The basement had always been damp. Boxes softened at the corners, door frames swelled every summer, and pale gray blooms returned to the concrete regardless of bleach, fans, or dehumidifiers. We called it the swamp and treated it as one more defect of an old house.
The contractor was the first person to use another word. He crouched beside the foundation wall, pressed two fingers to the concrete, and said the structure was full of moist. He pronounced the final word slowly, almost professionally, then wrote something on his clipboard and angled it away when I tried to read.
He refused to elaborate. He recommended removing everything from below ground level and suggested we avoid sleeping directly against exterior walls. When I asked whether we had mold, seepage, or a cracked foundation, he said those would have been easier. He left without giving us an estimate and never returned my calls.
Within weeks the dampness started climbing. Wallpaper loosened along the stairwell in long vertical strips. The upstairs linen closet began smelling of tide pools. My husband’s winter coat developed droplets along the inside lining, although the room remained dry and cool.
The moisture itself behaved strangely. It gathered where bodies spent time. His side of the bed stayed clammy beneath the sheets. The fabric on my reading chair darkened each evening into the shape of someone sitting there before I arrived.
We ran three dehumidifiers continuously. Their tanks filled faster every day. The water inside was always several degrees warmer than the surrounding air and faintly cloudy, with threadlike particles that disappeared when exposed to sunlight. Eventually I stopped emptying them outside after noticing that grass grew thick and dark wherever the water touched soil.
The house now makes sounds at night that plumbing cannot account for. Something moves through the walls with the slow pressure of water squeezed through cloth, followed by a soft internal shifting that travels room to room. Yesterday one section of drywall flexed inward when I leaned against it, yielding like skin over something swollen.
This morning the stairs were soft beneath my feet. My heel left a shallow depression that gradually filled itself level again. The upstairs hallway smells strongly of the sea now, and every framed photograph has developed condensation behind the glass. In several pictures, our faces are becoming blurred while the rooms around us remain sharp.
The contractor finally answered my call this afternoon. He sounded surprised that we were still inside the house. When I repeated the phrase he had used during the inspection, there was a long silence, followed by the sound of papers being moved. He corrected my pronunciation very gently.
The word, he explained, was not moisture. It was a plural.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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