I promised a second part to my Kipling essay (which I’m working on assiduously), but thought I’d switch it up and post some fiction this week. If you happen to have seen my old blog or follow me on Twitter/X, you may have already encountered this story. But I felt a persistently smoldering need to expose it to my now much wider Substack readership. I think this is my best horror narrative, though it’s not just about the thrills and chills. It’s a comment on trends in architecture, an attack on the Swiss, a introduction to some secret teachings from the Kabbalah, and — but I’ve already said too much…
All the surfaces were clean, and the faucets did not leak. There were no cracks in any of the walls or ceilings. There seemed to be no need for maintenance anywhere. The new LED system meant that light bulbs never needed to change. Summer and winter, the temperature adjusted itself quietly and without notice. No antique radiators shuddered into life.
The gray cube sat in the middle of the New England woods. It was geometrical perfection, a Platonic solid, sheer concrete and glass. Inside, there was surprisingly little carpeting for a home. The stairs were made of steel, the kitchen was concrete, the living room floor was hardwood. There were no animals to shed hair, slobber on throw pillows, or urinate indoors. There were no stains. No children’s toys lay scattered in the backyard or in a bedroom. Austere works of abstract art decorated the living room, huge monochrome canvases, while a statue made of bright steel, twisted into a spiral, greeted visitors in the foyer.
Shannon had to convince herself that she liked it. All those flat, unadorned surfaces. The shining steel. It definitely felt… European. Dutch? Swiss? What was that architectural movement called? The Doghouse or something? The house was really Robert’s decision. He had been so enthusiastic about it. He had raved about how modern and cool it was. She tried to search for words to temper his enthusiasm, but none arrived. Shannon couldn’t think of any that wouldn’t make her sound corny. She couldn’t figure out how to say that she liked old armchairs, worn-out Ottomans, Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Art Nouveau décor, and ornate moldings. It seemed somehow sentimental, unbefitting the kind of people they were supposed to be.
The first night, she couldn’t get to sleep. She stayed up and tried to listen to the crickets that must be chirping outside. But the walls were too insulating. There was nothing. The term “dead silence” kept coming into her mind. Shannon started to feel like a little kid who has gone to sleep over a friend’s house for the first time and then starts to freak out in the middle of the night, missing the familiarity of home. But what home was she missing? Her childhood home? Not the best, honestly. The apartment they’d inhabited in Queens for three years when they were engaged? She couldn’t wait to get out of that dump. But then why was this so…
The next day, she tried to tell this to Robert. She said she thought the place could use some “homey touches.”
“You’ve got to give it time,” he said. “A sense of home will start to settle in. And even though this place doesn’t have a ton of quote-unquote ‘homey touches,’ you’ll start to appreciate other things about it. Big windows, perfect ventilation. That kitchen countertop is the best you’re gonna find.”
Robert worked in tech. Big data specifically. He tried to explain what he did to her, but aside from the fact that it involved harvesting personal information from practically everyone, she wasn’t clear on the details. Maybe she just wasn’t interested. While Robert started his new job, she was left alone at home. In the fall, she’d start her Ph.D. program in biology at Wilbur College, which was just a ten-minute drive down the road. Until then she would – what were you supposed to do? Become a wine mom? She wasn’t a mom yet. Just some woman day drinking wine.
The first day Robert was gone, she joked uneasily to herself about these wine mom matters. She decided that she would have a glass of wine or two.
Four not insignificant glasses later, she was sprawled out on the sofa, running through her life story in her mind. Occasionally she would turn her head to the side and stare at the concrete wall behind their big plasma TV. She would stare at it with intensity, like she was looking for an inscription, a message, to appear.
The wine was making her feel a little flimsy, as though the borders of her self were becoming curiously permeable. But what was there in this house to permeate her? It felt so empty. So unspeakably quiet and empty. The A/C didn’t make a sound. There was no underlying electrical hum like you could sense in most places. It was just quiet, and she was drifting in the middle of that quiet, a slim drunkenly rocking boat, just a tipsy little boat, bobbing and bobbing in the middle of…
Someone screamed in her left ear.
