It started as a joke.

“Bet it’s rats,” my roommate, Tyler, said the first time we heard it. Three soft knocks behind the drywall, evenly spaced. Knock. Knock. Knock. Too slow for a mouse. Too deliberate for pipes.

Still, we laughed because laughter kept the unease away. I banged back with my fist. Grinned at him. Silence answered.

The next night, the sound returned. Same time—around 2 a.m. Same place—the thin wall beside my bed. Same rhythm. Knock. Knock. Knock.

I banged back again, harder. And this time, after a pause, the wall knocked back. Four times. Like it was correcting me.

We didn’t laugh after that.

 

For days it continued. Always at night. Always three knocks. At first, I tried ignoring it, stuffing my head under a pillow. But ignoring a knock is harder than it seems. You wait for it. You tense, listening, heartbeat climbing as the silence stretches too long. Then—Knock. Knock. Knock. Relief and terror in one breath.

Tyler stopped sleeping in his room and started crashing on the couch. Said he liked the “better airflow,” but I caught him glancing at the walls like they might breathe.

We called maintenance. Some tired guy came, banged around, said there was nothing inside. “Old buildings make noises,” he muttered. He left without fixing anything.

That night, the knocks didn’t come from the wall.

They came from the closet.

 

I didn’t sleep at all. Neither did Tyler. The next night, we heard whispering. Low. Urgent. My name. Over and over, like a voice pressed against the other side of the door.

Tyler swore it whispered his name too, though we both agreed never to repeat what it really said aloud.

By the fourth night, the whispering stopped. Silence stretched on, thick and heavy. Tyler said maybe it was over. I wanted to believe him.

But then the closet door opened by itself. Just an inch. Just enough.

And the air smelled wrong. Damp, metallic. Like something that had been locked away too long.

 

Tyler moved out the next day. Didn’t even tell me—just packed when I was at class. His room was stripped bare by the time I came back. His closet door wide open.

I didn’t blame him.

I almost left too, but rent was cheap, and I convinced myself I’d imagined most of it. Sleep-deprivation hallucinations. Shared paranoia.

The first night alone, I slept with the lights on. Nothing happened. Second night, nothing. By the third, I started to relax. Maybe it really was just the building settling.

Then, at 3 a.m., I woke to three sharp knocks. Not from the closet. Not from the wall.

From inside Tyler’s empty room.

My breath froze. I stared at the open door across the hall, every instinct telling me not to move. Then I heard it—his voice.

“You shouldn’t have stayed.”

 

I told myself it was stress. I told myself I was hearing things. But the next morning, I found something on Tyler’s wall. Three indentations, perfectly round, pressed into the drywall at shoulder height. Like someone had knocked from inside the wall itself.

I didn’t call maintenance this time.

Instead, I pressed my ear against the marks. For a long moment, I heard nothing but my own pulse. Then faintly—so faintly I almost thought it was my imagination—scratching.

Let me out.

 

I started locking my bedroom door at night. Not that a cheap lock could keep much out, but it gave me the illusion of control.

It didn’t matter. The knocks followed me. They came from the wall by my bed again, louder now. Three at first, then four, then five. Always one more than before, as if counting upward.

I stopped sleeping. Shadows crawled at the edges of my vision. The voice whispered through the cracks in the wall, familiar but wrong. Sometimes it was Tyler. Sometimes it was me.

One night, I dreamed I was standing in front of the closet. The door swung open, and there was nothing inside but a hole in the wall, black and endless. Something reached out—long fingers, skinless and wet—and knocked three times on my chest. I woke gasping, bruises already forming.

 

Last night, the knocking didn’t come at all. The silence was worse. Heavy. Expectant.

At 2:59 a.m., I heard the closet door creak. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. The air smelled like rust.

Then, slowly, I heard footsteps in the hall. Not boots. Not bare feet. Something in between, sticky against the wood. They stopped outside my bedroom door.

The lock clicked. Once. Twice.

And then, very softly, three knocks came from the inside of my room.

 

If anyone finds this, don’t come here. Don’t open the closet. Don’t answer the knocks.

It doesn’t matter if it sounds like me.

It doesn’t matter if it sounds like someone you love.

It’s not them.

It never was.