The Man in the Attic

My bathroom has a combination bath/shower.  With the usual selector knob -- you turn it one way, and you get water through the spout into the tub; you turn it the other way, and you get a shower.  On mine, if you turn it half way, water comes out in equal proportions from the spout and from the shower.

At the end of my shower, after turning off the water, I routinely turn the knob half way, to totally drain the pipes.  But sometimes I get distracted and forget.  My last shower was such an occasion, apparently, because when I tried to turn the selector knob to tub to obtain the right temperature before turning it to shower, I found it already on the tub option.

The normal response, of course, is -- as I said -- I forgot to drain the pipes last time I showered.  And this was my rational response today.  But deep inside, I felt alarm.  My instincts told me, "The Man in the Attic has taken a shower while I was out of the house."

Who is this mythical attic dweller?  And whence cometh he?  

Back when I was a kid, I was much smaller and the photo supplements in the Sunday newspaper -- notably Parade Magazine -- were much heftier.  One Sunday, I read about a couple who had discovered that some guy, without their knowledge, had been living for a long time in their attic.  He would come out for food and water, and possibly exercise, only when the owners were safely gone.  You might say he was an early example of homelessness, except he wasn't -- he had found a home.

The hair on my young neck stood up when I read this.  Our house didn't have an attic, as such, but it had a lot of dark crawl spaces emptying through cupboard doors into the upstairs bedroom that I shared with my brother.  My reaction was similar to my terrified reaction when I read a "comic" book about a mirror through which our hero's evil double came out at night and created havoc.  For years, I made sure my desktop mirror was covered, or at least turned to the wall, before going to sleep.  But that's another (embarrassing) story.

My brother and I reinforced each other's courage, and we would occasionally examine the crawl spaces by flashlight.  I'm happy to report that no outsider was ever discovered.  But they might have been.  It could happen.  It happened to those folks in Parade Magazine.

I grew up, of course, and put aside childish things.  Or did I?  I now live in a two story house, with an attic of sorts.  Not an easily accessible attic.  While I was in college, my family lived in a  house with a serious attic, where one opened a trapdoor and a nice set of stairs slid down.  The attic interior was more or less finished, according to photos I've seen of it, but I don't remember ever investigating it.  Or being concerned about it.

No, my present attic is accessible only through a small covered opening in the ceiling of the hall adjoining my bedroom.   If you were fat, as many Americans are, you might get stuck trying to enter it.  And you would have to stand on a chair, push the cover aside, and lift yourself by your arms into the attic.  A fairly athletic endeavor.  And not one I've ever attempted.

Not because I'm too weak or too lazy.  Mainly out of an absurd sense of fear, fear of what I might find up there.  Maybe not a person currently living there.  Maybe just an old sleeping bag, a lot of empty food cans, various drug paraphernalia?  I've lived in this house for 35 years -- what are the odds that no one has ever lived in my attic in all that time?  Did I tell you what I read in Parade Magazine ....!?

Several years ago, my brother was helping me with various issues of home maintenance.  I mentioned that I'd heard rats scurrying about at times in the past, and that a neighbor had claimed to have seen an opossum slipping his way into the attic through a presumed opening to the exterior.  My brother had no qualms about slipping through the narrow entrance and checking it out.  No rat droppings.  No openings to the outside.  And most surprising of all, no signs of human habitation.

I'm sure he gave me his honest opinion as to what he'd seen.  Or thought he saw.  But he isn't a trained inspector of attics, is he?  Seeking out evidence of human habitation isn't one of his many abilities.  Maybe the Man in the Attic isn't really the cause of the knob's position in my shower -- I'm a rational fellow, and I realize I may be absent-minded at times.  (Although I checked my towel and washcloth before taking my shower today -- just a precaution, to see if they were suspiciously damp.)

But there's been someone up there at some point.  (And I'm just as sure of that as Trump is sure of election fraud.)  There may be someone up there right now.  In fact, didn't I just heard a creaking up in the attic........????