Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Pennick ·
The Footsteps Under the Floorboards at Pennick
A schoolteacher lodging above the old reading room at Pennick hears someone pacing the room beneath her floor each night, and the steps are always one lap ahead of her own, as though the person below has already walked the route she is about to take.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: Alice Hume, schoolteacher
I took the rooms above the old reading room at Pennick in September, when I was posted to the village school. The rooms were cheap and warm, and the landlady, a Mrs Dunning, said the reading room below had been closed for years and was used only for storage. She gave me the key to the front door and told me not to go down the back stairs, because the boards were rotten. I did not ask why. I had been in the village a week and had learned that there were a great many things people in Pennick did not explain.
The first night I heard the steps.
They came from directly beneath my bedroom floor. A slow, careful pacing, back and forth across the length of the room below. Heel and toe, not heavy, the step of someone who was not in a hurry. I lay in bed and listened, and after a while I realised the steps were not random. They were walking a route. Four paces to the window, a turn, four paces back to the fireplace, a pause, and then the same pattern again.
I got up and went to the top of the stairs and listened. The steps stopped. When I went back to bed, they started again.
The second night I tried to match them. I got up at the same time and walked my own room, from the window to the door and back, counting my paces. The steps below changed rhythm to match mine, quick at first, then slower, as if whoever was down there was keeping pace with me through the floor. Then, halfway through my fourth lap, they got ahead of me.
I stopped. The steps below did not. They went on walking the route I was about to take, one lap in front, so that every time I reached the window they had already turned and were heading back to the fireplace, and when I turned, they were already at the door.
I asked Mrs Dunning about it at breakfast. She did not look surprised. She said the reading room had been run by a family called Vance for three generations, and that old Mr Vance had walked the floor every evening after closing, going over the day's accounts in his head, pacing out the stock on the shelves. He had died in the reading room in 1961. Nobody had been down there since.
I went down the back stairs that afternoon, despite the warning, and found the reading room door unlocked. Inside it was dim and dusty, the shelves still lined with books, the reading tables covered in sheets. In the middle of the floor, worn into the boards, was a path. A track, four paces long, from the window to the fireplace, and back. The wood was pale and smooth in the centre of each step, the way a floor wears when the same feet have walked it every day for decades.
I walked the path. My feet fitted the worn places exactly.
That night the steps came again, from below. This time they did not get ahead of me. They kept perfect time, every step matching mine, the sound coming up through the boards as clear as my own heartbeat. I walked the room, and the steps below walked it with me, and when I reached the window and turned, the steps below turned too, and for the first time since I came to Pennick, I felt that somebody was glad of my company.
I still lodge above the reading room. The school term is in its third month. I have stopped using the front stairs. I walk the room each night, from the window to the fireplace and back, and the steps below walk with me, close and steady, and sometimes, when I stop to rest at the fireplace, I hear a long, contented sigh come up through the floor, the sound of a man settling down at the end of a long day to go over his accounts, one last time, before the lamps are turned out.