The apartment lay empty, a silent tomb for months, before Mara shattered its dark stillness. She loved the solitude, silence as thick as fog, air stinging with something unspoken and just too cheap to be pleasant.
A fifth-floor walk-up in a crumbling century-old hulk of a building? A bargain of unutterable horrors. The landlord, a stooping specter with gnarled fingers as twigs on a dead tree, handed her the keys, his voice a rasp of a whisper.
"Don't touch the crawlspace," he warned, his bony finger stabbing toward a little, nasty door behind her bedroom closet. "It's sealed for a reason." Mara dismissed him as another mad shard of the past.
But old houses do have their ghosts, after all. She moved in on a cursed Friday. The first night, the bedroom light dimmed, twice, before dying into darkness.
She blamed the wiring, cowering with the hall light throwing wicked shadows across her floor. By Sunday, the sound had driven her three times, a light scratching, claws on wood, the closet was its wicked refuge.
She never deliberately left the door ajar. But each morning, she woke to find it creaking wide open, wide enough for something cold to watch her sleep. Wednesday, she could hear it, unholy breath, not hers, not of the living.
It echoed from beyond the walls. Pressing her ear against the cold, crumbling plaster, she listened hard to the shallow, ragged wheeze, a dark symphony of inhales and evil exhales.
That night, sleep poured from her hands like sand. At dawn's breaking, the closet door, wide open, yawned at her like the jaws of a starving animal. The crawlspace too had been violated, its seal shattered asunder, its festering secrets laid bare to the light of day.
Frozen in shock, Mara's heart raced as she gazed into that void, the emptiness too profound to be natural. Shadows there grew darker, soaking up all hint of light, covering something that moved with dread intent.
It was a sinuous promise of something living. Mara's heart thudded, and she retreated. Shadows shifted, and something came out. It was not a beast.
No, it was like a man, thin as a wisp of smoke, white as a corpse, with eyes that protruded like great sacks and seemed to gobble the light, and fingers that curled into unnatural claws, as though clutching for a soul.
His lips were stretched into a grin, not one of happiness, but a sickly parody of happiness, a mask for an ancient horror
"I lived here once," he spat, the air thick with terror.
Mara's scream tore the silence. But shadows consumed her scream.
The thing that was in the wall stretched out, its long finger tracing the tenderness of her cheek with an iciness that seeped deep into her bone.
"I never went away," he warbled, each syllable veiled in hatred.
A week later, the flat stood vacant once more, a storehouse of memories. The landlord wiser for nothing gave a young couple a tour of the ghostly halls.
"Great spot," he quipped, "Fifth story, no neighbors."
He offered up the keys, his eyes darting nervously toward the closet.
"Give the crawlspace a wide berth. It's sealed for good reason."