Chapter 1 - The Hungry Secret Friend
The first time my four-year-old daughter told me there was a little girl living inside our wall, I laughed.
That was my first mistake.
My name is Ryan Mercer, and until that autumn, I believed I had an ordinary life.
Not a perfect one.
Just ordinary.
I had a wife I loved, a daughter who could turn breakfast into a forty-minute negotiation, a mortgage that made me wince every month, and an old house that always seemed to need something repaired.
My wife, Claire, and I had bought the house six months earlier.
It was beautiful in the way old houses sometimes are—high ceilings, narrow hallways, thick wooden doors, decorative molding, and walls that seemed too solid to belong to the modern world.
Claire had fallen in love with it immediately.
I hadn't.
There was something about the place that bothered me from the first afternoon we toured it.
The hallways were unusually deep.
The rooms didn't seem to line up correctly.
And when I measured our bedroom one weekend while planning built-in shelves, I discovered something strange.
The exterior dimensions of the house suggested there should have been almost four feet of additional space between our bedroom and our daughter's room.
I mentioned it to Claire.
She went still.
Only for a second.
Then she smiled.
"Old houses are weird."
I accepted that answer because I had no reason not to.
Back then.
Our daughter, Lily, loved the house.
Especially her bedroom.
It had pale cream walls, a deep closet, and a long carpeted hallway outside where she liked to sit with her dolls.
Three weeks after moving in, she began talking about her "secret friend."
At first, Claire and I assumed it was imaginary.
Her name, according to Lily, was Emma.
Emma was shy.
Emma didn't like bright lights.
Emma couldn't come out.
And Emma was always hungry.
"Why can't Emma come out?" I asked one morning.
Lily spooned cereal into her mouth.
"Because she's not supposed to."
"Who says?"
Lily looked toward Claire.
Claire was standing at the kitchen counter.
Her coffee cup stopped halfway to her mouth.
Then Lily shrugged.
"She does."
Claire placed the cup down.
"Ryan, she's four."
"I know."
"Kids make things up."
"I know."
Claire smiled, but it looked forced.
"Then stop interrogating her like she's a witness."
I laughed.
That should have been the end of it.
But the noises started a few days later.
Scratching.
At first, I blamed mice.
The sound usually came late at night.
A faint scrape.
Then another.
Sometimes a soft bump.
Always somewhere inside the wall separating our bedroom from Lily's closet.
I called an exterminator.
He found nothing.
No droppings.
No nests.
No damaged insulation.
No sign of rodents.
"Old house," he said.
Everyone kept saying that.
Old house.
Settling wood.
Pipes.
Heating ducts.
Anything except what it actually was.
One night, I woke around two in the morning.
Claire was sleeping beside me.
The room was completely dark.
Scratch.
I opened my eyes.
Scratch.
Scratch.
I sat up.
The noise was coming from the wall.
Then it stopped.
I listened.
For perhaps thirty seconds, there was silence.
Then I heard something that made every hair on my arms rise.
A cough.
Not a pipe.
Not wood settling.
A human cough.
Small.
Weak.
A child's cough.
I switched on the bedside lamp.
Claire jerked awake.
"What?"
"Did you hear that?"
"Hear what?"
I put a finger to my lips.
We waited.
Nothing.
I got out of bed.
Claire grabbed my wrist.
"Ryan."
Something in her voice made me look at her.
She wasn't sleepy anymore.
She looked frightened.
"What?"
"Don't."
"Don't what?"
"Start tearing the house apart at two in the morning."
I stared at her.
"I heard somebody cough."
"You were dreaming."
"I was awake."
"Ryan."
There was an edge in her voice.
I pulled my wrist free.
I walked to the wall and pressed my ear against it.
Nothing.
Claire sat motionless behind me.
Eventually I returned to bed.
But I didn't sleep.
Over the next two weeks, Lily's behavior became stranger.
Bread disappeared.
Crackers disappeared.
Bananas vanished from the fruit bowl.
Once, I found an empty yogurt cup underneath Lily's bed.
"Sweetheart," I said, "if you're hungry, you can just ask."
"It wasn't for me."
"For Emma?"
Lily nodded.
"She's really hungry."
I felt a chill.
"Where does Emma eat?"
Lily pointed toward her closet.
Claire walked into the room at that exact moment.
"Lily."
Her voice was unusually sharp.
Our daughter flinched.
Claire immediately softened.
"Sorry, honey. Mommy didn't mean to scare you."
