The Wall

In my old house, I’d hear screams through my bedroom wall every night.

I’d lie awake, sweating through my pastel sheets in clenched-teethed terror, bringing the quilt to my throat in a lumpen knot as the cries went on and on in the darkness. They echoed behind the wallpaper as though the space beyond was a fathomless tunnel, and that was part of the terror, the impossibility of it all.

There was nothing on the other side of the plaster but an old airing cupboard with a stiff door that no one could open; it was barely large enough to stand in, let alone for a voice to resound through it in such a manner.

Yet with the noise routinely fencing off the grasps of sleep I knew that I wasn’t dreaming, though the screams bled so deeply through my slumber that I saw no rest, even then.

I was forever absconding to the houses of friends to escape from it, dreading the inevitable return to my own room, the sight of whose poster-clad interior soon elicited wild throes of panic even before I’d taken to my bed.

In time, I learned to wait until my mother had gone to sleep in order to slip off to other rooms, and in this way I learned that the screams could only be heard through that sole wall, and from no other surrounding it, or below.

Though a child, then, I perceived that the walls of the house were all too thin to contain a person trapped within them, though they might indeed conceal bones— despite my mother’s front against the existence of ghosts, I had considered a paranormal angle, and was convinced that I would one day unearth some grotesque history of murder that would lend credence to my hypotheses.

One night, I heard my mother stumbling about the upper floor of the house in search of me, having evidently looked into my room to find my bed quite empty. I had tried to tell her of the screaming wall, but she had dismissed the notion, seemingly convinced that I was a fanciful child, and would soon grow out of such things.

I was ashamed to think what she’d make of my cowardice, and of my venturing from my door after lights out.

Yet as I lay under a blanket on the living room couch, my mother began to call my name with mounting hysteria, overturning furniture and knocking on surfaces in a frenzy that I did not understand, but that struck a rusted nail of answering terror through my navel.

Panting in ragged sobs, my mother staggered downstairs and into the living room, one hand clasped to her collarbone against the trilling of her heart.

“Stevie,” she said. “What are you doing down here? I thought something had happened to you.”

I stared, nonplussed, through a haze of gloom.

“I can’t sleep in my room, Mum,” I said. “You know why.”

I thought she’d rail against me, insist that there was nothing, that my imagination had inflamed me like an illness, that I’d have to see a doctor if it carried on— she’d said as much so many times that I physically winced in anticipation of it.

To my alarm, she slid down against the doorway in a boneless motion, her hands kneading her heart.

“I thought it’d stop,” she whispered. “I hoped it would. That it wouldn’t be that way anymore.”

I sat up against the sofa in rigid surprise.

“Wait,” I said. “I thought you didn’t believe me.”

My mother ran a hand through her hair, and with a start I saw that it was silvering at the roots with premature age.

“I do,” she said. “I do believe you. You can sleep somewhere else after tonight. We’ll do something with the spare room, make it really nice for you. Alright?”

Relief ran out of me like overflow from some ancient water tank, pressure seeming to release from every limb.

“Okay,” I said. “But Mum… why did you make me stay in there if you knew about the screaming?”

My mother tousled one sleep-filled eye with the heel of her hand and looked at me with a strange, furtive guilt.

“I wanted you to be close to your Dad.”

My father had left when I was too young to remember him, and hadn’t returned to the house or been in contact since. I felt little for the man but resentment and suffering, a wound torn through time by his careless hand.

Thus, I didn’t understand my remaining parent’s statement until I was seventeen, having come home from a clandestine house party to the sound of my mother crying, somewhere high up in the house. Even before I tried the door to my old bedroom I knew that was where she was.

I found her kneeling on the stripped mattress, her palms and right ear pressed to the wall, listening to the screams as she rocked and moaned under her breath.

She reeked of alcohol; she was drunk, I realised, with humiliation. Drunk, and crying, and scratching at the wall as though she wanted to take the screamer into her arms to hold them.

I recalled what she had said about my father, how she’d wished me to be close to him, through the wall.

Had he died, and remained in the house, as all my childhood I’d been so sure some unnamed soul had been? If so, how had the death come about, and why hadn’t my mother told me?

I sobered up so fast that I forgot I’d been drinking myself.

“Christ,” I said, unsteadily, and I went to help her up and haul her away from the room.

With balled fists she pushed at my shoulders, wanting to go back.

“He needs me. He needs me. Let me stay with him.”

“You’re drunk, Mum,” I said; thank God she was thin, as light as a child in my arms. “Let me get you to bed. Get you some water.”

“No, no,” she insisted, her breath hot, and sickly, and sour with wine. “I need to tell you the truth about what happened. Where your Dad went.”

“He left when I was four,” I snapped, although I no longer believed it. “He’s not here.”

My mother stumbled free of my arms, her eyes alight with with some emotion I could not place.

“He is here!” she insisted. “He’s been here all this time! I’ll show you.”

She went to the airing cupboard door and kicked at it till its stiffness pulled loose from the frame. Switching on a light, she beckoned me in and pointed at the left-hand wall, the one it shared with my old room. Ignoring my rising agitation, I bent down to look, deciding to humour her.

“There,” she said. “That’s your Dad, now. Speak to him, if you want to. I think he screams so much because he feels alone, because he doesn’t know where he is, or what happened. Maybe he’d feel better if he heard your voice.”

My jaw was jammed with the stiffening of terror; I could neither shout nor breathe, staring, mad-eyed, at the thing inhabiting the wall.

