Our Little Guest
Aaron Trudeau
The noises started three nights after they moved in. At first, the family assumed it was the pipes settling. Then they began to move. All around the house, that frantic scratching shifted from place to place within the drywall. They believed it was some kind of animal. The father spent hours on his hands and knees with a flashlight, checking the baseboards and methodically setting traps in every nook and cranny. Still, the scratching persisted, muffled and unrelenting behind the plaster, wrapping a cold, suffocating panic around the entire house. Across the kitchen island, his wife watched in silence, stirring her already-cold coffee. The children stopped asking about the scratches as the days pushed on, pulling their blankets over their heads instead. The noises escalated with each passing day—until, abruptly, they didn’t.
The walls went dead silent, and the family exhaled a collective sigh of relief. They believed it was finally over. But one night at dinner, they heard it again. Not a scratch this time—but what sounded like a voice. At first, it was just a few grunts and broken syllables echoing through the plaster. By the next dinner, it was stringing together full words. It sounded like something speaking through damaged vocal cords, forced from a throat that didn’t fit. It horrified them. They weighed calling animal control or the police; the idea died before either of them could pick up the phone. There was simply no way to call for help when you couldn’t put the nightmare into words.
Then one day, they saw it. Through a small gap in the drywall, expecting a nightmare, they were shocked to see a cute little fuzzy raccoon. It slowly pushed its head out. Its eyes were locked on the family. After a heavy silence, it spoke. Its raw, grating voice mimicked scraps of conversations it had stolen from them. Paralyzed with fear, the family barricaded themselves in a single bedroom, sleeping huddled together. All day and night, they could hear their own voices echoing back through the drywall. This went on for what felt like days—until the voice changed. It grew clearer. More human. It began speaking to them directly.
The parents argued in panicked whispers over what to do, but as the days blurred together and options ran out, they gave in. The raccoon stepped out into the open once more, ready to present itself. To their surprise, it was pleasant. Kind, even. It possessed a strange, gallows sense of humor and proved oddly calming to be around. After weeks of jagged nerves, the house felt warm again. As time went on, they leaned into their unique bond with it, desperate for normalcy. The children stopped going outside to play, abandoning their bikes in the yard to rush inside the moment school let out, eager to spend every possible minute with it. The mother even caught herself smiling as the children bickered over who got to sit next to it. When she came home to find it soothing the children with a voice that matched her own, she would simply hang up her coat and say nothing, letting the peaceful house stay peaceful. They guarded the existence of their strange, fuzzy friend, convinced the outside world was too cruel to things they did not understand. The raccoon would slip out into the darkness, returning with small metal trinkets it had scavenged, leaving them behind as quiet tokens of appreciation.
One night, after everyone else had gone to sleep, the father stayed up with it. He thought it would be best to apologize for trying to trap and kill it. The raccoon looked at him, its black eyes locked on his. It was almost like it could see through him. Then it said in a quiet, uneven voice: “I’m hard to kill… You, on the other hand… would be easy.”
The father’s breath hitched in his throat. He tried to force a laugh, but his jaw locked shut. He backed away, retreating up the stairs. The words stuck to his skin like sweat, refusing to let him sleep as they looped endlessly in his dark room. The house felt different, almost alive. Hours later, restless and suffocating in the darkness, he crept to the garage and stared at his old shotgun mounted on the wall. His fingertips hovered inches from the cold steel before a sudden shift in the shadows locked every muscle in place. The stale air seemed to thicken, pressing against his ribs with a suffocating certainty that something was sharing the dark with him. He backed away quickly, leaving the garage and deadbolting it behind him.
While the rest of the family grew to love the raccoon and welcomed it deeper into their lives, the father remained unnerved. He observed subtle changes in silence. It retreated deeper into the walls, becoming a ghost they only heard scratching in the dark. And when it finally did crawl into the light, something felt profoundly wrong. Patches of fur had sloughed away, leaving raw pink skin that seemed to stretch too tight over its frame. Its eyes had sunk deeper into its skull and looked darker than before. It started to move more unnaturally. Not on all fours, but dragging itself by its front paws. Its lower legs trailed behind it like dead weight. When the children noticed, they simply brushed it away with anxious excuses, whispering that it must be sick or injured. The mother agreed, shooting the father a quick, sharp look whenever he would stare too long.
The raccoon simply stopped appearing, but the noises continued, scratching and scraping, bleeding into every room. These noises alternated between feral grunts and pitch-perfect mimics. More than once, the children would be woken by their mother calling them from the dark hallway, only to find it empty. The father abandoned the idea of sleep altogether, while the kids, still hesitant, clung to their companion. The noises would grow more and more frequent, echoing throughout the house from dusk to dawn.
And then, all of a sudden, it stopped.
Deafening quiet filled the rooms. The silence wasn’t a relief, but an eerie pressure that felt almost unnatural. Everywhere he turned, the father felt the weight of unseen eyes. He stared at every inch of the plaster, desperately searching for the source of his skin-crawling unease. Yet there was nothing. No sound. No movement. Just dead air. Slowly, normalcy settled over the house. The kids grieved, and the parents silently agreed that the raccoon must have crawled off somewhere private to die, sparing the children a horrific death. It felt like one last kind gesture from the creature that came to love them. But the father was left with a hollow, gnawing guilt over his distrust. He replayed every closed door and defensive glare from his wife. His bitter paranoia had driven a sick, kind-hearted creature to die completely alone.
The fragile peace shattered one afternoon when the phantom echo of a child’s scream pierced through the hallway. The father vaulted across the house and threw open the door, only to find nothing. There was absolutely nothing. He tore through the empty rooms, searching every inch of the house, until the truth struck him like a physical blow. The children were at school. His wife was miles away at the store. He was completely alone in the house. An oppressive, sinister presence lingered in the air. Deep down, his mind flashed to the raccoon, but the noise disappeared into a dead silence as soon as it came. It was gone.
The days that followed were deceptively quiet, wrapped in an uneasy, fragile peace. But the house wasn’t right. The mom walked into the living room one afternoon, her brow furrowed with genuine confusion, asking why he had been screaming curses down the hall. The father stared at her, utterly bewildered—he hadn’t spoken a word. Upstairs, the kids began trading hollow accusations, swearing the other had started a fight with them, only to find them completely alone on the other side of the house. Everyone was fraying at the edges, snapping over nothing, their words sounding flat, drifting just a fraction out of character. Just as the tension threatened to break them, the cycle stopped. They had just finished dinner and stood up from the table when the children gasped, their faces instantly lighting up with pure glee. There, tucked snug into a gap in the drywall, was the raccoon.
Only its striped tail and dark backside were visible. The children rushed over, chatting excitedly. One of them reached out, grabbed it by the waist, and pulled.
It moved too easily—too light, too empty.
A collective gasp shot through the room as every ounce of color in their face drained to a pale, haunting white.
The raccoon was gone. Only its skin remained. Hollow like a discarded suit.
The memory of the children screaming came rushing back to him, along with every strange, impossible event. He walked over to the lifeless pelt and pulled it open. It bore no sharp cuts or jagged tears. It simply slid out of itself. Almost like it had outgrown its coat and needed to find something larger.
The father looked back at his family one last time. He scanned their pale, frozen faces. They stared back at him unblinking, with horror written all over their faces—except for one, who held his gaze for a moment too long, looking just a little bit too loose in their own skin.
About the author
Aaron Trudeau is a Minnesota-based writer with a love for horror and stories inspired by nature. When he isn’t writing, he enjoys the outdoors and strength training
