Short Story: The Girl in the Wall

www.AntonioGarciaBooks.com

‘Wow’, Teddy thought. ‘I can’t believe I’m now a homeowner.’

He stood off to the side as the movers came and went, carrying furniture and leaving to grab some more.

Once all his furniture was in place, he opened a bottle of wine and then started unpacking.

He couldn’t stop smiling as everything in his life seemed to be coming together. He had gotten that promotion he wanted at work, which meant he was now able to invest in a home to call his own. No more living in apartments.

By the time he started getting drowsy, it was getting close to midnight. The wine wasn’t helping either.

“I’ll get the rest in the morning,” he said to himself.

Half asleep, he put his glass in the sink and headed towards the bedroom.

A soft voice stopped him mid-step while he was walking up the stairs.

“Hello?” he asked, doubting that he had heard anything.

“Hello?” a soft voice answered him, causing him to tense.

“Who are you?” he asked, trying to locate where the voice was coming from.

He wasn’t necessarily afraid. The voice sounded like it was coming from a child. What did make him nervous was that the child’s voice seemed to be coming from inside the house.
“Emily,” the voice responded.

The little girl didn’t sound like a threat. She sounded scared.

“Where are you, Emily?” he asked, stepping as quietly as he could, hoping to find where she was.

“I don’t know,” she answered, sounding genuinely scared. “It’s dark though. I can’t see anything.”

Teddy stepped as lightly as he could, hoping to hear at least the direction.

“Keep talking, Emily,” he said. “So I can find you.”

“Please help,” she responded.

She sounded like she was coming from the spare bedroom, so Teddy quickly made his way there.

“Emily?” he asked once he was in the room.

“Help me,” she replied.

Teddy spun around. She now sounded like she was back in the hallway.

“Emily?” he asked again, looking both ways up and down the hallway.

No response.

Confused, Teddy continued to call for her, but she didn’t answer. He was only met with silence.

After another hour of looking all over the house, inside and out, he called it quits. He locked the doors, set the alarm, and then went to bed.

He spent the entire next day unpacking, and though he couldn’t get the little girls voice out of his head, he didn’t hear her again.

A knock at the door startled him.

When he opened it, there stood an elderly woman holding a pie.

They stared at each other for a moment. Living in an apartment had not prepared Teddy for what it would be like living in the suburbs.

“Hi,” the woman started.

“Hi,” Teddy responded quickly.

Seeing the confusion in Teddy’s eyes, she continued.

“I thought I would welcome you to the neighborhood with a pie,” she said smiling.

Feeling a little embarrassed, he invited her in.

As he led her to the kitchen to put the pie down on the counter, she took the opportunity to look around, getting a sense of what kind of person her new neighbor was.

“How are you liking the house?” the woman asked.

“I like it,” Teddy replied. “Though I’ve only been here only a day. It’s nice though.”

He took out a couple of plates and set them on the counter.

“How about you? How long have you lived in this neighborhood?” he asked.

“Oh, a long time,” she said. “Around forty years now.”

“Wow,” he said, impressed.

“Yes,” she started. “Moved here with my late husband when he took a job nearby.”

“Would you like some milk?” he asked.

“Yes, please,” she replied.

He filled two glasses with milk and handed her one.

“I’m glad there is someone living in this house again,” she said. “It’s been a few years.”

“Yeah, I was surprised that the house had been on the market for so long,” Teddy answered.

“It’s because of the little girl who went missing a few years ago,” she explained. “It was all very tragic.”

Teddy gave her a quizzical look and thought of the little girl’s voice he had heard the night before, though he didn’t want to bring it up just yet.

“Missing girl?” he asked.

“You didn’t know?” she asked surprised. “I figured it would be one of those things the realtor would have disclosed.”

“I think they only disclose deaths,” he said. “Maybe only murders.”

They both stared at each other for a moment.

“Would you rather not know about it?” she asked. She didn’t want to jade his experience of the house if he didn’t want her too.

“You can tell me,” he said. “Chances are, other people will mention it and it will keep me from having to go to the library to look it up myself.”

She nodded and began. “Her name was Emily.”

Teddy tightened up at the name but said nothing.

“One day she was here and the next, she was gone,” she continued. “Nobody really knows what happened. Just one day, she wasn’t in her room when they went to wake her up for school. They called the police, there was a huge search, but nothing was ever found.

“It was assumed that she was kidnapped, but there wasn’t any sign of a struggle or anything missing. Her window was closed, and everything was in its place.

“Over time, the searches ended, though once a year, they still re-examine it as an unsolved mystery on some local crime show.

“Most people think the parents were somehow involved, but without a body, or any other clues, there was no way to prove it.

“To this day, it’s still a cold case. The parents moved away a couple of years later and this house just sat here. People looked at the house, but once they had learned of the history, they didn’t want it anymore. The realtors must have gotten tired of bringing it up if they didn’t have too.”

She finished that last sentence with a shrug.

Teddy was at a loss of words. He wondered if someone was messing with him the night before.

‘Maybe a neighborhood kid,’ he thought.

The woman saw him deep in thought and asked, “You okay?”

