The Painted Room

Hieu’s first day in America was a blur of airports and freeways, ending at a small, aging house on a maple-lined street in a town that smelled of rain and wet asphalt. The family hosting him were kindly but overwhelmed—a mother, a father, and a teenage girl who regarded him with shy curiosity. Their home was neat but cluttery, lined with photographs and religious iconography, and they showed him to a spare bedroom at the end of a narrow hallway. The room was modest, with a single window looking out onto a fence, a bed with a floral quilt, and a faint, sweet scent he couldn’t place—like dried flowers or old wood. Exhausted beyond reason, he thanked them and collapsed onto the mattress, not even bothering to unpack. He lay on his side facing the wall, which was painted a pale, sickly green. Within minutes, sleep pulled him under.

He woke, disoriented, to a dim room lit only by the orange glow of a streetlamp outside. He guessed he’d slept a few hours—his body still heavy with jet lag. As he lay there, he heard a faint sound: a soft, rhythmic scratching, like fingernails on fabric, coming from the other side of the wall. He pressed his ear to the plaster and heard a low murmur, a voice he couldn’t make out, but it spoke in a language he didn’t recognize—not Vietnamese, not English, but something with sibilant edges. He assumed the family had a radio on, or maybe the girl was on her phone. Too tired to investigate, he tried to sleep again, but the scratching followed him, growing louder and more insistent, until it seemed to be inside his own skull. He sat up, turned on the lamp, and the sound ceased instantly.

The next morning, at breakfast, he asked casually about the noise. The mother’s smile flickered. ‘Oh, the house has its quirks,’ she said, pouring him tea. ‘Old pipes, drafty walls. Nothing to worry about.’ But her eyes darted to the ceiling, and she changed the subject. The girl, Ana, shot him a warning glance, and Hieu felt a chill that had nothing to do with the unseasonable cold that had crept in overnight.

Over the following weeks, Hieu learned the rhythm of the house. He attended classes, navigated the complexities of American life, and returned home each evening to the same routine. But the noises continued—sometimes from the wall, sometimes from behind the closet, sometimes from the floorboards beneath his bed. He would see, out of the corner of his eye, a shadow that moved against the flow of the light. He began to suspect the house was infested—with rats, perhaps, or something worse. He bought traps and set them, but they remained unsprung.

One night, unable to sleep, he decided to inspect the room more closely. He pulled back the faded floral wallpaper near the bed and found that it was not wallpaper at all, but a layer of cheap paint that had been applied over something else. As he peeled it away, he uncovered a mural—a painting of a forest, dark and twisted, with trees that seemed to reach towards the viewer. In the center, barely visible, was a small figure—a child, perhaps, or a hunched animal—with its back turned. The paint was old, but it looked fresh, as if it had been redone recently. He thought he saw the figure’s head begin to turn, and he stumbled back, tearing the paper further. The sound it made was uncannily like the scratching he heard every night.

He brought his discovery to the family. They exchanged glances, and the father finally spoke. ‘We knew about the painting when we moved in,’ he said, his voice low. ‘The previous owner was an artist. She painted that room for her daughter, who died in that bed. They say the girl loved the forest, and she would sit for hours, drawing it. But after the funeral, the painting would… change. We tried to paint over it, but it always came through. So we lived with it.’

The mother added, ‘We thought if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t be bothered.’ Hieu felt a wave of cold sweat. He realized the scratching wasn’t coming from inside the wall—it was coming from the painting itself. The figure had turned. It was looking at him. And its mouth was open in a silent scream.

Hieu moved out that week, finding a cheap apartment near campus. He told himself it was just a coincidence, a case of exhaustion and an overactive imagination. But months later, when he visited a friend who lived in a modern building with pristine white walls, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched. He began to hear, faintly, a scratching in the walls even there. He started sleeping with a light on. He started checking behind every painting.

One morning, he woke to find his own bedroom wall—in the new, clean apartment—now bore a faint, green stain, the same sickly hue as the room he’d fled. And in the center, a dark shape that seemed, to his tired eyes, to be a small figure. He moved again. But the stain followed. It’s there now, behind the bed, growing darker each night. The scratching has started. I don’t know how long I can keep repainting the walls.

This is Hieu’s story. He told it to me over coffee, his hands trembling. I’m sharing it without his consent, and I hope he never finds this. But maybe you can understand why I sleep with my lights on, why I’ve stopped buying old houses, and why I now check every wall for the faintest trace of green.