The Pitted Concrete

The summer of ’57 was thick with the hum of cicadas and the oily smell of hot asphalt. My father, Arthur, had been invited to a barbecue at the home of a colleague, a man named Harlan Kest, whose property sat far back from the county road, swallowed by a dense stand of pines. My mother, Eleanor, clutched her purse the whole drive, her knuckles white as Arthur swerved to avoid a deer that materialized from the twilight. He laughed, slapping the steering wheel, while she stared ahead, silent. I was in the back, eleven years old, watching the trees blur into a solid wall of green.

We turned onto a gravel drive that crunched under the tires like broken teeth. The house itself was a squat, modern concrete block, all sharp angles and flat surfaces, with a wide picture window that glowed a sickly yellow. It looked recent, but already the concrete was pitted, tiny craters dotting the walls as if something had eaten at it. The front yard was a strange thing—not a lawn, but a stretch of packed earth dotted with old, gnarled oaks that hunched over the driveway like tired giants. Their branches scraped against each other, and I could swear I heard a low murmur in the rustling leaves, like the house itself was whispering to the trees. The alley leading to the front door was lit by a single, buzzing bulb that cast more shadows than light.

Inside, the party was in full swing. Laughter, clinking glasses, the smell of charred meat from the grill. Harlan Kest was a big, bluff man with a booming voice and a handshake that crushed my fingers. He introduced us to his wife, Mavis, a thin woman with a tight smile and eyes that never quite met yours, and their two children, a boy my age named Ellis and a girl a few years older named Prue. They were polite, but there was a wrongness about them, a stiffness in their movements, as if they were following a script they didn’t fully understand. I pushed the feeling away and found a seat on a porch swing, watching the adults get louder as Arthur knocked back his first whiskey.

As the evening deepened, the party split—the men huddled around the grill, the women in the kitchen. I wandered to the edge of the yard, where the pines began to press in. The air was cool here, and the cicadas were loud, but underneath that, I heard something else: a rhythmic scraping, like a nail dragging across concrete. I followed the sound around the side of the house, where the ground dipped into a shallow hollow. There, in the gloom, I saw a figure—a boy about my age, pressed flat against the house wall, his fingers moving in a slow, deliberate pattern over the pitted concrete. He was tracing the craters, his lips moving, whispering words I couldn’t catch. He turned his head, and his eyes were wide and white, but he didn’t see me. He was looking through the wall, as if at something on the other side. Then his mouth opened, and he let out a low, guttural sound that seemed to come from the earth itself.

I stumbled back, my heart hammering. I found Ellis on the porch, and I asked, ‘Who is that kid?’ Ellis looked at me, confused. ‘What kid?’ I described him, the way he pressed to the wall, the whispering. Ellis’s face went pale. He grabbed my arm, tight, and pulled me close until his lips were at my ear. ‘Don’t go near the walls,’ he hissed. ‘They’re not finished. The house is hungry.’ I laughed, thinking it was a joke. But Ellis didn’t laugh. He just stared at me with the same white-eyed look as the boy, and then he said, ‘We’ve all seen him. He’s the reason we have to keep the lights on at night. If the lights go out, he comes out of the walls.’

I didn’t have time to dwell on it, because Arthur was calling me, his voice slurred, wanting to leave. My mother was already in the car, her face pale, and I could see the fear in her eyes. As we pulled away, I glanced back at the house. The picture window was dark now, the parties gone. But at the corner of the house, I saw the boy again—standing perfectly still, his face pressed against the glass, his mouth open in a silent cry. And I saw the walls themselves shudder, the concrete rippling like skin, as if something inside was trying to get out.

The drive home was worse than ever. Arthur was drunker than I’d ever seen him, swerving across the center line, muttering about ‘that damn house’ and ‘the things in the walls.’ I could hear my mother’s breath catch every time a car passed, their headlights washing over us like searchlights. We nearly had a head-on collision with a truck, and I remember thinking, ‘This is it. This is the end.’ But somehow, we made it home, and Arthur passed out on the couch, and my mother and I sat in the kitchen, not speaking, just listening to the ticking of the clock.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. The image of the boy, the whisper, the rippling concrete—it played over and over. And then I heard it: a faint scratching at my window, a scraping, rhythmic, like nails on concrete. I pulled back the curtain, and there was the boy, his face lit by the moon, his lips moving. He wasn’t looking at me; he was looking past me, into the house. And behind him, the shadows around my yard’s trees shifted, and I saw the walls of our own house—the old brick, the mortar—begin to pit and crumble, forming small craters, like a disease. I slammed the curtain shut and hid under the blanket, whispering to myself that it was just the wind, just the night.

But I knew better. The house wasn’t the only thing that was hungry. The earth itself was waiting, and we had brought it a feast. And somewhere, in the distant pines, I heard the boy’s voice, now clear as a bell, saying, ‘You’re next, you’re next, you’re next.’

We never went back to Harlan Kest’s house again. I’m glad. But even now, decades later, when I see a house with concrete walls, or feel the grit of cement on my fingertips, I shiver. Because I know that there are places where the walls are not just walls—they are lips, they are gums, they are teeth, and they are always, always hungry. And the boy with the white eyes, he’s still there, tracing his name into the pitted concrete, waiting for someone to come close enough to listen.