Under the Rug

[Author’s note: This story was inspired by the book The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1984). While I was unable to secure the rights to post the relevant illustration here, it should be reasonably easy to find it through other means. Special thanks to my dad for offering his editorial services for this story.]

It was a month or so after he moved into the house that Professor Eli Schulman noticed something under the living room rug.

It was right by the fireplace, where he’d spent the afternoon taking an electric sander to the decorative millwork put there by his Aunt Rachel. Most of his efforts to expunge all tangible remnants of her legacy were concentrated in the master bedroom. His libido was robust for his age, but it could never withstand intrusive thoughts of his aunt’s presence nearby. Especially given the specific plans he’d had for that room.

But more than than that, he wanted to scrape away all of traces of her everywhere in the house, a final show of defiance, a demonstration of ingratitude towards her bequest. He’d always relished the chance to retaliate against those whom he’d perceived to have slighted him. It didn’t matter if they were still alive or not.

That evening, he was sitting down for filet mignon and Merlot when he caught the rug moving from the corner of his eye. He quickly turned towards the movement, but the rug was as sedentary as it had been since he had first rolled it out. He stared at the spot for several seconds before pouring the wine. Perhaps his apprehension about the house was subconsciously manifesting itself by playing tricks on his mind.

It was a grand house, even older than his aunt, with so much exposed brick the chimney blended in seamlessly. Eli’s brother and sisters joked that it must have been haunted, as Rachel wouldn’t have seen left it to him otherwise. They all could sense that he was her least favorite nephew, for reasons she never divulged.

Two weeks passed and it happened again. Eli had just finished nailing some framed photographs to the wall when he saw a bulge beneath the rug the size of a softball squirm around the room.

Rats, he thought. The house was infested with rats. No wonder that old spinster saw fit to leave it to him in her will. He grabbed a chair from the dining room and hoisted it aloft, ready to do combat with the intruder, his violent intentions in stark contrast with his appearance of a bald, bespectacled man in a bow tie and button-down cardigan.

He swung the chair downwards, taking the bulge right in its peak, but not before it had knocked over a small table, shattering the porcelain lamp that had rested atop it. Muttering a string of curses, Eli went to grab a dustpan from the closet to tend to the lamp’s remains. When he got back, he found the lump was gone.

He cursed more audibly than before. That the rat had escaped meant more to him than just a loose pest in his dwelling. The rat had escaped vengeance for the lamp. For as long as he could remember, Eli had done all he could to ensure those who caused him pain or embarrassment got what was coming to them.

When he was in the second grade, he started taking note of which coats and jackets were worn by the classmates who tied his shoelaces together or pushed him into puddles. One day he snuck a box cutter into class and methodically slashed the lining of the offending students’ jackets while they hung on pegs in the classroom. He was never caught. As he got older, he got more creative in dealing with the offenders in ways that would cost them more dearly.

When Eli was a high school freshman, he found upperclassmen who caused him trouble quite easy to deal with, as they were allowed to drive their cars to school, cars that sat during school hours with their gas tanks unguarded, just begging for a generous helping of water or sand. His favorite method of revenge, though, was laxatives. What the lasting effects lacked in wasted money they made up for in humiliation, provided the timing of their administration was just right.

Eli set aside the table and chair and rolled up the rug, checking for any evidence of rodential intruders, but he found not a strand of fur. Nor did he find any evidence of infestation along the baseboards. He determined to call an exterminator if the problem continued.

It did, although not in any way Eli expected. After vacuuming the rug, he spent hours in his study grading papers and bemoaning the clearly lax standards for college admission nowadays, then came downstairs to find the rug with at least a dozen lumps under it.

He took a second or two to register the sight before rushing to the lumps and aggressively stomping on all of them. But rather than crunching under his feet with a final squeak of capitulation, they deflated upon impact to a flat surface. Eli once again rolled up the rug and again found nothing.

Eli’s puzzlement over what was going on did nothing to assuage his suspicions about his late aunt. His demeanor was enough to assure even his parents of his innocence, but Aunt Rachel somehow seemed aware of his unusual level of dedication to his own brand of justice. He first sensed this from the occasional narrow-lidded glance and her tone of voice when he denied any knowledge of the mysterious misfortunes that sometimes befell his siblings. And his suspicions were all but confirmed on the day of his bar mitzvah, when she momentarily took him aside to share a few words with him.

Remember, Eli, being a man doesn’t just mean having more freedom. It also means having more accountability. More expectations for you to deal with other people maturely and letting some things go. You remember that.

He thought of Aunt Rachel as he stared at the rug, unsure if he should even bother rolling it back out at this point. He supposed a bachelor had little need to ensure his home was presentable. . .although he was expecting the occasional visitor.

Shortly after becoming an associate professor, Eli had learned to his concealed delight that professors really did encounter the occasional coed who was willing to do “anything” to get a passing grade. He was unwilling to risk taking advantage of this while married — June was a nosy little shrew, almost as bad as his new neighbor Mrs. Hartwood. But ever since she left him he saw fit to take advantage of his newfound freedom.

