The Echo in the Wall

The first time Lena heard the tapping, she thought it was the pipes.

It was an old apartment, after all—peeling linoleum in the kitchen, floorboards that groaned like arthritic joints, and walls too thin to keep secrets. The landlord, a man with a coffee-stained shirt and cigarette breath, had told her when she moved in, "Things creak. You get used to it."

But this wasn't creaking.

The sound came every night at precisely 2:17 a.m. A slow, deliberate tapping. Three knocks. Pause. Then two more. Always in the same sequence. Always behind the wall directly across from her bed.

She tried ignoring it for the first week. Then recording it. Then tearing the paint from the wall in an obsessive attempt to find some logical source. Mice, she hoped. A bird, maybe. Something alive and explainable.

But there were no droppings, no signs of infestation. Just an unsettling, hollow coldness behind the plaster, as if the wall itself was pretending.

On the tenth night, she started responding.

Tap, tap, tap… pause… tap, tap.

She took the handle of her hairbrush and knocked back.

Tap, tap, tap.
Tap. Tap.

There was a longer pause that time. She held her breath. Her heart began to thud harder than the knocks themselves. The air felt thick, charged, like it did before a thunderstorm.

Then, from behind the wall:

Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Pause.
Tap.
Tap.

An exact mirror of her knock.

Lena didn't sleep for the rest of the night.

She had moved to this city six months ago after the divorce. The kind of split that bleeds you dry of noise, leaving only silence and half-sentences. Her therapist said change would help. New apartment, new routine. "Reclaim your narrative," she had said, as if Lena were a poorly written character.

The apartment was cheap. That's what mattered. It was small and gray and lonely, but it was hers. She brought only essentials: her books, a record player, and an old rotary phone she never connected—just for the aesthetic.

But in recent days, the silence she once sought felt oppressive, like being watched by something she couldn’t see. She had stopped playing music. Even her own thoughts had begun to echo strangely in her head, repeating like skipping vinyl.

It was after the tapping began that the dreams followed.

Not nightmares, exactly—those at least were loud and screaming. These were quiet things. Sterile, emotionless. Dreamscapes where Lena would walk endlessly through empty corridors. Sometimes white hallways. Sometimes all black. Sometimes she would open a door to find her childhood bedroom, exactly as she left it at eight years old. Her mother humming off-key in another room.

But whenever she turned to see who was tapping in the dream, she would wake up.

2:17 a.m.

Tap. Tap. Tap.
Pause.
Tap. Tap.

She began journaling to hold onto reality.

June 12th
The sound came again. Same time. Same pattern. Tried not to respond. Failed. Something wants me to answer it. I feel it. But what if it’s just in my head?

June 13th
Skipped therapy. I don’t want to explain this. Not yet. I found a mirror in the thrift store and put it up across from the wall. Just to… watch. Nothing unusual. But it still tapped.

June 14th
I heard whispering. Not from outside. From the wall. I swear it said my name.

She never reread her entries. It felt dangerous to make the past permanent.

Her neighbor, Mrs. Feldman, lived one floor down and had been in the building since 1973. She smelled of menthols and lilac perfume and spoke with the kind of voice that had seen too much life.

"I used to hear it too," she told Lena one afternoon while watering her violets in the hallway.

Lena froze. "You did?"

Mrs. Feldman nodded without looking up. "Years ago. After my husband died. Thought I was losing my mind. It stopped after a while."

"What… what did you do to make it stop?"

The old woman gave a shrug. "Started talking to it. Then stopped. Then ignored it. Eventually, it didn’t matter. It only talks to the ones who listen."

Lena couldn’t breathe.

She stayed awake the next night, armed with her phone's voice recorder and a cold cup of coffee. When the taps came—on schedule—she didn’t respond. She only recorded.

In the morning, she played it back.

Silence.

Not even the tapping.

Not even the hum of the room.

It was like the phone had recorded a black hole.

She began drawing the layout of her apartment—sketching the walls, imagining what was behind them. There shouldn't have been anything. No crawlspace, no extra room. But when she measured the outside of her apartment versus the inside, there was a discrepancy of two feet.

