26 Nov Found You

Nathan Rye was six years old the first time he heard the wall move.

It was a Tuesday. He remembered that much, mostly because Tuesdays were spelling test days, and because his mother had said it out loud when she tucked him in.

“Long day, Tuesday,” she’d murmured, smoothing his hair back. “You sleep. Tomorrow will be easier.”

She kissed his forehead, turned out the light, and left the door open a crack. The hallway nightlight bled a thin, amber wedge across his carpet, just enough to outline the dresser, the toy chest, and the sagging bookcase with its leaning rows of hand-me-down picture books.

He lay on his back, watching that wedge of light become less defined as his eyes grew heavy. The house settled around him: the heater cycling, the fridge kicking on in the kitchen below, and the faint, comforting murmur of the living room television.

He rolled onto his side to face the wall to his left. Off-white paint. A hairline crack near the baseboard that his father kept saying he’d fix. If Nathan stared there long enough, he could almost imagine he saw something move inside that crack, but he knew better. His teacher had told the class that their brains liked patterns, that when they stared at things too long they might see shapes that weren’t really there.

He tried the trick now, letting his eyes go out of focus.

That was when he heard it. A soft, hollow tap. Not on the surface—there was no sharp contact, no vibration through the plaster. The sound came cushioned, farther back, as if someone had knocked on a door and then closed another door over it.

Nathan froze.

The heater hummed in its usual rhythm. The TV voice downstairs rose and fell. A car passed outside, throwing faint headlights across his window.

Tap.

This time, he was sure.

“Mom?” His voice felt too loud in the room, so he tried again, more quietly. “Mom?”

No answer. The TV clicked off.

He pulled the blanket up to his chin and watched the wall. That was all he did for a long time—watch, and listen, and try to decide whether he’d really heard something.

When sleep finally came, it came suddenly. One moment he was awake, heart beating hard in his ears, the next it was morning.

* * * * * *

By the third night, he’d convinced himself he’d imagined the sound. Kids did that. His father said so whenever he talked about monsters and shadows and the way the closet always looked deeper with the light off.

“Brains are tricky,” his father said. “You think you hear one thing, see one thing, and your head fills in the rest. That’s how you scare yourself.”

So Nathan tried not to scare himself. He tried to think about other things. He recited spelling words in his head until the letters blurred. He counted the seconds between the heater turning off and turning on again.

The wall stayed quiet. Until it didn’t.

Tap.

He was on his back this time, eyes closed, drifting. The sound pushed through the edge of sleep and nudged him awake. Same place. Same muffled quality.

Tap. Tap.

His eyes opened. The wedge of light from the hallway still cut across the floor, but now it seemed narrower, as if the door had inched closer to closed.

“Mom?” he tried again.

No answer.

He swallowed and listened.

The knocking came again, slower, more careful. It wasn’t random. There was a pause between each one, like whoever—or whatever—was doing it wanted to see what he would do.

He pushed himself up on his elbows. The blanket slid down his chest. A chill crawled up from the mattress and settled between his shoulder blades.

“Dad?” he called, louder.

Footsteps thumped in the hallway. His father appeared in the doorway, face shadowed from the light behind him.

“What’s going on, buddy?” He sounded tired.

“I heard…” Nathan gestured toward the wall. “Something. In there.”

His father glanced at the wall, then at him. “Pipes,” he said. “House is old. It makes noise. Go back to sleep.”

“It wasn’t pipes.”

“Nathan.”

The tone ended the conversation. His father crossed the room, pushed the door open a little wider, and gave the wall a perfunctory knock with his knuckles.

“See?” he said. “Nothing. Just your imagination working overtime.” He rapped again, harder. “If there was a mouse in there, it’d be running now. Hear anything?”

Nathan didn’t.

“No,” he admitted.

“Then sleep.” His father flicked a hand at the bed. “Tomorrow’s another test day.”

When his father left, he listened harder than ever.

The house was quiet for a long time.

Then, softly, from somewhere deep in the structure, three answering taps came. They didn’t come from where his father had knocked. They were not at the same height, but a little lower, a little closer to the head of Nathan’s bed.

