No. 262

“Hey, come look at this,” said Charlie.

“What is it?” I asked him. I’d been reading my book on the couch and I didn’t want to get up for nothing.

He was somewhere on the other side of the house. I could hear him knocking on something. The noise intrigued me, so I put aside my blanket and tea, and got up to see what he was yelling about.

“What?” I said again as I rounded the corner into the back bedroom. Actually, it wasn’t a bedroom. We’d always used it for an office because it was so small.

Charlie was tapping the wall on the far side of the room. “I think this is hollow.”

“Of course it’s hollow. It should be, unless there’s a beam behind it,” I told him.

“No,” he said. “No, this is different.” He thumped on the opposite wall. “Hear that?”

I did. It wasn’t the same sound. “Do the first one, again.”

He hit them both, one after the other.

“You’re right,” I admitted. “What do you think it is?”

He didn’t answer me. Instead, he pulled a hammer out of his toolbox and drove it through the “hollow” wall. The tool left an enormous gouge in the otherwise flat surface. Charlie grabbed the edge of the smashed drywall and pulled. It sloughed off in an entire sheet, as if it hadn’t been properly anchored in the first place.

I craned my neck to see what, if anything, it revealed.

“I might have made a mistake,” Charlie admitted when we didn’t detect anything out of the ordinary. There was just the usual pink insulation and framing boards.

“Wait,” I told him. “What’s this?” There was something just behind the edge of the new hole. I peeled back a portion of the wall that was still standing.

“It’s a doorknob,” said Charlie. “What’s a doorknob doing back there?”

I tugged the rest of that piece of drywall. It, too, came away easily.

“What’s an entire door doing back here?” I asked him.

We both stood for a minute and looked at it. Charlie was the first to speak.

“Do you think we should open it?”