The unsettling feeling began with the wallpaper. It was old, a pattern of faded, floral arabesques that seemed to writhe and shift in the periphery of my vision. I had inherited the house from a great-aunt I'd never met, and it was filled with the dust and neglect of a long-abandoned life. My brother, Leo, thought it was a fantastic project house. I thought it was breathing. At first, I dismissed the feeling as nerves. The solitude was a heavy blanket; the nearest neighbor was a mile away, and the phone line was still dead. The only sound was the wind sighing through the pines and the incessant, almost musical, creaking of the old house settling. But then the shifting began in earnest. Not in the wallpaper, but from within the walls themselves.
A rustle, like dry leaves skittering across a wooden floor. A low, persistent scratching, as if something with a thousand tiny claws were perpetually trying to climb out.I told myself it was mice. But the sound wasn't in the walls of the kitchen, or the pantry, or the places mice should be. It was in the walls of my bedroom, specifically, the one behind my headboard. I'd tap the plaster, and the scratching would stop instantly, replaced by a profound, echoing silence. It was a silence that listened.My attempts to rationalize it grew more frantic. Was it a family of squirrels? Had a bird somehow gotten trapped? The explanations grew weaker with each passing night, as did my sleep. The scratching grew bolder, more deliberate. It was no longer a rustle, but a rhythm.
A tap, tap-tap-tap, pause. Tap, tap-tap-tap, pause.
It sounded like a message being spelled out, and I found myself holding my breath, straining to decipher it.The real fear set in when I heard the whispering. Faint at first, a susurrus that I thought was the wind. But it came from the same wall as the scratching. It was a multitude of voices, and they were all whispering my name. Eliza. Eliza. Eliza. The sound was not in my head. I pressed my ear against the cool plaster, and the whispers grew to a chorus, overlapping and echoing, a symphony of soft, sibilant secrets, all directed at me.
I ripped the headboard from the wall, sending a plume of plaster dust into the air, and found nothing but crumbling lath and ancient insulation. The whispering stopped.Leo came to visit that weekend and found me huddled in the living room, a blanket over my head, with my mattress and headboard pushed against the opposite wall. He laughed it off as nerves, as I had. "This place just needs a little TLC, a little love," he said, and went to bed in the same room I had abandoned.The next morning, I found him standing in the hallway, staring at the fresh plaster I'd just finished painting. A single word was carved into the new surface, a jagged, sloppy scrawl that hadn't been there the night before. OUT.His face was pale. I pointed toward my old room. "Did you hear anything?"He shook his head, looking over my shoulder at the scratch marks on the other side of the wall. "No," he said, his voice flat. "But I heard the wallpaper.""The wallpaper?""Shifting," he said, his eyes wide and fixed on mine. "Just shifting."
He pointed to the doorway of his room. The old floral paper was rippling, not from a draft, but from some motion underneath it. Then, a single, deliberate tear appeared near the bottom, slowly, deliberately. A single finger, thin and impossibly long, poked through the opening and waved at us.I wanted to scream, but no sound came out. The house was alive, and it wanted us to see it. Not just hear it, but see it. And not just it, but them. They were coming, a legion of whispers and clawing things, not from the walls, but from behind the walls, and they'd been watching all along.
The next morning, Leo and I drove away in a panicked rush, leaving the key in the mailbox. We never went back. But the old house is still there, and sometimes, at night, when the wind howls, I imagine I can hear a voice calling my name. It's a sweet, melodic whisper, and it's always followed by a sound I can only describe as a wet, tearing laugh.