The Hollow Spaces Between

It started when I was nine, listening to my older brother and his friends huddle in the corner of the living room, their voices hushed and trembling. They swore they saw something in the hallway of our old apartment—a woman, pale as milk, drifting through the dark like she was made of fog. They described her as if she were a wound in the air, a tear in the fabric of the house. The next week, our grandfather passed, and for years I was consumed with a childish envy. I wanted to see her, to feel that chill of the impossible. But she never came back, and the memory faded like a bruise.

Now I’m thirteen, and we’ve moved into a sprawling, decaying house on the edge of a dying town. It had four bedrooms, which was a luxury for our family of six, but I got the smallest room—a cramped, oppressive cube at the end of the hall, with a single window that looked out onto a wall of pine trees that seemed to lean closer each day. The wallpaper was a sickly yellow, peeling in long strips like dead skin, and the drywall beneath was soft, crumbly, almost inviting. I don’t know why I started picking at it. Maybe it was the boredom, the need to deface something, to leave a mark. I would sit on my floor for hours, gouging out little crescents of plaster, until thin rivulets of dust pooled on the baseboards.

My dad, ever patient, eventually painted over my damage with a smooth, pleasant cream color. But I didn’t stop. I just dug deeper, through the fresh paint, through the old layers, until I hit something solid—a series of horizontal wooden slats, each about an inch apart, running across the entire wall. Through the gaps, I could see pure blackness, a void that seemed to swallow the light from my bedside lamp. I remember pressing my eye to one of the slats, peering into that darkness, and feeling a strange, giddy thrill. There was something in there. I was sure of it.

I started to sleep with the light on, but the darkness behind the slats seemed to grow, to press outward, as if it were breathing. The first time I heard it was on a Tuesday night, around 3 AM. A soft scraping, like fingernails on wood, but not from the walls—it was coming from inside the wall, between the slats. I froze, every muscle locked, and listened. It was rhythmic, almost like a heartbeat, but it was moving. Slowly, it traveled from the corner of my room, behind my bed, and then stopped right where I was sitting. I could feel it—a cold draft emanating from the gaps, and a faint, sweet odor, like rotting flowers.

I told my parents, but they dismissed it as mice or the house settling. My older brothers laughed, said I was hearing the pipes. But they hadn’t seen the slats. They hadn’t felt that presence pressing against the other side. I started to dig again, this time with my bare fingers, tearing at the edges of the wood, trying to widen the gap. The wood was old, brittle, and it gave way with a dry snap. I pulled one slat loose, revealing a hollow space that ran deep into the wall—far deeper than it should have, a channel that seemed to extend into pure darkness, warm and fetid, like a mouth.

And that’s when I heard the woman’s voice. It wasn’t in my ears—it was in my head, a whisper that coiled around my thoughts: ‘You’ve been digging for me all along.’ I fell back, my heart hammering, and I saw something move in the gap—a flash of pale skin, a long, pale finger slipping through the hole, curling as if beckoning. I screamed, and my mother burst in, but by then, the finger was gone, and the hole was dark and empty.

I couldn’t stay in that room. I moved to the living room couch, but I could still feel her presence, seeping through the floorboards, the vents, the cracks in the walls. My family thought I was going crazy, made appointments for me to see a therapist, but I knew it was real. I started leaving the house at night, wandering the perimeter, looking into the windows, and I saw her—pressed against the glass of my room on the second floor, her face a pale oval, her eyes black pits, her mouth forming silent words. She wanted me to come back, to finish what I started.

The night my grandfather died, I had a dream. In it, I was older, standing in that room, and I had torn all the slats away, revealing a gaping hole in the wall, like a wound. And from that hole, the woman emerged—not walking, but gliding, her feet not touching the floor. She looked like the sisters in those old paintings, but her skin was stretched too thin over her bones, and her smile was too wide. She reached for me, and I couldn’t move. She whispered, ‘I was waiting for you to open the door.’

I woke up screaming, and I knew that my grandfather’s death and this woman were connected. She was a collector of souls, a remnant of some old tragedy that had soaked into the wood and plaster of this house. And I had been scraping away the layers, releasing her from her prison, unaware that I was also opening a door for her to take what she wanted—my life, my soul, the essence of everyone I loved.

Now, I sit in the corner of my room, the slats removed, the hole yawning before me. I have a flashlight, but the beam is swallowed by the darkness. My family is asleep, and I can hear the scraping again, closer, more insistent. There’s a tapping now, like something inside is trying to break free. And I know, with absolute certainty, that if I look into that hole one more time, I’ll see not just the woman, but all the faces she’s taken—including my brother’s, my cousins’, even my grandfather’s, all staring back at me with hollow eyes, waiting for me to join them.

I don’t want to look, but I can’t stop myself. I lean forward, my breath fogging the air, and I peer into the darkness. I see a flash of white, and then a hand, impossibly long, reaches out, and the finger curls again. This time, I don’t scream. I just let it take me, and as the darkness swallows me whole, I realize that I finally got what I always wanted—a true paranormal experience. But in that moment, the last thing I see is the hole in the wall, and from the other side, I watch myself kneeling, watching, trapped forever in the hollow spaces between the walls.