Shannon shot up straight on the couch. Every muscle in her body tensed. What the hell was that? Her pulse accelerated to its maximum. She looked around to the left and the right. No one, of course, was there.
It must have been a dream. One of those weird things. It took her a minute to find her bearings. Part of her wanted to go check every room in the house, though, obviously, no one was there.
The scream had sounded like a man’s scream. It was strong, loud, and insanely—outraged. The scream of someone who was trapped and wanted to tear down the walls that were trapping him.
But was it really a man screaming? It had another quality to it. One that she had never heard before in any human voice. As she thought about it now, she felt like throwing up. In fact – she had to puke.
Shannon ran to the bathroom and emptied her stomach into the toilet with one powerful lurching motion. The highly sensitive, Japanese-manufactured toilet promptly flushed when she had finished. The bidet function initiated and almost hit her in the face.
Shannon looked at herself in the mirror and studied her teeth, which were still a bit purple from the wine. As for the weird auditory hallucination – four glasses of wine did all that? Shannon could hold her liquor: she’d been in the nerd sorority, which drank the hardest.
You should put it down to stress. Stress is responsible for so many things. The stress of moving, the stress of interior decoration, the stress of starting a new program at a new school. Wondering how Robert’s new job would go…
All that made sense. Yet she knew that it seemed strangely inadequate.
But the process of rationalization, once started, is hard to stop. It takes on its own energy. And by the time Robert got home, Shannon was making some artisanal pizzas with arugula on them.
“Did you know arugula was a thing with pizzas?” she said.
“No,” he said. “Arugula? Why?”
Their evening went on like that, just normal spousal chit-chat. When they tucked themselves into bed, Shannon was marveling at how comfortable these high thread-count sheets were, at how the temperature and humidity in the bedroom were just right. Utterly perfect and flawlessly controlled. She drifted away, reflecting on the gratitude she felt for the wonders of technology, for the detail-oriented minds of Swiss designers and German engineers.
She woke up in the night because there’d been a noise. Not a “bump in the night,” but… It sounded like the dryer was running. Robert wasn’t in bed next to her.
Shannon checked the clock. It was 3 A.M.
“Robert?” she called out.
No answer.
Oh, God, she said to herself. This is the part where I’m supposed to investigate the house in my underwear and then get chased around until I’m finally disemboweled by the skull-mask-wearing killer. Who turns out to be Robert or some shit. This is great.
She wrapped herself in a bathrobe and trotted down the hall. The dryer was in the basement. She called Robert’s name again. Nothing.
My whirlwind romance with this utterly thrilling and unpredictable man.
Shannon reached the laundry room. The dryer was running, but it sounded like there was something thumping around inside it. As the dryer rotated, it was bumping regularly, every second, over and over again.
“Robert??” she called, this time with the customary note of mounting terror creeping into her voice.
Shannon tore the door to the dryer open without even turning it off. The light inside the machine activated as the door opened, granting some visibility, and the object that was bumping around inside popped out, landing right on Shannon, who fell backwards.
She clutched it to her chest and then pulled it away. It was a human hand. Robert’s hand. It had his fraternity ring on it, along with his wedding band.
At this point, Shannon woke up, screaming. Robert woke up a second later.
“Holy Christ, Shannon! What the hell…?”
“I just… I just… Oh, God, Robert.” She fell back into bed next to him, clutching him to her. “I had a horrible dream.”
“Yeah? What happened?”
“I heard the dryer running downstairs. So I went down there. And when I opened the dryer door, your hand – your severed fucking hand – popped out.”
Shannon was half-laughing and half-crying.
“Oh, well, I guess that sounds scary.”
The next morning, Saturday, Robert woke her up to serve her a pumpernickel bagel and some orange juice. He’d withdrawn his hand into the cuff of his robe.
