Chapter 8: The Nest in the Walls

Chapter 8: The Nest in the Walls

The first few days were a study in forced normalcy. Leo and James didn’t speak of what happened in the woods. An unspoken, mutual pact of denial was formed in the sterile silence of their dorm room. They went to classes. They ate in the crowded dining hall. They pretended that the world hadn't been ripped open to reveal a core of writhing, impossible horror. They acted as if James hadn't tackled a creature made of wet sticks and shadow, and as if Leo hadn't been seconds away from being consumed by his own childhood ghost story.

But the silence was a thin, brittle skin stretched over a festering wound. They saw Sam and Chloe once, across the sun-drenched campus quad. The girls saw them too. For a brief moment, their eyes met—a flash of shared, traumatic understanding—before they both looked away, quickening their pace and disappearing into the crowd. The adventure was over. The story was toxic. No one wanted to be a part of it anymore.

For Leo, the pretense of normalcy was a full-time job, and it was exhausting him. He sat in lectures, the professor’s voice a meaningless drone, his own mind replaying a frantic loop of a featureless face and the clatter of tin cans. Sleep offered no escape. When he did manage to drift off, his dreams were suffocating nightmares of dusty hallways that twisted into impossible shapes and the feeling of being watched from a darkness that had no source. He would wake up gasping, his sheets soaked in a cold sweat, the phantom smell of rot and old beans clinging to his senses.

The smell was the first and most persistent crack in his fragile reality. It had faded after that first morning, or so James insisted. “It’s just the pipes, man,” he’d said, spraying a cheap can of air freshener around the room. “This building’s ancient.”

But for Leo, it never truly went away. It was a ghost on the edge of his senses. He’d catch a whiff of it while studying in the library, a sickly-sweet undertone that would make him look up, his heart pounding, half-expecting to see a tall, pale figure standing among the shelves of books. He’d smell it in the steam of the dining hall, a note of decay that would turn his stomach and kill his appetite. He started to question his own mind. Was it real, or was it just the memory of terror, a scent-based PTSD that his brain refused to let go? He wanted to believe it was in his head. That would be so much simpler.

Then came the scratching.

It started about a week after their trip to the manor. It was a faint, intermittent sound, like a mouse scrabbling behind the drywall. It came from the wall his bed was pushed up against. The first time he heard it, in the dead of night, he sat bolt upright, his ears straining in the darkness.

“Did you hear that?” he’d whispered.

From the other side of the room, James’s deep, even breathing was his only reply.

Leo told himself it was nothing. Rats. The building settling. The guy in the next room hanging a poster. He spent the next day armed with rational explanations, building a fortress of logic against the encroaching dread. But the sound came back the next night, and the night after that. It wasn't frantic or random, like an animal. It was a slow, rhythmic scrape… scrape… scrape. A deliberate, patient sound. The sound of something methodically wearing its way through.

He started sleeping on the couch, telling James his mattress was giving him a backache. He couldn’t bear to have his head inches away from that wall, from the slow, persistent sound that seemed to be counting down to something terrible.

His carefully constructed denial was crumbling, brick by brick. He was jumpy, irritable, his grades slipping. The world of midterms and campus life felt like a flimsy stage play, while the real, terrifying drama was unfolding just out of sight, behind the walls of his own room.

The final wall of his sanity came down on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. He was walking back from the student union, a cheap umbrella doing little to ward off the chill. The campus was grey and washed out, the paths slick with fallen leaves. As he approached his dorm, he glanced up at his window—third floor, second from the end. It was a habit, a subconscious check to make sure his sanctuary was still there.

For a fraction of a second, he saw a figure standing in the window.

It was tall, so tall its head was bent to fit within the frame. Its form was a pale, indistinct smudge against the gloom of the unlit room. It was perfectly still. Leo’s heart seized in his chest. He blinked, rain splattering on his face, and when his eyes opened again, the window was empty.

He stood frozen on the sidewalk, oblivious to the students hurrying past him. It wasn’t a trick of the light. It wasn’t a reflection. He had seen it. The vague sense of being watched, the phantom smells, the scratching in the walls—it all snapped into a horrifying, cohesive picture.

He ran. He took the stairs three at a time, his wet sneakers slapping against the concrete, his breath a ragged sob in his throat. He fumbled with his key, his hands shaking so violently it took him three tries to get the lock to turn. He threw the door open, ready for anything—for the creature to be standing there, for the room to be filled with cans, for the end.

The room was empty. James’s rugby bag was on the floor, a textbook lay open on his desk. Everything was exactly as it should be. The air was still. But the smell… the smell was stronger than it had ever been. A thick, cloying miasma of rot and metal that made him gag.

He backed out of the room, slamming the door shut, and leaned against the opposite wall of the hallway, his chest heaving. It was in there. Or it had been. He wasn't crazy. It was real. The realization brought no relief, only a cold, abyssal terror. It hadn't stayed at the house. It wasn't a ghost tied to a location. It had followed the bloodline. It had followed him.

That night, he couldn't even pretend to sleep. He lay on the lumpy couch, staring at the ceiling, listening. The rain had stopped, and a profound silence had fallen over the dorm. Around three in the morning, it began.

Scrape… scrape…

The sound came from the wall behind his bed, as always. Slow. Patient. But this time, Leo listened with a new, horrifying clarity. He wasn't just listening to a sound anymore; he was listening to an action. He imagined long, pale fingers, tipped with something hard and sharp, dragging against the inside of the drywall. It was building something. Or digging something.

He sat up, his entire body tense. He strained his ears, focusing on the sound with an intensity that made his head ache. The scraping stopped. Leo held his breath.

Then, a new sound.

A soft, metallic sound from the other side of the wall.

Clatter-skitter.

The distinct, unmistakable sound of a single tin can rolling across a wooden floor.

Leo’s breath hitched in his throat. His blood turned to ice water in his veins. The sound came again, a little closer this time. Clatter.

It wasn't just haunting him with memories and phantom sensations anymore. It was here. It had followed him from the ruins of Elderwood Manor, across miles of highway, and into the heart of his new life. And in the dark, hollow spaces between the ordinary walls of his safe, normal dorm room, it was building its nest.