THE WALLS HAVE VOICES

Chapter 3: The Games Begin

A week passed. A week of sleepless nights, of jumping at every sound, of Mia refusing to speak at all. Mom had started praying constantly, clutching her rosary and muttering about demons and possession. Dad tried to keep things normal, but I could see the strain in his eyes, the way his hands shook when he thought no one was looking.

The voice—we'd started calling him "the thing in the walls," though we never said it out loud—had been quiet for three days. We'd almost started to believe it was over, that maybe we'd imagined the worst of it.

Then the games started.

I found the first note slipped under my door on a Tuesday morning. The paper was old, yellowed, and the handwriting was spidery and strange:

"GAME ONE: HIDE AND SEEK

I'm hiding somewhere you can see,

But looking won't help you find me,

Count to ten and turn around,

I promise I won't make a sound."

My hands trembled as I showed it to my parents. Mom immediately started crying, saying we needed to leave, to get out of this cursed house. But Dad was stubborn.

"We just bought this place. We can't just abandon it. We'll call the police again, get them to do a more thorough search."

The police came. Again, they found nothing. The younger officer suggested we install security cameras, which Dad did that same day. We put them in every hallway, in the living room, in the kitchen. Surely, we thought, surely we'd catch something now.

That night, I was in my room doing homework when I heard Mia scream. I ran to her room and found her standing in the middle of the floor, pointing at her wall. Written in what looked like black marker were the words:

"FOUND YOU, LITTLE MIA"

Dad came running, saw the writing, and immediately checked the security footage. Nothing. The cameras showed no one entering or leaving Mia's room. The writing had simply appeared.

"This is impossible," Dad muttered, rewinding the footage again and again.

But there it was on the wall, and there was Mia, who wouldn't stop shaking, who crawled into my bed that night and wouldn't let go of my shirt.

The games escalated. Objects started moving—small things at first. A cup would be in a different spot than where we'd left it. A book would appear on a different shelf. Then bigger things. Furniture rearranged overnight. Pictures turned to face the wall. Once, we came downstairs to find every chair in the dining room stacked in a tower that reached the ceiling.

The cameras caught nothing. Nothing.

"It's mocking us," I said one night as we all huddled in the living room, too afraid to separate. "It knows about the cameras. It's showing us it can do whatever it wants."

Mom was rocking back and forth, praying. "We need a priest. We need an exorcism. This is demonic—"

"Marsha, please—"

"Don't 'please' me, Gregor! Open your eyes! This isn't natural!"

A voice drifted from the heating vent, sing-song and terrible:

"Priest won't help and prayers won't save,

This is my house, you're in my cave,

Play my games or try to run,

Either way, I'm having fun."

Dad grabbed a screwdriver and started unscrewing the vent cover. His hands were shaking so badly he could barely grip it. When he finally got it off and shined a flashlight inside, there was nothing there. Just empty ductwork stretching into darkness.

"Where are you?" Dad screamed into the vent. "Show yourself, you coward!"

Laughter echoed through the ducts, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

That night, I couldn't sleep. I lay in bed with Mia beside me—she refused to sleep alone anymore—and stared at the ceiling. I kept thinking about the house's layout, about all those odd spaces I'd found. There had to be hidden rooms, passages between the walls. That was the only explanation.

Around three in the morning, I heard it: footsteps in the hallway. Slow, deliberate footsteps. I held my breath and listened. They stopped outside my door.

Then came a knock. Three slow knocks.

"Benjamin," the voice whispered through the door. "Are you awake? Do you want to play another game?"

I didn't answer. Didn't move. Didn't breathe.

"I'll take that as a yes. Here's the game: tomorrow, I'm going to take something from each of you. Something precious. If you can find where I've hidden them before midnight, you win. If not... well, you'll see."

The footsteps retreated down the hallway. I checked the security camera footage the next morning. Nothing. The hallway had been empty all night.

But when we woke up, things were missing. Dad's wedding ring—gone from his nightstand. Mom's Bible—vanished from her bedside table. Mia's favorite stuffed rabbit—disappeared from her bed. And my phone—taken from my desk where I'd left it charging.

We searched everywhere. Tore the house apart. Found nothing.

At 11:45 PM, fifteen minutes before midnight, I found them. They were in the basement, arranged in a circle on the floor, with a note in the center:

"YOU WIN THIS TIME, CLEVER BOY

BUT I HAVE MANY MORE GAMES TO ENJOY"

I gathered our things and ran upstairs, triumphant. We'd won. We'd beaten him at his own game.

But as I reached the top of the basement stairs, I heard him laughing in the walls, and I realized something that made my blood run cold: he'd let us win. He'd wanted us to find them.

This was all just entertainment to him. And the games were only beginning