The Curtain Between

It was a humid August night when my daughter, Lena, came back from her midnight stroll with friends. I was dozing on the sofa, the television mumbling to itself, when she slipped in and clicked it off. Our flat is small, a single corridor with two rooms separated by a thin partition and a heavy velvet curtain that does little to muffle sound. Lena’s room is the inner one, mine the outer, and we’ve always been able to hear each other’s breathing, let alone words.

I woke to darkness and thirst. I padded to the kitchen, the tiles cold under my bare feet, drank a glass of water, and returned to my bed. The silence was thick, broken only by the hum of the old refrigerator. As I settled under the sheet, I heard Lena’s voice, low and firm: ‘Go away.’ I assumed she was shooing the neighbor’s cat, which sometimes slipped in through the window, or that she was talking in her sleep. I closed my eyes.

Then, a scream tore through the thin wall: ‘MAAAAA!’ My heart slammed. I jumped up, throwing aside the curtain. The room was pitch black, the streetlight outside casting a faint glow through the blinds. Lena was sitting upright in her bed, her face pale, her eyes wide but unseeing. She was trembling, pointing at the corner of the room.

‘I saw something,’ she whispered, her voice cracking. ‘A man, standing there, watching me. I told him to go away, but he just smiled.’ I flicked on the light, but the corner was empty. I checked under the bed, in the closet, behind the door. Nothing. I told her it was just a nightmare, a trick of the dark. She nodded, but her hands were shaking.

I went back to my room, leaving the curtain open a crack. I lay awake, listening. After a while, I heard Lena’s breathing even out. But then, a sound came from her room—a soft, rhythmic scraping, like fingernails on wood. I froze. It was coming from the wall between our rooms. I pressed my ear to the wall. The scraping stopped. Then, a whisper, so faint I almost missed it: ‘You can’t see me, but I see you.’

I stumbled back, my legs weak. I called out Lena’s name, but there was no answer. I rushed to her room. She was asleep, but her face was contorted, as if in pain. I shook her awake. ‘There’s something in the wall,’ I said. She looked at me, her eyes hollow. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s been here for days. I didn’t want to scare you.’

We sat together, huddled on her bed, as the scraping grew louder, then stopped. The silence that followed was worse. Then, from the corner, a voice—not Lena’s, not mine—a deep, gravelly voice that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere: ‘You should have left when I told you to.’

We fled the flat that night, but the voice followed us. It whispers from the walls of every room we enter, always just out of sight, always watching. And we know, with a certainty that chills our bones, that the curtain between us and the other side was never really closed.