Two feet unaccounted for.

Two feet of hollow space.

She called the landlord.

He laughed when she asked if anyone had ever complained about noises.

"Lady, this place is 100 years old. If the ghosts haven’t gotten you yet, they’re probably bored."

She didn’t laugh.

That night, she did something new.

She spoke.

Standing in the dim light of her bedroom, staring at the wall, she whispered: “What do you want?”

No answer.

Then:

Tap. Tap. Tap.
Pause.
Tap. Tap.

Same rhythm. Same ritual.

She clenched her fists. “You’re not real,” she said louder. “You’re just my head playing tricks. You’re not. Real.”

The wall responded.

But this time, it wasn’t taps.

It was a voice.

Whispered. Thin. Like air being sucked through a cracked window.

“But I remember you.”

Lena didn’t move for a full minute after the voice spoke.
"But I remember you."

The words still echoed in her head, but the voice had been quieter than thought itself. Thin, papery, like someone reading her memories out loud from behind glass.

She stared at the wall. Her knees wanted to buckle.

This was the moment she should have called someone. A friend. The therapist. Anyone. But who do you call when your wall starts remembering you?

She did something worse instead.

She pressed her ear to the wall.

For a moment, there was only silence. Her pulse filled the space between the plaster and her skin, quick and arrhythmic.

Then: a breath.

Faint, steady. Not hers.

Lena scrambled back so hard she hit the edge of her dresser, knocking a mug of pens to the ground. The crash sounded deafening in the tense quiet.

She waited.

No response.

No tapping.

No whisper.

By morning, she had convinced herself it was a waking dream. A fugue. Sleep deprivation. She’d read enough about sensory hallucinations to know the brain, when lonely enough, fills in the silence.

She went to therapy that afternoon.

Her therapist, a pale woman named Dr. Harrow, listened with narrowed eyes and occasional scribbles.

“You said the wall spoke to you,” Harrow repeated. “Do you think it was real?”

Lena hesitated. “No. But it didn’t feel imagined.”

“Describe the feeling.”

“It felt like…” She looked past Harrow’s shoulder, toward the office window. “Like someone was underneath my thoughts. Not replacing them. Just... following them a half-second behind.”

Dr. Harrow leaned forward. “Has this happened before? In childhood, maybe? During the divorce?”

“No.” Lena crossed her arms. “Just here.”

“Then maybe it’s the place, not the voice. What does the apartment feel like to you?”

Lena thought for a long time.

“Like it was waiting for me.”

That night, she dreamed of her mother’s basement. Not how it looked now—but how it had been when Lena was seven: unfinished concrete floors, a yellow laundry sink, shelves filled with boxes of forgotten photographs.

In the dream, she stood in the middle of the basement holding a rotary phone. The one from her apartment.

It was ringing.

When she picked it up, no one was there. Just the sound of breathing. Then tapping. Then—

“But I remember you.”

She dropped the phone.

It landed on her foot.

And that’s when she woke up.

With a sharp pain in her foot.

She looked down. A small red bruise was blooming over the bone of her ankle.

The phone—her old rotary phone—was lying on the floor next to the bed.

She hadn’t touched it in weeks.

Lena began to avoid the bedroom altogether.

She moved her sleeping arrangements to the couch and stacked books and an old lamp in front of the wall that tapped. But the sound followed her.

Not literally. But in her mind. A phantom noise—like when you get off a train and still feel yourself swaying.

She started hearing tapping in other places. In the therapist’s waiting room. On the bus. Inside her kitchen cupboards.

Tap. Tap. Tap.
Pause.
Tap. Tap.

Every time, she turned her head instinctively, waiting to see someone—or something—knocking just out of view.

And every time, there was nothing.

She called her ex-husband.

“I just need to talk to someone who knows I'm not insane,” she said.

“You sure I’m the right choice for that?” His voice was gruff, tired. “It’s been six months, Lena.”

“I know. I’m not asking for anything. Just a voice I remember.”

There was a pause.

Then: “You still having those nightmares?”

Her blood ran cold.

“I never told you about the nightmares.”