I watched my wife kneel beside her.
"No more talking about Emma, okay?"
Lily frowned.
"But she's real."
Claire's face changed.
I saw fear again.
"Claire?"
She stood quickly.
"Can we not encourage this?"
"I'm not encouraging anything."
"Then stop asking questions."
That night, we argued.
Not loudly.
We almost never shouted.
But something had shifted.
"Why does this bother you so much?" I asked.
"Because you're frightening her."
"She's not frightened."
"I am her mother, Ryan."
"And I'm her father."
Claire looked away.
Something about that sentence seemed to hurt her.
I didn't understand why.
The following afternoon, I came home early.
Claire's car wasn't in the driveway.
The house was quiet.
"Lily?"
No answer.
I checked the living room.
Empty.
Kitchen.
Empty.
Then I heard her whispering upstairs.
I climbed the stairs quietly.
The hallway lights were on, casting warm pools across the beige walls.
Lily's bedroom door was partly open.
I approached.
She was kneeling inside her closet.
Her back was toward me.
In one hand, she held a slice of bread.
With the other, she was pushing it toward the baseboard.
"She's hungry again," Lily whispered.
I stepped closer.
"Lily?"
She jumped.
The bread fell from her hand.
"What are you doing?"
Her eyes widened.
"Nothing."
I crouched beside her.
"Who are you feeding?"
She looked toward the wall.
"Emma."
I examined the baseboard.
At first, I saw nothing.
Then I noticed a thin vertical line in the wooden paneling.
A seam.
I ran my fingers along it.
The panel moved.
My heart began pounding.
"Lily, go into the hallway."
"But—"
"Now, sweetheart."
She obeyed.
I pulled harder.
The wood shifted.
A narrow black opening appeared.
Cold air brushed my face.
Behind the panel was empty space.
Not insulation.
Not pipes.
A passage.
I grabbed my phone and switched on the flashlight.
The beam entered the darkness.
Dust.
Old wooden framing.
A blanket.
A plastic bottle.
Food wrappers.
Then something moved.
I nearly dropped the phone.
Two enormous eyes stared back at me.
A child was sitting inside the wall.
A little girl.
Maybe five.
Maybe six.
She was painfully thin.
Her dark hair was tangled around her face.
She wore an old white nightdress.
She clutched Lily's bread against her chest.
For several seconds, neither of us moved.
Then she whispered, "Please don't close it."
My stomach turned.
"Oh my God."
I reached toward her.
Footsteps thundered behind me.
Claire appeared in the bedroom doorway.
She saw the open panel.
Then she saw the girl.
Every bit of color disappeared from her face.
"No."
I turned.
"Claire—"
"No."
She stumbled backward.
"What the hell is this?"
"Ryan, don't."
"What?"
"Don't touch her!"
The girl recoiled.
Claire's voice rose into something close to panic.
"Don't touch her, Ryan!"
I ignored her.
I slowly extended my hand.
"It's okay," I told the child. "I'm not going to hurt you."
Her eyes moved from my hand to my face.
She stared at me.
Really stared.
As if she knew me.
Her lower lip trembled.
Then she reached toward me.
Her tiny fingers touched mine.
"Daddy?"
The word was barely a whisper.
But it destroyed the room.
My heart seemed to stop.
Behind me, Claire made a broken sound.
I looked over my shoulder.
She had collapsed onto her knees.
She was crying.
Not ordinary tears.
She was sobbing like someone whose worst nightmare had finally opened its eyes.
"I've never seen her before," I whispered.
Claire covered her face.
The little girl crawled closer.
As she moved, her hair slipped away from the left side of her neck.
And I saw it.
A reddish-brown birthmark.
Small.
Curved like a crescent broken through the middle.
My hand instinctively went to my own neck.
To the mark I'd had since birth.
The exact same shape.
The exact same place.
I stared at Claire.
"Tell me what's happening."
She couldn't answer.
Then something sounded behind the child.
A footstep.
Deep inside the wall.
Then another.
Heavy.
Slow.
Coming toward us.
The little girl squeezed my hand.
Her entire body began trembling.
I pulled her toward me.
"Who's back there?"
No answer.
Another step.
A silhouette appeared in the darkness.
Tall.
Adult.
The figure stopped several feet behind the child.
One hand slowly emerged into the beam of my phone.
It held an old photograph.
A photograph of my family.
And then a man's voice came from the darkness.
May you like
"There's something your wife never told you."
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