What the Walls Keep

The brand-new geriatric care center looked magnificent from the outside, but inside it was new without being impressive. It's hard to make a place like this seem grand when it offers little hope and only endings. 

I have been volunteering here on morning shifts for a few months. My father was a patient here and died in this hospital, too. Giving my time here was the right way to make things right. I'm not much for bedside comfort, but I'm dependable and hardworking, and that helps me feel better about myself. There is nothing wrong with that, is there?

The ward's head sister exhibits a dual personality: she is warm and patient with the elderly but strict with the staff.

She told me I was late, without lifting her eyes from the chart cart.

"The wheelchairs on the third floor needed new cushions; the old ones had gone to the incinerator."

"How many?"

"Ten. Storage is in the old ward downstairs. Take the service lift."

That was the entire exchange. I liked that about her — it meant I never had to answer when she didn't ask how I was.

I discovered the new building was constructed on the old hospital's site, since they'd left the underground part intact in case it was ever needed for extra space. Down in that concrete maze, one of the old service rooms had been turned into a storage room.

The place was supposed to be empty.

That was not the case. When I found the light switch, the neon ceiling lights shuddered on. Some were burnt out, and the rest flickered irregularly, unable to maintain a steady glow.

I was walking down the main corridor when I suddenly realized this was the ward. Room Six was down here somewhere, the room I had never been able to forget. 

I am rational and usually find reasonable explanations; however, I must admit it was how large and abandoned it felt. I decided I wouldn't stay long enough to figure out why.

I hurried to look for the storage room. The sole sound was the humming of the tubes. There was no other sound — not even my footsteps, which struck me as odd since the damaged linoleum always creaked when I visited my father.

The truth is, I don't care for places like this — those that seem empty but are not. Without AC, the air was hot and stuffy. The windows, half-hidden underground as I recalled, shone green under the neon light until sunlight waned them. The light came through what now seemed like smaller windows than before.

I went into a few rooms, looking for the one that was now a storage room. Five years after the ward closed, the old odor remained — urine, bleach, and something beneath both.

I found the storage room and the cushions, but couldn't stop moving around.

I felt the need to leave immediately, but I didn't.

I visited room Six once more — the room whose layout I knew well, the one that had my father's bed. Where the two beds had been, rust stains marked the terrazzo floor. The bedside cabinets remained, and the one with the crack I remembered was now darker, almost black, but still visible. Two bedside cabinets were the only furniture left in the room.

Light entered through the half-hidden window, too bright and lively, as if from a children's book. It made the room seem worse, combining emptiness with sunshine to create an uneasy feeling.

I was about to leave, but couldn't. It wasn't due to any noise, sight, or anything unusual — just a feeling I had missed something.

I don't think there are such things as ghosts, but I do believe grief creates a mark on places — a stain no quantity of bleach can remove. Even if you scrub a room until it smells like chlorine, it won't be clean.

I then realized there was no dust on the cabinets or window frame. This was true for a few other open rooms, too. It seemed odd, unless people had been coming down here to clean.

Another thing bothered me: the ward was stuffy, filled with a humidity that made no sense in a desert city.

I fastened the wheelchair cushions onto an empty food cart and began pushing it toward the door.

But I didn't leave. I walked back into room Six — the room where my father died.

I put my hand on the wall. It was wet, not dripping but a slower, stickier kind of wet, like tears evaporating halfway down before reaching the floor.

Water damage, I told myself: old building, bad drainage. Humidity finds the easiest path.

I've never heard of walls crying. Not outside of horror movies.

This was just an old building.

I told myself that on the way out, and again the next morning. I believed it enough to return to my life — three more shifts, three more walks through the new wing, three more days without thinking about room Six.

On the fourth day, I went back down.

"More cushions?" the head sister asked, already writing something else.

"There were a few torn ones we missed."

She didn't look up. "Take the lift."

We didn't need more cushions. She didn't ask why I was carrying an empty bag.

The lift doors opened onto the same corridor, the same buzzing tubes, but something in it had moved since the last visit, in a way I couldn't immediately place. It took me a few steps to understand what: the air appeared drier and colder. Not the ordinary basement cold, the kind that sits flat and even in every room — this had a direction to it, a faint draft moving against my ankles, as if it were coming from somewhere specific, pulling rather than just existing.

