’t know, electronics. Stuff I didn’t recognize and some camera equipment.”

“And the camera?”

“I told him he couldn’t use it.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t want crowds of people here asking to investigate it.”

Sheridan looked up at me for a moment, then over her shoulder at the crime scene behind her. “Shit luck,” she said.

I almost laughed. I wanted to, but somehow it felt like spitting on Liam. It didn’t feel right - laughing at something, anything, while his lifeless body hadn’t even turned cold. Instead, I made a noncommittal grunt.

“How many tries before Mr. Dunn made it in?”

I shook my head. “No idea. He must have tried a hundred times since last December.”

Sheridan looked up from her notes. “That’s two months ago.”

“I know,” I said. “He was here every day. As soon as I got out of class, as soon as I was off work, as soon as I got back from studying, he was always there on my porch, flapping an envelope at me. I told him to stop, I got scared someone was gonna think I was a drug dealer or something, but he never did. He was always there. Like… like some stray animal I fed one too many times.”

Sheridan nodded, as if she understood his motivation. “Did he ever explain why he needed to know so badly?”

“He tried,” I said. “But I didn’t care. It was an attic, one I couldn’t get inside of, and if I asked too many questions or got too involved it would get in the way of my school and my job.”

“So you just… didn’t care?” Sheridan asked. It was the first time during the conversation that skepticism slipped its way into her voice. “You weren’t at all bothered by this supernatural thing in your house that used raw terror to keep everyone out?”

“Rent is high, I graduate next year, I gotta put food on my table,” I waved around at nothing. “And, stuff, you know? Other stuff. I don’t have the time to be curious, I’m too busy trying to keep my head above water.”

Sheridan worked her jaw like she was chewing the inside of her cheek. After a few seconds she asked, “What kind of things did Mr. Dunn say when he tried to talk to you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He would just kind of… think out loud.” I could remember that wild gleam in his eyes that hadn’t quite turned to lunacy yet. I remember Liam stumbling over his own words as he tried to get me to speculate with him, to think his thoughts. “He asked who built the place, who was renting it to me, who lived there before me, stuff I told him he could look up online. Then he started asking me what I thought would happen if someone demolished the house, what measures I had taken to get into the attic, stuff I didn’t care to try and things I knew would eat away at my sleep and my sanity if I let them into my head.”

“Sounds like a heavy thinker,” Sheridan said, and I could hear the admiration for him in her voice. Admiration… for the thing that got him killed. It fouled the air around me like the smell of rot in a damp room. “What kind of stuff did he try?” she asked.

“He said he tried pushing the hatch open with a long pole - he wanted to put a camera on a selfie stick and put it up there. He brought a drone over once and had it circle the roof of the house trying to get a look inside, but the only window into the attic is painted black. I woke up one night to him throwing rocks at the window, trying to break it open.”

“Did he?”

“Did he what?” I asked. “Break the window? Hell no – I wouldn’t let him. He cracked it before I stopped him, though. There’s a draft now.”

“Did the trick with the pole work?” Sheridan asked.

“I didn’t let him try that either,” I said.

“Why?”

“I was scared it would work.”

“What did you think he would find?”

“I was scared he would manage to move the panel, wouldn’t find anything, then no one would ever be able to close the damn thing back. But he did it anyway, eventually.”

I glanced over Sheridan’s shoulder and saw a police officer heading our way. I couldn’t tell if he noticed the journalist or not, but he was coming to talk to me at least. His steps were slow, methodical, heavy. His gait was offset by the apathetic atmosphere. There’s no need to hurry, it seemed to say, the only person in danger here is already dead so just take it easy, big guy. A noise came from the porch, metal contours unfolding and plastic wheels rattling over wood panel flooring. The police officer turned to see what it was. A gurney came out of the front door, burdened by a white sheet tucked into a Liam shape. One of the EMTs appeared behind it and flagged down the officer for help getting the gurney down the stairs. The officer turned and started walking away from us.

I looked back at Sheridan, her eyes were also on the retreating officer and her stance had changed. She looked like a cat, muscles tense and posture primed to flee at the first sign of danger. She looked back at me and asked, “Did all of his research interfere with his job?”

I got closer to a laugh this time, a short exhalation from my nose. “Yeah, he lost it.”

“He was fired?” Sheridan asked.

