In the Walls

Photo by Pascal Meier on Unsplash

It’s only been a few weeks since I moved to this place. I’m already regretting it. The panelled walls are talking to me.

I should’ve listened to my sister and given this place up for sale. It’s in the middle of nowhere, in a dilapidated condition, and far from civilisation.

I thought I could fix up the shack and earn a profit on the margin. But things have been really odd these few days. It started with the tapping. I ignored the strange din at first. I tried to. I really did.

I worked my fingers to the bone trying to make this place work. My debt kept piling up. I was too deep into the mud to just succumb to my inane fears and make a break for it.

Then again, how could I know what awaited me? I was only human, made of dirt and composed of skin and bones. 

A hole in the peeling wall bothered me. It wasn’t there when I first got here. It gradually grew bigger. A perfect circle.

It would be a lie if I said I didn’t consider tearing down the whole thing. But I couldn’t. I tried, though. But whenever I made up my mind, something beyond the wall fixed its eyes on me. Through that hole. That massive black hole that beckoned me to challenge it. 

The whispers, however, were what really got to me. Man, that shit broke me! How do I put this without sounding crazy? Whatever it was, on the other side of the wall, it knew me.

I had these dreams, nightmares if you will, about these- these people I had never met before. They kept whispering the same thing over and over again like a broken record: ‘We come from the walls.’

My sister wouldn’t pick up her phone. I sent a message three days ago. I told her to pick me up, that I was scared to death and about to lose my damn mind.

Something about this place was off. It was as if I was cut off from the rest of the world and trapped in another dimension far from home and everything familiar.

I’ve been staring at the phone screen for hours, waiting tirelessly and rocking back and forth like a distressed child. The hole kept getting bigger. The whispers were louder now. I stopped sleeping. Hell, did I even breathe? 

Eyes. Several of them. Packed into that freaking hole! Those people, they talked with their eyes. They were trapped behind the crumbling walls and they watched my every move. 

I shouldn’t have come here. They were coming for me. I just knew it, I… Oh, god! I promised I’d buy Denise that doll on her sixth birthday and now I was—what were they gonna tell her? I recoiled and fixed my bloodshot eyes on the deepening hole.

Crawling backwards in a state of panic, towards the locked front door, a decaying hand stretched out from within the hole.

I clutched to the door and shut my eyes with a grimace, convulsing in place. The- the people in the walls escaped! I- I'm going to die! I'm going to die…? No! Oh, god, no! I don’t want to die here! I don’t—oh, god, please, I…

Hundreds of hands ripped my face off. 

When I flew my eyes open, the mouldering hands and the blinking eyes enclosed me from all directions. Profound darkness surrounded me. A single string of light shone through the narrowing hole. In the walls.