The Ball on the Lath

We’d been in the house less than a week, me and my wife Elena and little Maya. The place was a Carpenter Gothic, all steep gables and peeling gingerbread, set back from a gravel road that turned to mud whenever it rained. I’d taken a job as a county archivist, which meant we’d moved to a town where the oldest things were the trees and the grudges.

Maya was five, with a head full of dark curls and an imagination I figured was just her way of settling in. But on the third day, as I was prying open a crate of books, she tugged at my sleeve. ‘Papa,’ she said, ‘there’s a man in my room. He’s gray, and he walks through the wall.’ I knelt down, told her it was just a shadow from the trees outside, and sent her off to help her mother. I didn’t look at the corner of her room when I passed it.

Elena was six months pregnant, tired and glowing, and she took to the house better than I did. She said it had good bones, even when the windows rattled in their frames. But after two weeks, she started waking me at night. ‘There’s a sound,’ she’d say, ‘from Maya’s room. Like a ball bouncing.’ I listened, heard nothing, and rolled over. But she kept at it, and one night I went upstairs.

The hallway was dark, the floorboards cold under my feet. Maya’s door was ajar. Inside, in the pale light from the window, I saw nothing. But as I stood there, the sound came: a soft, rhythmic ‘thud… thud… thud.’ It seemed to come from the wall between her room and the attic. I put my hand on the plaster. The sound didn’t stop. It was like something was bouncing a ball against the other side. I went up to the attic, but it was empty, filled with dust and old furniture. The sound stopped when I entered. I told Elena it was just a loose pipe.

Maya started drawing. She’d always loved to draw, but now she’d fill entire pages with the same picture: a tall, thin figure with no face, standing in a corner. She called him ‘the gentleman.’ Elena found a drawing under Maya’s pillow, and she didn’t sleep for two nights. I tried to laugh it off, but I had to force it.

Things escalated when the baby was born. A boy, we named him Samuel. He was healthy, but he cried constantly. The only thing that calmed him was the old wooden rocking chair we’d put in the nursery, which we’d set up in the room next to ours. But every time I put him down in his crib, he’d wail, and I’d swear something else was in the room with him.

I started to feel watched. In the hallway, in the basement, even in the yard. I caught myself looking over my shoulder. One evening, I was in the basement looking for a fuse, and I saw a door I hadn’t noticed before, built into the stone foundation. It was locked, but the key was in a jar on a shelf, as if someone had left it for me. I opened it.

Behind it, the space was barely big enough to crawl into. It was a void, with packed dirt floor and walls of rough stone. The air was cold and smelled of wet earth. At the far end, half-buried in the dirt, was a child’s ball, the kind you’d have in the 1900s, made of leather and stuffed with rags. I picked it up. It was as old as the house.

I put the ball on a shelf in the hall, thinking I’d throw it away later. That night, I heard bouncing. Not from upstairs, but from the hall. I crept out of bed and looked. The ball was on the floor, bouncing on its own, in the dark. I ran to the hall and grabbed it. It stopped the moment I touched it.

I knew then I had to do something. I did research at the county archives, looking up the history of our house. It had been built in 1887 by a man named Elias Thorn, a widower who had a daughter. She died young, of a fever, in 1891. The records said Elias went mad, boarded up her room, and eventually hanged himself in the attic. The room he boarded up was now Maya’s closet.

The next day, I went into Maya’s closet. There was a patch of wallpaper that seemed newer. I peeled it back. Underneath, the lath and plaster had been patched awkwardly. I knocked on it. It sounded hollow. I took a hammer and broke through.

Inside the wall, there was a space, about the size of a coffin. On the floor, in the dust, was a child’s shoe, a rag doll, and a small, leather-bound diary. I opened it. The pages were yellowed, the writing faded, in a child’s hand. It read: ‘Papa says I have to be still. He says I mustn’t tell anyone about the gray man. The gray man comes at night. He sits on my bed and bounces my ball. He tells me to be quiet, or he’ll show me his face.’

The last entry said: ‘The gray man wants me to come play with him. He says I can go through the wall if I want. But I’m scared. Papa says I mustn’t. Papa says…’

I closed the diary. My hands were shaking. I went to find Elena. I told her everything. She looked at me with an expression I’d never seen before. Fear, but also exhaustion. ‘What are we going to do?’ she asked.

I didn’t have an answer. But that night, I heard the bouncing again, louder, and now it was coming from both my children’s rooms. I went to Maya’s room first. She was sitting up in bed, staring at the closet door. ‘He’s in there, Papa,’ she said. ‘He wants to play with Samuel.’

I opened the closet door. The gray man was there. Not a shadow, but a man, translucent, his face a gray void. He held the old leather ball in his hand. He looked at me, and I felt a cold that went through my bones. He didn’t speak, but I heard a voice in my head: ‘She promised to play. She’s in the wall.’

I backed away. I ran to the nursery. Samuel was in his crib, silent, staring at the ceiling. Above his crib, I saw a crack in the ceiling, a line of black. And I knew what was in the wall.

I sold the house at a loss. We moved to a new town, a new state. But I still hear it, sometimes, in the quiet hours: a soft, rhythmic thudding, coming from behind the walls. And sometimes, when I look at Maya, I see her staring at a corner of our new apartment, and when I ask what’s there, she just smiles and says, ‘Nothing, Papa. Not yet.’