The Stucco Cracks

I was fifteen the summer we moved into the Cattail Arms, a squat, mustard-colored building on the edge of Albuquerque that smelled of burnt dust and mothballs. My mother, my aunt, my little brother, and I squeezed into a two-bedroom unit on the third floor, the paint peeling like sunburned skin. My mother had a way with dreams—she’d wake up shaking, muttering about falling teeth and dead birds, and within a week, something terrible would happen. I’d inherited a sliver of it, though I never admitted it out loud. I’d dream of rain, and then someone’s car would stall in a flash flood. I’d dream of a loose tooth, and a cousin would break his arm. It wasn’t a gift; it was an itch.

That Saturday, the apartment sweltered. My mother and aunt took my brother to the laundromat on Central, where the machines ate quarters and the dryers never got hot. I stayed behind, sprawled on a cracked vinyl sofa, half-listening to the buzz of a failing fluorescent light. My boyfriend, Diego, called from a payphone at the corner bodega.

“Hey, you home?” he said, his voice crackling.

“Yeah, everyone’s out. You can come over if you want.”

“Cool. Be there in ten.”

I hung up and stretched, my bare feet sticking to the linoleum. The apartment was a maze of cardboard boxes we hadn’t unpacked, and the air was thick with the smell of my mother’s evening primrose oil. I decided to wait for Diego on the little balcony—a cramped concrete slab with a rusted railing overlooking the parking lot and the empty lot beyond, where weeds grew tall and garbage bags swelled in the heat.

As I leaned on the railing, I noticed something odd in the stucco wall beside the sliding door. A crack—thin as a spider’s leg—ran from the corner of the window down to the floor, and inside it, something glinted. I knelt and peered, but the light was dim. I scratched at the edge with my fingernail, and a piece of the stucco flaked off. Underneath, there was a small, circular indentation, about the size of a quarter, filled with what looked like dried clay. I pried at it, and it popped out, leaving a shallow hole. In the hole, I saw a tiny, folded piece of paper.

I pulled it out. It was yellowed, brittle, and covered in minute, cramped handwriting. I unfolded it carefully. The script was in a foreign language—maybe Spanish, maybe something else—but one word stood out in block letters: “EL CALOR.” The heat. I stared at it, feeling a chill despite the sweltering air. Diego’s voice called from downstairs, “Hey! You up there?”

I shoved the paper into my pocket and met him at the door. He was sweating, his hair plastered to his forehead, and he grinned, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I forced a laugh. “Just the heat.”

We hung out for an hour, watching TV and messing around, but I couldn’t shake the unease from that paper. After he left, I took it out again. The handwriting seemed to shift in the dim light, as if the letters were slowly crawling. I put it under my pillow, thinking I’d show it to my mother later. But that night, I dreamed of the crack in the wall, spreading wider, and a voice whispering in a language I didn’t know, but I understood: “You found my warning.”

I woke up drenched in sweat. The room was dark, but I could see the crack in the wall from my bed—it seemed larger, and the stucco around it was damp, like something was bleeding through. I reached out to touch it, and my finger sank into the wall as if it were wet clay. I yanked back, and the hole closed instantly, leaving only the original crack.

My mother came home the next morning with a bag of groceries. She stopped at the threshold, her eyes scanning the room, and said, “Someone’s been here. Someone angry.” She walked to the wall and touched the crack, her face going pale. “This is new.”

“I found something in it,” I said, and retrieved the paper from under my pillow.

She read it, her lips moving silently. Her face drained of color. “Where did you find this?”

“In the wall. Under the stucco.”

She clutched the paper to her chest, her hand trembling. “This is not a joke. This is a warning from a soul that never left. It says, ‘The heat will bring them back.’ But what heat? And who?” She looked out the window at the blazing sun. “We need to leave this apartment.”

But we had nowhere else to go. And that night, the heat intensified. The air became thick and syrupy, and even with the fans, we sweated,praying for a break. At midnight, I heard a faint scratching from the wall. I put my ear to the crack, and I heard a voice, high-pitched and frantic, speaking in ragged Spanish: “No dejes que entren. No dejes que entren.” Don’t let them in.

I pulled back, heart pounding. My mother, awake, stared at me. “You heard it too?”

“What is it?” my brother whimpered from the bed.

“Nothing,” I said, lying. “Just the pipes.”

But the scratching grew louder, and then the stucco began to bulge. A small hand—brown, withered, fingerless—pressed against the wall from inside. Then another. And then a face, pressed against the stucco from within, its features forming in the plaster—a child’s face, eyes wide and empty. My mother pulled me and my brother into the kitchen, shielding us. “Don’t look,” she commanded, but I couldn’t help it.

The face was mouthing something, over and over. I read her lips: “Calor. Calor.”

Then the stucco cracked more, and a thin, reedy voice seeped through: “The heat is coming. They don’t like the cold.”

“Who?” I shouted, but the wall went silent.

The next day, Diego didn’t come to school. I called his house, and his sister answered, sobbing. He’d been in a car accident on I-40, she said. His car had rear-ended a truck. He was in a coma. I sank to the floor, the paper burning in my pocket. My mother knelt beside me, her face grim. “Your dream?” she asked.

“I dreamed of rain,” I said. “But it was blood.”

I knew then that the warning wasn’t about heat in the weather. It was about the heat of anger, of desperation. The building had been built over something—an old pueblo, a place where people had been trapped and left to burn. The souls were reaching out, and they had latched onto Diego, using him to deliver a message.

That night, I tore open the wall with a crowbar. Inside, I found a hollow cavity filled with bones—small, child-sized—and a rotted leather pouch. Inside the pouch was a photograph of a family, their faces scratched out, and a clay charm shaped like a sun. The paper I’d found was wrapped around the charm. I realized the message wasn’t from the dead; it was from the living, a plea from those who had sealed the souls inside. They had tried to warn anyone who came to this place: the heat would release them.

The stucco crack had grown into a yawning mouth. I dropped the paper and backed away. As I did, the bones stirred, and a wave of heat blasted from the wall, knocking me back. I saw a vision—a fire, long ago, consuming a village, and the screams of children as they were trapped beneath the earth. My own scream joined theirs, echoing through the apartment.

At dawn, the authorities came. They dismantled the wall, found the bones, and declared it an ancient burial site. But it was too late. Diego never woke up. And now, whenever the temperature climbs above ninety degrees, I still hear the scratching, and I know they’re waiting, still hungry, still wanting to feel the sun.

I don’t dream of rain anymore. I dream of fire. And I know, one day, the crack will open fully, and the heat will bring them all back.

My mother says we should have listened. But listening doesn’t undo what’s already been set free. The stucco cracks are just the beginning. And if you ever find a paper folded in a wall, don’t read it. Don’t touch it. Just run—because the heat is coming, and it doesn’t care who it burns.