The Vinyl Wall

I never believed in the word ‘gift’ until the summer I spent in the coastal town of Port Blossom. My name is Mira, and I had taken a temporary position at the old maritime bank there. The apartment I found was a top-floor unit in a building called The Anchorage, a relic from the 1960s with creaking pipes and a smell of salt and dust. My roommate, Lina, worked the same shifts as I did but often left earlier, so the place felt like my own private purgatory in the early mornings.

Our room was a narrow rectangle with two twin beds against opposite walls. My bed was nearest the window that faced the deserted pier. A faded floral curtain hung limp, and the only piece of furniture was a heavy oak desk with a green banker’s lamp. The walls were covered in a vinyl wallpaper patterned with pale, repeating anchors and ropes. I hated that wallpaper. It seemed to collect shadows in its grooves, and at night, the anchors looked like eyes.

One morning, at 5:47 AM, I was sitting cross-legged on my bed, brushing my hair, when my fiancé, Leo, called over video. My phone propped against the lamp, and he was sipping coffee in his kitchen a hundred miles away. I laughed at something he said, and then he went quiet. His face contorted in confusion. ‘Mira,’ he said slowly, ‘who is that behind you?’ I twisted around, but the room was empty. ‘There’s no one,’ I said. He shook his head. ‘In the reflection of your mirror, the one on the desk. A dark shape, like a tall man, just for a second.’ I looked at the small hand mirror I’d left by the lamp, now catching the pale ceiling light. Nothing. But a chill ran down my spine.

That evening, I mentioned it to Lina. She laughed nervously. ‘It’s the old building. People say it’s haunted by a lonely sailor who jumped from the lighthouse.’ I shrugged it off, but that night I woke at 3:33 AM to a sound like fingers dragging across the vinyl wallpaper. I turned on the lamp, and the sound stopped. The pattern of anchors seemed darker, more defined, as if the ink had bled into the wall. I pressed my palm against it, and it was cold, colder than the air. I pulled my hand away, and a faint indentation remained, like a palm print, then faded.

Over the next weeks, the episodes escalated. Leo would call me at odd hours, asking if I was okay, because he’d seen that same dark figure in the reflection of his own phone screen when we were on video. I began to avoid mirrors. Lina confessed she felt watched in the shower, and the curtains would billow even when the window was shut. One night, I decided to test something. I placed a camera on the desk to record while I slept. The next morning, the footage showed me sleeping, but at 4:11 AM, the vinyl wallpaper bulged outward in the shape of a man, pressing as if trying to escape. Then it subsided. The anchors on that section had rearranged themselves, forming a crude pattern that looked like a face in agony.

I contacted the building’s old super, Mr. Whitfield, who reluctantly told me the story. In 1962, a bank teller named Elias claimed to see the faces of the drowned in the wallpaper patterns. He was committed to an asylum after he tore the wallpaper off his wall to reveal the original plaster, which showed the same patterns. Before he was taken, he scratched into the plaster a single phrase: ‘The Vinyl Remembers.’ He died a month later, and no one ever rented this room for more than a year. That was because, Mr. Whitfield said, the wallpaper ‘wakes up’ and pulls the memories from your deepest fears, etching them into its surface.

Lina moved out the next day. I stayed, because I was stubborn and because I needed the job. I tried to distract myself, but the wallpaper began to show images not from the past but from my future. One evening, I saw a calendar page in the vinyl, and the date was three months ahead, with the words ‘THE WRECK’ written in scratchy letters. I didn’t know what it meant, but I was terrified.

A week later, I was at the bank when a supervisor told me I’d be transferred to the branch in Grayhaven, a town near a notorious shipwreck site. The name clicked. I terminated my lease and moved without telling anyone my new address. But the wallpaper followed me—in my new apartment, I woke to find one wall covered in the same pale vinyl, with anchors and ropes. My new roommate, a quiet girl named Ana, said it came with the place. The pattern seemed to shift when I blinked.

Now, I sit in my new room, and the wallpaper is alive. It shows me the ship that sank in Grayhaven in 1957, the S.S. Meridian. It shows me the faces of the drowned, and in the center, a figure that looks like me. I have tried to tear the paper off, but underneath is more vinyl, and more, and more. At night, I hear the anchors clink, and the ropes tighten. Leo doesn’t call anymore; the last time he tried, all he heard was the sound of waves and a man whispering my name.

I am writing this on my phone, the last thing I will do, because the wallpaper is now covering my door. It is moving toward my bed, and I can see the face of Elias pressed against the vinyl from the other side, his eyes wide with the knowledge I am about to learn. The vinyl remembers everything. And now it has me.