* * * * * *

Night blurred into night.

The knocking didn’t come every evening, but it came often enough that Nathan started bracing for it as soon as his mother turned off the light. On the nights it didn’t come, he lay awake anyway, waiting for a sound that never arrived. On the nights it did, it arrived a little louder, a little nearer.

Sometimes it sounded like bone on wood. Sometimes it sounded like something dragging the edge of a fingernail along a beam, testing it.

He stopped calling to his parents. They didn’t hear it the same way he did. Maybe they didn’t hear it at all.

His mother grew quieter, her eyes ringed with the colors of poor sleep. Twice, he woke from a shallow, restless dream to find her standing in the doorway, one hand on the knob, staring past him at the wall.

The second time, he whispered, “Mom?”

She jumped.

“You okay?” he asked.

She smoothed her hair back, gave him a smile that didn’t quite fit her face, and said, “Just checking on you, baby. Go back to sleep.”

Her gaze slid right back to the wall before she turned away.

* * * * * *

By the end of the second week, the sound had moved. It no longer came from the middle of the wall but from closer to the floor, close enough that if he dangled his hand over the edge of the mattress he could almost touch the spot.

He slept curled in the center of the bed, knees drawn up, blankets pulled tight over his shoulders. When the knocking came now, it came in short bursts, as if whoever was behind the plaster was impatient.

Tap-tap. Pause. Tap. Tap-tap-tap.

Sometimes it fell quiet just as his heartbeat climbed, as if it were listening for his response.

The third week, it stopped entirely.

The night it did, Nathan lay awake longer than usual, waiting. The heater cycled. The fridge hummed. A truck shifted gears somewhere down the road.

He heard no knocking. He waited anyway.

The hallway light looked strange under his door, weaker than it had before, as though the bulb were fading. He focused on its shape until his eyes burned, then rolled onto his side to face the wall.

“Are you there?” he whispered.

The question floated out and vanished. No answer came back. The silence in the cavity behind the plaster felt deep, but he told himself it was finished. Maybe his father had fixed a pipe. Maybe something had shifted and settled for good.

He almost believed it.

His eyelids drooped. The room softened at the edges.

“Hello,” he said finally, very softly, to the spot where the knocking had always sounded loudest. “Can you come closer? I… I can’t hear you. Please.”

For a breathless moment, he heard nothing, and received no reply.

Then, from inside the wall—far too close, as if the speaker’s mouth rested an inch from the other side of the paint—a voice whispered back, thin and satisfied:

“Found you.”

* * * * * *

20 Years Later 

Nathan stood in the doorway of his childhood bedroom for a long time before crossing the threshold. The room felt smaller than it had in memory—compressed, as if the walls had leaned subtly inward over the decades and never leaned back out. Afternoon light filtered through the warped blinds, catching suspended dust motes that drifted in slow, lazy patterns.

He set his overnight bag on the floor. The carpet was the same, though the blue had faded into a tired, grayish hue. The bed frame was gone, but the dresser against the left wall remained, the same one his father had pushed there all those years ago. Its surface was scratched, the varnish peeling along the edges, but its position hadn’t changed.

The wall behind it seemed to pull at him.

Nathan took a slow step toward it.

The plaster bore a different color than the surrounding paint—barely noticeable unless you knew what to look for. A patch, once fresh, not anymore. Hairline seams spidered along the edges, evidence of a repair rushed or done out of desperation.

He reached out, running  his fingertips along the cold surface. Nothing moved. No sound came from inside.

He didn’t expect it to, not yet. The house had been empty for months. The utilities were shut off. His father had died in hospice two towns over. There had been no final words, and no explanations. Just a phone call, then paperwork, then this return.

He stepped back and exhaled softly, doing his best to remain calm.

The first night back, he slept on an air mattress. It sagged toward the center whenever he shifted. He couldn’t bring himself to sleep in the master bedroom—not yet, not with the smell of old aftershave lingering in the air and the faint indentation in the mattress where his father’s body had just been.

