A Ghost Story a Day, Today's Was Mild

The Sound of Fingernails in the Wall The first night I moved into this studio apartment, I heard a sound from inside the wall. It was faint and rhythmic, like fingernails slowly scraping against a cement surface. It came from the wall by my headboard. The landlord said the next unit was a storage room and nobody lived there. I listened against the wall all night, and the sound moved with me. If I moved left, it moved left. If I moved right, it moved right. The next day, I took a hammer and chipped away a small section of the wall. Inside were red bricks, nothing else. After replastering it, the sound disappeared. I thought I had solved it. Until last night, as I was lying on my side scrolling through my phone, the sound returned. This time it was closer, as if coming from inside my pillow. The rhythm of the scratching fingernails sped up, carrying a sense of urgency. I pressed my ear to the mattress. The sound was coming from below. I lifted the bed frame and saw a fresh crack in the cement floor beneath the bed. The edge of the crack was covered in bloody fingernail fragments. Something was moving inside the fissure. A pale hand was slowly, inch by inch, pushing its way up. My phone suddenly lit up. A message from the landlord: "Forgot to tell you, the previous tenant was also chipping away at the wall under the bed before they went missing. They said someone inside the wall was knocking on them." The crack widened another inch. On the ring finger of that hand was a ring identical to mine.