Chapter 27: The Message in the Walls
Evelyn didn't move.
The bedroom was silent again, but the feeling in the air remained—tainted, like the walls themselves had absorbed something rotten.
Her phone buzzed again.
Another message.
"Look in the walls. She left you something."
She stared at the text.
Her hands shook. Who was sending these?
And more importantly—why were they helping her?
She grabbed the phone and slowly turned toward the bedroom. The door stood ajar, its darkness now deeper than before, almost like a mouth waiting to swallow her.
Still, she entered.
Her room was cold—unnaturally cold.
Frost laced the window edges despite the warm spring air outside.
She forced herself to look around.
The bed. The dresser. The cracked mirror on the closet door.
Nothing looked disturbed—except the wall beside her bookshelf.
There was a faint, jagged bulge, like the drywall had been hastily patched.
She reached out, hand trembling.
Knuckles brushed the surface.
It felt soft.
Almost... breathing.
She recoiled.
But then she heard it.
A faint scratching sound—from the inside.
Something was behind the wall.
Heart hammering, she ran to the kitchen, grabbed a knife. Returned.
She pressed the blade to the wall, hesitated—then cut.
Drywall crumbled.
Dust choked her as she tore a hole into the wall.
And then—she found it.
A small box, taped shut and wrapped in cloth that had long since yellowed with age.
She pulled it free.
Inside was a bundle of old, water-damaged papers.
And a cassette tape.
Labeled in Lillian's handwriting:
"If you're reading this, they know."
At the bottom of the box—
A polaroid.
Evelyn and Lillian—age thirteen—smiling in the woods behind the town.
But behind them—
A third figure.
Barely visible.
Faceless.
Watching.
The Tape
Evelyn stared at the cassette tape in her hand, the plastic case slick with a cold sweat she couldn't explain. Her fingers gripped it tighter, as if it might try to wriggle free.
Her mind swirled with questions—how had it survived this long? Why had Lillian hidden it behind the wall? Who else knew it existed?
She laid the items on her bed, carefully unfolding the brittle papers. The writing was in Lillian's hurried scrawl, some letters smudged by moisture or time.
> "If you found this, Evelyn… they've let you. They want you to remember now. But you have to understand—it's not just the town. It's beneath it. It's in the blood. The whispers weren't in our heads."
"Don't trust the mirrors."
"Don't trust the voice pretending to be me."
Evelyn's stomach twisted.
She needed to listen to the tape.
She rummaged through a box in her closet until she found an old tape player from college. After inserting the cassette and pressing play, the machine hissed with static for several seconds. Then—
Lillian's voice, raw and frightened, filled the room.
> "It started with the circle. We didn't know what it was. We were just kids, playing near the water. But the circle wasn't made by us—it was already there, carved into the rocks."
"We stepped into it, Evelyn. And something stepped out."
A pause. Then a breathless whisper:
> "I see it in reflections now. It wears my face. Sometimes yours. Sometimes…"
The recording cracked, and the next voice wasn't Lillian's.
It was deep, reverberating, as if the speaker were miles underground—or not human at all.
> "You should have let her go, Evelyn."
Evelyn slammed the stop button. The silence that followed was deafening.
Then—a knock at her front door.
She jumped.
Three steady taps.
Someone waited.
She crept toward the door, peeked through the peephole.
No one there.
But lying on the welcome mat—
Another polaroid.
This one showed Evelyn asleep in her bed, the photograph taken from inside her room.
She hadn't even gone to bed yet.
Her chest constricted. She backed away from the door slowly, barely able to breathe.
Behind her—
A soft, rhythmic scratching sound echoed from inside the wall again.
Only now, it came from every wall.
All around her.
Closing in.
She ran to the kitchen, her pulse thudding in her ears. Threw open drawers, looking for something, anything that could protect her.
She found a box of matches.
That was when she noticed—
The wallpaper was peeling. Beneath it, symbols were carved into the plaster.
The same symbols she and Lillian had seen that day near the lake.
Circles. Claws. Eyes.
One of them was bleeding.
Not ink. Not paint.
Blood. Fresh.
Evelyn dropped the matchbox.
The room suddenly felt alive.
The floorboards groaned—not from her weight, but as if something beneath them stirred.
Her phone buzzed again.
Another message.
> "You brought it back with you."
What Sleeps Beneath
The room was breathing. Evelyn felt it in her bones. The wallpaper curled back as if recoiling from her presence, revealing more of the etched symbols. Some lines pulsed faintly, like veins just under the surface of skin.
She clutched her phone, rereading the message:
> "You brought it back with you."
Her mind raced—what had she brought back? From where?
The tape had mentioned the circle by the lake. That day. That moment. She and Lillian had stepped into something ancient.
And it had marked them.
A sudden thud beneath the floor jolted her thoughts.
Then another.
Something was moving under the house.
Her instinct told her to run, to flee into the night and not look back. But the rational part—the journalist, the friend, the girl who had lost Lillian—demanded answers.
She grabbed a flashlight, her hands trembling as she made her way to the basement door. It hadn't been opened in years.
The hinges screamed in protest.
The air down there was thick.
Old.
Wrong.
With every step, the darkness seemed to deepen—not from lack of light, but from the presence of something that devoured it.
At the bottom of the stairs, her flashlight flickered.
She swept the beam across the space. Dust. Boxes. Cobwebs.
Then—
A trail.
Dark streaks leading across the floor, like something had been dragged.
She followed it to the far wall.
More symbols.
But these were different. Fresher. Carved with precision, and smeared with something that still dripped.
At the center of the markings was a trapdoor. One she had never seen before.
Her breath caught in her throat.
She knelt beside it, her fingers hovering just above the wood.
Another vibration. Her phone buzzed.
A new message.
> "Don't open it. That's where she sleeps."
Evelyn's heart pounded.
She?
Another buzz.
> "The Faceless Queen. She's still dreaming. If you wake her…"
Another buzz.
> "We all burn."
A creak echoed above her—floorboards shifting in the living room.
She wasn't alone in the house anymore.
Something had entered.
And it was waiting.
She could feel it watching, hear its breath syncing with hers.
She turned off the flashlight.
Darkness swallowed her.
She waited. Listened.
And then—
A voice.
Not from her phone.
Not from the tape.
From the trapdoor.
> "Evelyn…"
It was Lillian's voice.
But she remembered the journal's warning:
"Don't trust the voice pretending to be me."
She backed away slowly, but the voice grew louder—more desperate.
> "Help me. Please. You left me here."
And then—
The lock on the trapdoor clicked open by itself.
End of Chapter 27.
Will Evelyn open the trapdoor despite the warnings?
Who or what is the Faceless Queen?
And what really happened to Lillian all those years ago?