“And for your next course… hand!” He shot his hand out of the robe’s cuff and started tickling Shannon with it.
“Robert, Robert, I’m going to spill the orange juice!”
The tickling turned into fondling.
She was laughing. But there was something else. Hadn’t she heard a different kind of laughter ringing in her ears when she woke up at the end of the dream? Laughter in a deep voice, alien and inhuman. Like the voice that had screamed in her ear.
The weekend went by without incident. By Sunday, Shannon had completely forgotten about the dream, the dryer, the alien laughter.
On Tuesday, she remembered.
Shannon went down to the basement to do laundry. But when she was almost in the laundry room, she heard one of the machines suddenly turn on. She dropped the hamper she was carrying and paused at the door. Okay, she thought, I must have accidentally set a timer or something.
Shannon pushed the door open. It was the washer running.
At least, it’s not the dryer. And there’s no horrible thumping sound…
Shannon opened the washer lid. Inside, it was churning, full of water – but there was something else. She peered down into it, she reached out her hand, she touched the surface.
A huge centipede tried to scuttle up her arm, to escape the now down-rushing water, which started to drain away. Shannon screamed and brushed it into the washer. She stumbled backwards. The whole thing was filled with bugs.
Centipedes, spiders, ants, beetles, house flies… It looked like every insect in every secret corner of the house had somehow wound up inside the washing machine. And as the water drained away, gurgling, it left a huge pile of dead and half-dead insect corpses twitching at the bottom of the washer. The washer made more sick, gurgling noises, almost like it was (the thought entered her mind, but it was too weird) trying to eat them.
And was there another sound inside the gurgling? A sound perhaps like the obscene chuckling she’d heard at the end of her dream?
Shannon bolted from the laundry room and slammed the door behind her.
Hours later, she was scowling at Robert.
“These things happen,” he said. “There must be some weird plumbing issue that coughed up all these bugs. There was probably some blockage or something. We’ll just shell out, buy a new washer. What’s another fifteen hundred bucks at this point, anyway?” He sighed.
“But Robert – ” Shannon said. “This is so weird. There was the dream with your hand in the dryer and then this. And it just seems – ”
“Yes?”
Seems like what? Like the washer had somehow attracted the insects in order to eat them? Because it was alive and – and hungry? Or that the whole house was hungry? Wasn’t that what she was trying to say? That it was a – haunted house?
Shannon leaned back on the couch and closed her eyes. “Maybe I’m still experiencing some kind of residual stress from all the activity over the last month. Maybe it’s that. Or maybe… Maybe this is sexist and idiotic, but I don’t mean it that way. I think women are… You know, we’re finely tuned instruments. We’re receptive. There’s something about this place, I just can’t—”
“You’re definitely a finely tuned instrument. But I think this key might be a little off...” Robert touched her.
Shannon had to laugh. “Jesus, Robert. Not now. I’m just… Ugh.” She turned over on her stomach and buried her face in a throw pillow.
The next day, when Robert was off at his new job, Shannon was sitting on the couch, trying to read her Kindle. But she couldn’t focus. She kept thinking about the dream, about the washer, about the alien laughter.
Fuck it, she thought, chucking the e-reader onto the other end of the couch. I’m making a sandwich.
She made a roast beef sandwich in the kitchen, using a Kaiser roll. She decided to eat it on the living room couch and was just tucking in, when she heard the garbage disposal start gurgling in the kitchen.
For a team of Swiss designers, the wiring in this place is definitely fucked.
She had left some roast beef on the counter. Apparently, it had fallen into the sink, into the drain, where the garbage disposal was now chewing it up.
Just like it was hungry.
Shannon turned the garbage disposal off. She sat on a chair near the counter and held her head in her hands. She felt that it was going to keep getting weird like this. Like it wouldn’t stop.
But what won’t stop?
The “haunting”? Her burgeoning psychological issues? Shannon sighed. She considered day-drinking some wine but wasn’t sure if she’d run into a repeat of the other day. Wake up to some entity yodeling in her ear about how it was starving for bugs and roast beef and – God knows what else.
