The October Malice ༄ (gxg)

eleven, wallpaper

The wallpaper in her room had never looked so particularly interesting as it did that morning.

It was a dreaded Tuesday, one where she woke up dragging her feet and rolling her eyes at anything that moved. She had the intense urge to just skip her classes that day, but she didn't have much else to do. She'd decided to choose boring entertainment rather than just boredom alone.

But as she tugged her sneakers onto her feet, she had heard some sort of scratching noise. Living in the middle of a forest, it wasn't unusual for mice to find their way into the Indick household. Sitting on the edge of her bed with her knee bent up towards her, hands reaching to her foot to tie her shoe, she froze once she had heard the barely audible scratching. Her breaths stopped, suspended in her lungs like time itself had frozen and forgotten about her brain which, like always, was running a thousand miles a minute.

Her ears strained to listen very carefully to the noise, dark blonde eyebrows creasing in her concentration. She looked all around the parameter of her room, eyes tracing the corners of the floor for sight of a little grey or brown rodent, but her floor was carpeted and the scratching was obviously coming from a hard surface. The mouse was possibly in her walls, she assumed. It had never been that big of a deal to find a little mouse every now and then, so she shrugged it off and continued lacing her shoes.

But the scratching did not stop, and a boiling aggravation began to rise inside of her. The scratching was so monotonous and repetitive like a bug buzzing right in her ear, so she stood from her bed and walked towards her opposite wall where the scratching was seeming to have been coming from.

She neared the wall slowly, trying hard to concentrate on the scratching noise, but her attention was captured by the wallpaper coating that singular accent wall of her otherwise beige room. The wallpaper had been there her whole life, yet she had never really seen it as she was seeing it in that moment.

It was a striped mixture of gold, maroon, and olive green. The scratching noise was still in her ear, but she was somehow more focused on finding the pattern of the wallpaper. She started at a random stripe—a gold one. It was thin and lined with even thinner green stripes, a thicker red stripe running to its right. Then there was a thinner green stripe, a thicker gold one, and an almost invisible red stripe.

Her eyes began to ache from all the different stripes, and she started over at the first gold stripe, giving all her determination to finding the exact pattern of the wallpaper. But, to her irrational vexation, there seemed to be no pattern. Once she would get the hang of it, she would expect a certain stripe to come next, but she would be thrown off every time with a different color.

Why would someone make a wallpaper with no pattern? Why had she never even noticed this before.

The scratching was suddenly much louder, coming directly from behind the wall which she was standing only a foot in front of. Her breath was still held, lips ajar from her confusion. Eyeing the wallpaper nervously as if the stripes were going to jump out from their stationary wall, wrap around her neck, and strangle her to death, she slowly leaned forward and turned her ear towards the wall.

Her hands pressed against the cold, coarse wallpaper right before her ear did, and she waited, listening closely, until she could hear the scratching right against her ear. It felt like there was someone hiding behind the wall and raising a long and jagged fingernail right against the wooden surface where her ear was pressed against and scratching furiously.

The scratching grew louder inside her eardrum, and it suddenly felt as if the hidden person's fingernail was scratching the very inside of her ear, reaching far inside past her eardrum and to her brain, tickling it violently. Yet she could not pull away, could not breathe, and could not feel anything else besides the scratching inside her head and the buzzing wallpaper against her hands.