Opal in the Wall

I 

The weak spot in the ceiling wasn’t there when I moved in. Believe me, I would’ve noticed it. It just appeared, with little parade, benignly, just to the side of my bed, after about three months of living in that apartment. It wasn’t particularly big. I measured it, one day, wobbling on top of my rotating office chair to reach, wielding a ruler. Diameter: around seven centimetres. It wasn’t wet, either. No ominous dripping or questionable smells. Just a spot that was a bit tender, off-colour, with little flakes of shattered white paint clinging to it. I didn’t have enough architectural know-how to gauge whether the ceiling was awaiting imminent crumble, crushing me while I slept. When I probed it with my index finger, it gave me this strange nauseous feeling, like my apartment was dirty. Like I was dirty, somehow, and the appartment knew it. 

It was to the left of the overhead ceiling light. Once I noticed it, I couldn’t stop looking. It absorbed my gaze hungrily; we looked at each other a lot. I would watch it during nights I couldn’t sleep, lying there, waiting for something, I don’t know what. Briefly, I considered putting something over it, a Post-it note veil perhaps, or even just painting it over, but I was afraid to keep messing with it, in case I forced it to finally give way, and something would come through, into my room. 

Nothing did, for a month or so. Quietly, unmaliciously, we co-existed. It didn’t cause any ruckus. It simply became another piece of furniture. Besides, it wasn’t like anybody came over to see it. I was very busy with work in those days. 

Then, the ceiling collapsed. 

Well, not really. Only in that seven-centimetre spot. At first, I saw the dislodged chunk of ceiling lying like an old warhorse slain on the carpet, and then it occurred to me to look up. Something was peeking through the hole. 

I screamed, because I thought it was a dead animal. A large rat came to mind, but the object was far too dark and elongated, dangling there. My next thought was something bigger, more rogue, like an opossum, but we don’t have those here, and anyway, I wasn’t sure if I actually knew what those looked like in real life. If it was an animal, it wasn’t an alive one. It was a mass of hair, but it didn’t writhe or yelp. Just a long fistful of straight, dark brown hair. Scraggly, with noticeable knots. If it was human, it needed a good wash and condition. I picked up a pen I had knocked off my desk in my panic and flung it at the thing. It hit. The hair was real. 

I measured it: one hundred and forty-three centimetres long. Any longer and it would have been stroking my bedsheets. No smell. It had split ends. Blocked any glimpse into the hole beyond. It could’ve been attached to anything up there. Unmoving — if it was part of something living, I would’ve been impressed with their patience. Unless it was part of something dead. 

That was the thought that, ultimately, made me pull on it. I had to check, had to know. To be honest, I think I was a little delirious. My universe had so quickly rearranged itself around the hair and its hole, and now it was shrinking under the pressure. Gloved, I wrapped a hand around the hair and yanked. 

I don’t know what I was expecting. An object to tumble down, or a cry of sudden and human scalp pain, maybe, but it was definitely not more hair. I pulled and pulled and it kept coming. Incredibly long hair, limp and unkempt, and after a while I gave up when I realised that was all it was. Just hair. I didn’t touch it again, and I burned the gloves. I slept on the sofa that night, clad in the clothes I had worn all day, my bedroom door locked from the outside with the dining table dragged over it.  

II 

The next day, I decided to embrace rationality again: I resolved to investigate the apartment above mine. Just to see if anything was wrong, if I needed to call anyone, if I could express my neighbourly loyalty in some way. It was a daunting task for me. I had only lived in that place for a few months, and while I had danced the dance of polite introduction with my very nearest neighbours, the apartments above and below me were an unexplored expanse. 

The lift was empty and uncharacteristically unsullied by the permeating smell of urine that lifts often are. The hallway was also empty. The carpet on this floor was a different colour to my own, burgundy to my moss green. 

No response, when I knocked on the door of the apartment above mine. They were probably out. I knocked again, though a squirming feeling had lingered from the beginning that even if I managed to get in, there wouldn’t be anything to find. Somehow, I knew that the hair wasn’t invading from above, but from between our two apartments — under their floor and above my ceiling, that little gulf of domestic purgatory. The mass, I had seen it, was coming from the side, slithering into my room from those strange fathoms. For good measure, I knocked once more, but then stopped, as I didn’t want to cause any disturbance. 

— — —

It came from a wall next, one day, high above the bed. There was a little divot where I had knocked the headboard into the wall once, and this traitorous blemish must have deteriorated somewhere within its perimeter. If I had been sitting up in bed at the time, the strands of hair that came out would’ve been caressing my shoulders. Luckily, I was lying down, awake, chewing over something, probably work. I kept glancing over at the faithful pillar of hair that at first emerged from the ceiling, beside my bed, now touching the floor.

Unknowingly, it had become almost a source of comfort to me, its silent presence taller and more familiar than a person. It was then that something slid into view. Hair protruding from somewhere behind me. Dangling over me like a serpentine child’s mobile. I didn’t scream or anything, because I knew what hair looked like. I just moved back to the sofa. 

It started coming from everywhere after that. Gathering in my shower drain, daring to clog up my pipes with stuff that had never belonged to my body. It sprouted from between tiles and from under the carpet; it crept from behind the wall-hangings and the appliances. I found it tangled around cutlery in the drawers and pooled in nests in my wine glasses. I started buying bottled water in bulk, because when I turned on the tap, all that came out was hair. I looked up specialist services that might be able to help me but found none. I didn’t know who to call. I didn’t know if it was serious enough. I didn’t know if anyone could even help me with something like this. It wasn’t trespassing, wasn’t home invasion, wasn’t an infestation. Not a thing a person could feasibly exterminate or evict. It was not alive to begin with. 