“Yup. Got laid off, his girlfriend broke up with him, he got evicted, and drained his savings trying to get into the attic.” Sheridan didn’t saything. She had responded to everything with a professional quickness, making use of every spare second she had before some official ushered her away from the scene, away from me, away from her story… but the silence in her stare said the one thing she wouldn’t. And you just took it all? I sighed. “I felt awful about it,” I said. “Not that it makes it any better. But I did stop him, eventually. Just… I couldn’t keep letting him do it to himself, but I needed the money, too. So I tried to get most of it back to him and told him he couldn’t come around anymore.”

“You ‘tried?’” Sheridan asked.

“He wouldn’t take his own money back.” I said.

“You tried to give back ‘most’ of it?”

“Fuck you.”

“How did he react to being told he couldn’t come back?”

“How do you think?” I waved at the web of yellow tape wrapped around the columns of my porch. “He came back.”

“What did you do?”

“I told him I was gonna file a restraining order.”

“I imagine he didn’t take that very well.”

I shook my head. “You have no idea.”

“Give me one.” She said, and something in her voice made me want to. Maybe it was some latent power that journalists have, or maybe I was still trying to process my new traumas, but whatever it was it worked.

Memories of yesterday had been on repeat in my head for the last several hours, but I still had trouble focusing on them. They were quiet memories compared to his screams. I let them roll once again through my mind and tried to describe what I saw.

“Liam came to my house yesterday,” I said. “He told me he was back to take me up on the offer, to try one more time, then take his money, and then to move on with his life. I told him I thought he was doing the right thing and I let him into my house. I shut the door, he locked it. Then he pulled a gun on me.” Sheridan whispered a low curse under her breath, but I didn’t hear which one. It didn’t matter. I kept going.

“Liam took me to the bathroom and handcuffed me to my own toilet.” I said. I rubbed my bruised wrists while I spoke. “He went into the hallway and was quiet for hours. If I had to guess, he was staring at the attic, trying to go in, paralyzed in its presence like every other time before. Then he left my house. Heard the front door open and shut. I called out for help, screamed, but no one heard me… or no one cared. Liam showed back up an hour later with a duffel bag, just like that first day. He must have loaded the thing down because he was practically dragging it through the house. It looked too heavy to pick up and I could see some pieces of lumber sticking out one end where he couldn’t get the bag’s zipper to shut all the way. He took the whole bundle into the hall, I heard it unzip, and then he started building.”

“Building?” Sheridan asked.

“Yeah, building.” I said. “I heard a hammer, power tools, other things. I couldn’t tell you what, I was too busy contemplating all the life decisions that led to me dying with my face in the back of my toilet.”

“How long did he leave you there?”

“Long enough,” I said. “I got a good look at that toilet. It was dirty, splattered with urine stains, a few pubic hairs clinging to the porcelain. I thought about all of the times I was gonna clean the toilet and never did, of all the lame excuses I made to blow it off for another day, of how I had no idea I’d die with my face just inches away from it. Before Liam came back into the bathroom and uncuffed me, I had gone through every memory I spent on that toilet. It was surreal, watching my life since I moved here flashing before my eyes, but only in the context of the bathroom and the toilet I was stuck to.

“I had a housewarming party, one my friends threw for me when I first moved, they brought a ton of drinks. I spent the next morning huddled at the foot of that toilet so I could puke into it every ten minutes. I had the flu one time, sat on it and didn’t have the strength to get up again. I watched Netflix on my phone, waiting to feel better but never getting there, just burning through a half season of some show until my legs went numb. And I can’t even remember what show it was anymore. I dated a girl for a while, once - it didn’t work out - I remember forgetting my phone, though, when I went to use the bathroom and just looking around the room to kill the time until I was done. I found a pregnancy test in the bathroom trash can. I can hardly remember a time I ever felt so scared, and that includes Liam pointing a gun in my face.

“I guess none of that matters, though. He came back, eventually. He told me I was going to help him get inside the attic, and then he would leave me alone forever. He had gotten the hatch open with a long pole, and stuck his camera up in the space. He showed me the pictures, but there was nothing in them. It was an empty attic like any other - just a dark crawlspace lined with old fiberglass insulation. There wasn’t so much as an empty box up there. He shouted at me, commanded me to look harder, begged me in tears to be honest with him and tell him what I saw, but he just wouldn’t believe me when I said it was empty. He went through the full spectrum of human emotion right there in front of me, just having a complete emotional and mental breakdown while he dangled a loaded gun next to my head. I think he forgot he was even holding it.”

