THE PLASTER VEINS

The files from Harrowgate Orphanage were filled with mundane horrors—neglect, spoiled food, cold winters. But the clinical reports were contaminated by the children’s shared delusion. They didn't whisper about a monster under the bed; they were terrified of the "Wall-Press." It wasn't a creature, they insisted, but the absence of space. It was the narrow, suffocating darkness that waited patiently between the wall and your back. The orphans learned to sleep facing the peeling plaster. They said if you faced the open room, you’d feel it: a cold, damp puff of air on your neck, a presence that smelled of wet cement and something like spoiled, metallic milk. That was your only warning.

​When the orphanage was condemned, the building stood for twenty years, a hollow-eyed monument to misery. It was just another derelict building until the urban explorers started coming, drawn by the dark folklore.

​And then they started staying.

​We analyzed three different sets of recovered footage. The first was from a pair of bloggers. Their video was ninety minutes of bravado and jump-scares until the end. They were in the main dormitory. One of them laughed, and then the camera whipped around. We heard him say, "Did you... did you touch my back?" The camera fell, pointing at the ceiling, but the audio... The audio was pristine. We heard a wet, tearing sound, like old cloth being ripped from a wound. We heard a muffled, dragging scrape. And we heard the other blogger screaming, "Where did he go? Where did he go?!"

​The last vlogger’s footage was the worst. He was alone. He had set his camera on a tripod to film himself. He sensed it. He turned, slowly... always too

slow. We watched, unable to look away, as the solid brick wall rippled like thick, dark tar. It didn't open; it just yielded. He was pulled in, and the last thing the camera recorded was the wall becoming perfectly flat again.

​My team wasn't for ghost hunting. We were specialists, equipped with ground-penetrating sonar and high-fidelity thermal sensors. We were here to find bodies. We came to quantify the legend, not become part of it.

​The moment we powered on the equipment, the mission was compromised. The sonar was a nightmare. It wasn't bouncing off solid walls; it was giving soft, variable returns, like we were scanning a massive, solid block of gelatin.

​"Thermal is... that's not right," Harris muttered, tapping his display. I looked at my own scanner. He was right. It was impossible. The walls were latticed with faint, spider-webbing heat signatures. They followed the plumbing, the wiring, and then... they formed shapes. Human shapes, fused into the plaster and lath, their limbs twisted at impossible angles.

​"They're alive," I whispered, my own breath fogging in the cold air.

​The thermal scanner proved it. A network of faint, collective heat, just degrees above the cold brick. We weren't scanning a building; we were scanning a mass grave that hadn't finished dying. We could see the newest ones, the explorers, still vaguely flexing inside the solid structure, like sleeping insects trapped in amber.

​That’s when we heard the whisper. It didn’t come from the vents or a specific room. It came from everywhere, from the plaster itself. A dry, sibilant chorus of a dozen voices.

​"Keep... your... back... to... the... wall..."

​"Device malfunction," Harris, ever the soldier, barked. "I'm checking the fuse box in the—" He spun around, shining his high-beam into the center of the main hall. A human reaction. A fatal one.

​The shadow on the wall behind him didn't just detach. It poured. It wasn't a shadow; it was a void, an absence of light and sound in the shape of a man, impossibly tall and thin. It wrapped around his head before he could even register its presence, muffling his scream into a wet, choking gasp. It was a sound I will hear in my sleep forever.

​It dragged him backward. His boots, heavy tactical gear, screeched on the floorboards as he desperately, uselessly, tried to find purchase.

​He didn't phase through the wall. He was absorbed.

​His fingers clawed at the plaster, tearing away paint, and then his hand sank into the wall as if it were wet clay. I was frozen. I watched his body get pulled in, his limbs bending, breaking with soft, wet cracks to fit the space inside. For one agonizing second, his face pressed against the plaster from the inside—his eyes bulging, his mouth a perfect 'O' of silent horror, like a man drowning in solid rock.

​Then the wall sealed. And it was just a wall again. Flat. Stained.

​Now I’m alone. I haven't moved in an hour. My back is pressed so hard against this hallway corner I can feel the individual lath-boards through the plaster. My thermal scanner is still on, lying on the floor in front of me, its screen a flickering beacon of doom.

​It’s no longer showing a dozen heat signatures. The entire scan is a pulsing, dull red. They aren't just in the walls. They are the walls. They are awake. They are active. And they are all converging on my position.

​The brickwork behind my head... it doesn't feel solid anymore. It feels soft. Spongy.

​And it’s getting warmer. I can feel a faint, slow... pulse.

​I just felt a puff of cold, damp air on my neck.