Woman in the Walls
by Eda Obey
Image by Camila Quintero Franco from Unsplash
Previously published in the Curious Things Anthology Aug 2019
“Mommy, there’s a woman in the wall, and she whispers to me at night.”
Helen froze when her daughter Al said this.
Al added, “She scares me.” The girl was hidden under her blanket, and only her big brown eyes peered up at her mother, who stared back at her.
Helen forced away the shiver running up her spine and tried to sound like the confident adult she was supposed to be. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” she told her daughter. “You’re letting your imagination run away with you.”
Al (originally Althea) squinted her eyes and nodded doubtfully as her mother patted her and promised to bring in a nightlight if that would make her feel better. Al nodded again, then pulled the covers over her head.
And that is why Moira, Helen’s wife, found her digging through the junk drawer in the garage. She stood on the stairs with her arms crossed and asked, “What are you looking for?”
“Nightlight,” Helen mumbled. “Al is having nightmares. She thinks something is whispering in the walls.”
Moira rubbed her arms. “Well, that’s creepy.”
She walked up behind Helen and slid her arms around her waist to hug her. They leaned against each other for a moment, then Moira released her from the hug and pulled a plastic tub labeled Yule down from a shelf. She ripped off the lid and scrabbled around for a moment before triumphantly pulling a light out of the box.
“Here,” she said as she tossed a lump of plastic at Helen, who clumsily tossed it from hand to hand before finally securing it by hugging it to her body. Helen looked at the nightlight. It was two cheerful snow people roasting marshmallows over a nightlight fire.
“But it’s July,” she finally said.
Moira shrugged. “It’s a nightlight. Problem solved. Don’t get hung up on the details.”
Helen clutched the nightlight tighter for a second, then relaxed. “You’re right. I get so worked up over stupid stuff. I just want to be good mom, ya know? I think of my mom and what a mess that was.”
Moira held up a hand to stop her. “We don’t need to speak of that woman. She wasn’t a mom, she was an ongoing battle. You’re a great mom to Al. And you did right by your mother, even if she didn’t do right by you.”
Helen looked at Moira in wonder. How had she gotten so lucky? There were moments when Helen was almost paralyzed by the sheer love she had for her family. She was scared to even breathe if it meant changing the world even an iota from the perfection she had in this moment.
Moira smiled her sweet smile and pinched Helen’s cheeks. “Cheer up, chipmunk. You’re my favorite nut,” she whispered, then kissed Helen lightly on the lips. “Don’t forget to turn out the lights and come to bed. Dork.”
She said this over her shoulder as she walked down the hallway and disappeared into their bedroom. Helen went back to Al’s room and plugged in the nightlight. Al looked seriously unimpressed with the cheerful campfire, but promised to try and get some sleep. Helen stayed to stroke her daughter’s back for a while. Her thoughts strayed to her dead mother.
Helen’s mother, Leda, had always been difficult, but when she began to show symptoms of dementia, it took difficult to a whole other level. Leda turned mean and paranoid. She began to lash out with a scream or a slap that would take even the most hardened caregiver by surprise. Although Helen had tried her best, she’d finally had to admit defeat and move her mother to assisted living. It wasn’t the best place, but it was the best they could afford. Her mother hadn’t planned on living this long, and so all her bills fell to Helen’s modest income. The day they moved Leda in was one of the worst days of Helen’s life. Leda had glared out the windshield the whole ride over. They got her settled in her room, but when Helen turned to leave, her mother grabbed her arm and leaned in to hiss:
“An abortion would have been better than a daughter like you.”
The attending nurse peeled Leda’s curled fingers off of Helen’s arm and gave her a pitying look. Later, the nurse whispered in Helen’s ear that mothers losing their minds were the hardest. They said things they didn’t mean. Helen laughed tightly and told the nurse that Leda meant every word that ever came out of her mouth.
The night after the nightlight was plugged in, Al’s frantic screams brought both Helen and Moira running into her room. Al was pointing at the heating vent in the wall and screaming. While Helen folded Al into her arms and rocked her back and forth, Moira turned on the lights. After a few gulps of air, Al said the woman was back and this time she’d seen the reflection of her eyes in the vent. The woman had been staring at her. Moira flopped onto her stomach on the bed and started tracing circles on the bedspread.
She said, “You know what I think it is? I think it’s a raccoon running around in the vents and laughing to itself because we’re so worked up. Aren’t we silly?”
Al glared. Then she snapped, “I’m not lying. And I’m not silly!”
Moira smiled. “Yeah. But raccoons have eyes, and they are silly. Right?”
Al thought about this for a bit, then nodded.
Then Moira clapped her hands together and said, “I know! I’ll bring you a flashlight and my phone. If you hear it again, turn on your flashlight and film it with the phone. Then we’ll have proof of what it is.”
Al agreed. As Moira left to get the flashlight, Helen began fussing with Al’s comforter. Suddenly Al grabbed Helen’s arm and screamed. Helen turned to see a flash of eyes in the vent. She screamed, too, and Moira ran in with a baseball bat. All three of them screamed back and forth. After everyone calmed down, Moira unscrewed the vent to look in it with the flashlight. Her hand came out covered in dust and cobwebs.
“Nothing there,” she reported. “We’ll call the exterminator tomorrow. C’mon now. Everyone sleeps in the big bed tonight.”
