The Wallpaper in Room Two

My grandmother had a peculiar obsession with wallpaper. After she passed, we found rolls of it in the attic, all the same pattern: faded roses on a yellowed background, peeling at the edges. My parents had inherited their summer cottage, a squat, timbered place in a village called Ashworth, which was little more than a crossroads, a post office, and a church with a crooked steeple. We’d spent past summers there, but those were different times, before the divorce, before my mother’s nervous cough that echoed through the dim hallway. This year, though, it was just my father and me, sent ahead to air the place out.

The walls inside were stained with old water damage, and the air smelled of mothballs and dust. The cottage had two bedrooms, but the smaller one, the one with the wallpaper, was always locked. My father had the key, a rusty brass thing on a rope, which he kept in his shirt pocket. He only unlocked it once, on that first afternoon, to show me the damage. The wallpaper in there was worse than the others, bubbling and splitting, with a dark, damp patch spreading from the floor like a stain of spilled coffee. He said we’d need to strip it all, but he didn’t have the tools yet, so he locked it back up and told me to stay out.

That night, the house settled, as old houses do, with creaks and groans. I lay in the main bedroom, which was barely larger than the other, with a bed that sagged in the middle. The wind rattled the windows, and somewhere, a door banged shut. I might have slept, but I woke to a sound like scratching, a mixture of nails on wood and the slow peel of paper. It came from behind the wall, from the small locked room. I pressed my ear to the wall, and it stopped. Then a whisper, so faint I thought it was the house, saying, ‘Let me out.’ But it was a child’s voice, or something trying to mimic one.

Over the next few days, the scratching grew bolder. One afternoon, I stood outside the locked door and looked at the space beneath it. The gap was too small for anything to pass, but I saw a shadow move, just a flicker. I called my father, but he was in the garden, and when I told him about the sound, he said it was just mice. But that night, I heard the sound of something being dragged across the floor inside. The house was silent, but I heard a rhythmic thump, like a ball being bounced, and then a faint giggle. I knew then that whatever was in there wasn’t a mouse.

I decided to investigate. I found a screwdriver in the kitchen drawer and, when my father was out, I forced the lock. The door swung open to reveal a room that was almost bare: a single mattress in the corner, a wooden chair, and the wallpaper, peeling in strips that hung like dead skin. The dark patch on the floor had grown, and it looked damp, though the room was dry. In the center of the room, a small hole had been bored in the floor, about an inch wide. As I watched, a strand of hair, long and dark, twisted out of the hole, then retracted, like a worm sensing the air.

I heard the front door slam and hurried to close the door, but the lock was broken. I pushed a heavy dresser against it, pretending it was just clutter. That night, I couldn’t sleep. The scratching was louder, more frantic, and I could hear a word repeated over and over: ‘Alison.’ That was my name. I covered my ears, but the sound came through the walls, as if the house itself was whispering it. I got up and pressed my ear to the wall, and a voice whispered back, ‘Don’t leave me.’

My father noticed my worry, but I couldn’t tell him the truth. He’d think I was having a breakdown, just like my mother. I called my grandmother’s old friend, Mrs. Haskins, a dried-up woman who knew the town’s secrets. She told me that the cottage had been built on an old burial ground, and that the previous owners had a daughter who vanished in the ’70s. No one ever found her, but some nights, children in the village would claim they saw a little girl tapping on their windows. Mrs. Haskins said, ‘That room, it’s where they found her hairbrush.’ I didn’t sleep that night.

Three days later, I woke to the sound of tearing paper. The noises were constant now, emanating from the locked room. I broke the door down with a chair, and the wallpaper in there was gone, all of it, lying in heaps on the floor like snow. The hole in the floor had widened to a gaping maw, and from it came a foul wind, and a voice, clear and pitiful, ‘Alison, help me.’ I knelt and peered into the darkness, and I saw two small eyes reflecting back, and a pale hand reaching up. I grabbed it, and it was cold and solid, and something pulled back, almost dragging me in. I let go and scrambled back, heart pounding. The hand retreated into the hole, and the mouth of the pit sealed itself with new wallpaper, peeling and fresh, with the pattern of roses.

I ran out of the house, leaving my father behind, and drove to the nearest town without looking back. But that night, in my motel room, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned, and there was nothing. But the wallpaper on the motel wall, a cheap imitation, began to bubble in one spot, forming a face, my face, but with hollow eyes. And a voice, inside my head, said, ‘I can wait.’

It’s been a year, and I’ve moved three times. But every time I enter a new place, I check the walls for any sign of that familiar pattern. Once, I saw a patch of it in a doctor’s office, and I had a panic attack. The wallpaper is not just in that house; it’s in me. And sometimes, late at night, I hear the scratching, and the voice calling ‘Alison,’ as if it will never stop.