There was a hole in the plaster, red and black like a wound in the side of a rotting animal, pulsing with an unnatural light and moist, slippery shadow. I saw a quantity of throbbing meat in that strange aperture, layers of it shifting together in a tide of visceral decay.

A blue eye rolled outwards, looking up at me in what I suppose was recognition.

It was alive, I realised, alive, and moaning in tortured spasms.

“What the hell is that?” I asked, in a rough whisper. “Mum, what am I even looking at?”

“I told you,” my mother said, swaying tipsily against the door. “It’s your Dad.”

I thought I might faint, or else lose the bitter contents of my stomach across the carpet.

“How… how did he end up like that?” I asked.

My mother shook her head.

“I don’t really understand it, myself, but that gap in the wall made him that way. He found it one afternoon while he was doing odd jobs around the house. ‘Ellie, come and look at this,’ he said. ‘There’s a weird light in here. Never seen anything like it.’ I went to look, and it scared me.

It made me think of dead stars you see in space documentaries, the way they eat up planets in all that whiteness. ‘Get rid of it,’ I said. ‘Board it up and leave it alone.’

You father gave me such a look then— hostile, and actually shocked.

He’d never looked at me like that before.

‘I can’t do that,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to know where that light is coming from. It’ll drive me crazy not knowing.’ I didn’t like leaving him alone with it— I had this feeling of just… dread. But I couldn’t stand around hanging over him all day. I left him to it.

A couple of hours later I went upstairs to check on him, knowing right away that something wasn’t right. When I opened the cupboard door I saw him stuck in the gap in the wall, his head and shoulders through it, and right away I jumped forwards, tried to pull him out.

But the more I pulled, the more he seemed to just fold into the wall, screaming all the time. It was like he was being crushed in on himself while he was still alive, bones breaking, fat and muscle squeezed like mince through a fist.

There shouldn’t have been room for him to be forced into the wall like that, but it happened anyway. I stood there, helpless, watching him become a part of the red dark and the light, and I knew I’d never be able to leave this house, not while he was there, alive in the wall. No matter how he looked, no matter how much it hurt.

I loved him. Love him. I can’t get him back, and I can’t let him die, either.”

“You’ve… you’ve tried getting him out?” I faltered, my voice a taut, nervy squeak.

The eye in the wall closed, blood rolling beneath the naked lid, like a tear.

“I tried to get him out,” my mother echoed. “With tools, whatever I could. But whatever that hole is, it crushes metal and wood up like paper. Nothing seems to last in there but… meat. I feed him, obviously. Throw stuff in, and I suppose he eats it, somehow.

I’ve even thought of climbing in there myself to be with him, but I couldn’t leave you alone. I just hate seeing him in pain, and confused. I don’t know what to do. I can’t tell anyone about him, scientists or whatever; they might hurt him, or take him away.”

She began to cry again, standing so close to the hole that I feared she too would be lured in and changed by cosmic pressure into another mangled thing.

“Go to bed, Mum,” I said, tugging her away. “It’s alright. We’ll think of something. Just get some sleep. I— I want to spend time with my Dad.”

My mother lingered, briefly, looking at what had become of my father, mumbling consolations in answer to his wordless groans. Then, like an old, old woman she shuffled away, leaving me alone with the thing in the wall.

I knew I could not leave it there, this aperture, with its transformative hunger, no more than I could abandon my father in his agonised state. In a half hour I had detached from the last of my childhood, and from all known things, spiritual, physical. Now I was moved by instinct only, as all animals are in the face of incomprehensible danger.

Off about the house I went in search of an aerosol can and lighter, inspired by something I’d seen in a film, having no other notions at my disposal. That done, I returned, makeshift weapons in hand, and stood looking at my father for a very long time.

I wondered if there was enough of him left to remember me, or if all he knew was pain, his neurons reduced to struggling threads.

What had compelled him to become one with the gap in the wall? Had it spoken to him, coaxed him close with its anglerfish light of black and red till he was compressed within?

I feared that call, and the agony that followed. My sweaty t-shirt clung to me like a diver’s suit, though I was colder then than I could ever remember being in that house.

Standing a good distance back from the hole, I raised the aerosol can and struck up a flame.

Light in its xanthous shimmer, the savagery of burning meat—

I had never heard my father scream louder than he did that night, nor for so long.

I kept the flame on him till the wall blazed, and I had to grab the fire extinguisher to put it out. All the time I felt that whatever ripped that hole through the wall—through space—was still there, humming, hungry, alive, though there was nothing then but an arch of smouldering brick between my old room and the cupboard.

*

We moved out of that house to my grandmother’s, not long after. My mother needed the care; she lost her mind, after what I did, couldn’t understand that I’d put my father to rest, or tried to.

Perhaps she never will.

As for myself, I could never look at a blank wall the same again. I began flipping obsessively through all kinds of books and documentaries for answers as to what had become of my father.

As one might suspect, I found little of use.

All I can think of is that sometimes—for inexplicable reasons, at random—there appear tears through matter that draw things into themselves, either to change or devour them with an incomprehensible eldritch appetite.

I only hope that the hole in our old house is closed, now, a healed scar, flat and white on a new wall.

I pray that my father is at peace, but sometimes I dream of him, as he might be now, his mind drawn, screaming, through a russet and ebony void in unknowable space.

Better not to think of it, or else I, too, may go mad.