She touches the walls the same way she once touched me.
Gently.
Her fingers barely hovering over the plaster, letting the mere suggestion of her caress do all of the work. She touches the walls of the apartment the same way she touched me and I fear our marriage has reached a point of no return.
It didn’t take long for me to notice her strange behaviour. From the day we moved into the apartment my wife developed a habit of running her fingers along the walls as if our home were a long-lost lover. At first, I thought she was simply excited to live an existence free of landlords but as the days went on her attachment to the apartment became unavoidable.
Every chance she would get she would press her body against the walls.
Whenever we’d talk, be it in the living room or bedroom or kitchen, one of her hands was always caressing the third silent member of the conversation.
Sometimes, when she thought I wasn’t looking, I’d find her sneaking a lick.
I thought our marriage was rock solid. I thought we’d get a dog and raise children and grow old together.
I was certain.
People in happy marriages, however, seldom end up in this dark corner of the internet.
We moved to Prague because of my work. I initially had a couple of cities in Europe to choose from, but the moment I mentioned Prague my wife insisted the choice had already been made. She spent four years studying in the city for her bachelors and two years of our marriage insisting we go visit.
I didn’t argue.
The city seemed nice enough.
Once I accepted the position and we started going through the process of getting our visas, my wife took the reins of decision making once more. If we were to move to another city permanently, she said, we should invest in buying an apartment.
She was always very iffy on the idea of starting a family and settling down, but the moment the city of Prague entered the equation her vagueness dissipated. I was pleased with this development and I had done rather well for myself financially, so I let her find us a place.
The apartment she bought was wholly different from what I expected.
When I googled neighbourhoods in Prague I expected us to end up in the Parisian houses that made up much of the heart of the city. I expected parks and cafes and restaurants and bars that used to be barracks or churches once upon a time.
I expected culture.
What I got instead was communist outskirts.
The apartment my wife had purchased was on the edge of one of the subway lines and was located on the fourth floor of a sea of cement. The apartment had low ceilings from which we could clearly hear our neighbours, but all in all it wasn’t terrible. A spacious bedroom, a comfortable living room, a kitchen with everything the stomach could desire and a living room big enough to host guests. The apartment itself wasn’t strange — not in the beginning at least.
What confused me was the location.
We were miles away from any hint of culture, the air smelled vaguely of dog-food and the only real restaurant dining option was the pizza stand in the subway that was staffed exclusively by people who looked like they should be on suicide watch. For the life of me I couldn’t understand why my wife had chosen that particular apartment in that particular corner of the city.
Any reservations I had about our new home, however, were undone by my wife’s sheer excitement at being in the new apartment. When we first got past the front door she made multiple rounds around the apartment, running her fingers along the walls all along the way. When she had finally finished touring the apartment, she collapsed on an old couch the previous owners had left behind and regarded the plain white ceiling as if it was a fresco painted by the masters.
That night, when we first made love in our new home, she refused to do so in bed. Instead, she pressed herself up against the walls of the old communist-era home. Her request was queer, but I was far too caught up in the act to question it.
As the days went on, however, I would find myself thinking back to that night over and over again.
My wife has always had very strong opinions about aesthetics, but when it came time to furnish our new home, she left the task entirely up to me. She wouldn’t leave the house. Whenever I came back from my Ikea trips, I would find her standing at the front door waiting for me, slightly out of breath. It was as if the sound of my key in the door had disturbed her from whatever she was doing prior to my arrival.
The way she would caress the walls bothered me, but whenever I tried formulating my discomfort into words, I would end up feeling insane.
She said she was simply excited to be back in Prague. She said she simply liked the apartment. After my first couple attempts to broach the subject, I remained silent.
Then, I found her licking the walls.
We were curled up on the couch watching a movie when she got up and left. I figured she went to the bathroom, so I didn’t make much of her absence. When she didn’t return for a solid twenty minutes, however, I went to search for her.
I found her in our bedroom. She was licking the wall.