Not that he didn’t take precautions in doing so — he had become an expert in not getting caught. He steered clear of the more libertine-seeming women, the ones for whom reporting him afterward would carry few repercussions for themselves. He knew to stick to the ones from strict religious households, the ones who had put a value on their purity, who would risk a tarnished reputation and shunning from Mommy and Daddy if their dealings with Prof. Schulman were ever found out. Dealing with them could be a headache — their inexperience could lead to problems, and a few refused to let him go all the way so they could maintain physical evidence of their chastity — but it was certainly preferable to risking the consequences of exposure.

He decided to leave the rug rolled up. The floorboards looked nice enough anyway. That was what he kept telling himself as more mobile lumps appeared under more and more rugs. He checked each one, and each time he found nothing. It usually happened shortly after he vacuumed the rug in question, sometimes after he cleaned up a spill on it.

Finally, there was not a rug in the house left unfurled. Eli wasn’t especially pleased, but at least he could say with some confidence that that would the end of it.

He cursed his naïveté when he started noticing bulges under the paint on the walls after he’d spackled in all the holes left from Rachel’s framed pictures and other decorative hangings. He’d seen pictures like it once in a magazine, about how it was evidence of a leak and each bulge is full of water. Against the article’s advice, Eli pricked one with a safety pin and, as he expected, nothing spurted out but air.

The walls were roughly three quarters painted drywall and one quarter exposed brick, not counting the windows. Eli didn’t much care for the thought of scraping off all the damn paint, which seemed the only practical solution. But he couldn’t look at the current state of the house without feeling it was about to be flooded. And besides, he wanted to have things reasonably presentable for an upcoming visitor, although bare drywall might not be too much of an improvement.

He brought out the electric sander again and got to work. When the weekend was over, the house looked like a sandstorm had swept through it. But Eli suspected that if he repainted it, the same problems would arise.

It was the week after he finished that he was expecting one of his female students to visit to “negotiate” for a higher grade. He made sure she would take the bus rather than a car, walk through the wooded area behind his house, and enter through the back door. Her name was. . .Cassandra? Or maybe Cassidy.

Eli never found out too much about these coeds, nor did he feel the need to. But he liked to imagine they were the daughters of all his strapping, charismatic college classmates to whom the coeds flocked. That would be poetic justice, he thought, and then smiled to himself, an English professor to the core.

Cassandra/Cassidy knocked on the back door and addressed him as Professor after he let her in. (He liked when they did that.) He offered her a glass of water and led her to the bedroom. He was only being practical; after all, it wasn’t as if she would be expecting candlelight and rose petals on the bed. The water was purely for pragmatic reasons, to ensure she was hydrated.

Not that Eli would have cared too much if she did, but she didn’t mention anything about the walls. When they reached the bedroom, they both heard a distinct crack from the living room. Cassandra or Cassidy or whatever seemed willing to ignore it, but his current situation made him more wary than usual. He told her to finish her water and to get undressed, and that he would be back in a minute.

He walked back downstairs to find no one. There was, however, an unusual sight on the floor that ever so recently was covered by a rug: At the place where two floorboards had met each other at their ends, they had buckled upwards, as if a force from below had suddenly thrust them up. Eli walked to the anomaly and gently pressed against it with the ball of his foot. It gave a little.

He would have investigated further if he were alone, but right now he had other things in mind, and began heading back to the bedroom. Just before he left the living room however, there was another noise, this time a loud thud. He turned to find that a brick had fallen from the wall.

He ran to it, looking into the resultant hole, expecting to see more brick or insulation or maybe even the outside porch, but instead found a glob of mortar that started to ooze down the wall. Upon closer inspection, though, it wasn’t just mortar. It had bits of brick itself, as well as materials that weren’t supposed to be in its immediate surroundings like hardwood, drywall, and shellac. It reminded Eli of cysts that people could get on various places on their bodies that contained hair and teeth.

Rachel, that rotten, conniving old hag. Eli’s siblings were wrong. The house wasn’t haunted. It was diseased.

More cracks and thuds sounded around the house, exponentially increasing in frequency like popcorn being heated. Eli heard What’s-Her-Name run screaming down the stairs and toward the door through which she’d entered, only to struggle with opening it.

That figured, Eli thought. After all, he had just opened it recently. No surer way to cause problems with inflammation than by irritating the area. Never scratch at a pimple. . .

The house continued to break out in welts and rashes. Floorboards warped, drywall cracked, and bricks burst from the walls. Eli was struggling so much that he hadn’t noticed his student, carrying most of her clothes and wearing nothing but a brassiere and panties which she apparently hadn’t bothered to make sure match, had been slowly and gingerly crawling towards the front door.

It was only after all his neighbors had gone outside to see what the commotion was about that Cassandra/Cassidy ran out the front door, having only added her high tops and nothing else to her ensemble, and narrowly avoided bumping into gossip extraordinaire Mrs. Hartwood herself, but not before shouting a goodbye to Eli and

—oh dear God please don’t—

once again calling him Professor. Well done, Aunt Rachel, he thought. It seems you too were on a quest to make sure people get what’s coming to them, and you’ve succeeded.

The house had settled back down, at least for the time being. Eli went to the kitchen to drain what was left of his Merlot.