He unrolled a thin blanket, lay down, and stared at the ceiling.

Wind scraped tree branches along the siding outside. The house responded with quiet ticks and pops—normal sounds. Familiar sounds. But familiarity did nothing to quell the tension growing in him.

He closed his eyes and tried to focus on things unrelated to the room: the drive up, the lawyer meeting tomorrow, the list of items to box and donate. Adult obligations. Logistics. Anything else.

Sometime after midnight, he drifted into a restless slumber.

The tapping woke him. It wasn’t loud or sharp, but it was enough.

Nathan’s eyes snapped open. He didn’t move at first. Instead, he lay still, listening. His heart thudded once, then steadied into a pace he could keep track of.

The room was dark except for the weak glow of his phone charger’s LED.

Tap.

It came from the same wall. From the same place.

Nathan pushed himself upright, blanket gathering around his waist. He strained to hear past the settling house, beyond the rustling branches.

At first, there was nothing.

He waited.

Still nothing.

He rubbed a hand across his tired face and muttered, “Memory. That’s all this is.”

But he didn’t lie back down.

He stayed sitting until his back ached. Only then did he let himself ease down, though sleep felt fragile, like it’d slip from him if he breathed too deeply.

He didn’t sleep well.

* * * * * *

The following two days passed without incident. He sorted boxes, filled trash bags, opened drawers he hadn’t touched since childhood. In the kitchen he found a stack of unopened mail. In the living room he found the chair his father always sat in, still bearing the impressions formed by years of habit and routine.

Upstairs, the hallway was quiet. Dust coated the banister; a loose nail clicked under pressure when he walked nearby.

When he returned to the bedroom on the third night, a chill threaded across his arms. The air felt colder than it should’ve been.

He shook it off, lay on the mattress again, and tried to distract himself with an audiobook on low volume. The narrator’s voice droned steadily, but Nathan kept glancing toward the patched wall.

Hours passed. At some point he dozed off.

He didn’t hear the first tap. He felt it. A faint vibration through the floorboards, subtle enough that under any other circumstances he might have chalked it up to shifting joists. But this vibration traveled upward, into the dresser, into the wall itself.

Nathan jolted wide awake. He sat up, breath steady but short, his eyes fixed on the wall.

Tap.

It came clearer this time—still muffled, still somewhere inside, but closer. Intentional.

Tap… tap.

Two knocks. A pause. A third.

He swallowed hard, his throat dry.

“H-hello?” The word left him before he could stop it.

The room answered with silence.

He waited.

Shortly thereafter, a soft scrape followed, like something repositioning itself on the opposite side of the plaster.

His pulse climbed.

“No,” he whispered to himself. “No, no. This is—”

The next tap cut through his denial. It was sharper, nearer this time, almost aligned with where his childhood bed had once been.

He stood. His knees felt unsteady for a moment, but he forced his legs to hold. Each step toward the dresser chilled him, as if the air temperature dipped by degrees the closer he moved.

He reached out, laying a flat palm on the wall.

The plaster was cold and still. Then, faintly—

Tap.

This time, it came from just beneath his hand.

He snatched his arm back, chest tightening.

The wall shifted—a nearly imperceptible tremor, as though something had brushed gently against the inner boards.

Nathan backed away. Behind him, the air mattress creaked.

He whispered again, weaker this time.

“Hello?”

A breath-long pause stretched across the darkness.

Then, in a voice so soft it barely carried:

“…Nathan.”

Nathan didn’t answer at first. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. The voice—thin, quiet, and close—hung in the air like a single thread stretching between him and the wall. He waited for some rational explanation to present itself. A draft. A settling board. His imagination.

He stepped back until his calves brushed the edge of the air mattress. The wall looked ordinary under the faint glow of the charger light—plain paint, uneven texture, the faint lines of the patchwork his father had done years ago. Outwardly, nothing was wrong. But Nathan knew better.

His hands trembled. He forced them still and approached the dresser.