That next morning, Helen asked Al if she heard what the woman in the walls whispered to her. Al nodded and told her that the woman said there was a door in the wall behind her dresser that led to another world. Helen replied that there was no way there was a door they didn’t know about. Their house was fairly new. They had the blueprints. There was no door in Al’s room other than the closet door and the hallway door. Al said okay, but she still looked troubled.
Helen drove Al to school. One the way back, she saw an old woman who was standing on the street corner and flipping off the traffic with a grim smile. Helen got stuck beside her at the red light. The old woman swayed slightly, but still stood with military stiffness, waving her middle finger at Helen’s car. She reminded Helen of her mother.
Helen had tried to visit Leda. But Leda only gave one-word answers and shut down when Helen walked in the room. Plenty of times, Helen caught Leda lording it like Scarlett O’Hara over a table of bridge players. When she noticed Helen, she turned sullen. She told Helen that the hospital staff were goons that watched her every move. People stole things from her room. The orderlies were rougher than they needed to be. Then she always poked Helen in the chest and told her she was the worst daughter ever. Every time, Helen returned home in a foul mood.
Helen pulled into the driveway of her home, went inside, wiped down the counters, and picked up the laundry for later. Then she went back into the kitchen. After a moment of hesitation, she pulled a flat-head screwdriver from the junk drawer. With a deep breath, she headed to Al’s room to look for the hidden door.
She found it.
A slight indention in the paint revealed the outline of the door. She dug the paint and grout out from the seam. She stabbed and dug at it until finally she was able to curl her fingers around the edge and pull it open. It was a simple half door with hinges and no doorknob. A black empty square waiting in the wall.
A little later, Moira found her sitting in front of it. They went to the kitchen to escape it.. Al was dropped off by the mom of one of her friends. She seemed resigned when her mothers told her about the phantom door. She had expected that it really existed. The adults were the stupid ones. While Helen and Moira debated what to do next, Al snuck a butcher knife out of the kitchen and climbed through the door. When Helen noticed Al was missing, she completely melted down.
Moira tried to calm her. She told Helen to wait in the kitchen and left to get Al.
Helen waited three hours before she called the cops.
While Helen was waiting alone in a room at the precinct, she thought about the last time she’d seen her mother. Leda was trying to be nice. She asked how the girls were. How the new house was. Could she come for a visit? Helen had looked at her with huge eyes. Visit?!?! Leda leaned forward and covered Helen’s hands with hers. She looked meaningfully at their hands. When Helen looked down, she saw that her mother had written on the inner flesh of her fingers. GET ME OUT OF HERE one finger read. Another read PLEASE!!
When Helen had yanked her hands away, Leda had narrowed her eyes and snarled. She launched herself at Helen’s face. She latched onto handfuls of Helen’s hair. Helen grabbed Leda’s wrists, struggling to get free.
Her mother screeched into her face, “You ungrateful horror! I’m going to do to you what you’ve done to me! I’m going to rip away everything you care about and leave you weeping!”
The orderlies pried her off Helen, but Leda kicked and arched her back and kept screaming. “I hate you! I hate you!”
Helen had fallen over backwards and scrabbled out the door. She was led to the office of the director of the retirement home. She sat shakily on a pleather couch sipping a cup of water.
The director shook her head and said, “She is nothing like that when you’re not here.”
Helen felt a frisson of shame. It somehow felt like everything was her fault.
The director looked stricken for a moment after she realized what that sounded like. She waved her hands in the air. “Not to say it’s your fault. I’m saying she is manageable without your visits.”
Helen had dropped her face in her hands and nodded silently.
The director came over and sat beside her. She laid a hand on Helen’s arm and whispered, “And I truly think she is a danger to you. I never seen you be anything but pleasant to her. And she returns it vitriol. I think it would be healthier for both of you if you quit visiting.”
Helen was mortified at how relieved she was. Not visiting her mother made her feel like a terrible person, but not visiting on doctor’s orders was an acre of sunshine in a stormy valley. Very welcome. Her mother died a few weeks later, and that acre became the whole damn valley.
She had healed.
Now, sitting in that cold police precinct room and waiting for news of her wife and child, the sunshine was gone. She put her head on her knees and wept.
Officer Garcia, the detective she’d spoken to earlier, came in, sat behind the desk, and placed a stack of files in front of her. The detective spoke in a tight voice. “Where do I start? Wasting police time is a crime, you know.”
Helen looked up in confusion and whispered, “What?”
Holding a pen, Garcia flipped the file open. Helen’s driver’s license was on top. But the address was wrong. “Well, let’s see,” Garcia continued. “You don’t actually live where you sent us. You broke into that house and dug up those poor people’s wall. You attacked them when they came home. I have to say, it’s pretty impressive you came up with names and social security numbers for your imaginary friends. But you’re busted. Nothing checked out.”
Helen covered her eyes. “No, no, no, no…”
Garcia sighed and spoke into his walkie-talkie, “I got 5150 here, boys. Come and get her.”
Helen could hear Leda’s voice in her ear. Everything. I’ll take everything.
Her voice was as clear as if she were standing at Helen’s shoulder. Helen kicked and arched like her mother had on that last day, but the guards dragged her down a very long dark hallway that she knew she’d never return from. From beyond the grave, Leda did what she had always done. She won.
