We Have Carved Our Way to You

I moved into my new apartment in the suburbs of Chicago in late October 2019. The building was old. The walls were terrifyingly thin. I could hear my neighbor in apartment 4B clearly. I never saw him. He was silent all day. But at 3:00 AM, everything would start. I would hear a sharp scratching sound on the shared wall between us. It sounded like human fingernails trying to claw through the concrete.

Then, a faint singing would begin. It was a series of low-frequency hums that made my window glass vibrate. One night, I pressed my ear against the wall. I heard a voice whisper my name from the other side. “George… we know you’re listening.” The blood froze in my veins. How did he know my name? I hadn’t met anyone on this floor. I looked through the peephole into the hallway. The hallway was pitch black.

Suddenly, I saw the doorknob of apartment 4B turn slowly. The door opened just an inch. A single eye appeared from inside. It had no white in it. It was completely black and shined with a dim light. I backed away and fell to the floor. I heard a muffled laugh coming from behind the wall. The smell of sulfur and rotting garbage began to leak from under the door. I called the landlord in the morning. He told me with a trembling voice that apartment 4B had been abandoned for five years. He told me the last tenant was found dead while trying to dig through the wall with his bare fingers. I didn’t believe him at first.

I thought it was just a story to scare me. But that night, I heard heavy footsteps inside my apartment. The footsteps were coming from the kitchen. I walked slowly with a knife in my hand. I found no one. But I found scratches on my kitchen wall. They looked like the scratches I heard every night. They formed a single sentence: “We have carved our way to you.” I felt a sudden coldness behind my neck. It was as if someone was standing right behind me, breathing quietly. I didn’t dare to turn around.

Things started to get out of control in a physical and tangible way. I woke up the next day and found black bruises on my ankles. It was as if a strong hand had pulled me while I was sleeping. The mirrors in my apartment started showing a permanent layer of fog. Even if the air was dry. I began to see shadows moving in the corners of my eyes. When I turned, they disappeared quickly. I decided to put a security camera in the living room. The next night, I heard nothing.

I felt relieved for a few seconds. But when I checked the recording in the morning, I wished I hadn’t. The video showed a tall, thin figure coming out of the shared wall with apartment 4B. It didn’t come through the door. It came out of the solid wall as if it were made of liquid smoke. The entity was wearing tattered clothes from the last century. It stood over my bed for four continuous hours. It didn’t move an inch.

It tilted its head left and right slowly. In the video, the entity suddenly leaned down and whispered in my ear while I was asleep. At that moment in the recording, the power in my apartment went out. I heard the sound of glass shattering in the bathroom. I ran there. I found the mirror completely smashed. The shards were arranged on the floor to form a circle.

In the middle of the circle, there was an old, rusty key. It was the key to the neighboring apartment. Suddenly, the walls started bleeding a sticky black liquid. The pictures hanging on the wall began to flip upside down. I heard a collective screaming coming from behind the wall. It wasn’t the scream of one person.

It was the screams of dozens. It was as if the neighboring apartment contained a prison for tortured spirits. I tried to get out of my apartment door. But the handle was hot enough to burn. I was trapped. Voices began to pierce my mind directly. “Open the door, George… they want to come back… you are the required sacrifice.” I started to feel invisible fingers wrapping around my neck. I began to lose consciousness slowly. Darkness crawled from under the walls of the neighboring apartment to cover my entire world.

I gathered all my strength and broke the living room window with a wooden chair. The cold wind rushed in and shattered the cursed silence. I looked down; I was on the fourth floor. Falling meant death. But staying meant something much worse. At that moment, the shared wall opened completely. There was no wall anymore. I saw apartment 4B clearly.

It wasn’t an apartment. It was an infinite void of darkness. I saw hundreds of pale faces hanging in the air. Their eyes were sewn shut with black thread. The old tenant was standing in the middle. His fingernails were long and broken. He waved his hand at me and invited me to enter. Gravity in my room began to collapse. The furniture started flying toward that black void. I clung to the window frame until my fingers bled.

I felt a cold hand grab my foot and try to pull me inside. it was the hand of the entity I saw on the camera. I let out a scream that tore my throat. I remembered the rusty key I found. I threw it with all my strength into the black void. As soon as the key touched that darkness, there was an explosion of white light. The void suddenly shrank as if it were a black hole closing on itself.

I fell hard onto my apartment floor. The wall went back to how it was. But it was covered in ash. I ran toward the door, and it opened this time. I didn’t look back. I ran down the stairs and jumped into my car. I drove for miles without stopping. When I reached a distant motel, I looked in the car mirror. I screamed in horror. It wasn’t my hair that had gone gray. Instead, there were tiny scratches under the skin of my face.

They formed microscopic words: “We live inside you now.” I never went back to that apartment. I learned later that the building burned down completely an hour after I left. They found no trace of bodies. And they found no trace of apartment 4B in the original building plans. I now live in a mobile home in the middle of the desert. I stay away from any shared walls. But on quiet nights, I still hear the scratching sound. It’s not from the wall this time. It’s from inside my chest. As if something is trying to dig its way out from between my ribs. And worst of all, I’ve started smiling in the mirror with a smile that doesn’t belong to me. The smile of my neighbor whom I never met.