When I caught her, she denied it. She said she wasn’t doing anything strange and that I was simply inventing things. When I pointed to the wet spot on the wall where her tongue had been just seconds prior my wife finally acquiesced.
She said she wasn’t licking the wall.
She was simply smelling it and her tongue must have slipped.
When I asked why she would be smelling the wall of the apartment she shrugged and said that the wall had a peculiar smell.
It did.
It smelled ever so gently of sweat.
I tried theorising about why the wall of our apartment would smell that way but my wife refused to engage in the debate. She said she wanted to finish watching the movie.
So, we did.
That night, as we fell asleep, I could still see the wet patch of wall next to our bed. The room was dark and the patch had dried considerably by then, but I was certain that I could see it.
As I stared at the dark patch of wall, I started to get a feeling that it was shifting around, but I pushed those thoughts to the back of my brain.
I convinced myself that there was nothing wrong with the apartment.
I convinced myself I had nothing to worry about.
Later in the week my wife went drinking with her university friends and made me join her. I did not protest. Her strange affection towards the apartment was getting increasingly difficult to ignore and spending some time outside seemed like the perfect antidote.
We ended up at a rooftop bar not far from the old town. We were far too high above the city to see the crowds of tourists and all we were left with was the gothic city. It was much closer to the visage of Prague that Google had painted for me.
Questions about why my wife would insist on living in communist architecture swirled through my head, but the alcohol soon washed them out.
My wife’s friends seemed genuinely surprised at first. I, apparently, wasn’t the sort of type my wife went for back in university. I seemed to be a pleasant surprise, but as the night went on her friends kept on asking strange questions.
Did I really have no interest in the occult?
Was I really working a full-time stable job?
Did I ever try any sacrificial magic?
I laughed all the questions off, but my wife didn’t find them funny.
She still has her collection of crystals that I’m not allowed to touch, but back in university my wife was a big mysticism nerd. When she talked about that time of her life it sounded like it mainly involved reading obscure literature and going on camping trips to supposedly haunted places.
Once, about a year ago, when she drank a bit too much, my wife admitted to once being a part of a sacrificial circle that dispatched a chicken, but aside from a little spilt blood her ventures into the occult seemed wholly innocent.
Dead chicken or not, whenever we talked about the more mystical time of her life my wife seemed to be over it. It seemed more like a gathering of funny anecdotes than something she was still passionate about.
That night on the rooftop bar, however, my wife seemed to take her ancient interest in the occult deadly serious. Every joke at her expense, or more accurately at the expense of her past lovers, seemed to irritate her further and further until finally she stood up from the table and announced she had forgotten something in the apartment and had to go to retrieve it.
I offered to come with her, but she insisted I stay.
The apartment was, after all, just a brisk 20-minute subway ride away. She would be back momentarily. I didn’t want to start a fight, especially not in public, so I relented.
I stayed on the rooftop bar with her friends and waited for my wife to come back.
She didn’t.
She didn’t pick up her phone, she didn’t answer any of my messages and, once two hours had passed and we were all sufficiently buzzed, it became apparent that she wasn’t coming back.
I left the bar with one of her friends, Jana, if my memory serves me correctly.
We were both heading towards the subway to make our way home. Jana seemed nice enough and wasn’t as hung up on the whole cult thing as the rest of the group. When I told her which subway station our apartment was on, however, all the colour had drained out of her face.
‘That’s where Bořivoj used to live,’ she said. ‘They dated for a couple of years. Very stormy relationship. He was deep into the whole cult and demon and ghost thing.’
The fact that I could not even pronounce the man’s name got under my skin, but I got considerably more uncomfortable when Jana asked for my address.
When I told her she audibly gasped.
‘That was Bořivoj’s address,’ she said. ‘That’s where he died.’
I tried getting more information out of Jana but by then my train had arrived and I was anxious to get back to my wife. The whole ride through I kept my eyes glued to the windows of the subway. Past the ever-repeating mess of wires and metals I could see the reflection of my own face. I looked miserable.
