Todd had spent the last thirty-eight years being a bastard. He'd yelled at his kids, berated his wife, insulted the neighbors, made everyone around him feel worthless. He was quick with fists, cruel with words. After he died in the wreck, no one came to visit his grave.
No one mourned him. He hadn't been missed, not in the slightest. But the house—his family home—still stood, as if nothing had changed.
The walls felt hollow now, but they hadn't been like that when Todd was alive. He never paid attention to the house. It was just a place to sleep, eat, and complain.
He'd taken its stability for granted, as if it would always be there, like the way the floor creaked underfoot, or how the pipes groaned at odd hours. His life was a mess of noise. He never heard the subtle changes.
But now, in death, he could hear everything. From inside the walls.
His body had rotted away quickly, but his spirit didn't. It was trapped. The walls, once his home, now felt like a prison. Todd was stuck in a narrow cavity between the sheetrock, confined to a space too small to move, too tight to scream loud enough for anyone to hear. He wasn't sure how it happened.
One moment, he'd been in the wreck, seeing the blood pool beneath him, the glass digging into his skin. Then, nothing. He wasn't dead. But he wasn't alive either. He could feel everything, his arms pinned to his sides, his chest against cold plaster.
His family couldn't hear him. He had tried, for days. Screamed until his throat bled, pounded against the walls until his knuckles were raw. His voice, muffled by the plaster, never made it out. The house swallowed it all. Every noise he made faded into the hollow of the walls, leaving nothing but silence.
He began to cry. There was no shame in it now. The cruelty, the selfishness, everything he had done in life, all of it—he could see it now. The hurt, the pain he caused, the hours his family spent trying to please him, to make him love them. It had never been enough.
The sound of footsteps from above echoed, but no one was there. The old house didn't care. Todd could hear the faint creak of floorboards like a whisper just out of reach, but it wasn't a comforting sound. It was mocking. The house was laughing at him. It knew what he had done.
In the days that followed, Todd's body—his ghost—began to weaken. It wasn't hunger. Not thirst. Not anything physical. His mind cracked slowly, like an old vase chipping at the edges. He couldn't stand it. He couldn't escape.
One night, the sound of the door creaked open above him. The air, thick with stale dust, seemed to freeze. The family had returned—his ex-wife, his son, his daughter. They'd moved back in, though the house was different now. The air was colder. The walls felt thicker. Todd's heart beat faster, but his breath, ragged and desperate, was nothing but silence.
He tried one last time to reach them. He banged his fists against the walls, screamed his family's names. But no one heard. His words died there, absorbed by the thick layers of plaster and wood.
When his body finally crumbled, when the last of him was nothing but a faint, decayed presence, the house didn't acknowledge it. It didn't care. All that was left of Todd was his whisper, still stuck between the walls, unanswered, forever unheard. The family would never know. The house, in all its eerie silence, remained intact. The cycle would continue.