Behind the Wall

As soon as you entered the house you could tell that something was awry, slightly amiss. That’s if you were tuned into those kinds of things. Like I was. For me it has been easy to detect the whiff of fear that the walls exuded like a thick fog rolling from room to room.

I don’t know why I hadn’t reacted to it, not like I had that time we had travelled out into the depths of the countryside and stayed at some God-awful hotel, a place that rang out with the ghosts of those who had been slain in their sleep, or murdered on the mud tracks that ran through the hills, a twisting accumulation of veins that fed the summit. The thing is I hadn’t done a single thing that could have allowed me to tell my story in the flesh. Not one single God damned thing.

If you had entered that house you would have come through the screen door that kept out the incessant bugs in the late summer evenings; you would be greeted by a sumptuous entrance hall, shadowed by the mounds of webs that the spiders had left behind, some still with the cocooned flies lying trapped in a silken tomb. A short step forward, allowing time for your eyes to get used to the gloom that penetrated despite the attempts of many of this house’s owners to bring in more light, and a door would loom from the wall. This is where I can be found.

But, no one ever came into the room first. They would leave this until last, always. Often, I thought that it were only a peculiarity of the real estate agents on the first few occasions that it happened, but even visitors were taken by the rooms at the back of the house and by the cavernous space that the cantilevered staircase gave the property. Perhaps everyone did sense what the house had to say, but chose to suppress it, to keep it down and hunkered into a foetal ball, and to explore the rest of the house so that, by the time they had toured the remaining rooms – all of them sizeable spaces with high ceilings framed with exquisitely moulded plasterwork – the effect the house had been trying to impress on its visitors was dissipating and barely noticeable when experienced for a second time.

Visitors were always led into the far room, the area of the house that held the kitchen and dining area. There they would be offered a drink, perhaps something light to eat – “Are you hungry after your travels?” – and, while the kettle chugged like an elderly statesmen as it sat above the gas flame from the oven (it would be years until electricity would be piped into the property, so rural was its location when I was brought here) the guests would walk from room-to-room and soak in the atmosphere of this quirky Victorian mansion.

Finally, they would enter the front room; the best room, as its original inhabitants would have known it. However, they would dwell long, for soon the kettle would be heard, its piercing whistle breaking the still air, the silence. The void. Voices would exclaim that tea would soon be ready and that, perhaps, it should be taken in the garden – “Oh, you must see the flowers, we’ve worked so hard this year to make it beautiful and you know how I value your opinion, dear.” The door would be shut and the dust would settle again. And I would be left alone again, as I had been for many years now. Lost and never to be found, for there is no map that can be followed to find me, the person that put me here is probably as dead as I am, or soon to be. No one can be convicted now.

If they had looked closer, had inspected the décor a little bit closer, maybe they would have noticed that something was definitely out of place. If they had seen past the enormous, yet elegant, marble fireplace, they might have spotted that a Victorian property would have indentations on either side, not a flat wall of bricks as this one did. Had they bothered to walk along and tap the walls they might have discovered that the mortar that held those very bricks together, nestled between them as if it were the cream in a sponge cake, was becoming old and loose. Should that have piqued their curiosity, they might have taken a finger, so pink and slender, and worked it into the gap that would open up. If, and only if, they had done that, they would have felt a slight breeze, a zephyr that would disturb their hair and be felt as a light touch, a caress on the cheek. Only then would they have known that the wall was not original, that it had been added over the years, that there was something to be discovered behind this wall, which had lain undisturbed for years. They would want to rip back those bricks, those red teeth that opened into the mouth of Hell. For they would have found my skeleton and then the story would unravel.

Except, they never, ever did.