Until I Heard The Noises In The Walls

A Story by Alexzandria R.

A woman sits in her apartment, cold and enduring a power outage, when she hears a sound like something is trying to get out of the wall. What happens next is all but expected. Worst night ever.

It was a moonless night. Black and lit only by what few stars were visible in the sky. The power outage had been going on for weeks. No one knew what was causing it yet. The phone lines were down. Internet wasn’t working. People had been out trying to fix whatever was causing this, but no one could find anything wrong with the power lines or anything. The only thing saving anyone in my town from total darkness was a generator. I was the one apartment that couldn’t afford one.
I sat on my couch in the freezing darkness of my apartment reading a book with my flashlight. All the blankets I owned weren’t helping me a bit. The air was icy. Winter is the worst time for a power outage, I thought. My toes felt as if they were frozen and my fingers were numb. I put the flashlight down, turned it off, and attempted to warm my hands by pulling the blanket over me up to my chin and sitting there beneath it. I was calm. Everything was silent. Until I heard the noises in the walls. It sounded like something was scratching and clawing inside of the walls. As if something were trying to escape. It sounded like something far too large to be a mouse or anything like that.
I could hear pieces of drywall falling to the apartment floor as whatever it was inside the walls made its way out. My heart pounded against my ribs. I shivered and it wasn’t from the cold. I listened. It sounded like it was coming from the wall across from me where the television sat on top of an old card table I had lying around. The apartment was pitch black. I couldn’t see a thing. I could only listen to whatever creature was attempting to get into the room with me.
I heard large chunks of wood and drywall fall to the floor. Larger than last time, it sounded like. Something was digging through the walls. I jumped when I heard the card table flip over with a loud BANG! The television toppled to the floor, shattering the screen and sending pieces of glass in all directions. Then, I saw something in the darkness. Eyes? A pair of large yellow eyes, it looked like.
That’s the last thing I remember. I guess I blacked out. I woke with a massive headache and the bright light that was right in my face didn’t help much. I was lying down on something hard and cold like metal. I turned my head to the side so that the light wouldn’t be directly in my eyes. What I saw made me thrash around and struggle, trying to escape from whatever strange place I’d been taken to, only to find that my arms and legs had been strapped down. I had looked away from the light only to find something worse.
My neighbor who lived in the apartment next to me and had been my friend since I moved into the building was lying strapped down a few feet away from me. He was looking at me with wide pale blue eyes and an expression of horror. His chest just barely rose and fell with weak shallow breaths. That was one of the only things that told me that he was alive. That and the fact that I could see his beating heart. He had no skin from his collarbone down. I could see that many of his ribs had been removed as well. I realized where I had woken up. Or rather what I had woken up on. An operating table.
I turned my head to the other side. To my right was a small table and on it was a silver tray with all different types of tools, most I didn’t recognize. One was a scalpel. There was another one that looked like some type of scoop and another which from what I could see was just an oversized steak knife. From my left, I heard my friend speak. It was barely audible. He was so weak. I could tell that this was his dying breath.
“L-Leave h-him al-l-lone,” was all he could say before the light left those horror-filled blue eyes of his. Leave him alone? What’s that supposed to mean?
Then I realized that he wasn’t speaking to me, but someone-- or something-- behind me. I turned my head to the right once again and was greeted by a faceless woman wearing only a bloodstained white apron. She looked like one of those wooden dolls with joints that you can manipulate. The kind artists use to help them draw people. She had no facial features except a mouth. Just a smooth surface besides that. The same with her body. No breasts. Just the general shape of them. A smooth surface. She had no navel. When she turned around to get something from the cabinet on the other side of the room, I saw that she had nothing in the back either. A smooth surface.
She returned to my side with a syringe filled with god knows what. She stabbed it into my neck and I became paralyzed as she injected the liquid into me. Then, she spoke, using the only facial feature she had.
“This will just hurt a little bit,” she said, smiling a bit as she lifted the oversized steak knife off of the tray.