Shannon was right. It didn’t stop. The summer went on, Shannon read low-quality fiction on the couch and watched daytime TV, and Robert kept working long hours.
In the same period, birds crashed into the windows and broke their necks. Once, a red tail hawk nose-dived into the roof, tumbled down it, and lay on the patio dead.
Shannon had a nightmare where she felt someone was grabbing her foot, maybe trying to bite her toes. She struggled and struggled and woke to find her foot sticking through the wall. She had apparently kicked her heel right through the dry wall in her sleep. It was another expense they had to deal with. Robert rolled his eyes at the whole thing.
In the weirdest incident of all, their garage door opened in the middle of the night and then slammed down on top of a deer’s neck, killing it instantly. Shannon woke to rush downstairs in her bathrobe and find the bizarre scene, the deer still making helpless, dying noises.
As she stood over its dead body, she said out loud, “Okay. This is officially insane.”
As if it wasn’t already.
There were other, minor issues too. She would commonly walk into the kitchen to find the garbage can spilled on the floor. It felt like someone had been riffling through it, looking for scraps. Meat seemingly disappeared from the refrigerator and freezer. Bread bags were left torn open on the counter. And the garbage disposal turned on when Shannon brought food near it. Particularly meat.
Because of the bread bags, Robert thought some mice were loose in the house, which led them to set mousetraps. The mousetraps did catch a few mice, but when Shannon went to inspect them, it looked like the bodies of the dead mice had been torn up, chewed on, sucked at. All of this felt nightmarishly surreal to Shannon and just like standard maintenance issues to Robert.
“Look,” said Robert, “I’ll give you the deer thing. That was an anomaly. That was weird shit. But the bugs in the washer, the garbage disposal… This is standard stuff.”
“What about the mouse traps? Those mice were eviscerated. The trap couldn’t have done that.”
“Nah, mouse traps can cut a mouse in half. They snap really hard and fast.”
“What about the mouse that got trapped in the toaster and then got toasted to death? What are the chances of that Robert? And, what the fuck, I thought these Swiss designers would know how to keep mice out.”
“It was probably scrambling around and somehow activated the toaster. For God’s sake, this is a country house. Of course, there are going to be rodents around. Seriously, Shannon – dead birds, dead rodents. This is normal shit. This is nature and stuff. And about the birds: there’s probably just weird migration patterns around here or something. This is a new house. The birds will adjust. You know? They’re smart.”
“Are birds even migrating now? It’s July.”
“Look, I don’t know, Shannon. Would it make you feel better to invite some ghost hunter TV show out here?”
“No.”
“You don’t want a couple of fuck nuts with ghost-sensing antennae running around the house?”
“God, Rob, no.”
“Alright, well, what are you gonna do about this? What do you want to do? Get an exorcist?” He dipped his fingers in his glass and then flicked water droplets at her. “The Power of Christ compels you,” he chortled.
“Stop it,” she said, a drop of water now glistening on the tip of her nose. She wiped it off.
Robert kept chortling.
“Are you going to chortle your way through this whole discussion, Robert?”
“Well, if you really need to get your mind to rest, maybe you should—you know—go to therapy.”
“Therapy…” She seemed uncertain.
“Yeah, therapy. You’ve done it before, Shannon.
“I know, Robert.”
“But with a real psychiatrist this time. I don’t trust them if they can’t prescribe meds.”
“Oh, you just want to medicate this away? You really think I need to be on meds?”
“I mean, if you think there’s a ghost in our garbage disposal, eating ham…”
“It wasn’t ham. It was roast beef.”
“Well, whatever.”
“You’re making it sound weirder than it is.”
“I mean, what’s wrong with meds, anyway? What’s wrong with being happy all the time? God, I wish I could be happy all the time. And the fact that they have pills for that—”
“You’re being glib, Robert.”
“You’re being glib, Shannon.”
