The Static in the Lathing

It was the summer of 1998, and I was nineteen, living in a cramped apartment above my uncle’s hardware store in the rust belt town of Millbrook. The place had that smell of sawdust and old oil, and the walls were thin as paper. My bedroom was a narrow box at the back, its only window looking out onto a fire escape that clanged in the wind. I spent most nights hunched over my secondhand PC, a beige tower with a CRT monitor that hummed like a trapped bee. That particular night, I was deep into a racing game, the kind with pixelated mountains and slippery snow. It was around 3:15 AM, the hour when the building’s pipes groaned and the floorboards settled. I was grinding through a hairpin turn on the final Alpine track when I heard it: a strange, rhythmic scraping, like a fingernail dragging across a metal file. It was faint at first, but insistent, and it seemed to come from the wall behind my computer, which leaned against the plasterboard that separated my room from the vacant shop below.

I paused the game and killed the speakers, but the sound persisted. I powered down the PC, then reached behind the case and flipped the switch on the power supply. Still, there it was, a low, grinding whine, like a bearing about to seize. I pressed my ear to the cold case, but the sound seemed to originate from the wall itself, just behind where the tower sat. My heart started to thump in a nervous rhythm. I pulled the desk away from the wall, peeling back the cheap paneling where a corner of the wallpaper was peeling. There, I saw a small, dark vent, barely a hand’s width across, near the floor. It was covered in a rusted grate, and from within came that same scraping, now louder, almost eager. I knelt down, my nose inches from the grate, and the sound stopped. Then I heard a whisper, not in words but in a breathy sigh that moved the dust. Something in there was waiting.

I tried to pull the grate off, but the screws were stripped. My uncle, a practical man, had once told me that the building had been a factory before the war, and the basement was a maze of old shafts and ducts. He’d warned me never to go down there, said it was ‘unstable.’ But that sound, it was a call. I grabbed a flashlight from the kitchen and made my way to the basement stairs, which were at the end of the hallway, behind a door that was usually locked. The door was ajar. The stairs were narrow and steep, and the air grew thick with the smell of damp concrete and something else, a sour, metallic tang. My flashlight beam picked out cobwebs and scattered debris, and the sound grew louder, now a rhythmic chipping, like a stonemason at work.

I followed the sound to a low passage under the shop floor. There, against a far wall, I found a grate identical to the one in my room, but larger, and behind it was a dark opening. The chipping stopped. I shone the light inside and saw a narrow tunnel, barely wide enough to crawl, going into the earth. On the floor, I noticed a fresh scratch in the concrete, as if something had been dragged. And then I saw the lathing. It was an old plaster wall that had collapsed, revealing a hollow space. Inside that hollow, a figure was crouched, not human, but a thing of metal and wire, its skin like oxidized copper, its eyes two dim red dots. It held a small, rusted tool in its clawed hand, and it was rhythmically tapping it against a pipe that led up to my bedroom.

I stumbled backward, but the thing moved with a sudden jerk, faster than any machine should. It let out a sound, a high-pitched grinding, that matched the one I’d heard. It began to crawl toward me, its limbs unfolding like a spider’s. I turned and ran, scrabbling up the basement stairs, slamming the door behind me. I didn’t sleep that night, and the next morning I told my uncle, who went pale. He said, ‘The lathing, you saw it?’ He showed me an old newspaper clipping: a fire in 1959, a factory worker who went missing, his machine kept running, and they found a ‘mass of fused metal’ in the walls. He said the building had been ‘haunted’ ever since.

I packed my things that same day and left Millbrook. But even now, years later, when I hear the hum of a computer fan or the whine of a bearing, I feel that scraped raw place inside me. And sometimes, in the dead of night, I hear a tapping behind my wall, and I know it’s still there, lathing away, waiting for me to listen.