The Hollow Between Walls

I never believed in the quiet. Not in the way people mean when they say a place has a good quiet, a peaceful hush that settles over you like a blanket. No, the quiet I came to know in that little room on the outskirts of Baguio was a heavier thing, a presence that pressed against the ears and left a low hum in its wake. It was the kind of quiet that made you strain to hear something—anything—just to confirm you weren’t deaf.

I was twenty then, studying in the city but living in a cramped boarding house that clung to the side of a hill. The house was an old wooden structure, paint peeling in long, pale strips, and it held four rooms in a row along a narrow hallway. I had the second room—a box of a space with a single bed, a rickety desk, and one window that overlooked the tangled bushes and the winding road below. The other rooms were occupied by an elderly couple who kept to themselves and a young man who worked nights at a nearby convenience store. It was the kind of building that sighed as it settled, and I thought nothing of it.

But there was a sound. A steady, rhythmic scratching, like fingernails dragging across wood, coming from inside the wall directly behind my bed. It began three days after I moved in. At first, I dismissed it as rats—there were plenty of them in these old houses. But the sound was too deliberate, too even, to be the scurry of vermin. It would start at odd hours, often late at night, and it would stop the moment I pressed my ear to the plaster. And then, just as I began to convince myself it was nothing, it would resume, always from the same spot.

I tried to ignore it. I read, I studied, I listened to music on my headphones. But the sound seeped through, a persistent rasp that seemed to grow louder with each passing day. It was like a whispered conversation held just beyond comprehension, an insistent question I couldn’t answer. One evening, desperate for sleep, I moved my bed to the opposite wall. The scratching followed. It was as if the sound had no fixed origin—it was simply in the walls, in the bones of the house, waiting for me to acknowledge it.

Then the dreams started. Or perhaps they weren’t dreams, but memories of a place I’d never been. I would find myself in a long, narrow corridor, lined with doors that were slightly ajar. Behind each door, a different sound: a child’s sob, a woman’s hum, a man’s low monotone—all speaking words I couldn’t grasp. At the end of the corridor, there was a solid wall of dirt, and from it, hands would emerge, slowly, their fingers curling and uncurling as if beckoning. I always woke with a gasp, my skin cold and damp.

The last night I spent in that room, I had a visitor. I awoke to a woman’s voice, clear as crystal, speaking in a dialect I didn’t recognize. She said, ‘You hear it too.’ I sat up, heart pounding, but the room was empty. The silence that followed was absolute, heavier than the scratching ever was. Then the scratching resumed, louder, more frantic, as if something inside the wall were trying to claw its way out.

I left the next morning. I told the landlord I had found a cheaper apartment closer to school, but the truth was I could no longer endure the sound. As I packed my bags, I noticed a loose board at the base of the wall—the one I’d always dismissed. On a whim, I pried it open. Inside, the hollow space was dusty, but it contained a small, faded photograph and a crumpled letter. The photograph showed a smiling woman, her face half-obscured by shadow. The letter was handwritten in a language I couldn’t read, but one phrase I could piece together from its shape: ‘the hollow between walls.’

I never found out who she was or what her story was. But sometimes, in the quiet of my new apartment, I think I can hear a faint scratching, far off, like a whisper carried on the wind. And I wonder if the hollow in that old house ever found what it was searching for—or if it’s still waiting, patient as the mountains, for someone else to hear it too.