“You want me to call a psychiatrist? Fine, I’ll call a psychiatrist. We can do it right now. I’m googling.”
Robert sipped his water and turned his attention back to the golf tournament he had been watching before they started this argument. He un-muted the TV.
“I found one,” said Shannon. “Dr. Lawrence Friedman. Looks like he’s got a high rating from this website where patients rate their psychiatrists.”
“He can prescribe meds?”
“Looks like it.”
“Friedman sounds Jewish, so he’s probably secular. Sometimes these psychologist guys end up being secretly Christian-y. Jesus smugglers, you know? They smuggle in Jesus right when you’re not suspecting it.”
“Alright. Looks like he’s got an email on here. I can email him and describe what’s going on.”
“Really? You’re gonna describe it? The ham – or, I’m sorry, roast beef – and everything?”
“God. Just let me handle my own problems.”
“Okay. Fine.”
A few minutes later, Shannon felt water speckling her neck and ear.
“The Power of Christ compels you, Shannon! The Power of Christ! The Power of –”
In a few hours, she got an email back from Dr. Friedman. He seemed to have accepted the idea that the house was haunted. Nothing in the email mentioned Shannon’s own mental health. “I’ll come visit your house, if that’s okay with you,” he’d written. “These things aren’t so strange to me. I’ve had cases like this before. Demonic possession, poltergeists, you run into these things when you’re a shrink. I want to see this place.”
Shannon wrote back and told him it would be okay, he could come check it out next Tuesday when Robert was at work.
***
When Dr. Friedman got out of the car, Shannon realized that he was actually an Orthodox Jew, one of those guys who still dressed like it was the Old Country.
“You must be Shannon?” he said. “Your message was very concerning. I mean, what you were saying about this house. Swiss design… Epicureans.” He shook his head.
“Yeah,” said Shannon, not sure what he meant.
Shannon observed him as he muttered to himself and wandered around the house. He seemed to spend a lot of time staring into the garbage disposal drain. He also seemed to be saying words to himself in another language. Hebrew? Was he praying or something?
“So,” said Shannon. “You’re a man of faith?”
“Yep,” said Dr. Friedman. “Freud covers everything from the nuts to the navel. But above that? The rabbis and maybe Jung take it from there.”
When he finished his inspection of the house, they went back to the driveway.
“Oh, this is bad alright,” Dr. Friedman said. “This is worse than the dybbuk I had to clear out of a hairstylist’s place in Queens. Much worse.”
Shannon was alarmed. “Why? What’s so bad about it? Robert spent a fortune on this place. It’s brand new. There’s no Indian – I mean, Native American – burial ground here. There were no murders. I researched all that. Construction went fine. It’s a completely new building.”
“Well,” said Dr. Friedman. “I can tell you your problem. This place is an empty vessel waiting for something to fill it. And it’s attracting nightmares. It’s like a wound in a body with no immune system.”
“What?” said Shannon. She felt confused.
“Do you believe in anything, Shannon?” said Dr. Friedman.
“Sure,” she said. “I believe in justice, progress, equality, science…”
“Yeah yeah yeah, I know. I’ve seen the signs in people’s yards. But do you have, like, religious beliefs? Or even a belief in eternal beauty or, I dunno, Plato’s Forms or something?”
“I mean, not really.”
“Look, I’m not trying to evangelize you. That’s not the Jewish way of approaching these things. Plus, I’m a psychiatrist and so on. But, well, can I speak freely? Do you want to hear my diagnosis? Do you want to hear what I think is really wrong? I could speak euphemistically, but…”
“Go for it.”
“It’s like this. For starters, there’s no history here and that’s exactly the problem. There’s no culture, no traditions, no mystery, no gods. Those things help protect our world from the other one – I mean, the bad part of the other one. There’s no dreams in this house, no Romantic illusions, no fiction, and no sense of humor.”
“Hey, I used to read fiction. And Robert’s sort of funny, I guess.”
