The Angle of the Wall

I’ve never told this to anyone, not even my husband. Some things are better left unsaid, especially when they live in the walls of your own home. But I’ve kept a record of that night, in a moleskin notebook I hide in the back of the closet. This is what I wrote, the night it happened, when I could still hold a pen without shaking.

It started with a sound. Not the usual creaks and groans of a settling house—this was a dry, slithering scrape, like something heavy being dragged across the tiles of the bathroom floor. I was alone; Derek was on a night shift, and the dog, a cowardly lab, had already tucked himself under the bed. I was in the bathroom, readying for a shower. The room was steamy from the pre-heat, and the mirror was fogged over. The heat made the air feel thick, and my skin prickled with the sensation of being watched. I chalked it up to the old house settling, but the scrape stopped right outside the shower curtain.

I pulled the curtain back, expecting to see nothing, but the bathroom was empty. The frosted glass of the window was slicked with moisture, and through it I could see the usual dark of the backyard. The hook for my towel clanked against the glass as I hooked it, and I turned, half-expecting to see Derek’s face in the mirror. But there was only me, my reflection ghostly in the water fug.

Then I saw her. In the gap between the vanity and the toilet, a shadow that wasn’t cast by anything. A woman, maybe mid-twenties, with dark hair slicked against a pale skull, standing perpendicular to the ground, like she was lying on the wall itself. She wore a simple, long dress that dripped wet against the white tiles, and her eyes were black, two endless pits. But it was the angle of her that stuck me—her head tilted sharply, as if her neck had been broken, so that she was looking at me sideways, a predator’s cant. I froze, my breath caught in my throat, and she was gone. Not a fade, just a blink.

I stared at the spot where she’d been for what felt like an eternity, the steam curling around me. The air was still, but the shower curtain swayed slightly, as if a drafts passed. I should have left then, grabbed my keys and fled. But I was rooted, my mind trying to reconcile what I’d seen. A trick of the light, a shadow from the streetlamp, my own reflection distorted by the fog. I forced myself to step to the toilet, to lean over and check behind the door. Nothing. The bathroom was exactly as it had been, except for a single puddle of water on the floor, right where she’d been standing. But I hadn’t splashed the floor.

I turned on the cold tap, cupped water, and splashed my face. When I looked up, the mirror had cleared somewhat, and there was a handprint on the glass—small, feminine, and pressed against the surface from the inside. I screamed then, a raw, jagged sound, and ran. I stumbled down the hallway, past the weird angle of the wall where it jutted out to accommodate the plumbing, and into our bedroom, slamming the door behind me. The dog was trembling under the bed, and I dove beside him, my heart racing.

I didn’t sleep that night. I lay with the blankets pulled over my head, listening to the house. And the sounds came: the whisper of plastic on the countertop, like a bag being opened; the soft murmur of voices, too low to be distinct, almost like a television in another room. But we didn’t have a television upstairs. These sounds rose and fell, wrapping around the silence, and I felt a pressure, a presence, like someone had crawled into bed beside me and was breathing in the hollow of my neck.

Morning came, and I told myself it was a nightmare, a sleep paralysis episode. I cleaned the bathroom, scrubbed the handprint from the mirror, and tried to forget. But I couldn’t forget the angle of her, that unnatural posture, as if she were crawling the walls herself. And as I left the house to go to work, I passed the bathroom door, and the floor was wet again, a trail of damp footprints leading from the bathroom to the wall’s angle and stopping dead. Right at the spot where the wall cut at that strange angle, there was a faint indentation, as if someone had pressed their entire body against the plaster. I touched it, and the plaster was cold, impossibly cold.

Since then, I’ve made sure to shower at the gym. And now, as I write this, I hear the plastic slide again, and the voices start their low murmur. I’ve grown kind of used to them, I suppose. But I stay away from that bathroom. And you know, the strangest thing is, the odd angle of that wall has always bothered me, ever since we moved in. It never made sense, architecturally. I’ve had builders in, and they can’t explain it either. They say it’s just a quirk. But I know, now—it’s not a quirk. It’s a door. And sometimes, it opens.