The Weeping Wall

My earliest memory of the wrongness was the smell of wet plaster and old pennies, clinging to the air of the guest bedroom at my great-aunt Edna’s farmhouse in the Pennines. I must have been eight, visiting for the summer, and the room was always cold, even in July. The wallpaper, a faded pattern of roses and thorns, seemed to shift in the peripheral vision, the petals bleeding into each other. I told myself it was just the damp.

At first, it was only the sound of water running at night, a low, gurgling rush behind the walls. But the farmhouse had no internal plumbing in that wing; the pipes were all on the exterior, and the bathroom was down the hall. I would press my ear to the peeling paint, and the sound would stop, replaced by a faint, wet breathing. I never told Aunt Edna. She was a stern, practical woman who would have dismissed it as imagination, and I was a child who feared her disapproval more than the unknown.

The incidents grew more tangible as I entered adolescence. I’d be in my room at our own house, a modern semi-detached in a tidy suburb, and I’d feel a cold patch on my shoulder, as if someone had laid a damp hand there. I’d turn, and nothing. But the fabric of my t-shirt would be damp, and there would be a faint, earthy smell, like the inside of a cellar after a flood. These episodes would pass, and I’d convince myself it was a leak or a trick of the senses.

But the intervals shrank as I grew older. In my twenties, they became weekly, then daily. The sensation evolved. I’d be at my desk, typing, and the air around me would thicken, and I’d hear a woman’s voice, not in my ears but in my skull, a low, weeping murmur that formed words I could almost understand. ‘Stay,’ it would say, or ‘It’s not time.’ I tried to record it, but my phone picked up nothing but static.

Last week, I found a crack in my apartment’s bathroom wall, a hairline fracture that had not been there the day before. It grew overnight, spreading like a black spiderweb, and when I put my hand to it, I felt a pulse, a slow, throbbing beat. I pulled away, and a single tear of reddish water seeped from the crack, trailing down to the tiles. I looked closer, and I could see a face pressed against the inner surface of the wall, distorted, as if behind glass. Its mouth moved, and I swear it spoke my name.

I called a plumber. He found nothing. A structural engineer. Nothing. But as he was leaving, he paused and said, ‘You ever had the walls weep? Happens with damp in old houses.’ I didn’t tell him that my apartment was new, or that the weeping was the sound of a woman sobbing, muffled by plaster and lath. I didn’t tell him that every time I close my eyes, I see her, a hunched figure in a grey dress, her face hidden, standing at the end of a long, dark corridor that used to be the hallway of Aunt Edna’s farmhouse.

Tonight, the weeping is louder. It’s coming from every wall, and the temperature in my flat has dropped to a bone-chilling cold. I’ve locked myself in the bathroom, the room with the crack, and I’m writing this on my phone. The crack is now a fissure, and I can see her more clearly. Her hands are pressed against the inside, her fingers bent at odd angles. She’s not trying to get out; she’s trying to pull me in. And I know, with a certainty that settles in my bones, that she’s been waiting for me since I was eight, growing stronger as I grew, feeding on my fear, and now she’s ready. The wall is weeping, and I hear my own voice in the sound. It’s not me, but it’s my voice, pleading. And I know that when I finally answer, when I put my hand to the wall and press, I will find that it’s not solid at all. It’s been a membrane all along. I have one last choice: step through, or let the water rise. And as the floor begins to flood with that thick, reddish water, I realize that she is me, a version of me I never wanted to meet, and she’s been waiting to be born.