I stood still and listened. Beneath the neon hum, there was something else now, low and irregular, almost below hearing — not dripping, not settling pipes, something closer to a scrape, there and then gone, there and then gone, so faint I couldn't be sure I hadn't invented it to fill the silence I'd complained about the first time. I made myself keep walking.

Three of the rooms I passed had their doors open wider than I remembered leaving them. I hadn't touched any of those doors on my last visit. I told myself an orderly must come down occasionally, a maintenance check, something ordinary, and I kept walking because stopping to think about it properly felt like giving it more room than it deserved.

The wet mark on the wall in room Six had dried, or maybe it had never been more than a shadow. I stood where my father's bed had been and looked at the crack in the cabinet instead, because that, at least, I trusted. That crack had been there while my father was alive.

My father, Salomon, used to say it in the last year, when the disease had eaten past the part of him that filtered what he said out loud. They're in the walls, he told me, very calmly, the way you'd mention the weather. They're digging. Can't you hear them?

I redirected. That's the word they teach you — redirect, don't argue with delusions, don't feed them, don't ask questions. So I never asked him who "they" were. I already knew, in the way you know something you avoid looking at directly. My father was nine when his family went into hiding. He spent two years in rooms with false walls and floors that opened onto nothing, listening for boots beyond the plaster. Sixty years is a long time. Long enough, I thought, for safety. I didn't understand that safety doesn't arrive and stay. For him, it was a door that opened and closed at random for the rest of his life, and in the end, it stopped closing.

I never told him it was over. It wouldn't have meant anything to the part of him that was left. I told myself that keeping calm, keeping his room as homely as possible, and keeping my voice controlled was its own kind of care. Maybe it was. I understand now it was the only way I knew to be near him without feeling what he felt.

Behind where the bed had stood, near the skirting board, was a fist-sized opening, its edges pushed inward, as if something had come through from the other side rather than the wall failing at this point. It hadn't been there four days ago. I was certain of that in the way I'm certain of very few things.

I didn't touch it at first. I bent down with the empty bag still in my hand and let myself believe, for as long as it took to draw one breath, that he had been right. That something patient and slow had been on the other side of these walls, and had taken sixty years to arrive.

Then I looked properly, because that's who I am, and I couldn't stop being that person who investigates everything.

I looked through the rough opening. There was no tunnel, no hidden passage. Just the dead space between the inner wall and the concrete foundation, stuffed with crumbling mortar and the sour smell of stagnant air. A section of lath had decayed, and the plaster had caved in under the damp, ordinary neglect.

I sat back on my heels and let it be exactly that, ordinary.

I don't know how long I stayed like that before my hands went back to the hole. I pulled at the deteriorating edge with my fingers, widening it, working the old plaster loose in dry chalky pieces that fell into my lap and across my knees. I didn't stop when it started to hurt. I didn't stop when something gave under my nail. I didn't stop until the hole was nearly twice its size and there was nothing behind it but more dark, more cold, more nothing — and even then I sat there a moment longer, hands in the opening up to the wrist, before I understood I had no idea why I'd done it.

My fingers were scraped raw, one nail torn low enough to sting, a thin line of blood already drying in the plaster dust. I hadn't felt any of it happen.

It occurred to me, sitting there with my hands sore and my knees full of plaster dust, that this was the closest I had ever come to believing him. Too late to matter to him. Not too late to matter to me.

They're in the walls. Can't you hear them?

I hadn't heard digging. Not really — not the thing he meant. Whatever I'd heard in the corridor was mine, not his. That was never what frightened me. 

I wiped my hands on my uniform, which did nothing to clean them, and sat a moment longer in room Six with the two bedside cabinets, the rust stains, and the hole I had made bigger for no reason I could explain to anyone, including myself. Then I stood up.

I put the bag over my shoulder. I didn't cover the hole, photograph it, or bring it up to the head sister on my way out. I left it exactly as I found it.

"Find what you needed?" she asked, without raising her eyes.

"Yes," I said, and for once, I wasn't lying to redirect anyone. I meant it. I just couldn't have told her what it was.

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