Tattoo Beneath the Floor Boards

You may find this account peculiar, perhaps even trifling, until you have read it to its conclusion. It concerns the small but disconcerting occurrences that have beset our household since the passing of Christmas—a time when, as you know, the spirit of cheer can so easily give way to unease once the lights are extinguished and the decorations stowed away.

My wife, ever the industrious soul, adheres firmly to the adage that tasks deferred are tasks undone. On Boxing Day, she resolved to banish every trace of the holiday from our home.

Among the decorations slated for their annual confinement in the attic were two wooden nutcrackers garbed in military regalia. One, a drum major with a baton, stood tall and imperious. The other—a drummer, diminutive in comparison—seemed almost plaintive in aspect.

It was as she prepared to pack them away that she noticed something amiss: the drummer’s drum was nowhere to be seen. We spent searching the room for the errant piece.

We dragged the furniture aside, lifted carpets, and inspected nooks that had not seen the light of day in weeks. Yet the drum remained elusive, as if spirited away.

Though frustrated, we thought no more of it at the time. After all, such trifles turn up when least expected.

It was a few nights later—perhaps three or four—when the first incident occurred. My wife and I had retired for the evening, the house settling into its usual nocturnal quiet.

At some point past midnight, I was roused by a sound faint yet insistent: the steady tattoo of a drum, coming, as best I could judge, from beneath the floorboards of the back portion of the house.

At first, I took it for some trick of the imagination, a product of half-sleep. But as the nights wore on, the sound persisted, growing no louder but no less distinct. Each time it began, the pattern was the same: a slow, deliberate roll, followed by an irregular staccato as if struck by hands not altogether steady.

By the fourth night, curiosity and unease drove me to investigate. Beneath our home is a crawl space—not unpleasant to navigate so long as one remains crouched.

Armed with a lantern, I descended into the area just after the sound had commenced. The space was well-lit, and I took care to examine every corner, every joist and beam.

Yet there was nothing to see, no drum, no source for the noise, only the oppressive quiet of the space and the faint scent of damp earth.

I emerged none the wiser. But that night, I could have sworn the drumming grew louder as if it resented my intrusion.

My wife, less susceptible to fancy and hard of hearing, confessed that she found the sound disturbing.

“It is not the noise itself,” she said one morning, her face drawn. “It is the persistence of it, as if someone—or something—is determined to make itself heard.”

I do not care to prolong this narrative unnecessarily, for it is not in the recounting of each nightly disturbance that the true horror lies but in the culmination. A week after the drumming began, I was woken not by sound but by the distinct impression that I was not alone.

The room was cold—unnaturally so—and the air carried a faint tang of woodsmoke, though there had been no fire in the hearth that evening. As I sat up, my eyes came to the foot of my bed.

Silhouetted against the pale light of the moon stood the nutcracker. It was the figure my wife had packed away, and there on the leather bandolier swung the missing drum.