Chapter 4: What the Walls Held

Chapter 4: What the Walls Held

The two spectral eyes held them captive. They floated in the corner of the room, unblinking portals into an ocean of sorrow. There was no malice in their gaze, no threat, only a profound and endless agony that seemed to leach the warmth from the air, from their very blood. Leo and Kiwi huddled together on the couch, two points of fragile life in a room saturated with death. The blankets were a useless shield. The cold wasn't on their skin; it was inside them, a deep-seated chill that emanated from the ghostly stare.

Leo’s mind, which had always sought rational explanations, was a wasteland. There was no logic for this, no scientific principle that could account for the silent scream that still echoed in his skull or the two sorrowful lights burning in the darkness before him. Beside him, Kiwi trembled, her breath coming in shallow, hitched gasps.

As slowly as they had appeared, the eyes began to fade, not blinking out of existence but dissolving like smoke, until only the oppressive darkness remained. But the feeling of their gaze lingered, a psychic imprint burned into the room.

Neither of them spoke. There were no words for what they had just witnessed. Moving felt impossible, as if any action would shatter the fragile truce and invite the horror back. They remained frozen, two statues of fear, waiting for the dawn.

But something else began to fill the silence. A smell.

The faint, bitter scent of coffee that had haunted the apartment’s edges was no longer faint. It grew in intensity, a thick, acrid wave that rolled out from the hallway. It wasn't the pleasant aroma of a fresh brew; it was the smell of burnt grounds, of old, stale coffee left to scorch on a hot plate for days. It was suffocating, and it carried a new, even more vile undertone.

Beneath the burnt coffee was something else. A sickly-sweet, cloying odor. The smell of meat left too long in the sun, of rot and decay. The two scents mingled into a nauseating perfume that coated the back of Leo’s throat and made his stomach churn.

“Oh god,” Kiwi gagged, pressing the collar of her shirt over her nose. “Do you smell that?”

Leo could only nod, his eyes watering. Kiwi’s theory from the day before slammed into him with the force of a physical blow. I started to think they were trying to cover up another smell.

The source was unmistakable. It was coming from the spare room. From the room with the wall.

Against every instinct for self-preservation, they found themselves moving. It was a slow, zombie-like shuffle, a morbid magnetism pulling them toward the heart of the apartment’s sickness. They needed to see. They needed to understand. The alternative—hiding and letting their imagination fester—was somehow worse.

They stood in the doorway of the small, dark room, the combined stench so overpowering it was almost visible, a shimmering haze in the air. The wall, the one that had been so pristine and white, was no longer inert.

It was sweating.

Dark, ugly patches of moisture had bloomed across its smooth surface, like continents of disease on a pale map. A network of fine, spidery cracks radiated from the center, and the entire wall seemed to bulge slightly outward, the plaster stretched taut, pregnant with some unspeakable horror. It looked sick. It looked alive.

As they watched, a single drop of a dark, viscous fluid oozed from one of the cracks. It was thick and blackish-brown, like old motor oil mixed with blood. It clung to the wall for a moment before tracing a slow, obscene path down the white plaster. Then another drop followed, and another. The wall was weeping a foul-smelling, putrid ichor.

“Leo,” Kiwi whispered, her voice a thread of sound. “What is happening?”

He had no answer. He could only stare, his mind replaying the sensation from hours earlier—the impossible, frantic thrum of two hearts beating beneath the surface. They weren't beating anymore.

A low groan echoed in the room, not a ghostly moan, but the sound of stressed plaster and wood. The central bulge pulsed, growing more pronounced. The spiderweb of cracks widened, pieces of paint and plaster flaking off and dropping to the floor with soft ticks.

CRACK.

The sound was as sharp and final as a gunshot. A jagged, vertical fissure split the wall from floor to ceiling. The sickening smell intensified, billowing out in a concentrated wave. Leo retched, stumbling back, but his eyes remained locked on the grotesque spectacle.

With a final, wet tearing sound, the center of the wall gave way.

It didn’t explode outward. It slumped, collapsing in on itself as if the pressure within had finally dissolved its container. A dark cascade of coarse, granular material poured onto the floorboards, a dry waterfall of what Leo now recognized with sickening certainty as coffee grounds. Thousands upon thousands of them, spilling out in a dusty, bitter-smelling tide.

And with the grounds came the source of the rot.

First, a pale, slender hand with crudely severed fingers, the bone stark white against the dark grounds. Then, a tangle of long, dark hair matted with the same foul substance. A section of a torso, wrapped in the tattered remains of a floral dress, fell with a heavy, wet thud.

Leo and Kiwi screamed. It was not a choice. It was a primal, involuntary response to a sight the human mind was not built to witness.

More of the wall crumbled, revealing the rest of the gruesome cache. Huddled behind the woman’s remains was a smaller form, folded into an impossibly compact shape. The small, pale face of a young boy, his eyes closed, his expression peaceful in a way that was more horrific than any scream. Caleb.

They had been dismembered. Hacked apart and packed into the wall cavity like garbage, with pounds of coffee grounds used as a crude, aromatic embalming agent. A desperate, insane attempt to hide not just the bodies, but the very smell of murder.

This was what the ghosts of Elara and Caleb Thorne had been trying to show them. This was the source of the cold, the agony, the terror. Their silent screams had been a desperate plea for discovery. The wall wasn't just a patch job. It was a crypt.

The full, visceral horror of their situation crashed down on Leo. He had been sleeping, eating, living just a few feet away from a makeshift grave. The feeling of being watched wasn’t a haunting; it was a cry for help from the other side of the plaster.

The sight of the desecrated remains, the desecrated mother and child, finally broke him. He turned away, stumbling into the hallway, and was violently sick on the floor, his body convulsing as it tried to expel the horror he had just ingested with his eyes. Behind him, Kiwi’s screams dissolved into horrified, guttural sobs.

The secret of Apartment 1000L was no longer hidden. It lay spilled across the floor in a gruesome tableau of coffee, plaster, and death. And their lives, which had only just begun to intertwine, were now irrevocably bound to it.