I paused. Sheridan had been silent, taking notes and paying attention. She knew I was gathering myself together for the next part, psyching myself up for it, but she also started to look aggravated or nervous. Or both. She was on limited time and needed the end of this story for her article. I was eager to skip as much of this part as I could. “How much do you know about what happened next?” I asked.

“I overheard it was a suicide,” Sheridan said. “Another person said it was involuntary.”

I nodded. “Yeah, that’s about right. He went on the roof while I was locked in the bathroom, drilled a little hole and fed a rope through it. He, uh… I guess set up some kind of pulley system or something like that? He had a harness on - like a climber’s harness, you know the type - and he had built a crude crank out of the lumber he brought. He had everything connected, kept me at gunpoint, and told me to hoist him into the attic or he would shoot me. So I grabbed the crank.”

“Did he say what he saw?” Sheridan asked.

“He didn’t get all the way in,” I said. “Not that first time, anyway. He started screaming and thrashing and told me to stop so I cranked backwards to lower him. As soon as his feet touched the carpet he yelled at me, demanding to know why I quit pulling him up. I told him that he said to stop, and he tells me, this guy tells me, ‘we’re gonna try again and no matter what happens do not stop pulling me up.’ He looked me right in the eyes, right in the eyes and said, ‘If you drop me again, no matter how much I beg you to, I will shoot you.’ I could see the insanity in his eyes, so I cranked. He started screaming again, begging me to drop him. I didn’t. When he realized I really wasn’t going to stop he tried to shoot me. He missed, but he shot at me. I should have done something, anything, but I was scared shitless. I just stopped cranking and dropped to the floor. I curled up into a ball, hands over my head, and waited to die.”

“That’s when someone called the police?” Sheridan asked.

“I guess so,” I said. “The gun was so loud, louder than the movies, you know? I swear everyone in the neighborhood could have, or should have, heard it go off. But I don’t really know, I guess. My ears were ringing, my heart pounding, and I could smell something in the air, like the gunpowder or something. I couldn’t think straight because a madman was going to kill me in my own home. But guns are loud, yeah, so I guess someone heard it go off and called nine-one-one. Liam calmed down after a moment and talked to me like I was a dog he had just slapped. He was trying to be kind, gentle, to coax me back up off the floor like he didn’t just try to kill me. He even tossed his gun down the hall, pleading with me to look how he was putting his trust in me for this one thing, this one last thing. I just… did what he told me to do.”

My face burned red with shame, I felt heat behind my eyes and the quiver in my throat that threatened to turn into heavy sobs.

“Did he tell you what he saw?” Sheridan asked.

“He didn’t have time.” I said. The memory was bright, painfully clear as it unfolded before me. “I wish I had done something different, but I was terrified. So instead of running for the gun or the door I just cranked. I cranked as fast as I could, trying to get him in before he started his thrashing again. I cranked hard and fast until his head made it past the threshold. As soon as it did, he…”

I couldn’t.

I couldn’t go on.

I couldn’t say it.

I did the best I could. “He killed himself,” I said. “End of story.”

“How?” Sheridan asked. “How did he kill himself? He didn’t have the gun anymore, he was strung up in a harness.”

I looked at Sheridan. I tried to meet her eyes, to see what inside there would so casually ask me to describe something like that. Was this story good enough for her? Would it make her famous, rich, give her the satisfaction she craved? Would it be enough to prove herself past whatever doubts she might hold about her journalistic abilities? Would it get her away from whatever she was running from or bring her to whatever she was chasing down? Would it be everything she ever wanted?

Would Sheridan finally be happy when I describe Liam’s cries of pain and wails of terror gurgling in his throat? The sound of him spitting out his own tongue after chewing it off? The desperate gulps and wretches as he inhaled his own blood to drown himself? The indescribable sounds of his fingernails digging his own eyes out of his head?

Would that be enough for her? Did she want to hear all about the blood pouring from Liam’s blue face? The red, the blue, the red, blue-

“Officer!” I called out. One of them turned and began to jog my direction.

“Shit,” Sheridan hissed. “Thanks, asshole. Call me when you realize no one else will believe any of this.”

Something brushed the palm of my hand. I looked down at a slip of red paper with an email address, then a slip of blue paper with a phone number. “No thanks,” I said as I stretched out my hand to give it back. But I was too late, I was handing the paper to a patch of red and blue darkness. Sheridan was gone. As the officer reached me, hand on the butt of his gun, looking around for threats, I folded the paper in half and slid it into my pocket.

The End