“Yes,” he said, coming back to the conversation. “I think someone might have been messing with me last night. I heard a little girls voice asking for help and said her name was Emily.”

The woman almost dropped her glass.

Now it was Teddy’s turn to ask if she was alright.

“Yes, I’m sorry,” she said, putting her glass down and heading towards the door. “I have to go. Enjoy the pie.”

Teddy was thoroughly confused.

“Was it something I said?” he asked as she walked through the front door. “Do you know who would be pretending to be a little girl to mess with me?”

She didn’t answer, and by the time he got to the front door, she was already walking down the sidewalk.

He watched her walk away until she was around the corner and out of sight.

Unsure of what to take from the encounter, he slowly walked back into the house.

He decided to go online to see what he could find out about Emily’s death.

According to the story, Emily was a normal child. The only thing that seemed odd was that she had always been home-schooled. That in itself wasn’t unusual, but there wasn’t anything else that stood out.

The people in the neighborhood commented that nothing seemed unusual with the family either.

Suspicion fell on the parents when there didn’t seem to be any other possibilities of who may have been involved. The parents vehemently denied the accusations, and nothing ever came from them.

Probably because they weren’t happy with being accused of murdering their child, they moved once the searches found nothing and no other leads were forthcoming.

Not feeling any more enlightened, Teddy called it as the sun started to go down.

He poured himself another glass of wine. He wasn’t by any means an alcoholic, but since he was off work for the rest of the week, he decided to enjoy it as much as he could.

He was feeling completely relaxed when once again he heard the girl’s voice calling out.

“Help me,” she said.

Teddy jumped at hearing the little girl’s voice again.

He put down his glass.

“Hello?” he started. “Who are you?”

“My name is Emily,” the girl replied.

“Emily died,” Teddy said, hoping to trip up whoever was messing with him.

“Help me,” the girl called out again, seemingly ignoring what Teddy had said.

Regardless of who was calling out, Teddy still felt obligated to help if the person was really in need.

“Where are you?” he asked.

He felt like he was just repeating the conversation he had the night before, but since he didn’t get much from the girl that night, he hoped something more would come from this conversation.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “It’s dark. I can’t see anything.”

Like the night before, Teddy found himself in the guest room, where the voice seemed to be coming from.

“Emily, can you hear me?” he asked.

“Yes,” she answered.

He hoped she wouldn’t stop talking like she did the night before.

“I’m trying to find you,” he said, trying to reassure her. “Keep talking so I can.”

“I’m scared,” she said in response. “I want to go home.”

If someone was messing with him, they were doing a great job. The little girl seemed truly afraid.

“I’m trying to help you, but I have to find you,” he said, trying to keep her talking. “Why don’t you tell me a little about yourself. What’s your favorite color?”

“Help me,” the girl said, instead of answering the question. “I’m scared. I can’t see anything.”

Even though she wasn’t answering the question, she was at least talking, so Teddy continued to walk around, trying to follow her voice.

He kept walking back and forth between the guest room and the hallway. Whenever he walked into one, it sounded like she was coming from the other.

Becoming frustrated, instead of standing in either the hallway, or the guest room, he stood underneath the door frame.

To his surprise, instead of sounding like it was coming from the room or hallway, it was seemed to be coming from the wall directly in front of him.

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ he thought. ‘The wall separating the room from the hallway is less than six inches wide. There is no way she could be hiding in there.’

He quickly looked around for a speaker, or some other device they could be using to confuse him, but unless it was inside the wall, he didn’t see anything.

“Please help, I’m scared,” the girl continued as Teddy started looking over the wall more closely.

He scanned every inch of the old wallpaper that covered the wall. He had already decided when he moved in to get rid of it.

“I’m’ trying to find you,” he said, doing his best to reassure her.

‘What is this?’, he thought as he came across an imperfection in the wallpaper.

It looked like someone had reapplied it. It didn’t completely match up. Just to be sure, he looked at the rest of the wallpaper in the room but didn’t find any other discrepancies.

‘I swear to God, if someone is messing with me, I’m going to make them pay,’ he thought as he started peeling the wallpaper off the wall.

Once he had removed the entire seam of the wallpaper, he found another one, except this one was a seam in the wall itself, as if this part of the wall had been replaced.

Bordering on the edge of terror, he asked, “Emily, are you there?”

When she said, “Help me”, there was little doubt it was coming from directly in front of him.

He ran to the garage where he had put his limited tools and found a hammer.

He ran back to the room and immediately started tearing apart the wall with it.

Sweaty and tired, he collapsed backwards when just after a small part of the wall was removed, he could see what looked like bones inside.



As he watched the body bag rolled past him on the gurney, he tried to answer the police officer’s questions the best he could. He could tell the officer was skeptical of his explanation of how he had discovered the body, but he continued taking notes as he was describing.

Over the next few weeks, all that the news covered was the discovery of the little girl found in the wall. The parents were arrested, being determined that they had murdered her by poison and hid her in the wall.

The police never thought to look there, since space was so limited. The parents had mutilated the body to make it fit, which only added to the horrific unveiling of the life she had been subjected to.

Teddy decided to stay in the house. He felt a certain closeness to the girl he had found, though he never heard her voice again.