“Used to. Sort of. That doesn’t cut it, Shannon. You and your husband and your house – you’re not protected from the other world, because you don’t believe in it. You’re completely oblivious to it, and you’re completely defenseless against it. There’s no spirit here.”
“Hey, we’re spirited. We have fun. At least, sometimes…”
“Excuse me, but since you wanted my honest opinion, I’ll just say it. That’s not good enough. There is so little spirit in your house and in your world that the spirits feel tempted to swarm into the vacuum. And the ones so tempted are – ” he hesitated for a moment – “the very worst. Have you ever heard of a tramp soul, Shannon?”
“Uh, no,” she said.
“Well, there’s some fascinating literature on the topic I could direct you towards. It’s said that before God created this world, he created others—botched worlds that needed to be destroyed. Living entities, cast off from those ruined worlds – shells, you might say, husks — go floating around in the space behind our world. Trying to find a way in. Trying to find cracks in the wall. They’re attracted to life on this plane because they have, let’s say, certain strong, deformed desires. It might be a matter of extreme lust—truly implacable horniness—or of hatred and rage. It might also just be a deep hunger. But these desires come in alien forms. Forms you and I might not recognize. The mystics say that there’s a ‘Great Wall’ separating our world from the abyss behind it, the place where these entities exist. And that Great Wall needs to be maintained through acts of spiritual devotion, remembrance, and love. Without those, the Wall starts to crack. It falls apart…”
This is too crazy, Shannon thought. I invite this guy over, and he goes full Jewish version of The Omen, lecturing me about God and tramp ghosts from outer space or whatever.
But she felt, somehow, better listening to him talk than she did when Rob was reassuring her that these were all just minor maintenance issues.
Dr. Friedman was still talking. “The house, thanks to its soulless Swiss design, is like a magnet for these creatures. I almost wonder if the architect was dabbling in the occult… And, when I walk through your house, Shannon, I can feel them. They’re just an inch away, just behind the crumbling Wall. And when they get through, they won’t just possess the house. They’ll possess you.”
“Maybe that’s why the birds crash into it,” said Shannon. It annoyed her that she was saying this out loud, as though she was taking him seriously. “They can barely tell that it’s there. The Wall is so thin…”
She stood there, in the middle of her driveway, and thought. There were indeed times when the unadorned surfaces of the house seemed as thin as cardboard to her, ready to fall away on all sides, leaving her exposed in an utterly empty, starless void. There would be nothing around her except the sound of wet lips smacking in the dark… She shuddered.
“What can I do though? I mean, not that I agree with you. But if I did.”
“Do? One of two things. You can try to believe in something. Almost anything. Joseph Smith discovering golden plates, Transcendental Meditation, being a Presbyterian. Just some way of re-orienting yourself towards the Most High. Or you can leave. And, I mean, if you’re not going to start believing in something, you should probably consider getting out, like, now.”
“What about science? Can’t I believe in that? Or, like, secular humanism?”
Dr. Friedman scrunched up his nose. “Uh, no. You already believe in that. And it’s not working.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yeah, so. Maybe change your tactics. The mind has what Gerard Manly Hopkins called, ‘sheer cliffs of fall,’ Shannon. Mad abysses of unreason. You don’t know what might worm its way in. Especially in a – ahem – modern residence like this one.”
“But, we – I mean I… I can’t believe. Don’t you understand? I can’t reckon with something that’s not rational.”
“Then leave, Shannon. Sell this place to a nice family of Hindu immigrants. Or some Hasidic Jews – just saying. They’ll keep it safe. This is a decision you need to make now. Tonight. This house won’t be content eating scraps from the garbage disposal much longer.”
“My husband would never agree to it. He thinks I’m acting completely insane already. Plus, I mean, a leading Swiss firm designed this house.”
