The Echo in the Walls

The house on Hemlock Lane didn't look evil. It looked tired. Its paint was peeling, and the porch sagged like a weary smile. It was all we could afford after the bankruptcy. My daughter, Lily, was seven, and she saw it as an adventure. "A castle, Mommy!" she'd declared.

I should have listened to the silence. It wasn't peaceful; it was a held breath.

The first incident was small. A favorite sippy cup of Lily's, one she'd left on the kitchen table, was found in the basement, placed neatly in the center of the concrete floor. I blamed my own stress-induced forgetfulness.

Then came the whispers.

I'd hear them at night, a soft, sibilant murmur just below the register of understanding, like a radio tuned between stations. It seemed to come from the heating vents. I told myself it was the wind, the old pipes.

Lily started having an imaginary friend. She called him "The Man in the Walls."

"He's shy," she explained, coloring at the coffee table. "He gets lonely. He likes to play hide-and-seek."

A cold knot tightened in my stomach. "What does he look like, sweetie?"

She didn't look up from her drawing. "He's skinny. And he can fold himself up real small to fit."

A week later, I was tucking her in when I noticed it. On the wall beside her bed, about four feet up, was a smudge. It was greasy, grey, and shaped unmistakably like a long, thin handprint. Far too large to be Lily's.

My blood ran cold. I scrubbed it off, my hands shaking. That night, the whispers were louder. They weren't coming from the vents anymore. They were coming from inside Lily's room.

I burst in to find her sitting up in bed, wide awake, having a conversation with the empty corner.

"He says he used to live here," she told me calmly. "He says he got stuck."

"Stuck where?" I asked, my voice a trembling whisper.

"In the walls," she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

I called a pest control company the next day, convinced we had raccoons or squirrels. The inspector, a grizzled man in his fifties, went into the crawlspace. When he came out, his face was pale.

"Lady," he said, wiping dust from his hands, "you don't have animals. But... you've got something else."

He led me to the access panel in Lily's closet. Shining his flashlight into the dark, narrow space between the walls, he illuminated something that made my legs give way.

There were drawings. Dozens of them, scratched into the wooden studs with what looked like a fingernail. Stick figures trapped in boxes. A crude drawing of our house. And dates, going back decades. The most recent one was from last week.

And then I saw the nest. A pile of old rags, a tarnished locket, and Lily's missing sippy cup. It was a bed. Someone, or something, had been living in the walls of my daughter's room.

We stayed in a hotel that night. I called the police. They found nothing, of course. They said it was a prank, a trespasser.

But I know what I saw. And I know what I hear now, even here in this sterile hotel room. Because the whispers didn't stay in the house. They followed us.

Last night, Lily woke up screaming. "He's here! He's folded up under the bed!"

I looked. There was nothing. But this morning, on the pristine white wall of the hotel room, right next to her pillow, was a fresh, greasy handprint.

The Man in the Walls wasn't stuck in the house. He was stuck to us. He's not in the walls anymore.

He's in our life. And I don't know how to evict him.