“I… thought you did. Back in January. You said something about walking down hallways?”

“No. I never mentioned that to anyone.”

She could hear him breathing. Slow. Uneven.

“I’ve had them too,” he said quietly. “Only mine end differently.”

“How?”

“There’s always a door. And a voice on the other side.”

That night, she didn’t try to sleep.

She brewed bitter black tea and sat on the floor with her journal. Her handwriting had deteriorated into near-illegibility, lines sloping off the page like falling thoughts.

She flipped to the last page and wrote in shaky script:

If I knock again, will it open?

There was no answer. Not at first.

She leaned her head back, eyes fixed on the ceiling. Her breath fogged in the cold air. The apartment had dropped ten degrees since sundown.

Then—so soft it could’ve been memory—came a tap.

Just one.

She moved to the wall, placed her palm against it.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

This time the reply was immediate.

“I’m what you locked away.”

Later that night, she tore through her belongings—looking for old journals, photo albums, anything that could hint at what this meant. What she had locked away.

In a box marked “college,” she found a folded note written in her own hand. No date. No context.

It read:

“Don’t let the silence get too deep. That’s where it hides.”

She had no memory of writing it.

She didn’t sleep.

At dawn, she called the landlord again.

“This is going to sound insane,” she said. “But is there any way to access the wall cavity behind my bedroom?”

He snorted. “What, you think you left your soul back there or something?”

“I’m serious. There’s a space. I measured it. I think someone might’ve lived in there.”

Silence.

When he spoke again, his voice had changed.

“You’re in 3B, right?”

“Yes.”

A long pause.

Then he said, “Stay out of the wall.”

The line went dead.

Lena’s hands were shaking as she scribbled her last journal entry that morning.

June 17th
Someone else had the dreams. Someone else heard it. Maybe it’s not just me. But maybe… maybe I brought it with me. Maybe it didn’t live in the wall at all—maybe it just followed me here.

She closed the journal, stood, and stared at the now-barricaded bedroom door.

The wall didn’t need to knock anymore.

Because it was waiting for her to knock first.

Lena didn’t remember falling asleep, but she awoke to find herself on the floor beside the barricaded bedroom door. The journal was still open on her lap. A fine layer of dust coated the spine.

But she had cleaned yesterday.

She was sure of it.

Or was it the day before?

The apartment smelled different—stale, like air that hadn’t moved in weeks. The plants in the kitchen were withered. Her teacup, untouched, had a ring of green fuzz circling the rim.

Something had changed.

Something had shifted.

She went into the bedroom.

It had been a week since she stepped inside, and the atmosphere was like walking into a sealed tomb. Still. Breathless.

The tapping had stopped, but the silence had become so complete it felt unnatural. Like sound refused to exist here.

The mirror on the wall had cracked down the center. A thin, splintered line, as though it had split open under pressure. Her reflection didn’t move quite right—lagging by milliseconds, just enough to be wrong.

She avoided looking at it.

Lena stripped the paint off the bedroom wall. Plaster flaked into her nails. Beneath that was a layer of wood. Beneath that, she found nothing.

No insulation. No wiring. Just a hollow space.

She knocked—once.

And then, not from the wall, but from behind her, came the reply.

Tap. Tap. Tap.
Pause.
Tap. Tap.

She spun, heart pounding. The room was empty.

Then she heard something she hadn’t in days: the rotary phone ringing.

She approached it like an animal approaches a trap. Slowly. Every muscle ready to flee.

It rang once more, then stopped.

She lifted the receiver.

Static.

Then, through the crackling—her own voice.

“Don’t let the silence get too deep. That’s where it hides.”

She slammed it down.

That night, she dreamed again of the basement.

But this time, it had changed.

There was a door now.

At the far end of the dream-space basement, a metal door stood slightly ajar. Light spilled from the gap, too bright, too white. Like a hospital operating room.

And the sound was no longer just tapping—it was breathing. Multiple lungs. Slow. Rhythmic.

She stepped forward, unsure of her feet. As she reached for the door, she heard the whisper again.

“I remember you… before.”

