The massive front door, made of thick, dark wood, swung closed with barely a squeak. I heard the latch catch, and at last I was alone in my new house. Now that it was mine, I felt a powerful urge to tour my beautiful home once more. The walls, painted in deep colors--the entrance hall in hunter green, the living room in apricot, the study in carmine, the kitchen in a creamy alabaster. Each room had its own color and its own feel. The wooden paneling, dark and smooth. The rugs and runners, soft and warm and dyed in ornate patterns. The heavy wooden doors, which mostly swung easily and without a sound, cut off the sounds from outside each room, making each space a world of its own.
I had spent so much time looking until I had found it, as if discovering a hundred-dollar bill on the street. The previous owners had been an old wealthy couple, and the house itself was solidly built but dated. To modernize the house would be a big project, but for now it could wait. I simply wanted to bask in my good fortune and enjoy it. It would be a couple of days before my furniture and things all arrived, so I had a little time to relax before I began the ordeal of unpacking.
For these few days, I had brought only the essentials, packed into the smallest moving truck I could rent. It would only take an hour or two to set them up--some basic cookware, a smallish bed for the guest room that I could use until my other things arrived, clothes, bedding, towels, books, and my beloved Prussian blue easy chair. So first I walked around the house and marveled at how clean it was. The previous owners must have checked everything before they left, because I was hard-pressed to find a speck of dust or a rug out of place.
I climbed the stairs to the second floor and took a deep breath, the air smelling faintly of cedar. I tested the lights, checked the thermostats, poked around in the kitchen, and tested the three bathrooms. Everything was perfect. I smiled and gazed out the window in the guest room on the second floor, the sun shining warmly. Then I went outside to unload the truck. Aside from a little trouble getting the mattress and box springs up the stairs, everything went smoothly. At the end, I set down my easy chair in the study, stood up, and wiped my brow with my arm. The sunlight streaming in through the window was now at a steep angle, and was now more orange, as the sun hung low in the sky.
Those first days were wonderful. I still had a little time before my job started up, and so I spent much of my time reading in the study until my things all arrived, and then I spent a good three days unpacking and getting things in order. All of the utilities got connected up in that time, too, so, except for the limited locations where I could connect my computer, everything was sufficient for my needs. After I finished unpacking, I went through the whole house and cleaned up everything that needed it. I was finally home.
That evening, I was sitting in the study, reading, when I saw a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. I stood up and went over to where I thought I had seen something, but there was no trace of anything there. It must have been a bit of light reflecting off of my glasses, so I tried to recreate it by sitting back down and moving my head around, but nothing I did seemed to cause the same effect. Still, I had seen nothing actually moving, and it hadn't made a sound or left any traces on the floor or wall, so I chalked it up to my imagination and went back to my book.
Yet it kept happening. Every once in a while, I would catch the barest hint of something moving over by a wall, or in a corner, and every time I would find no sign of it afterward. It would happen in every room. I had had the house properly inspected before I bought it, and the inspector found no signs of mice or bugs, and I had seen no evidence of them when I was unpacking, so it seemed strange to me that I was seeing things now. I examined the trim at the bottom of the walls and there were no visible gaps or cracks. Maybe it was just the effect of too much quiet. I turned on my stereo and listened to some music until I went to bed.
As the days went on, it kept happening, but soon my job took me out of the house for much of the day and, although I would still occasionally see brief hints of motion when I was at home, that was all. The weeks went by and I suppose I became used to it. I ended up explaining it away as glints of light off of polished wood, or glimpses of light bulbs as I turned my head, yet I could never recreate them. I tried spraying for bugs and setting mouse traps, but neither had any effect. I even tried putting down some diatomaceous earth around the edges of walls, so that anything crawling there would leave tracks, and it might kill bugs, too, but I never found any of the powder disturbed. It was a few months later, when my first vacation started that I realized it had been getting worse, and I had been too set on ignoring the disturbances to honestly realize it.
That was when the sounds started. I was puttering away in the kitchen when I saw something dart across the wall--no big deal, I thought--but then I heard a strange noise, like flipping the pages in an old book. I set down my ladle and went over to the wall, but there was nothing there, and no cracks or gaps in the wall. I went over to the pantry and there was no sign of anything amiss, no spilled flour or sugar, no signs of anything in or around the food. I was examining a box of dried noodles when I heard it again behind me. I stepped over to the wall and crouched down, examining the floor, trim, and wall carefully, but I still couldn't see anything.
Yet now, each time I saw a movement, I would hear a sound. And the movements themselves seemed to become larger and more obvious, but every time I went for a closer inspection, I would find nothing. Honestly, I was a little surprised at how few bugs I had seen in the house--it would be expected for one to get in now and then, even in the best of circumstances, and I had seen nothing. I went to the store and bought some caulk and some tools, but every time I examined the walls, I found no place to use them. The whole house seemed to be carefully sealed, despite what I was experiencing.
That night, it got worse. I lay in bed, my eyes open and accustomed to the dark. Without my glasses, there was nothing for the moonlight to reflect off of, yet still I saw--and heard--little movements all around the room. I could still hear them when I closed my eyes. The minutes ticked by until they became hours, and still the sounds haunted me. Finally, in a bit of desperation, I yelled aloud, “Stop!” and suddenly, everything went completely quiet. I stayed motionless for a few minutes, and nothing came back. Finally free of the disgusting sensation of things crawling around me, I managed to drift off to sleep.
