Her parents weren’t there for her, enough.
Or, more accurately, they didn’t care to look after her, so they left her to her own devices.
“Go play outside. Go play in your bedroom, dear, we couldn’t care less, just leave us alone for one second.”
And so she did. She would.
There was a handy crawlspace, small enough that she could fit through, but grown-ups couldn’t. It was perfect if she needed an escape into the other side of the house without causing a disruption. She loved games, but she never played fair. When she would coerce her parents into playing hide and seek, she’d simply go into the crawlspace, and she would win every time.
She’d feed the mice that lived there cheese, and took books and toys in with her to keep her company. Her favourite was a doll that her mother made for her years ago, with two small, black button eyes, and little rosy cheeks like hers.
One day, her parents told her they wanted to play hide and seek. For the first time in her life, they actually wanted to play with her. Elated, she ran into the crawlspace while they counted. Once she was inside, however, she heard the click of the lock on the small door. When she tried it, it wouldn’t budge, she couldn’t pull it open again.
Eventually, she started panicking as the walls felt like they were closing in on her, and as she looked through the keyhole, she could see her parents finishing packing, and they started to head out the door, without her.
She yelled for them, clawing the door so hard that her fingernails almost broke, scratching deep grooves into the paint.
“Don’t leave me, don’t leave me!! I’ll die without you!”
They didn’t listen. Deep down, she didn’t expect them to. They’d never helped her before, so why would they start now?
She held her doll close to her chest, as she prayed for someone to come and save her.
Eventually, she grew tired as the days went by, her hunger growing as her body grew thinner and thinner, her arms spindly, like the dust-covered spiders that accompanied her in the crawlspace.
She died in there, but her soul kept living, fueled by spite and hunger. She was still so hungry.
Then more construction came, and they filled up her home in the wall with cement, weighing heavy on the body that she could no longer see.
The people that moved in were distant, two rich entrepreneurs who had more money than to know what to do with.
However, there was one thing that separated them from all the other tenants she had seen come and go.
They had a daughter. A daughter who they never loved, a daughter that they would ignore and push to the side like she were nothing, but a daughter nonetheless.
Some part of the girl in the walls wanted to save her, and so every night while her parents lay fast asleep, she would beckon the young girl into her world. She gave her what her parents could never have given her; A loving carer who gave her everything that she so desired.
Except…She was still so hungry.
She asked the daughter if she wanted to stay with her instead of her parents, and the two decided on an agreement. She would make her look like the doll she had loved, and she could stay there forever.
But you see, the girl who had lived in the walls all those years ago, while she did love games, she never played fair.
She still kept her promise, though. And kept the girl in the world she had fabricated for herself, feeding off her soul like a leech.
Decades passed, and she was growing accustomed to her new routine. It was working well, and her hunger grew less and less as time went on.
She’d put a fake smile on her fabricated lips, smile, and lure them into her spiderweb of deception.
When the next tenants moved in, and the girl finally discovered the door, she had seen what made the girl happy, and twisted it so she could use her like the rest of the children.
The woman in the walls hummed to herself as she made food, the smell reminding her of what she needed to do to feed again.
As the girl walked into the fake kitchen and asked;
“…Mom? What are you doing here in the middle of the night?”
She turned and smiled wide, her next prey within her grasp.
“You’re just in time for supper, dear.”
This is going to keep me up at night
