Voices in the Wallpaper
壁紙の中の声
That first night, unable to sleep, I lay listening to the old house around me.
Lying awake beneath a strange ceiling, I heard the wallpaper begin, very softly, to .
At first I mistook the sound for wind slipping through the gaps in the window frames.
But wind does not pause for breath, nor shape itself into my grandmother's low, patient voice.
Pressing my ear against the cold wall, I heard her whispering a name I half knew.
She was speaking to someone, her tone gentle, the way one soothes a frightened, sleepless child.
"You mustn't be afraid," she said; "the house only wants to keep you a little while."
Frozen against the , I felt each word travel through the paper and into my skin.
I heard another voice answer, thin and uncertain, and realised with horror that it was mine.
Yet I had never spoken those words, nor stood inside this bedroom before that very night.
Lying there in the dark, I listened to myself agree to something I could not remember.
The conversation was not a memory at all; it was a for a night still coming.
Trembling, I switched on the lamp, and the whispering withdrew slowly back into the papered walls.
The wallpaper, patterned with roses, seemed to hold its breath quietly along with me.
Behind one rose the paper had lifted, revealing older paper crowded with tight handwritten words.
Leaning closer, I could make out phrases in my own hurried, entirely .
They described this exact night: the lamp, the fear, the roses, the listening, waiting walls.
Whoever had written them had known precisely what I would do, and when I would do it.
Having read enough, I tried to tear the paper down, but it simply would not come away.
Beneath my nails the wall felt warm, almost soft, like skin unwilling to be broken open.
at last, I lay back and heard my grandmother calmly resume her patient whispering.
This time she described tomorrow, listing the rooms I had not yet dared to enter alone.
"She will find the photographs," the wall said softly, "and then she will begin to stay."
I told myself it was only a dream, spoken by grief in an unfamiliar, creaking house.
But dreams do not leave, come morning, three fresh lines of my on the wall.