When I entered the apartment, I found her waiting for me in the hallway.
There was sweat above her brow, her bathrobe was beyond revealing and the door to our bedroom was left ajar.
She was also holding a lit cigarette, even though she quit when we first started dating. I focused on that. My mind was filled with thoughts of a dead man who’s name I couldn’t pronounce and the scent of sweat from the walls made me dizzy — but I focused on the cigarette.
She said coming back to her old stomping grounds had made her miss old habits.
She offered me a cigarette and I took it.
I am not a smoker, but I was shaken and tipsy enough to appreciate the hit of nicotine.
There was a half-drank bottle of jack in the living room that had not been there when we left the house. Next to it sat an ashtray filled with a dozen dead cigarette butts. The thought of my wife having company in the apartment while I was gone tugged at the back of my skull but I asked about a more pressing question.
I asked about the man who’s name I couldn’t pronounce.
Hearing those foreign sounds come out of her mouth without a hint of effort felt like an icepick to the throat. My wife seemed reluctant to talk about her old fling at first, but when I kept insisting, she finally opened up.
Yes, her and this Bo-ri-voj dated back in university.
Yes, he too had an interest in the occult.
No, I had nothing to worry about.
He was dead.
When I asked about the nature of his death, she tried changing the topic of conversation again. She poured me a drink, she cuddled me, she insisted that now is not the time to talk about death.
I, however, refused to let go of the question.
I wanted to know how he died.
I wanted to know where he died.
My insistence on the precise location of his death took all the flirt out of her eyes. She poured herself another drink, thought for a while and then started to speak about her ex.
She spoke slowly and, even though she was far from sober, she chose her words with surgical precision.
As I was well aware, she was no longer interested in the occult. She moved on from the eldritch shortly after leaving university and entering the job market. She had lost contact with this Bo-ri-voj character and she had not thought about him for years, but, supposedly, he remained deeply tied to various cult societies.
She had found out, very recently, just about a week or two ago, that he had died in a sacrificial ritual gone wrong.
I, once more, asked my wife where he died.
She was not aware this Bo-ri-voj was dead when she bought the apartment.
She simply remembered Prague 13 being a nice peaceful neighbourhood where one might raise kids. That’s why she chose this apartment, her exes death would have nothing to do with it.
It would be crazy to even suggest that.
In retrospect, her answers brought up more questions than they answered. But on that couch, in that moment, with all the alcohol in my blood — I was satiated by her words.
It wasn’t what she said, it was how she said it.
Everything seemed to be okay. Suddenly any prospect of infidelity seemed to only be a product of my neuroticism. I was just happy to be spending a nice evening with my wife.
We drank and we laughed and we drank some more.
My wife took me to bed and, in the morning, I woke up in her sweet embrace.
My tolerance for drink isn’t very strong. When I woke up my body felt horrible but aside from the rough hangover I was happy.
It wasn’t until I went to the bathroom to wash out my mouth that panic seized me.
In my sink, floating on the bubbles of draining Listerine, sat bits of plaster.
I rinsed again and found even more plaster.
The memories hit me like a brick — vague visions of drunken love intermingled with terror. I could remember my wife’s familiar touch. I could remember her lips and long fingers and moans but beyond all that, there was something else.
There was something else in the room with us.
Along with her gentle touch I could recall something more coarse and cold traveling up my back. I could recall feeling like the walls were closing in on me.
Beyond that, my memory refused to travel.
The horrid implications of my drunken night chilled me to my core but it wasn’t until I went back to the bedroom that my sanity had fully snapped.
The walls.
It was the walls that sent me running out the door of that cursed place.
All across the bedroom, as if drawn by a petulant child, there were spots of wet. Like drunken polka dots they covered the walls and, what was worse — what was considerably worse — they moved. The wet spots on the wall moved like the cells of some primordial organism.
They moved in the rhythm of my sleeping wife’s breath.
I thought my marriage was rock solid, but turns out it’s as brittle as drywall.