The Hung Hide

The first time I noticed it, I thought a cricket had gotten trapped behind the picture frame. But the sound wasn’t coming from the frame; it was coming from the drum my mother had hung on the wall of our new house. She had made it herself, stretching raw deer hide over a wooden hoop, and her cousin had carved a drumstick that hung just above it like a dark, polished bone. We moved in that spring, and the drum went up in the living room, a silent guardian watching over our boxes and half-unpacked books.

All summer long, that drum made a sound like a grasshopper trapped inside, a rhythmic tick-thump, tick-thump that would start and stop at odd hours. At first, we dismissed it as the hide drying and stretching in the heat. The summer was brutal, dry, and hot, and the rawhide would have been brittle, but the ticking was too deliberate, too alive. My wife, Elena, would look up from her reading and say, ‘There it goes again.’ My daughter, Mira, claimed she saw the drum’s surface move, but we chalked it up to her imagination. I, too, tried to ignore it, but as autumn crept in and the air grew crisp, the ticking only grew more insistent.

Finally, one evening, I had enough. The sound was driving me crazy. I pulled the drum off the wall, feeling its weight, the hide cool and smooth under my fingers. I shook it, expecting to hear something rattle inside, but there was nothing. I turned it over and examined the taut skin, the lacing, the wooden rim. No cracks, no insects, no foreign objects. Then, I held it to my ear, and I heard a faint, sticky rustling, like something was crawling just beneath the surface. I put it down and told Elena we should take it to a museum or throw it away, but my mother, who had been watching silently, shook her head.

‘Don’t’, she said, her voice low and serious. ‘That drum is not just a drum. It holds a spirit. A hungry one.’ I laughed, but she didn’t smile. She told me a story from her childhood, about a drum that had been made from the hide of a deer that had been killed in anger, and how the spirit of that animal can linger, seeking release or revenge. She said her grandmother used to say that a drum made in haste, or with bad intentions, can become a prison for a restless soul. She looked at the drum, her eyes dark and distant. ‘You have to feed it.’

I thought she was joking. But the next morning, the drum was back on the wall, and there was a deep, wet smear on the hide, something that looked like congealed blood. I asked my mother if she knew anything about it, but she just shrugged and said, ‘It takes care of itself.’ Not long after, our cat, Whiskers, disappeared. Mira cried for days, but then she stopped, and she started spending a lot of time staring at the drum. One day, I caught her whispering to it. When I asked what she was doing, she said, ‘It’s lonely.’ I felt a chill run down my spine.

That winter, things got worse. Strange noises at night, not just the ticking, but a low, resonant hum. The drum seemed to pulse with a life of its own. I decided to take it down and burn it. But as I reached for it, the hide bulged outward, like a hand pushing from the inside. I stumbled back, and the drum fell to the floor, rolling to a stop. A crack split the hide, and from the gap, a long, black tendril of smoke curled out, smelling of rot and burnt hair. I froze, watching as the smoke coalesced into a vague, animalistic shape, with too many legs and a gaping, silent mouth.

My mother came into the room, her face grim. She said, ‘You’ve angered it. Now it’s free.’ The shape began to move, crawling across the floor, heading toward Mira’s room. I screamed and ran after it, but it slipped through the crack under her door. When I threw the door open, the room was empty. The window was open, the curtains fluttering in the cold wind. The drum lay on the floor, silent at last. The only sound was the faint tick, tick, tick, coming from the walls, spreading throughout the house. We moved out two weeks later, but I still hear it sometimes, especially at night. And I know, somewhere, the drum is out there, waiting for a new wall, a new house, a new family to feed on.