She woke up with blood under her fingernails.

She had scratched something into the wall while sleepwalking.

One word:
“BELOW.”

Lena left the apartment for the first time in days.

She walked to the public library, where the fluorescent lights felt both comforting and offensive. The librarian didn’t comment on her appearance, though her eyes did linger a beat too long.

She requested building records for her apartment complex.

Most had been digitized. She found the original architectural plans.

There was no cavity in the wall behind her bedroom.

But there was a door in the basement once—long since sealed. Not listed in modern floor plans. No reason given.

Just marked:
“ACCESS BELOW – BLOCKED OFF 1989.”

Lena barely remembered the walk home.

She stood outside the apartment building, staring at it like it was alive. Breathing. Watching her.

Mrs. Feldman was sitting on the front steps, a cigarette smoldering in her fingers. Her eyes, sunken and yellowed, tracked Lena silently.

“You went looking,” the old woman said.

Lena nodded.

“They always do.”

“What’s under the building?” Lena asked. “What’s below?”

Mrs. Feldman exhaled a plume of smoke, eyes fixed on the horizon.

“Us,” she said. “Versions of us. The parts that didn’t survive.”

Lena opened her mouth—but no words came.

The old woman just smiled sadly. “The echo always wants to come home.”

Lena found the basement door at the end of the first hallway. Behind the laundry room. Behind the furnace.

It looked like any other door. Gray, metal, a faded “Fire Exit” sign hanging askew.

But it was locked.

Or it had been.

The lock had been snapped—recently. The metal still bright around the break. Someone—or something—had gone inside.

She should’ve turned back.

But she opened it.

Stale, warm air flowed out like a breath that had been held too long.

The stairwell descended at a shallow angle. The walls narrowed as she walked, like the building itself was closing in around her.

There were no lights.

Just the dim glow of her phone screen, which flickered every few seconds as though struggling to stay conscious.

And then—she heard it again.

Tap. Tap. Tap.
Pause.
Tap. Tap.

But this time it came from ahead.

At the bottom of the stairwell was another door.

Wooden. Cracked. Covered in deep gouges, as if someone had tried to claw their way through. Or out.

She reached out.

The doorknob was warm.

When she opened it, the smell hit her first—dust, rust, and something sweetly rotting.

The room was small. Stone walls. No windows. Just a single chair in the center.

And on the walls—hundreds of scratch marks. Small ones. Shallow.

Words etched again and again.

“I remember.”
“I remember.”
“I remember.”

Lena turned, bile rising in her throat.

And then she saw it.

In the far corner, curled like a dead insect, was herself.

Or something that looked like her.

Thin. Pale. Hair falling out in patches. Lips moving soundlessly.

And tapping.

Her fingers moved against the wall in the same pattern.

Tap. Tap. Tap.
Pause.
Tap. Tap.

The thing looked up.

Its eyes were hollow, like someone had scooped them out and filled the sockets with memory.

It smiled.

“You shouldn’t have remembered,” it said

Lena didn’t move. The figure in the corner—her, but not her—kept smiling. A twitching, skin-deep grin that never reached the hollow eye sockets.

“You shouldn’t have remembered,” it whispered again. Its voice came in two layers: one inside her ears, the other deep in her chest. Like it had always been speaking through her.

Lena backed toward the stairwell door. Her body wasn’t responding the way it should. Her limbs trembled, but her thoughts were sharp, lucid—too lucid. Like her brain had turned the volume of reality up too high.

“You’re not real,” she said.

“I am what’s left when you stop pretending,” it answered.

Then it tapped the wall again.

Tap. Tap. Tap.
Pause.
Tap. Tap.

She turned and fled.

Up the stairs, barely registering the scraping echo of movement behind her. The hallway lights flickered. The door at the top groaned as she slammed it shut behind her.

Back in her apartment, she locked it. Bolted it. Pushed the dresser against it.

But something followed.

Not physically. Not audibly.

It followed through her mind.

Like a parasite waking up.

That night, Lena didn’t sleep.

She sat in front of the mirror with her journal, watching her own reflection breathe half a second behind her. She spoke aloud. It didn’t.

