The Grout Between the Tiles

Our flat on the fourth floor of a pre-war building in the city had a particular smell, a mix of old wood and damp plaster that clung to everything. My brother, Leo, and I shared the room at the end of the hall, the one with the cracked window that looked out onto a brick wall. My sister, Mara, had the smaller room next to ours, and our mother worked nights as a nurse, so we were often alone. Our father was a marine engineer, gone for months at a time, his presence more a collection of postcards and foreign coins than a person.

For about a year, we had heard the sounds. Not voices, exactly, but the kind of muffled, rhythmic tapping you might mistake for pipes or a neighbour’s radiator. It usually started around midnight, coming from the wall between our room and the bathroom. Leo claimed it was a rat, but the first time I pressed my ear to the cold plaster, I felt a faint vibration, like something breathing on the other side. I never told anyone, but sometimes I thought I heard words, distorted and slow, as if spoken underwater.

Then came the morning of May 5th. The sky was a dull grey, and the flat felt unusually still, even for a Tuesday. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, my school books open but unread, waiting for Mara to help me with a maths problem. Leo was in the kitchen, I thought, because I could hear the fridge door hinge complain. That’s when a voice said, clear as a bell, ‘Hello, Mummy.’

It was high and thin, like a child’s, but with a hollow quality that made my stomach drop. I froze, my pencil hovering over the paper. ‘Leo?’ I called, but my voice came out squeaky. I heard the fridge door close, but no answer. Then, thirty seconds later, the voice came again, this time from the direction of the bathroom, and it was distinctly a little girl’s, pleading: ‘Hello, Mummy. Where are you?’

I ran out of the room, nearly crashing into Mara, who was standing in the hallway, her face pale. ‘You heard it too?’ she whispered. I nodded. ‘It’s coming from your room,’ she said, and I saw her hands were shaking. Without thinking, I sprinted back to our bedroom, and that’s when I saw her.

The little girl stood in the middle of the room, about three feet tall, her hair grey and matted, her skin the colour of ash. She wore a dirty white nightgown that hung on her like a tent, and her eyes were black buttons sewn roughly onto her face. She was dripping wet, and there was a smell of damp flowers and rot. She was looking at the wall, not at me, her mouth moving as if she were speaking to someone I couldn’t see.

I screamed. The sound tore out of me, and she turned her head slowly, those button eyes fixed on me. Behind me, Mara gasped. She was at the doorway, staring, unable to move. The little girl raised a hand, and I saw that her fingers were webbed, and there was something on her wrist, a faded hospital bracelet with a name I couldn’t read. She smiled, and her mouth was a black hole filled with silt.

Then she vanished, like smoke dissolving, leaving a wet patch on the wooden floor. Leo came running from the kitchen, asking what was wrong, but I couldn’t speak. Mara pulled us both into the living room and locked the door. We sat on the sofa, not moving, until our mother came home at eight in the morning to find her children huddled together, the air in the flat thick with the smell of wet earth.

We told her, but she dismissed it as a nightmare, saying we had all been stressed. But the next night, the tapping started again, and this time it was unmistakable: it was coming from the floorboards, from under the rug, from the very foundation of the building. And when I put my ear to the floor, I heard a voice, not a girl’s, but a woman’s, old and cracked: ‘Where have you taken my daughter?’

We moved out two weeks later, but the dream continues. Every night, I see the little girl in the corner of my new room, dripping water onto the carpet, the hospital bracelet now reading the name ‘Amina’. And the grout between the tiles in our bathroom, which I thought I’d seen cleaned, still holds those black specks that move when I’m not looking.