The Sunday Scaries
Volume 1, Number 26
Microfiction by Pat Harrigan
Content Warning: Language and Horror

Home Improvements

I have these friends, they got married and bought a house. They lived in it for a year and then started some renovations. Do you know what they found? A whole bathroom, behind a wall. It was spick and span, the toilet looked like it was never used, the water was hooked up and everything. Why would someone build a perfectly functioning bathroom—toilet, sink and bathtub, even a mirror—and then just wall it off?
          Walter, that’s my friend, he thought it was pretty hilarious. He started using it whenever he had to go. The place has two other bathrooms, including one just off the master bedroom, but he wouldn’t use any of them. He told me, get this, that if he could, he always waited to shit until he got home instead of doing it at work. I guess he sort of trained his body to do it that way, that timing.
          He started talking about it in a weird way. First it was things like, It’s my happy place. I can be alone there and think. Then it was more like, I don’t know how to put this, like it was a place he liked to visit, to hang out? Like you and I would go to a bar, see the usual faces. He’d say, it lets me think things through. Only sometimes he didn’t say think, he’d say talk. Talk things through. I laughed at him once: Walter, is there someone living in your bathroom?, and he got all embarrassed.
          Tracy, yeah, his wife, called me up out of the blue. I was her friend before I was his actually. I introduced them. So it’s not weird for her to call me, but this time it was actually sort of weird. He’s locked himself in there, she said, he won’t answer me, but he’s sort of singing and humming, and there’s something wrong with the pipes, he must have done something, because the kitchen sink backed up and the pipes by the washing machine were kind of trembling, even though she didn’t think there was any water running through them.
          So I came over and knocked at the bathroom door. Yeah, he’d installed a door. With a lock. You didn’t think they just left a hole in the drywall? Okay, but I guess it was just assumed. Anyway, I knocked. He’d stopped singing by then, but I could see what Tracy meant about the pipes. Everywhere in the house, wherever there was a water pipe, it was kind of vibrating, not a lot, but definitely you noticed it. They kind of buzzed.
          I popped the lock with a screwdriver. He wasn’t in there. That was the last anyone saw of him, I shit you not. No, he wasn’t down the toilet. Yes, I looked.
          Tracy moved out. Well, she’s staying with me for now, actually, just until she finds an apartment. Sometimes when I’m on the can, I imagine Walter’s voice yelling up at me from somewhere. Don’t rip my balls off, I whisper to him. You got nothing to worry about with me and her. We’re all just friends here, right?
💀