The next morning, I was dusting in the living room when I just knew I had seen something dart toward the wall, near a closet. I went to my toolbox and got out a flashlight and a crowbar with a wide, flat spatula end. I crept over to where I had seen the thing go, and peered at the trim and the inside of the closet, but there was nothing to see. As I stared, though, suddenly I heard a rustling noise behind the trim, and I got out the bar and pried the trim off of the wall.
To find nothing. Not a crack, not an insect, mouse, or spider. Not a thing. I sat there on the floor, a length of trim in one hand, a crowbar in the other, and felt hopeless. I was torn between the terrifying sensation that there was something living in my house and the hopelessness that there was nothing I could do to even find, let alone get rid of, this presence. Then I saw something, a brown, fuzzy shape, dart across the wall on the other side of the room, and I yelled and threw the piece of trim at it, but the shape was gone. All that was left was a deep white scratch where one of the nails sticking out of the trim had dragged across the wall and ruined the paint.
I slumped down even further. Here I was, chasing nothing, breaking apart my home, and for what? Because of some harmless sound or fleeting shape? I shook my head, looking at the damage I had done, and started to stand up. But as I stood, suddenly the sound of rustling began again, at the wall where I had removed the trim.
It was inside the walls! I screamed it to myself as I dashed off to grab a hammer. I ran back into the room and pounded the wall, making a ragged hole. The sound kept going, so I widened the hole until I had ripped out nearly a square foot, and I peered in with my flashlight. However, all I found were some wires and insulation, no traces of anything that might have been moving around. My hands itched from the fiberglass. A large chunk had fallen out of the wall and flopped onto the floor. Then I heard it again, and saw it! A muffled rustling sound and a hint of movement from the pink piece of insulation! I pounded on it with the crowbar and the hammer, I stomped on it. Certainly now I would find what was making these noises, what was darting across my walls!
But there was nothing. I lifted the piece of fluff, now torn and matted, and looked it all over. I shook it. But nothing came out. That's when the sounds started again, this time coming from all around me. What's worse, this time the sounds seemed to have a sort of rhythm to them. There was something oddly familiar about it. I sat and listened, too terrified to move. After a few minutes passed, I realized that it was not just the rhythm of the sounds that was familiar, it was more than that. Their pitch and timing now seemed to suggest words, rasping at the edge of my hearing.
I couldn't understand what was being said, but I was soon overcome by a deep, terrible dread. I stood up and ran out of the room, slamming the door behind me. I dashed up the stairs to my room and locked myself in, sitting in the middle of my bed, my eyes closed, my whole body shaking. The sounds grew louder, more insistent. It was all I could do to sit mutely, my hands covering my head, my eyes shut tight. I clamped my hands over my ears, but somehow I could still feel the vibrations. Whatever it was, it was here, in my room, with me. There was nothing I could do to escape it. I cried out again, “Stop!” but this time it had no effect. There was not even the slightest pause in the vibrations.
I slowly opened my eyes again, and now I could see hundreds--oh God, thousands!--of dark, hairy shapes darting across all of the walls around me. They blotted out most of the light coming through the window. The sheer number of them made the bile rise in my throat. I choked, and as I turned my head to look around, they shimmered and distorted. The sound was louder and seemed even more intelligible now. I felt like I was just a hair away from being able to make it out. I looked around madly, and saw the shapes distort again, and that's when it hit me: what I was seeing, a detail I had missed.
Slowly, painfully slowly, without a sound, I crept off my bed and stood up. The shapes were darting across the wall, weren't they? I took a slow step toward the wall, then another, shaking with fear, until I was only a few inches from it. The shapes were everywhere, moving swiftly and making sounds like a thousand little brooms sweeping the walls around me. I willed myself steady, lifted my hand with excruciating slowness, and gently placed my hand on the wall. It had no effect on the darting shapes. My hand didn't cover up the shapes that should have been under it. It was as if the shapes were painted over my hand and the wall. It made no sense... unless.
At that moment, I realized what I was seeing. The darting shapes, the rustling noises were not crawling across my walls in my house. They were crawling around inside my head. Perhaps not actually physically inside my head, but in a projection of my mind's eye. It was all in my head. All in my head. Tears welled up in my eyes and I sobbed in fear and desperation, sinking to my knees. And that's when the rustling sound changed. All the little brooms stopped for a moment, and then came back in a very different form. Laughter. I couldn't tell if it was the intruder in my head, or my own. Maybe it was both. Darkness washed over my senses, like a wave of filthy water. I struggled to breathe. Now the sounds became even more like words, and I felt like I could understand them now, somewhere deep in my bones. The words weren't mere chatter. The words were commands. And I would obey.
THE END
# # #
Thank you for reading! I wrote this while I was reading a bunch of H.P. Lovecraft's stories, and thought this idea I had was fun.
I'm thinking about putting together a sequel or semi-sequel, from the perspective of someone who knows and is friends with the main character of this story (or a similar character), and watches his deterioration, trying to figure out what is happening and stop it.
Do you like cosmic horror? Check out my novella What the Soul Still Fears! It might scratch that itch for you! It's an homage to Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness but from a very different perspective, with some fun hard science details in there!
I also think you might like my short story No Ticket, available free here.
Also, the cover image here was edited by me from a picture by Mitchell Luo, courtesy of Unsplash.
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