The Call from the Flash -EN

„Can you hear it?

It whispers in the plaster of the walls. It crawls beneath your fingernails while you sleep. You think you are alone in your room, safe behind locked doors. But the darkness is hungry. And it is calling for you. Come closer. Don’t look away. It has already seen you…“

© 2026 Angela Cap

It began with a scream.

Short, piercing, coming from somewhere in the dark neighborhood three houses down. A sound so sharp it sliced through the sultry evening air like a rusted scalpel. In its wake, the suburban idyll collapsed into raw, crackling unease. A dog nearby began to bark like mad, a hysterical, fear-drenched yelping that cut off far too abruptly, as though someone had crushed its windpipe with a blunt pair of pliers. In the bushes beneath the kitchen window, a cat hissed, a hate-filled, territorial sound, followed by the wet noise of paws fleeing in panic through mud. Then, with a loud metallic crash, a garbage can toppled over in the driveway outside.

Something was crawling through the sewers of this street. Something that hunted everyone. Every single one of them.

For several seconds I did not move. My head throbbed so violently that every pulse sent a searing, stabbing pain through my skull, as though someone were driving a rusted iron bolt behind my temple with a sledgehammer. The air around me was thick, stifling, unbearably damp , it hung in the room like stagnant water. It was saturated with a heavy, metallic smell that immediately drove bitter yellow bile into my throat. Slowly I straightened up, my muscles creaking like dry, brittle leather. The room around me was dim, decayed, and had the feel of a forgotten grave. Faint, ash-grey light filtered through a small window somewhere far above me, crusted over with a thick layer of brown grease and dust. It barely illuminated the rotting wooden walls, whose once-white paint had faded to a sickly urine-yellow. The floorboards were warped with age, and dark, nearly black stains spread across them like a creeping biological decay that had been drawn deep into the fibres.

Memory fragments flickered through my mind like a broken, rattling film projector. I had been on my way home from school. I usually took the main road, but my phone had died. I had cut through an unfamiliar narrow alley. I remembered thinking about dinner. My mother would surely have cooked something special tonight. And my little siblings would have come running to the front door the moment they heard the rattle of the key in the lock, meeting me with wild embraces and wet kisses. My family was my everything.

A faint, pained smile almost crossed my lips. Then the memory shattered with the ugly screech of bursting metal.

A blue truck. Headlights scorching my retinas. The tyres had locked on the wet asphalt, the vehicle had mounted the kerb and slammed head-on into a cast-iron lamppost. I remembered crawling up out of the roadside ditch, dazed, to survey the damage. The impact had twisted my head sideways. The street had been strangely silent. Not a soul in sight. Only the broken streetlamp flickering in a poisonous violet in time with my hammering heart. And then , a sudden, dull blow to the back of my skull. The bony sound of a splintering cranium. And now I was here. In this hellish place.

Instinctively I reached out a clammy hand and touched the back of my head. My fingers grazed something dry, encrusted, unnaturally sticky. When I pressed down, the scalp gave way with a soft, squelching sound. Dried blood, mixed with grey cerebrospinal fluid.

My heart began to race like a trapped, dying bird against my ribs. „How long…?“

I whispered, hoarse. My vocal cords felt like dry sandpaper. How long had I been unconscious? And more importantly , where in hell had I ended up?

I rose slowly, trying not to make a sound. But the old boards bent and groaned in protest beneath my weight. I froze mid-movement. Even this quiet, dying sound seemed far too loud in the sepulchral silence of the house.

To my left stood a small dresser, its dark wood chipped, brittle, and riddled by fat white woodworms. A few metres ahead stood a round wooden table, upon which sat a dust-covered ancient clay vase that stank of damp earth and mould. Beside the table hung a crooked painting. The image was so thoroughly devoured by moisture and green mould that nothing remained of what it had once depicted, only a smeared patch of dull, eye-like colours, a murky dead iris-blue in the middle of a wasteland of mud.

On the floor beneath the painting lay something small. A colourful wax crayon. Beside it, a half-torn child’s drawing. a crudely drawn house with enormous pointed teeth in the doorframe. Above the windows, in shaky childish handwriting.It doesn’t sleep.

An ice-cold shudder shot through my spine. My gaze wandered to the wall directly beside me. Words had been carved into the brittle wood. The letters were jagged, deep, and uneven, as though gouged in blind, desperate haste with bare, bleeding fingernails. They were dark red. Almost black with dried crust. That was not mould. That was dried blood.

I squinted to read the carved message in the faint cone of light.You have five days.Beneath it, the last word had been engraved deeper, wilder, more brutal than the others. Desiccated shreds of flesh still clung to the splinters of the wood. FLEE.

Five days…? Flee from what, for God’s sake…?

I took a step back to examine the wall more closely. Something unbelievable happened. when my elbow touched the plaster, it yielded elastically. It was warm. Far too warm. Beneath the peeling wallpaper lay no stone , it was moist, slick-pulsing epithelial tissue laced with fine bluish capillaries. The wood grain of the dresser? Frozen, sinewy muscle fibres. When I laid my hand flat against the wall, I felt a deep, seismic, irregular heartbeat.

The house was breathing.

It was not a building. It was a living, digesting organism. And I was trapped in the middle of its labyrinth. The five days were not a human kidnapper’s countdown , it was the metabolic rate of the beast. Five days until its gastric acid had fully dissolved my bones. It was a biological curse. Whoever ended up here was digested and made part of it.

