My boyfriend and I are in a long-distance relationship. To make up for it, we Skype all the time. We were on one of these late-night video calls when it happened. Steve stopped mid-sentence and said: “Rae, what’s that behind you?”
I turned around. There was nothing behind my chair but but blank wall.
“What are you talking about?”
“The crack in the wall. Harry’s going to have a fit.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the wall.”
“Oh, really? You don’t see the huge crack spanning your entire wall?”
I turned around again. All I saw was that ugly lime-green wall. Harry, the landlord, painted all the apartments in the building like that. All the walls white, except for one blinding lime-green “accent” wall in the main room.
“No. I don’t see it.” I sighed, and said in my most seductive voice: “Can’t we get back to what we were doing?”
“Maybe it’s a glitch? Or some dirt on your camera?”
I sighed.
“Check your webcam.”
“Fine.”
I clicked on the tiny image of myself in the corner. It filled the screen.
I froze.
Whether it was dirt or a glitch, I couldn’t tell. But there did appear to be a jagged, thick, black line running through the lime-green paint. “That’s so weird.”
I rubbed my camera, but it didn’t go away. I hung up and re-entered the call, and it didn’t go away.
“It looks bigger now,” he said.
“What?”
“At the beginning it was just a thin crack. Now it looks a like, two inches wide.”
“Okay. Can we talk about something else now?”
“But it’s so weird.”
We continued talking. Steve’s eyes stayed fixed just over my shoulder the entire time. I tried to ignore it. “So Mary said, what are you doing here at the salon, in the middle of the night? And I said –”
“Rae! Behind you!”
“What?”
But I didn’t have to ask. As my eyes glanced to the small camera feed in the corner, I saw the crack behind me was wide. Much wider than before.
And four fingers were poking out.
I got up and ran. Out of the apartment, down the stairs. I swung the door open and leapt out into the cold night. As I tried to collect myself, I looked up at the apartment building.
And saw a dark shadow flitted by, from behind the sheer curtains, on a third floor room.
I pulled out my phone and called the police.
***
I found out a few days later that someone on the third floor went missing that night. A young guy named Charlie Hayworth. After a few days of searching, they found his body.
Inside the wall.
Yet – there was no damage to the wall at all. And the body they found – though it matched Charlie’s body by DNA – was in a severe state of decomposition. He was little more than a skeleton… even though he only disappeared a few days ago.
And there’s one other thing.
As the police continued their investigation, they found out the ugly lime-green paint Harry used wasn’t just paint. It was laced with some sort of weird chemical that even the scientists had trouble identifying.
And Harry?
He disappeared the night the body was found.