He pulled the top drawer open, and found it empty. The second drawer held only a few loose screws and a piece of broken chalk. The bottom drawer stuck, but he managed to pry it open enough to see a tangle of old kids’ drawings, half-crumpled and discolored with age. And behind the dresser, along the seam where it met the wall, he saw a faint line—darker than the paint, almost invisible unless you were looking for it. A hairline fracture running vertically, almost the height of the dresser.

He set his jaw and pushed the dresser aside.

Dust rolled out in a thin cloud. He coughed and waved it away.

That was when he saw the scratch marks. They ran horizontally across the lower part of the wall—thin, shallow grooves in the plaster. Five at a time, like the drag of spread fingers, some short and some long, all of them curved slightly upward.

Nathan stared, breath catching in his throat. He reached out, hesitated, then touched the nearest groove.

It felt smooth at first, then rougher toward the center, as if whatever had made the marks had pressed harder as it dragged across.

His stomach knotted.

His father must have known.

His mother, too.

They had never said anything—not a real explanation, not even an attempt at one. Just warnings. Just avoidance. Just the dresser pressed against the wall all those years.

Nathan leaned closer to inspect the scratches.

That was when the wall tapped again—right beside his cheek.

He jerked back, heart slamming once, hard.

The tap came again. Two beats. Followed by a slow, deliberate dragging sound, tracing along the inside of the wall, moving horizontally, following the line of the old studs.

He turned and stumbled toward the hallway, but he didn’t make it to the door. On the floor just inside the threshold lay something he knew he hadn’t seen earlier—a small, worn, tattered leather-bound journal, its front cover cracked with age.

He crouched and picked it up.

The handwriting on the first page froze him.

Evelyn Rye.

His mother’s journal.

He carried it downstairs, turned on the small lamp in the living room, and sat in his father’s old chair.

The first entries in the journal were ordinary—lists, the weather, notes about errands. But halfway through, the tone shifted. Her writing jittered. Lines slanted. Words trailed off mid-sentence.

—sounds again. He won’t hear it. I told him, but he said—

—closer tonight. I wish he would sleep in our room, but Thomas said—

—it knows his name.

Nathan blinked, his throat tightening.

He flipped a few more pages.

—if it answers him, it’s over.

—Thomas is patching again. He doesn’t understand it can move through the hollows. Walls don’t make any difference. Doors don’t matter, either.

—he whispered. God help us.

Nathan set the journal on his lap. Outside, wind rattled the gutter. Inside, the house creaked.

He closed the journal and leaned back, rubbing his temples. Questions rushed through him, each one colliding with the next. What were they dealing with? What had they heard? And why in the hell didn’t they leave?

And why had they left him in the house long enough for the thing to answer him?

He exhaled, long and shaky, then stood, walked to the basement door, and opened it.

The smell hit him first—the scent of old wood, cold earth, metal, and dust. Beneath it all, he detected a hint of something else, the sharp bite of something chemical, likely from his father’s tools.

He descended carefully, one step at a time, flipping the chain pull for the single bulb. The basement lit in pale yellow. And there, along the south wall, lay rows of boards, nails, plaster buckets, and half-used tubes of sealant. Tools his father had used to repeatedly patch the wall. Tools he had used again and again, judging from the layers of dried plaster dust on the floor.

Nathan knelt to inspect a piece of torn drywall leaning against the wall. It was scarred with shallow gouges matching those upstairs.

His father had known. He had known—and failed to stop it.

Nathan rose, his pulse thudding in his ears. The house felt tighter now, as if the shadows were leaning in to listen. He moved back toward the stairs, but halfway up, he froze.

A dragged sound, slow and measured, came through the floorboards, traveling along the direction of the wall cavity.

It was moving. Upstairs. Toward the bedroom. Toward the place he had touched.

Then something whispered softly, “…Naaathan…”

He clutched the railing.

It was getting closer.

* * * * * *

Nathan stood at the top of the basement stairs, one hand locked around the railing, the whisper still echoing faintly through the ceiling above him.

He let go of the railing and forced himself up the final steps, each one sinking slightly under his weight. The hallway light flickered overhead. When he reached the bedroom doorway, he stopped.

