In 500... (or less)

Just Behind the Wall

My eyes wearily opened. This was the fourth straight night.

The excitement of my new home had not yet worn off, but I seriously had to figure out what that knocking noise was.

Every night, sometime after midnight, there was a light knocking sound coming from the other room. I finally went to go investigate, deciding it couldn't just be the furnace offering a noisy protest to being summoned awake to heat the house.

I followed the sound into one of the spare rooms. I was not prepared for what I would see.

There was a ghostly figure of a man, rapping on the wall of the room lightly with his hand. He looked at me as I stood frozen. Equal parts of fear and curiosity pulled me in different directions: one bade me to run, the other to stay. I thought I did not believe in ghosts.

He deliberately turned his attention back to the wall and tapped again before vanishing. I must have stood in the doorway for another five minutes, trying to process what I had witnessed. I determined it was a waking dream and crawled back into bed.

The next night, the same thing happened. Same tapping, same ghostly old man. I thought it odd to dream the same thing twice. I did a little investigating the next morning.

My home was formerly owned by an old man many said was extremely wealthy, though no one knew what happened to his money. A thought flashed through my head of the money being hidden in the wall, but I thought I'd already read that hokey ghost story.

Each night for a few more days, the old man returned. He never spoke. He just looked at me, then looked at the wall, then vanished.

I almost couldn't believe I was standing in the room the next day with a small sledge hammer, eyeing up the wall. The drywall crumbled with each blow. After a few swings, I inspected the hole. No money. Not behind the wall or under the insulation between the studs.

The old man came back that night. This time he was looking at a different spot. I dutifully demolished part of the wall and found nothing. We repeated the process the next night in a different spot.

I'd had enough by the fourth night of smashing holes in the wall. It was time for the old man to come clean about where he'd hidden the money.

As he tapped, I cleared my throat and spoke up.

"I think your memory is a little off," I said in as clear of a voice as I could muster. "I haven't found any money in any of the spots you've shown me."

He paused for a moment, surveying the destroyed walls in the room.

"Money?" He turned and sort of floated toward me, laughing. "Money?"

"There's no money," he said. "I just wanted to see if I could convince you to put holes in your wall."