When everyone had departed for the night, his parents cleared up, sighing and agitated with nervous fatigue that made them a little curt with each other. Lucas found himself in the kitchen with his mother, but she simply gave him a feeble smile and continued cleaning up. His father entered a moment later, greeted Lucas in passing, and helped his mother. The door to the little room was closed.

“Did you enjoy dinner?” his father asked him.

Lucas nodded. He wondered if he could ask them about the little room without giving them any reason to think he’d looked inside, and perhaps to impose on them the idea that he had not done what he had done. Why would he ask if he had already seen? So, the question would be kind of a lie. But then, hadn’t they lied to him about that door being stuck?

Lucas didn’t find himself asking them anything and went up to bed when his father told him to, as usual. Everything had been as usual, with the one exception of his discovery of that room whose emptiness would not leave him alone. Lying in bed that night, he imagined the table standing downstairs, confined to that room like an animal in a cage. Now the table was beginning to walk on its stiff wooden legs. He could hear the wooden feet rap against the ground like tiny hooves. It strained upward toward the dim glow of the clouded skylight, and began to call out in a high, rasping voice, the noise that a table makes when it is dragged across bare floorboards. Left alone at night, it was calling, its voice ringing in the confines of the small room, panting, and bumping against the door. Sometimes it was as if he were in the room too, and other times he saw himself, the bed, and down through the transparent house to the darkened room, the table shining in its outlines but eclipsed by the darkness, moving unnaturally.

There was a squeal of wood downstairs. This persistent but irregular noise drew him back into shallower sleep until he finally came fully awake. Lucas listened in the dark. He could hear the waves rushing on the beach, and something outside rattling in the wind, and, then, the kitchen door.

“If I hear it again, then I’m not imagining it,” he told himself.

He was nearly asleep again when the noise was repeated.

“I did hear it. I think. I did hear it... So, if I hear it again, then ... something’s happening.”

When he heard the squeal again, he felt a flash of irritation.