Chapter 4: The Woman in the Walls

The shuffling sound from the hallway was the final, brittle snap of Liam’s composure. For a terrifying, frozen moment, he was paralyzed in his office chair, his world shrunk to the thin piece of wood separating him from that dry, dragging scrape. The whisper from the video, “Night. Night.”, echoed in his mind, no longer a recording but a live threat. The creature wasn't on the ceiling anymore. It was mobile. It was coming for him.

Logic evaporated. The methodical IT technician was gone, replaced by a primal animal instinct to flee.

He didn’t think. He launched himself from the chair, not towards the door, but to the side window that looked out over the driveway. His hands fumbled with the lock, his fingers slick with a cold sweat. He shoved the window open, ignoring the scrape of paint, and clumsily bundled himself through the narrow opening. He landed hard on the damp grass of the flowerbed below, the impact jarring his teeth, the wet soil soaking through the knee of his jeans.

He didn't look back. He couldn't. The thought of seeing a pale, wounded face peering out of his own office window was more than he could bear. He scrambled to his feet, sprinted to his car, and jammed the key into the ignition with a hand that shook so violently it took three tries. The engine roared to life, a deafening, beautiful sound that shattered the tomb-like silence of his street.

He peeled out of the driveway, his tires screeching on the asphalt. In the rearview mirror, his house was just a dark shape against the predawn sky, its windows like vacant eyes. He half-expected to see every light flick on, to see a small figure standing on the lawn, but there was nothing. Only the suffocating, ordinary quiet of the suburbs.

He drove without a destination, his only goal to put distance between himself and that place. The gas station signs and fast-food logos blurred into a meaningless stream of light. An hour later, thirty miles from home, he saw the flickering neon sign of the "Starlight Motel." Vacancy. The letters glowed a sickly green against the dark sky. It was perfect. Anonymous. Temporary. Safe.

He paid for the room in cash, his face averted from the bored gaze of the night clerk. The room smelled of industrial cleaner and stale cigarette smoke, a chemical perfume of transient lives. A cheap landscape painting hung crookedly over a bed with a faded, brown bedspread. The fluorescent light in the tiny bathroom hummed with an irritating buzz. It was bleak and impersonal, and Liam had never been so grateful for four walls and a locking door in his life.

He bolted the deadbolt and wedged the room’s only chair under the knob, a flimsy barricade that did nothing to soothe the frantic buzzing under his skin. He sank onto the edge of the lumpy mattress, his body trembling with the adrenaline crash. He was free. He had escaped.

But the real prison was in his head.

He closed his eyes and the video played on an endless loop. The girl, unfolding from the shadows. The sickening, silent crawl across the walls, her limbs bending at impossible angles. The way she hung from the ceiling above his sleeping body, a grotesque guardian angel of death. The dark wounds covering her pale skin, wounds that seemed to itch and burn on his own face in sympathy. And the whisper. That dry, dead whisper. Night. Night.

What was it? What did it want? He was powerless. He had undeniable proof of the impossible, a video file that would get him committed if he showed it to anyone. He was utterly alone, adrift in a sea of terror with no land in sight. He had run, but the ghost had come with him, its image burned into his mind.

He couldn't sleep. The thought of closing his eyes in the dark, even here, was unbearable. He needed a light. He needed a distraction. He needed a problem to solve.

He pulled his laptop from his bag, the familiar weight a small comfort. He sat on the floor, his back against the bed, and opened it. The screen's glow pushed back the shadows. He was an IT technician. His weapon was information. If he couldn't fight this thing physically, maybe he could dissect it digitally.

He started with a wide net, typing "Missing children [his town]" into the search bar. The results were a sad litany of Amber alerts and cold cases, smiling school photos that stared back at him with heartbreaking innocence. None of them matched the gaunt, tormented face from his video. He refined his search. "Unsolved deaths," "child apparitions," "local folklore." He waded through forums filled with ghost hunters and conspiracy theorists, their stories lurid and unconvincing. Nothing felt real. Nothing felt like his horror.

His frustration grew. This was aimless. He needed to narrow the parameters. His instincts, honed by years of troubleshooting complex systems, took over. The problem wasn't random. The attacks, the vanishing camera, the hair—it was all focused. It began when he was in the house. The house.

A new line of inquiry opened up. He began researching the property itself. He pulled up county records online, tracing the deed back through its previous owners. A retired couple, a young family, then the original owner from when the house was built in 1978. Nothing unusual. He searched for news articles related to his address, his street. Car accidents, a neighborhood bake sale, a story about zoning permits. Mundane, suburban history.

He was about to give up, to close the laptop and surrender to a night of staring at the ceiling, when he found a small article in a digitized local paper from the mid-70s. It mentioned the development of his subdivision, "Oakwood Creek Estates." It described how the new homes were being built on land that was previously the old Miller Farmstead. A footnote mentioned the demolition of the original farmhouse and barns to make way for the new cul-de-sacs.

The haunting wasn’t tied to him. It was tied to the place.

The realization clicked into place with the force of a physical blow. The entity wasn't a ghost that had followed him home; he had moved into its tomb.

And as that thought solidified, another memory surfaced, breaking through the fog of the last few years. It was a memory of Sarah. Not the happy memories of their early years, but from the tense, frayed end. They were in the kitchen, the air thick with unspoken resentment. He was pushing her, asking why she was so distant, so anxious all the time. He'd thought it was about him, about them failing.

But now he remembered her face, pale and strained under the harsh kitchen light. He remembered the tremor in her voice, a desperate, fearful quaver he had misinterpreted as anger.

"It's not just us, Liam," she'd said, her gaze sweeping around the room as if she could see something he couldn't. "This place… this house… it feels wrong. There's something wrong with this house."

He had dismissed it. He’d told her they were just stressed, that she was imagining things. He had been so sure of his own rational world that he had been completely blind to her terror.

She knew. She had felt it too. And he had let her leave, thinking she was running from him, when all along, she had been running from the same thing that was now carving its name into his face.