Let It Bleed — If These Walls Could Talk

Fandango

D5DA1170-D1E5-4270-A143-DEBBD5088234“Sarah, what the hell are you doing?” Jim shouted when he came home from work and found his wife smashing holes in their bedroom wall with a hammer.

“I can hear them in the walls!” Sarah screamed.

“Them? Who can you hear in the walls? What are you talking about?” Jim grabbed the hammer away from Sarah and she collapsed on the bed, crying hysterically.

Jim walked over to the bed, put his arms around his wife, and said, “Shh, baby. It’s going to be okay. Now tell me what you are hearing in the walls.”

Still sobbing, Sarah said, “I don’t know, Jim. It’s a constant scratching sound, like there are mice or rats or maybe squirrels in the walls.”

Jim stood up and walked to the wall that Sarah had been pounding holes into just a few minutes before. He put his ear next to the wall and listened, but heard nothing. “Honey, I don’t hear anything. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t hear it anymore, either,” Sarah admitted, “but I wasn’t imagining it, I swear.”

“I’m going to get you a sleeping pill and I want you to take it so you can relax and get a good night’s sleep, since I know you haven’t been sleeping well lately,” Jim said. “Tomorrow I’ll stay home from work to look after you and I’ll patch up the holes in the wall.”

Once Sarah was asleep, Jim called her mother and told her about Sarah’s having pounded holes in the bedroom wall with a hammer and expressed how worried he was about her mental health. Years before, Sarah been institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital for delusional behavior, and Sarah’s mother became concerned that her daughter might be having another mental breakdown.

“I’ll drive down tomorrow and take her back with me to see Dr. Steiner,” Sarah’s mother told Jim. “If she’s having a relapse, he might want to admit her again.”

When Jim hung up from speaking with Sarah’s mother, he called someone else. A woman answered the call. “Hello, darling,” Jim said. “My plan is working. The audio recordings of the scratching sounds that I hid inside the bedroom’s heating duct have pushed her over the edge and her mother is coming to pick her up to take her to see her shrink tomorrow. When her mother sees the damage Sarah did to the bedroom wall, she’ll probably ask the doctor to re-admit her to the asylum. Once there, you and I, my darling, can be together at last.”

Written for the Let It Bleed Weekly Prompt Challenge prompt from Saumya Agrawal’s Randomness Inked blog. The prompt for this week is to write a post containing this sentence: “I can hear them in the walls.”

31 thoughts on “Let It Bleed — If These Walls Could Talk”

  4. newepicauthor April 9, 2019 / 9:43 am

    This actually happened to me. One night may wife and I were sitting on the couch in the living room watching TV and she said, “I hear a mouse.” I told her to stop being silly as there was no way a person could her a mouse. A half hour later this mouse ran across the floor right in front of us. She told me to catch it, but it ran down the basement and I told her I would get it tomorrow as this was a Friday night and I wanted to finish watching the movie. The next day I went into the basement and looked inside of every box that I could find. When I picked up this one box, I heard something move inside of it so I closed the lid and made my way up the stairs. I yelled at my wife to open up the door so I could throw the mouse outside, but then I heard the shower running and realized that she was not going to help. I opened up the front door and it was raining cats and dogs and it was a cold rain, so I just chucked the box outside. I saw the mouse run under the dumpster and I figured that I would pick up the contents of the box after the rain ended. When the rain stopped, I saw 5 little pink carcusses of the baby mice that died.

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  6. blindzanygirl April 9, 2019 / 10:37 am

    OMG this is brilliant Fandango

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  10. aguycalledbloke April 9, 2019 / 1:41 pm

    Excellent Fandango, aah the minds of the twisted but strategic!

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  12. Marleen April 9, 2019 / 3:45 pm

    That took an extremely dark turn. I thought one possibility was that they would find an animal in the wall. It does happen, and some people notice or hear more than others. It was odd she was putting holes in the wall, anyway, though. But…

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  13. Ennle Madresan April 9, 2019 / 6:25 pm

    Too true, according to all the stories, some of which make it to TV series/movies.

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  15. Saumya Agrawal April 13, 2019 / 9:38 pm

    I thought this would turn out to be another hysterical story but I loved how you twisted the whole plot from the second call onwards.

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    • Fandango April 13, 2019 / 10:49 pm

      Thanks. He was trying to “gaslight” her, if your familiar with that term.

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