The Weeping Wall

The first time I saw the house, I was eight. My parents drove me up a winding gravel road, past cornfields that had gone to seed, and parked in front of a sagging Victorian with a porch that listed like a tired ship. The woman who met us was called Mrs. Holloway, and she smelled of mothballs and something else, something metallic that I later recognized as old blood. She smiled with too many teeth and said, ‘Welcome, child. I’ve been expecting you.’

My parents left without a backward glance. I stood on the porch, clutching a small suitcase, and watched their car shrink into a dot of dust. Mrs. Holloway put a hand on my shoulder, her fingers like cold twigs. ‘Come inside. Dinner will be ready soon.’

That night, I lay in a narrow bed in a room that had once been a nursery. The wallpaper was peeling in strips, revealing darker patches beneath, as if something had bled through. The window looked out onto a wall of overgrown hedges that seemed to close in as I watched. I heard a faint scratching from inside the walls, like nails dragging along plaster. I told myself it was mice, but I knew better. It was the sound of someone trying to get out.

The dreams started that same night. I was standing in a long hallway, the floorboards slick with something dark. My hands were wet, and when I lifted them, they were covered in blood. But the blood wasn’t mine. It was warm, almost alive, and it pulsed as if it had a heartbeat of its own. In the dream, I walked toward a door at the end of the hall, and behind it, I could hear a child crying. I tried to open the door, but it was locked. I could feel something watching me from the shadows, something patient and hungry.

I woke up gasping, my hands clean but stiff, as if the blood had dried and crusted there. A dream, I told myself. Just a dream. But the next morning, I found a single red drop on my pillow, still wet. Mrs. Holloway said nothing when I showed her, just smiled that too-wide smile and said, ‘The house remembers its own.’

I became obsessed with the house’s secrets. There were hidden panels behind the bookshelves, a false floor under the rug in the parlor, and a stairway that led to a bricked-up doorway. Every time I found a new hiding place, the dreams would shift. I would be running through the house, my parents nowhere in sight, and Mrs. Holloway would be chasing me with a butcher’s knife, her face twisted with rage. I would always end up in the attic, where she couldn’t follow. There was a reason for that, I knew. The attic was the only place she was forbidden, and it was where I felt most alive.

The attic was filled with dust and broken furniture, but in the far corner, there was always a shape under a white sheet. I never dared to lift it. Something in me screamed that if I did, I would never be able to unsee what lay beneath. So I would sit with my back against the wall, listening to Mrs. Holloway’s footsteps below, her voice calling my name in a singsong that made my skin crawl.

As I grew older, the dreams became more vivid. The blood on my hands would sometimes speak to me in a whisper, telling me things I didn’t want to know. It said that Mrs. Holloway was not a woman, but a vessel. It said that the house was not my prison, but a waiting room. And it said that the thing under the sheet was not a thing at all, but a door.

When I was sixteen, my parents stopped coming to pick me up. I called them, but the phone lines were dead. I wrote letters, but they were returned unopened. Mrs. Holloway said, ‘They’ve moved on. You’re mine now.’ And for the first time, I saw something in her eyes that I hadn’t seen before: hunger. It was the same hunger I felt from the blood in my dreams.

That night, I decided to uncover the shape in the attic. I dragged the sheet away and found a full-length mirror, its glass cloudy with age. My reflection was not mine. It was a woman with hollow eyes and a mouth that was open as if in a scream, but no sound came out. I touched the glass, and it was cold, colder than ice. The reflection smiled, and then it reached out a hand from the mirror, and grabbed my wrist.

I woke up on the floor of the attic, my back against the wall, the mirror gone. In its place was a patch of wall that was weeping. Tears of blood streaked down the wallpaper, leaving dark trails. I put my hand to the wetness, and when I pulled it away, my palm was red. And that’s when I remembered. I had not been running from Mrs. Holloway all those years. I had been running from myself. The house was not haunted by ghosts. It was haunted by the memory of what I had done, and what I would do again.

The dreams stopped after that. But the weeping wall remained. I stay in the house now, Mrs. Holloway long gone, or perhaps she never was. I can’t say for sure. But every night, I go to the attic, and I press my ear to the weeping wall. Sometimes, I can hear a child crying on the other side. And sometimes, I realize that the child is me, and I am the one who has been silent all along.