Chapter 5: The Woman in the Wall

Chapter 5: The Woman in the Wall

The doorknob was cold and slick with moisture, like the skin of a fish. Leo’s hand trembled as he gripped it, the jaunty piano tune from upstairs a maddening counterpoint to the slow, deliberate clink… clink… clink from behind the door. He took a shuddering breath, the air tasting of mildew and rot. The house had given him a command: Dry the Lung. He was standing at the threshold of that lung, and he knew, with a certainty that defied all logic, that he had no choice but to obey.

He twisted the knob. It turned with a rusty squeal, but the door didn’t budge, its wood swollen tight against the frame. It was sealed shut by the very dampness he was supposed to cure. The irony was so bitter it almost made him laugh.

His rationality was a distant memory, a tool as useless as a disconnected phone. His new logic was the crowbar. He fetched it from the living room, its familiar weight a grim comfort. He wedged the flat end into the crack between the door and the frame and threw his entire body into it.

The wood groaned, a deep, protesting sound like tearing cartilage. He heaved again, his muscles screaming. Splinters flew. With a final, violent crack, the seal broke and the door flew inward, slamming against the interior wall.

A wave of air washed over him, thick and heavy and cloyingly sweet, like a mix of potting soil, stagnant water, and decaying flowers. It was a pulmonary smell, the scent of a deep, wet exhalation. The room beyond was almost completely dark, the lone window choked with a black, fibrous growth that blocked all light.

He flicked on his phone’s flashlight, the beam cutting a nervous path through the gloom. The sight made his stomach revolt. This wasn't a room; it was a cavity. The walls weren't painted but coated in a glistening, fleshy black mold that pulsed with a faint, internal light. The floor wasn’t wood but a spongy, yielding surface that squelched under the toe of his boot, weeping dark fluid around the sole. The air was so humid it felt like he was breathing water. This was the source of the house’s sickness, the rotten, waterlogged core of the organism.

And the sound was clearer now, no longer muffled. Clink. Clink. Clink. It came from the far wall, a steady, metronomic beat in the heart of the decay.

The piano music from upstairs seemed to intensify, the cheerful notes echoing in this putrid space, twisting into something predatory. It was the house’s work song, urging him on. He stepped fully into the room, the door swinging shut behind him with a wet, sealing thud. Panic flared in his chest, but he forced it down. He had a task. A quest.

He followed the sound, his flashlight beam trembling. The far wall was the worst of it, a weeping membrane of black growth and dripping slime. The rhythmic clinking was coming from somewhere inside it, from behind the layer of what he now knew wasn't plaster, but some kind of biological tissue.

He raised the crowbar. He had become an unwilling surgeon, following the cryptic prescriptions of his monstrous patient. He slammed the point of the tool into the wall. It didn’t crack like plaster. It tore, the crowbar sinking into the soft, fibrous material with a sickening, wet rip. A dark, iron-smelling liquid, the same fluid he’d seen in the bathroom’s veins, oozed from the wound.

The clinking didn’t stop. It was closer. More distinct. He tore at the wall with a frantic, animalistic energy, pulling away great, stringy chunks of the dark membrane. His hands were covered in the slime, but he barely noticed. All that mattered was the sound.

He clawed through the fleshy rot and hit something hard. Not wood. Something else. Plaster, maybe, deep beneath the growth. He smashed at it with the end of the crowbar, and it finally gave way, crumbling into white dust that mixed with the black slime.

He had broken through. He shone his light into the hole he’d made, expecting to see the house’s exterior siding, the night sky beyond. Instead, he saw nothing but more darkness. The wall was deeper than it should be. The hole opened into a space that shouldn't exist, a pocket of wrongness tucked within the house’s mundane geometry. It was impossibly deep, swallowing his light.

The clinking was coming from right inside the opening.

He reached a trembling, slime-covered hand into the void. His fingers brushed against something cold and smooth. Glass. He gripped it. It was a small jar, like for preserves or moonshine. As he touched it, he felt the rhythmic tap against its side. Clink. Clink. Clink. The tapping was coming from the other side of the jar.

With a grunt, he pulled. The jar was held fast by something. He pulled harder, and it came free with a dry, snapping sound. He brought it out into the dim light of the room.

His hand was holding a dusty mason jar. Inside the jar, a small, desiccated bird lay on a bed of what looked like dried leaves. But that wasn't what held his attention. His gaze was fixed on what his other hand was still holding. The thing that had been holding the jar.

It was a hand. A human hand.

It was skeletal thin, the skin pulled taut and brown over the bones, perfectly preserved, mummified by the strange, dry conditions within the wall's impossible cavity. A simple gold band was loose on the ring finger. And as Leo watched, horrified, the hand gave a small, jerky spasm. The gold ring tapped against the empty air where the jar had been. Clink.

A guttural sound of pure terror escaped Leo's throat. He scrambled back, dropping the jar, which shattered on the spongy floor. He shone his light back into the hole, widening the beam.

The hand was attached to an arm. The arm was attached to a body.

Folded into the impossible space within the wall, as if placed there deliberately, was the desiccated body of a woman. She was dressed in a simple 1950s house dress, the floral pattern still faintly visible. Her body wasn't rotting; it was fused into the structure itself, a webbing of the black, vein-like material snaking over her limbs and torso, anchoring her to the joists and insulation. Her other hand was pressed flat against the interior of the wall, as if she had been trying to push her way out. Her head was tilted back, her mouth open in a silent scream that had been held for decades.

She was the source. She was the infestation. Her slow decay, her last desperate moments, her body’s moisture being endlessly recycled by the house—she was the lung. The clinking wasn't a signal from the house. It was her. The last, reflexive twitch of a dying nerve, her wedding ring tapping against the jar she held, a final, futile rhythm against the silence.

Leo stared, his mind finally and utterly broken. He wasn't renovating a house. He was disturbing a grave. He was performing maintenance on a corpse that had become one with its tomb.

And from upstairs, the cheerful, tinny piano music played on, a ghost of the life this woman once lived, an endless, looping memory of the day the music finally stopped.