The Static in the Sockets

When I moved into the ground-floor apartment at the corner of Meridian and Ash, the landlord warned me about the wiring. ‘Old building,’ he’d said, tapping the fuse box with a yellowed fingernail. ‘Lights flicker, sockets spark if you look at ’em wrong. But it’s got character.’ I didn’t need character. I needed cheap. The peeling floral wallpaper and the faint smell of mothballs were a fair trade for the rent. My previous place had been a nightmare—whispering vents, a cold spot in the hall that followed you like a loyal dog. I thought I’d left all that behind, but the day I moved in, I noticed a black scorch mark above the kitchen outlet, shaped roughly like a hand.

A month later, I was on a video call with my friend Dana from back home. She was settling into her new studio out in the suburbs, and we’d made a habit of Friday-night catch-ups, laptops propped on kitchen counters. The connection was mediocre—her face would occasionally freeze into a pixelated smudge—but the audio was clear. We were laughing about a disastrous date she’d had when I heard it: a low hum, almost beneath hearing, rising and falling like a distant engine. I asked if she had the TV on. ‘No, it’s just me,’ she said, but I heard it again, distinctly this time—a rhythmic thumping, like a fist on a door, but muffled, as if coming from the next room. ‘That,’ I said, ‘you hear that?’ She frowned, tilted her head. ‘Hear what?’ The sound stopped.

I tried to wave it off as a glitch, maybe a neighbor’s bass. But then my image on her screen started to distort. My face warped, pixels stretching into a grin that wasn’t mine, then snapped back. I looked at my own screen—Dana was fine, but my feed was corrupted by a shifting pattern of static, like a swarm of dark flies. The temperature in my apartment plummeted; I could see my breath, and the air took on a metallic tang, like old pennies. ‘Dana,’ I said, my voice shaky, ‘something’s wrong.’ Her face went pale through the screen. ‘I feel it too,’ she whispered. ‘It’s like… cold.’ I heard the thumping again, but this time it was behind me. I spun around—nothing. But the kitchen light flickered, and the scorch mark on the wall seemed darker, more defined.

I grabbed my laptop and bolted for the hallway, slamming my front door shut. As I stood in the narrow corridor, catching my breath, I looked back at the door. There, at the bottom, a shadow pooled beneath it, but it didn’t cast from any light source—it was a pitch-black stain that seeped out like oil, spreading across the scuffed linoleum. It formed a vague, humanoid silhouette, arms hanging down, head tilted. It stood there for a long, impossible second, then sank back into the crack as if retreating.

I didn’t go back in that night. I stayed at a 24-hour diner two blocks over, nursing a cold coffee, my phone on the table. Dana called me later, her voice tight. ‘I did a bit of digging,’ she said. ‘Apparently, a guy died in your building a few years back. Electrocuted himself trying to fix the wiring. But the police report said he wasn’t a resident. He was a squatter, and he’d been living in the basement. They found him in the walls.’ I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the diner’s overcompensating AC. ‘He was stuck,’ she continued, ‘pressed between the studs, his hand against the junction box that feeds your apartment. They said he’d been there for weeks.’

The next morning, I phoned my landlord and told him I was breaking the lease, no questions. He refunded my deposit without a word, like he’d been expecting it. As I packed my boxes, I avoided looking at the wall above the kitchen outlet. But just before I left, I took a final photo of the mark with my phone. In the image, the scorch isn’t a hand anymore—it’s a face, wide-mouthed and staring. I deleted the photo, but the static in the sockets still hisses whenever I plug in a charger, and sometimes, late at night, I feel a cold draft from an open circuit, and I know that wherever I move, some wires will carry a current I can’t see. And on the video calls I still make to Dana, my image flickers for a moment, just beyond her reach.