Things that Live in the Walls

There are things that live in the walls here, but they don't tell you that in the welcome tour.

Well, they don’t tell you about a lot of things before the state abandons you here for ‘defiance’.

Twenty girls jammed in a too-small room. Clothes folded in the lockers but with no locks to keep girls from stealing your favourite sweaters. Creaky floors that tattle on you when you come home past curfew. Yellow stains at the edges of windows where former inhabitants tried to blow smoke out the crack in secret.

If the girls that earn allowance in the kitchen don’t like you, they spit in your food or jam a tampon beside your hotdog with red too dark for ketchup. There are rough girls here that eat nails for breakfast and there are hurt girls that do your nails then call you a fat cunt the next day when you eat the last Doritos bag because you’ve got an appetite.

But they definitely don’t tell you about the walls.

“Tonight’s a bad one,” Steph says, as she worms under my covers where I’m hiding. “Like, really fucking bad. It’s probably going to attack.”

“For real?” I croak. I’ve been lucky enough to avoid that so far. The other girls never talk about what a bad night means, when the wallpaper’s patterns churn.

Steph pushes her icy feet against mine. “Get moving, Kitty.”

I learned the first time that hiding only excites the others. Like zoo baboons howling and throwing shit.

I peel myself out and walk along the line of beds as the girls grow quiet. Annette, the eldest, hands me the softball bat.

New girls have to take the night shifts until a newer girl arrives. The problem is new girls don’t last long around here, and then you’re back on the chopping block. It Follows kind of rules. I’ve been ‘new’ off-and-on for eight months. Two girls disappeared after me, documented as runaways. A few days of flimsy police search to check a box on paperwork, and then a collective shrug.

I don’t want to become a shrug, but it’s not like I have a choice.

“H-Hello?” I whimper out into the empty halls. No answer. Annette pushes me out past the threshold with a hissed ‘bat up new girl’.

I lift it and the end wobbles as my hands shake.

The old manor is lit only by the moonlight. Our phones are locked up at night and the lights all shut off as part of the rules, so I’m walking near blind.

I pass Ms. Jackson’s room and hear guttural snoring. She takes enough sleeping pills to comatose a horse and doesn’t believe us about the things in the wall.

As if hearing my thoughts, it squirms through the striped hallway. The wallpaper seams split and I catch sight of grey, lumpy flesh. I hit my bat against the wall to scare it off. Like opening your coat wide enough to appear bigger and scare off a coyote.

But tonight, the thing doesn’t seem afraid. Instead of disappearing as usual, it breaks off into dozens of lumps that skitter under the wallpaper and ceiling. Like the beetle larvae from the garden they stuffed into a new girl’s mouth. Annette stood on the girl’s hands and yanked up on her jaw until she mushed them, swallowed, then barfed them back up.

I swallow back phantom grubs.

“What do you even want?” I ask the thing. The ceiling lights littered with dead bugs flicker as I pass under.

It never responds. Maybe some of the older girls know, but no one talks about their nights in the halls.

The wallpaper bulges and splits before, above me, one large grey thing fires out of the walls.

I hit it with the bat and it explodes into smaller pieces.

They stick to me, pinning me against the floor. Larvae squirm up my shirt, up my nose, into my panties. That last one cranks my head up, a new flood of terror jolting through me.

“Get the fuck off me,” I snarl, ripping them off.

The thing that lives in the walls dives for my pants again, runs up my shirt as tears well in my eyes.

Is this why some of the new girls disappear? This is why those that survive it stay quiet, so the other girls don’t run and take it instead.

It lives and thrives where girls are forgotten about.

I grab handfuls and start slamming them into the floorboards. It explodes like grey fruit gushers, chunks of orange and pickle-green offal squeeze between my fingers.

It keeps reforming, a hydra of slimy, grey flesh.

“You want in me so bad? Fine.”

I grab the nearest piece and like that girl—Mercy, I think her name was—I start chewing. I grab mouthfuls and choke it back. My incisors tear and my molars grind it into a garlic-vanilla-tasting paste. I swallow it down and keep it down. Unlike Mercy, I won’t be sick. I have an appetite.

The creature tries to reform but there’s less and less of it because I’m devouring it like the half-defrosted Hungry Man’s my mom tossed me to keep me quiet. I digest it like the foster system did me before one too many delinquency reports landed me here.

I’m fit to bursting but the thing thrashes and I keep it down with a hard-won swallow.

I return to the room and look at the girls differently. Annette is shaking as I enter.

“Go back,” she snaps. “It’s not dawn yet, you idiot. Do you want it to get us all?”

She’s terrified. They all are. All these once new-girls who don’t talk about what happens in the hallways.

“It’s not going to anymore.” I smear gray from my lips, sink into bed, and pull up the covers. “Night.”

Around me, shoulders relax and tension eases. Annette’s sincere voice echoes from across the room.

“Thanks new gi—” She reconsiders. “Thanks, Kitty.”