Each growth led me, when I traced their twisting lengths, to a place I couldn’t reach: behind the faces of my apartment. The walls and their ilk. I began tugging on the hair, compulsively, in different places, to see if I could map out a single source, single root to it all. Yet, like a magician’s hat, or the mouth of a clown, when I pulled, only more was produced. 

It was nearly three days later when something caught. It was a bunch protruding from behind a bookcase in the living room; I twirled the hair around my wrist and tested. Tension. Something bumped against the wall on the other side. Too big to fit through the tiny hole. Suddenly, I had the bizarre feeling that I might’ve been holding the handset of a telephone, waiting for a response, and that the strands were the long cord spiralling into somewhere I couldn’t quite see yet.

III 

The man at the hardware store looked at me oddly when I put the sledgehammer on the counter. He wanted to ask what it was for, I could tell, wondering what a woman like me with long nails and soft hands had to do with such a thing. He kept looking down at my body, then flicking up to my face, creases in his brow like there was something wrong with them both. Abstractly, I knew I’d been spending too much time at home, with nothing but the hair, and it was making me unusual to look at, making me seem strange. Redecorating, I told him, though he didn’t ask. Just redecorating. 

By that point, I had taken to playing with the hair that had emerged around my bed, fiddling with it when I was trying to fall asleep. It calmed me, combing through it with my nails, extremity interfacing with extremity, keratin singing to keratin. Massaging it smooth, untangling the tangles, twisting and untwisting, braiding and un-braiding, making and unmaking it pretty, like a child with her ugly doll.

IV 

Four great collisions, and the drywall in the living room crumpled. Almost abashedly, I peeled back the loose wallpaper, peering in. Something felt improper about this venture into the guts of the building, the space in its vulnerable state of architectural undress. 

The black trench between my apartment and the one next door was long and narrow. A stripe of vacancy, a darkness that – as my eyes adjusted – was textured and silhouetted with shadowy, winding patterns. My path was choked with hair. I tugged at it, but the tangle was too thick. No pull, no prize. If it had been here, it wasn’t anymore. Whatever I had felt here earlier had shifted somehow.

The leftmost wall was next. Just to the side of the television (which showed no image now, inside the wires there was only hair), I carved out a hole. As it fell away, an army of dead spiders were ejected, little folded-up umbrellas on the floor. The hair had snuffed them out, suffocated them, colonised their birthright corners. There was no longer space for alternate life in this apartment. I fed more of it through the widened hole and pulled it. A little more tension here. Further right, maybe. We were getting closer.

I smashed in the next wall. If no neighbours had noticed what I was up to during the eight weeks since this had first started, they surely wouldn’t come knocking now. Breathlessly, I unearthed the layer of hair that was behind my walls and that could have surreptitiously lain behind all walls in the world, for all I knew. An awful stench was released as I did so. I had finally found it. A nest to end all nests. A mat of hair so great it resembled some zoo creature, or a monstrous insect, furred and fat and sprawling. Watching me. There was a solid object suspended inside it, I could see even in the dark, something segmented and marbled pale. Becoming embraced by various hanging strands, I struggled towards the object, dusty and blistered hands reaching out to unravel and free it from its tentacled prison.

Before me was an unusual, blobby shape, but when I tried to pick it up, it fell apart. At length, I removed the palimpsest of hair to reveal a malodorous, mottled being, made of half-hair and half-bone. It was a large, decomposing rat. The source of the hair I’d been hunting was an illusion.

V 

In the end I just abandoned everything I owned and left. I’m not delusional enough to think anyone would believe me, about any of it. I told everyone there was vermin in the walls or something like that. That all my things had become contaminated, and I was forced to vacate. 

I haven’t mentioned this fact to anyone in charge of the place. I don’t know if there truly was anyone else in that building. Even now, I can’t remember any of my neighbours’ faces, if I had ever talked to them. In my head, I can see the geometries of their mannequin smiles, but then dark strands start slipping from behind their eyes and inside their mouths and drooling down their faces and I have learned to stop thinking about it.

What I haven’t said, what I haven’t let myself think, is that I may have recognised that hair. That colour, its fraught lengths and general unloveliness surfaced a memory of a girl I used to know when I was young. She had the filthiest hair any of us had ever seen, shamelessly parading it around the school halls. We used to say there were bugs in it, that it was so dirty because she lived in the dark, underground. That her parents were secretly spiders, and she herself would grow up to be a big fat spider. 

I suppose we were cruel to her, in the ways that children often are. She hovered for a few years in our vicinity. Then one day she just vanished, like a lot of childhood characters seem to. Stopped coming to school, stopped spreading her public disease. I don’t remember seeing anything on the news, so it can’t have been that bad. Other than those minor details, she was erased from my memory, that grimy silhouette of a person. Until now, I guess.

Technically I still live in that apartment, but I’m never going back. It hardly matters. Everywhere I go, I know it’ll grow alongside me, blooming like black mould. I live with my aunt now, and I’ve left that place long behind, but her hair still follows me. And despite how much I try, I can’t even remember her name.