Soul in the Walls

Soul in the Walls
By Riaan Hayes
Mae Harper thought buying the old house on Breaker Road would be a chance to start over.
The place was cheap, quiet, and far away from the life she wanted to forget. The locals called it a fixer-upper. To Mae, it looked like hope.
But the first night in the house, something feels wrong.
The walls seem too quiet.
The halls feel like they are listening.
And when Mae begins peeling the old wallpaper, she discovers something hidden beneath it.
Words.
Lines of writing carved and scribbled into the plaster, buried under years of paint and paper.
At first they look like random messages.
I'm sorry.
You said you wouldn't leave.
I tried to stay.
But as Mae uncovers more layers of the walls, she realizes the messages form a conversation - a story written across time by two people who once lived in the house.
A story about love.
And about something that went terribly wrong.
Then Mae meets Eli, the quiet man who cuts her grass every week. He's polite, distant, and strangely familiar with the house.
Too familiar.
Eli always seems to know when Mae finds another message.
He knows where things are in the house that she hasn't even discovered yet.
And sometimes, when Mae catches him looking at the walls, it almost feels like he's remembering something.
The deeper Mae digs into the hidden writing, the stranger things become.
The town avoids talking about the house.
Neighbors watch her with quiet curiosity.
And the messages in the walls start to feel less like memories. . . and more like warnings.
Because the story written inside the house isn't finished.
And the deeper Mae goes, the more she begins to suspect something impossible:
The woman in the messages may not be a stranger.
The woman in the walls may be her.
Now Mae must uncover the truth about the house, the town, and the man who seems to know far more than he should.
Because some houses hold memories.
Some houses hold secrets.
And some houses never let go of the people who once loved inside them.
Soul in the Walls is a haunting romantic