The Hungry Wall

It started with the wallpaper in the upstairs hallway. We’d moved into the old parsonage on the edge of the marsh, a place with paint peeling like dead skin and a furnace that groaned like a dying animal. My wife, Lena, was six months along, and our two girls—six-year-old Maia and little June, just two—were full of the restless energy of new places. But the house felt watchful, especially the hallway where the wallpaper showed faded roses that seemed to darken when you passed.

Maia began talking about ‘the lady in the wall.’ She said the lady was sad and wanted to come out. We dismissed it as a child’s imagination, the product of too many fairy tales. But then Maia started drawing her: a tall figure with hollow eyes and hair like seaweed, always pressing against a thin membrane, her hands flattened as if against glass. June, too young to understand, would sometimes wake screaming, pointing at the hallway door.

The bad nights started. We’d hear a faint, rhythmic scratching coming from inside the walls, like fingernails trying to find a purchase. At first it was only at night, but soon it was there all the time, a constant reminder that we were not alone. One evening, Lena was in the kitchen when she felt a cold draft from the hallway. She turned to see the wallpaper bulging outward, as if something on the other side was pushing. The bulge moved across the wall, leaving a trail of cracked plaster. She screamed, and the pressing stopped.

I tried to rationalize it—settling, rodents, the wind off the marsh. But I couldn’t ignore the way the house seemed to breathe. The upstairs hallway grew noticeably colder, and the air had a cloying sweetness, like rotting flowers. Maia started spending all her time in her room, drawing the lady over and over. Her pictures showed the lady getting closer, her hands breaking through the flimsy barrier. In the most recent one, the lady had Maia’s hand in hers.

One afternoon, I heard Maia crying from her room. I rushed up to find her huddled in a corner, pointing at the wall. ‘She spoke to me, Daddy. She said she wants to trade places. She wants my room.’ The scratching began in earnest then, a frantic scrabbling that filled the entire house. The wallpaper in the hallway split open, revealing a dark, yawning cavity behind it. A hand, impossibly thin and pale, emerged, reaching with bony fingers.

I grabbed Maia and ran. We pulled the girls into the car and drove to a motel, leaving everything behind. Lena kept asking what we were running from, but I couldn’t explain. All I knew was that the house was hungry, and it had wanted our daughter. We never went back. We left the furniture, the clothes, the life we’d started to build. The last I saw of the parsonage, a light was in the upstairs window, and something stood silhouetted against it, long and thin. It was waving, but I knew it wasn’t a goodbye. It was a promise.