June 22
I met it. I met me. Or what I left behind.
It remembered what I forgot. And now I can't un-hear the silence.

She flipped back through earlier entries and noticed something that made her stomach drop.

Pages were missing.

Whole entries torn out with surgical precision. Not ripped, not sloppy—carefully removed, like someone had edited her.

And in the back of the journal, where she had never written before, a new line had appeared in handwriting that looked like hers—just slightly wrong.

“You never left the basement.”

She staggered back from the journal, knocking over the mirror.

The glass shattered.

And behind her—in the reflection of the shards—stood the double.

Closer now.

Its skin had started peeling back from the jaw like damp paper. Beneath was a blackness not of shadows, but of absence. Like light refused to exist inside it.

Lena screamed, but no sound came.

Her throat moved, but nothing came out. Not even breath.

The silence had swallowed her.

She woke up on the floor.

Or maybe she had never left it.

Time was no longer moving linearly. She couldn’t tell what day it was. The plants were dead. The windows were sealed shut. The clocks all blinked 3:33.

Tap. Tap. Tap.
Pause.
Tap. Tap.

She didn’t flinch anymore.

She tapped back.

On the last morning she could count, Lena dressed herself like she was going to a funeral—hers.

She cleaned the apartment meticulously. Washed the walls. Burned the old journal. Set the rotary phone in the sink and filled it with bleach until it fizzed like it was trying to scream.

Then she sat in the bedroom, facing the wall.

The original wall.

The one where it all began.

And she knocked.

Tap. Tap. Tap.
Pause.
Tap. Tap.

There was no reply.

So she whispered.

“Let me in.”

The wall groaned.

Not metaphorically.

It exhaled.

The plaster rippled like water disturbed by breath, and a seam formed where no seam should be. A crack. A door-shaped outline.

She reached out.

And the wall opened.

Inside was not a room.

It was memory. Condensed. Tangled. Alive.

She stepped into herself as a child. Seven years old. Standing in her mother’s basement. The same dream. The same rotary phone.

This time, she answered it.

“You promised you’d forget,” said the voice.

Then she was twenty. Crying in her college dorm. Writing a note in a different journal:

“Don’t let the silence get too deep.”
And then burning it. Tearing out pages. Swallowing what was left of her.

Then she was thirty-two, walking into the apartment, and the voice whispered, “Now you’ll remember everything.”

And she did.

The locked door wasn’t beneath the building.

It was inside her.

All the years of trauma, carefully boxed. Rewritten. Therapy only skimmed the surface. Medications blurred the shape. But the echo stayed.

It had always stayed.

She had knocked first. As a child.

After the screaming. After the blood. After her mother stopped calling her name.

The voice in the wall was not a ghost. Not a demon.

It was Lena.

The part of her that survived by hiding.

It had waited, year after year, tapping, asking, begging to be remembered.

Now it was free.

She came back to herself in the middle of the room.

The mirror was whole again.

Her reflection smiled—perfectly in sync.

The journal lay open on the floor.

One final entry appeared as she watched:

June 23
She is not afraid of the silence anymore.
Because now, it speaks in her voice.

Outside, the building looked the same.

No one noticed when she walked out the front door, hair clean, smile easy. She passed Mrs. Feldman, who didn’t look up. The old woman just muttered, “They always return whole.”

Lena walked into the sunlight and vanished into the noise of the city.

But in Apartment 3B, deep behind the walls, a soft tapping began again.

Tap. Tap. Tap.
Pause.
Tap. Tap.

Waiting for the next silence.

Waiting for someone to listen.

Three months passed.

The landlord posted a sign outside Apartment 3B:

“VACANCY — QUIET UNIT, GOOD LIGHT.”

Lena’s name was never on a missing persons list.

Her rent was paid through automatic withdrawal for another six weeks. No one came asking. No one at work raised an alarm. The building simply swallowed her story like so many others—quietly, efficiently.

Just another vanishing.

Mrs. Feldman died in her sleep two weeks later. The super found her with a smile on her face and all the clocks in her apartment frozen at 3:33 AM.

