Chapter 8 - The Secret Space
A terrible, icy dread took root in my mind as I looked around the shadowed rafters of my parents' attic.
If Gregory Miller had worked inside this house for weeks without our supervision, what else had he done while we were sleeping or at school?
“David, shine the flashlight along the back wall above my old bedroom,” I instructed, my voice trembling with a dark suspicion.
We crawled over the thick pink fiberglass insulation toward the far corner of the attic, carefully placing our feet on the wooden ceiling joists.
The area directly above my childhood bedroom was dark and cramped, the sloping roofline forcing us to hunch over on our hands and knees.
David swept the bright beam of the flashlight across the drywall and the exposed wooden framing beams.
Everything looked normal at first glance—just dusty wooden trusses and old electrical wiring running toward the ceiling fixtures below.
But as the beam moved across a vertical support column, David stopped suddenly, his hand freezing in mid-air.
“Sarah,” he whispered, his voice catching in his throat.
“Look at the insulation batting along that floor joist right there.”
I leaned closer and saw that the thick pink insulation blanket had been neatly sliced open with a sharp utility knife and pulled back.
Resting directly against the bare drywall of my old bedroom ceiling was a flat, rectangular piece of half-inch plywood.
David reached out and lifted the plywood panel, revealing a neat, square hole that had been carefully cut through the ceiling drywall.
The hole was situated directly above the heating vent of my old bedroom, covered from below by the metal louvered grate.
Someone sitting in this cramped corner of the attic could look straight down through the heating vent onto my childhood bed.
Beside the viewing hole, resting on the dusty wooden beam, were three items that made my stomach heave with revulsion.
There was a half-burned white candle sitting in a cheap glass jar, a rusted pair of metal binoculars, and a small, leather-bound notebook.
David picked up the notebook using the edge of his shirt to avoid contaminating any preserved fingerprints.
He flipped it open, and the beam of the flashlight illuminated pages filled with dense, obsessive handwriting in blue ballpoint ink.
It was a detailed, chronological surveillance log dating from the winter of 2010 to the summer of 2015.
November 14, 2010 - 10:15 PM: Little bird is reading her history book. She brushed her hair sixty times tonight. She looks pretty in her blue pajamas.
March 22, 2012 - 11:30 PM: She is crying because of a boy at school. I will find out who he is and teach him a lesson. She only needs to smile for me.
August 18, 2015 - 1:00 AM: She is packing her suitcases for college. She thinks she is leaving my nest, but I have already applied for a maintenance job at the university campus.
I scrambled backward across the insulation, watching uncontrollably as the sheer evil of his violation washed over me.
For five years of my adolescence, the man who abducted me when I was seven years old had been sleeping in my ceiling.
He had watched me change clothes, watched me sleep, and listened to my most private telephone conversations from the darkness above my head.
May you like
“We’re getting out of this house right now,” David said, grabbing my arm and hauling me toward the attic stairs with fierce determination.
“I don't care what the FBI says about secure perimeters; this house isn't a safe zone—it’s his damn hunting blind!”
