Chapter 6: A Neighborhood Watch

Chapter 6: A Neighborhood Watch

The world narrowed to the gaping, black hole in the wall and the silent, screaming face within. Leo’s mind fractured. He couldn't breathe. The jaunty piano music from upstairs was the sound of his own sanity being ground into dust. He scrambled backward, falling over the shattered remains of the mason jar, the spongy floor squelching beneath him like diseased flesh. He didn’t feel the slime on his hands or the filth soaking into his jeans. He felt nothing but the freezing, absolute certainty that he was going to be next. He would be folded into a wall, his body becoming another clogged organ for this architectural monstrosity.

A primal instinct, older and more powerful than any rational thought, took over. He fled.

He burst out of the wet room, slamming the warped door shut behind him, the sound a wet, final slap. He didn't stop. He vaulted over the scattered renovation tools in the living room, the breathing stain on the floor an indifferent eye watching him go. He ripped the front door open and plunged into the night air, sucking in a lungful of clean, cool oxygen that felt alien after the pulmonary thickness of the house.

He ran. He sprinted down the cracked concrete path, his boots pounding a frantic rhythm. He didn't look back. The tinny piano melody seemed to chase him, clinging to the air, a ghostly tune unmoored from its source. He reached the street and kept going, his only goal to put distance between himself and the thing on Wallace Street that wore the skin of a house.

After fifty yards, his lungs burning, he stumbled to a halt, bent over, and retched into the weeds at the roadside. Nothing came up but sour bile. He wiped his mouth with the back of his slime-covered hand and finally forced himself to look back.

His house, Number 127, sat under the weak glow of a distant streetlight. From here, it looked almost normal—a simple suburban box. But he knew better. He saw the open front door like a gaping mouth. He imagined the living lung inside pulsing in the dark, the black veins in the bathroom contracting, the ghost radio playing for the woman in the wall. The house wasn't a structure; it was a wound. A creature lying in wait.

And he realized with a fresh wave of terror: where could he go? He had no car yet, having sold his old one to make the down payment. His phone, its screen cracked from his frantic work, was probably still lying on the floor of the wet room. He was stranded. Utterly, completely alone.

His desperate gaze swept the street, scanning the rows of identical, dark houses. They were tombs, every one of them. But then he saw it. Three houses down, on the opposite side of the street. A light. A single, dim, yellow square glowing in a downstairs window. It was the faintest sign of life, but to Leo, it was a lighthouse in an ocean of horror.

Someone was here. A neighbor. Another human being.

Hope, fragile and desperate, flickered in his chest. He could get help. He could call the police. He could tell someone what he saw. They would think he was crazy, but it didn't matter. He just needed to be near another person who wasn't made of plaster and rot.

He stumbled across the street, his legs feeling heavy and disconnected. The lawn of the lit house was just as dead and tangled as his own. The paint was peeling in the same leprous strips. But the light in the window was a promise of sanctuary. He climbed the porch steps, which groaned under his weight, and knocked on the door, his knuckles rapping sharply against the peeling wood.

He waited, his heart hammering. He could hear the faint echo of his own house's piano music from across the street, a thin thread of sound in the oppressive silence. He was about to knock again when he heard the scrape of a deadbolt.

The door opened a few inches, held by a brass chain. An eye, cloudy with age and surrounded by a web of deep wrinkles, peered out at him.

“What do you want?” a woman’s voice rasped, dry as autumn leaves.

“I… I’m sorry to bother you,” Leo stammered, the words tumbling out. “My name is Leo Vance. I just moved into Number 127. Something’s wrong. Terribly wrong. I need to use a phone. There’s… there’s a body in my wall.”

The eye blinked slowly, showing no surprise, no alarm. Only a deep, ancient weariness. The chain rattled, and the door swung open. “You’d best come in, then. You’re letting the cold out.”

An old woman stood before him, hunched and frail in a faded floral housecoat. This must be Martha. The reclusive neighbor the realtor had mentioned in passing. Relief, so powerful it almost made him weep, washed over Leo. He stumbled inside.

“Thank you,” he breathed. “Thank you so much. You won’t believe what I’ve seen—”

He stopped. The air in her house was the same as his.

It was thick with that same sweet, earthy smell of decay. The air was unnaturally warm, and the floorboards beneath his feet felt… soft. Yielding. He looked down the hallway and saw a familiar dark stain spreading from the base of the wall, the wallpaper around it bubbled and dark with moisture. A low, resonant hum vibrated through the structure, a sound he recognized with visceral dread. It was the sound of a house that was not just a house.

His hope curdled into ice. This wasn't a sanctuary. It was just another cell.

“There is no body in your wall, young man,” Martha said, her voice calm as she closed the door behind him. “You’ve simply found one of the old bulbs.”

Leo stared at her, uncomprehending. “Bulb? What are you talking about? It’s a woman! She’s… fused to the house!”

Martha shuffled past him toward a small, cluttered sitting room. “She fed the roots for a long time. It’s a shame you disturbed her. It takes years for them to settle in properly.” She gestured vaguely at the ceiling. “You’ve been making such a racket. All that hammering and tearing. You can’t just go ripping things up. This is a delicate garden.”

Leo felt the floor tilt beneath him. Garden? Roots? The words were nonsense, but the placid, matter-of-fact way she spoke them was more terrifying than any scream. He followed her into the sitting room, his eyes wide with horror. A thick, dark vine, like one of the veins from his own bathroom, snaked down from a crack in the ceiling, disappearing into a pot filled with dark, rich soil.

“You have to understand,” she continued, patting the vine as if it were a pet. “All this… it’s connected. One root system. Wallace Street isn’t a row of houses. It’s a single patch. A single crop.”

Her cloudy eyes finally met his, and for the first time, he saw a glimmer of something other than weariness in them. It was a kind of pity. “We are the caretakers. We tend to it. We keep it quiet. We feed the roots when we must.”

The blood drained from Leo's face as the implication of her words crashed down on him. The notes. The "renovations." He wasn’t a homeowner fixing a leak. He was a bee, tricked into pollinating a monstrous flower. He was a tool, being used by the organism to maintain itself. And Martha… she wasn't a victim. She was a willing participant. A gardener in this grotesque Eden.

“Your work… your ‘renovations’…” she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “They’re waking the others up. The quiet ones. You’re sending tremors through the soil, and things that have been sleeping for a long, long time are starting to stir.”

Leo backed away slowly, his hand reaching for the doorknob. He had run from one monster only to land in the den of its keeper.

“There’s no running, Mr. Vance,” Martha said, a thin, knowing smile gracing her lips. “The garden is hungry. And you’ve just rung the dinner bell.”

He ripped the door open and stumbled back out onto the dead lawn, the cool night air feeling like a slap. He looked from Martha’s dimly lit house back to his own dark, silent home across the street. Then his gaze traveled down the row of identical, boarded-up houses, stretching into the darkness.

They weren't empty. They weren't abandoned. They were dormant. A neighborhood of sleeping beasts, all connected by a single, subterranean root system. And he, with his hammer and his crowbar, had just woken them up. The horror was no longer confined to his walls. It was the entire street. He was standing in the middle of a graveyard, and he had just started digging.