Bogleech.com's 2013 Horror Write-off:

" The Wall Thumper "

Submitted by Slothkeeper

There it was again.

That tick-tacking. A sort of slow, piercing beat; a hammer on hollow metal kind of noise. As usual, it swelled and ebbed randomly, never quite achieving rhythm. When it first started, you dismissed it as maintenance workers fixing the pipes. What else could that sound have been? But the odd placement of the noise and the hours it kept… You once woke up to the crashing and banging at 3:20 am. No maintenance guy comes to work at 3 in the morning. It had to be something else.

Next you rationalized that it was the radiator clunkily turning itself off. But each time the noise began, you found the hunk of metal to be stone cold. Then you told yourself that it must have been the people in the room below. But the way the sounds seemed to be coming from inside the floor, their ceiling…

Now, as you lay in your bed, the noise startles you. There’s something new to it, a sort of frantic urgency you haven’t heard before. The timbre and speed of the rat-tat-tatting increases to a sudden crashing just below your head. The sounds of plaster and paper ripping. A brutal, howling scream. The kind grown men make. And then the most horrible squelching you’ve ever heard. It is as if the wooden floor is the only thing between you and an elephant being turned inside out by an industrial vacuum.

Then dead silence.

And the rat-a-tat-tat, hollow metal drum with a lifeless beat that tick-tacks its way into the insulation of your brain…starts…again. More distant this time. Almost like it’s coming from the floor above you. Inside your ceiling.