The dresser was no longer where he’d pushed it earlier. It had moved nearly a foot.

It was clear even from a cursory glance that it had not been dragged. Rather, someone had braced both palms against the wood and shoved it outward, away from the wall with quiet, steady force. The marks on the floor were faint but unmistakable.

Nathan felt a tremor pass through his shoulders. He stepped fully into the room. The air chilled as he crossed the threshold.

A tremor traveled through the hollow space behind the plaster as something unseen repositioned itself.

He approached the dresser cautiously.

“Nathan…” The voice came again, softer this time, coaxing.

He swallowed hard. “W-what do you want?”

The room fell silent. Dust motes hung motionless in the air. Then, with a quiet series of taps, something answered from within the wall—taps arranged with an eerie regularity.

There was a knock.

Then another.

The dread that rose inside him felt old—childhood fear dredged up and sharpened by adulthood, stripped of comforting explanations. He reached out and touched the wall again, intending to test the vibration.

The wall responded. A tap hit the plaster beneath his fingertips, perfectly placed, precisely timed, as though the thing inside the cavity had laid its hand flat against the opposite side, matching him.

“Stop,” Nathan whispered. His voice cracked.

As if in response, another tap sounded, more urgently this time, bordering on desperation.

He pulled his hand back, and the tapping stopped instantly.

Then, softly, the voices behind the wall said, “You beckoned meeeeeeee…”

Nathan’s breath thinned. “That was twenty-eight years ago.”

“An invitation… never expires.”

A cold shudder climbed the length of his spine. He backed away from the wall, bumping into the mattress, nearly tripping as he planted himself near the corner of the room.

“What are you?” he whispered.

Inside the wall, something creaked—lower and wooden, like a stud being slowly pushed aside. The sound of warped nails scraping free. The room vibrated faintly.

Then the wall cracked—a thin, splitting line down the fresh patch his father had made decades earlier. A hairline fracture that widened as a muffled pressure pushed outward from behind it.

“Nathan…” The voice had changed. It sounded closer than ever, as if it were nearly brushing the other side of the paint. “…I’m here.”

He stumbled backward.

The crack widened.

A sliver of darkness emerged behind the plaster—not the void of a normal wall cavity, but deeper, an impossible depth that swallowed what little light the room held.

His father’s journal entries flashed through his mind.

Walls don’t make any difference.

A pale shape pressed against the widening seam. Long fingers slipped through first—too thin, joints bending with the ease of fabric instead of bone. The hand groped blindly along the surface, searching.

Nathan choked out, “No—”

The hand found the floor and braced.

The wall split wider with a soft, ripping sound.

A second hand appeared, then part of an arm—pale, hairless, stretched wrong, the elbow bending at an angle that made Nathan’s stomach twist.

The voice came again, delighted now. “Found you.”

Nathan turned and ran for the door.

A violent scraping noise tore through the inside of the wall, growing louder, accelerating, vibrating the studs.

He grabbed the doorknob just as an impossibly cold hand wrapped around his ankle, and screamed.

Nathan dropped to his palms, scrambling, clawing at the floorboards, but the grip tightened, dragging him backward with slow inevitability.

His fingers scraped the wood. The dresser blurred past in his peripheral vision. The fractured wall yawned open wider as he was pulled toward it.

He twisted, kicked, and shoved, but his efforts were futile. Nothing loosened the grip.

Before him, the darkness behind the plaster widened like a mouth.

A moment later, the whisper came one final time, so close he felt it warm against his skin:

“I accept your invitation.”

The hand yanked. In an instant, Nathan’s body slid halfway into the cavity. Splinters tore at his sides. The space beyond didn’t feel like a narrow wall—instead, it felt vast, cavernous, and as cold as winter ground.

Before he even had a chance to fight back, a second hand gripped him, then a third, all dragging him into impossible darkness.

His nails caught the edge of the wall for a heartbeat, then slipped.

The darkness swallowed him whole.

The room fell silent, except for the faint settling of plaster dust drifting to the floor, as the crack in the wall slowly closed behind him.