“Switzerland,” said Dr. Friedman vehemently. He spat on the asphalt. “Look,” he said. “Your choice with him is the same. Convince him to leave or protect your own neck and go stay at your mother’s for a weekend. It’s for his sake, really. His sake more than yours. The fact that you’re sensitive to this house is troubling. But the fact that he’s not is just as troubling. He doesn’t know what he’s dealing with. He doesn’t have a clue, the poor schmuck. It makes him more vulnerable, in a way.”
“But, look, Dr. Friedman. This is like insane science fiction. You can’t expect me to accept all this stuff about a Great Wall and tramp souls and destroyed worlds. Like, why should I believe you? Like, what reason is there to believe any of this?”
“Well, what have you experienced? Do you feel like you’ve seen things that fit with what I’m describing?”
“I… guess… Yes. No… I don’t know.”
“Well, go and think it over. But remember – you don’t have a hell of a lot of time. And your husband doesn’t either. If you start to think I’m right, let me know. I’ll tell your husband I’m giving you medical advice to change your residence for the time being. And I won’t mention any of the things I just told you. So you can go stay with a relative or something. Please think it over though.”
“Okay,” she said, a bit dreamily. “I will.” She wasn’t at all sure she would.
As Shannon watched Dr. Friedman drive away, she wondered. Maybe I should have asked him for one of those hats. Or a Torah or something.
She decided she’d go inside, rest on the couch for a minute. First, she’d have a glass of wine. Okay, maybe two, or, because it had been such a weird, disconcerting morning, maybe three…
***
Shannon woke up on the couch. She’d only been asleep for an hour or two, but it somehow felt darker, even though it was just midday. Shadows were clinging around the room, and there seemed to be voices calling her into the bedroom…
They weren’t audible, but it felt like they were. They woke a powerful impulse in her, like whatever made a sleepwalker choose a direction. She just had to go back there.
At this point, there was really no choice. No time left to decide. That had all been over and done with this morning. Shannon walked down the hall, not really thinking, feeling sure and intent but also – dazed? Drunk? Sleepy? It was a peculiar combination.
When she reached the bedroom, the voices were saying something new. Turn to the wall. Shannon turned and stared at the wall. Not the wall with the Rauschenberg print. The bare wall.
Her eyes wanted to feast on it. Just a plain empty white wall. Its austere surface was somehow alluring. So deeply, beguilingly blank. Like it was overcoming the world, sucking everything around it into it. The bed, the lamp, the chest of drawers, her.
And there was something in the wall. Or just on the other side of it. And the wall seemed to be shivering, moving a little. Was she hallucinating? Was she really that tired?
She had to stare at it. Her gaze was helplessly magnetized.
A single crack opened straight down the surface of the wall. A black line that was not wide but seemed infinitely deep. Then, many cracks spread, branching from it.
Shannon knew that she had to fall back. To lay back on the bed. She had to let the voices in the wall stream through, feel them pour over her and into every pore and crevice.
She laid back, opened herself, and felt it.
***
“Shannon? Hey, they just called back. Washing machine should be here tomorrow… Shannon, are you…?”
Robert closed the front door and stood in the entry. For a second, he thought the house was empty. It felt so cold, so quiet. But the response came a moment later.
“I’m in here, babe. In the kitchen… You’re going to be impressed with this dinner. I’m going to prepare about five or six dishes. Was out shopping for spices earlier.”
“Oh… yeah?”
“Yeah. I found some really unusual ones.”
“That’s great, uh… Are you alright, Shannon? Your voice sounds kind of weird.”
“Yeah! I’m excellent, actually. Better than I’ve felt in years. Centuries. Millenia even!”
“Well, ha – good. It’s just that your voice sounds kind of weird or maybe… I dunno.”
***
Meal preparations took a few hours. Parts of the meat and bone were hard to cut through. She had to get some tools out of the basement. But it was worth it.
Shannon lingered for a long time afterwards, washing everything down with a few glasses of red wine.
A little bit of meat was still simmering on the stove. It would have to cook for another forty-five minutes, but then… so tender…
Shannon’s lips moved, and many voices spoke in unison.
“We’re full.”
They all burped.