There was no autopsy.

A new tenant moved in.

Her name was Elise.

Late twenties, mid-divorce, anxious but hopeful—someone trying to restart her life. She liked the view, the price, the way the walls felt thick and safe.

The real estate agent mentioned, as an afterthought, “Previous tenant was quiet. Bit of a recluse. No complaints on file.”

Elise smiled. That sounded perfect.

The first few days were uneventful.

She unpacked slowly. Replaced the dusty rotary phone with her mobile. Lit candles in the evenings, wrote in a fresh journal. She even slept through the night—something she hadn’t done in months.

But on the seventh day, she woke to a sound.

Tap. Tap. Tap.
Pause.
Tap. Tap.

She thought it was the radiator.

By the tenth day, she wasn’t sure.

She knocked back once.

Just to be playful.

She laughed aloud after doing it.

But that night, she dreamed of a door.

And a voice she didn’t recognize—but felt familiar.

“You hear it too, don’t you?”

Elise found a photo tucked behind the kitchen radiator.

It was old, curled at the edges. In it, a woman stood in the apartment’s living room. Mid-30s. Quiet eyes. Half-smile.

On the back, someone had written in looping cursive:

“Lena. 3B. Remember.”

She pinned it to her fridge.

She didn’t know why.

By week three, Elise stopped using the bedroom.

The tapping came more often now. Always from behind that one wall. Always in the same pattern.

Tap. Tap. Tap.
Pause.
Tap. Tap.

She brought in a contractor to examine it.

“There’s nothing back there,” he said. “Just insulation and concrete. Can’t knock it down without a permit.”

But when he left, he seemed unsettled.

He didn’t take the elevator. He walked all the way down the stairs, whistling loudly the whole way, like someone trying to prove they weren’t afraid.

Elise found the journal on the final day of October.

It wasn’t hers.

It had been hidden behind a loose tile in the bathroom. Water-stained. The first page read:

“If you’re reading this, you’ve started to hear it.”
“It’s not a ghost. It’s memory.”

She read every page in one sitting.

She found her hands trembling by the end.

The last entry chilled her:

“I thought I was the echo. But I was the silence it lived inside.”

“It wears your face so you’ll listen. It watches you so you’ll forget.”

“When it knocks, you answer. That’s the rule.”

“But no one said what happens when you knock first.”

That night, Elise sat cross-legged in front of the bedroom wall.

She held the photo of Lena in her lap.

She waited for the tapping.

It didn’t come.

Instead, she leaned forward and whispered:
“Are you there?”

And the wall whispered back:

“Yes.”

Then came the tapping.

Tap. Tap. Tap.
Pause.
Tap. Tap.

Elise didn’t knock this time.

She simply whispered:

“What are you?”

And the voice replied, slowly:

“The part you left behind.”

The next day, Elise asked the building manager about the basement.

“Sealed years ago,” he said. “Water damage or some legal thing. I’m not sure.”

“Do you have a key?”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t open anymore. Just empty space under there now.”

But Elise had dreams that night of stairs.

She walked down and saw Lena waiting on the bottom step.

Lena wasn’t frightening. She looked tired. Thin. Transparent at the edges, like she had begun to fade.

“Why did you stay?” Elise asked her.

“I didn’t,” Lena said. “You did.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

The dream repeated every night for a week.

Each time, the stairs got shorter. The room got brighter.

And Lena’s voice grew louder.

Until one night, she stepped aside.

And Elise passed through her.

Neighbors said she was quiet. A little distracted. Kept to herself.

No one heard her leave, but the apartment was empty by morning. The landlord found her phone on the counter. Still charging.

All the mirrors were turned backward.

The plants were gone.

And on the wall in the bedroom, scratched delicately into the plaster:

Tap. Tap. Tap.
Pause.
Tap. Tap.

“We are the echo and the wall.
We are the question and the silence.
We are what you forget—until you don’t.”

No one lives in Apartment 3B for long anymore.

They come.

They stay.

They hear it.

And eventually… they listen.

Because no matter who you are, there’s something inside you that knocks.

And once you knock back—

You’re never alone again