Before I could think further, I made a fatal mistake. My elbow knocked the small, wobbly table beside me. The clay vase tipped. For one agonisingly long moment it swayed on the dusty edge. Then it fell.

The heavy vase shattered on the wooden floor with a deafening, explosive crash. The sound of breaking clay cut through the silence like a razor blade. The bang echoed thunderously through the entire, empty house. A trigger in the labyrinth, wrongly tripped.

My heart stopped for a moment. I dared not breathe. For two seconds , absolute, paralysing silence. Then the knocking began.

It was not ordinary knocking. It was a deep, heavy THUD, followed by a wet, grinding sound.

It scraped against the wall.

The unmistakable, rhythmic echo of someone ascending a wooden staircase. With each footfall the wood gave a tortured, splintering groan, as though a colossal weight were crushing the steps.

Heavy and booming. Explosive and pounding.

Whoever it was, they were moving fast and heading straight for my room. It was the keeper of this flesh-prison, drawn by my mistake. The immune system of the house, spewed out to eliminate foreign bodies. The dull rumbling vibrated through my soles directly into my bones.

Naked panic seized me as the footsteps grew loud and more thunderous directly before the door. I had to hide. Right now. The tall wooden wardrobe at the end of the room appeared to be the only refuge.

I hurried toward it with silent, panicked steps, slipped inside the narrow interior, and drew the rotting door quietly shut until the latch clicked into place. The absolute darkness swallowed me.

Inside it smelled of decay. Of wet, rotting wood and the biting, sickly-sweet stench of putrefying flesh. It smelled like an unrefrigerated slaughterhouse in the height of summer. I pressed both hands over my mouth with all my force to suppress the rising urge to retch and the loud, rasping wheeze threatening to escape me.

Against the wooden back panel of the wardrobe , which felt beneath my fingers like the leathery inside of an oesophagus , my groping fingers found something papery. An old diary page, warped by sweat and blood, roughly attached with yellowed adhesive tape. I squeezed my eyes shut in the total darkness while outside the woman’s club scraped across the floor. In the tiny crack of pale window light I could decipher the hastily scrawled lines of a boy who had sat here before me.

It has no walls. It has no rooms. The house is not a house at all. It is only the mouth. And Mother sleeps beneath the street.

An icy lump formed in my throat. This was not a haunting. This thing was only a single appendage of something that lurked miles beneath the earth.

The heavy footsteps halted directly before the bedroom door. Pure, evil silence.

Then, BANG!

The wooden bedroom door was thrown open with such force that the wood splintered like matchsticks and fragments flew across the room. I flinched inside the wardrobe, my fingernails digging so deep into my own palms out of fear that warm blood ran down my wrists , anything not to scream out loud. Through the narrow, dusty gap in the wardrobe door I saw her.

The woman standing in the dusty doorframe was no longer human. Not even close. She was the walking immune system of this house. Her skin had the sickly greyish-brown colour of decomposing flesh. At her cheeks and neck the tissue was necrotic, almost pitch-black, hanging in fat, slimy flaps from her yellowed jawbones. Her white hair hung unevenly and filthily around her skull, cut in jagged, bloody tufts, as though she had torn it from her own scalp.

But her eyes, at the sight of them my soul froze solid. They were completely pale. No pupil, no iris. Simply two empty, milky-white spheres staring rigid and infinitely hungry into the room. She wore a dull grey, tattered nightgown. Dark stains spread unevenly across the encrusted fabric. Some were old, dried, a crusty brown. A few were shockingly fresh , vivid red and wet.

In her right hand she held a heavy wooden baseball bat. The thick end was coated in a crusted layer of dark blood. It dripped slowly, viscously, onto the floor.

Drip. Knock. Drip.The congealed blood hit the floorboards with a heavy, wet sound.

The woman tilted her head slightly, like a carrion bird, listening into the silence. A soft, deep growl escaped her throat. It sounded somewhere between the dull gurgling of a drowning animal and a broken whisper. The stench she exuded seeped through the cracks of the wardrobe.

A biting smell of an unwashed body, rancid fat, and ammonia.

She entered the room.

THUD.

With her every step the fleshy floorboards bowed beneath her, and dark fluids seeped from the cracks. Her head jerked sharply, in unnatural, mechanically-abrupt movements, as she scanned the room.Hunt. Listen. Eliminate.

I pressed my back so hard against the rear wall of the wardrobe that the rotting wood behind me gave way. I barely dared to breathe, my lungs burning painfully for oxygen.Please… please go away…

The pale, milky eyes of the woman turned slowly toward the wardrobe. My heart stopped for one full beat. She was coming toward me. Each step was slower, more threatening than the last. The heavy wooden bat scraped lightly across the floorboards.

SCRRRRAPE.

I felt my entire body begin to tremble uncontrollably. She reached the wardrobe. Her rotted, disfigured face was now only centimetres away from the narrow door gap. I could smell her hot breath, reeking of stomach acid. The woman raised her hand slowly. Her bony fingers closed around the cold, metallic door handle.

It began to turn. Slowly. The rusted metal squealed in torment. I squeezed my eyes shut, bracing for the lethal blow.This was it.

But suddenly, she stopped. The squealing ceased. Her head snapped with a violent, loud crack toward the dark hallway. She stood completely motionless for several seconds. Something in the organism of the house had changed. Perhaps another victim in another chamber of the labyrinth had solved a puzzle incorrectly.

Then she abruptly released the handle. Without making another sound, she turned and left the room. The heavy thudding of her footsteps faded slowly down the wooden staircase.