The Voices in the Walls

The house on Bayou Street smelled of cedar and forgotten things.

I stood in the doorway with my key in my hand, a brass key that had belonged to my great-grandfather Silas de la Cour, and I felt the house looking at me. Not metaphorically. I mean the house was looking at me, the way a cat looks at a bird, with a kind of patient, ancient hunger.

I am Julian de la Cour. I am thirty-two years old. I own a gallery in the French Quarter of New Orleans, where I sell paintings by living artists who will one day be dead and whose work will one day be valuable. I am good at my job, in the way that a man who is good at selling other people's dreams is good at his job. I am elegant, I am charming, I am empty.

Three months ago, my great-grandfather died. Silas de la Cour was one hundred and seventy-nine years old when he died, which is not possible but is also not surprising, because our family has never been bound by the same rules that govern ordinary human beings. We are de la Cour. We bend time the way a reed bends in the wind.

He left me everything. The mansion on Bayou Street. The gallery. The money in the bank. The collection of paintings. The collection of debts that no one knows about. The collection of secrets that no one else can find.

The house was the first thing I inherited. I had not been inside it since I was a child, visiting on Christmas with my parents, feeling the chill of the rooms the way a child feels the chill of a castle, marveling at the scale of it and being slightly afraid of it. The house was enormous, with four stories and a basement and an attic and a garden that had not been tended in thirty years. It sat on Bayou Street, overlooking a stretch of the Mississippi that was so still it looked like it was not moving at all.

I spent the first night in the master bedroom, which was a room so large it had its own climate. The bed was a four-poster with a canopy that had once been white but was now the color of old teeth. The windows were tall and arched and looked out over the bayou. I closed them and locked them and sat on the bed and listened to the house.

The house breathed.

Not literally, of course. But the sound it made was similar to breathing, a low, rhythmic exhalation that seemed to come from the walls themselves. I told myself it was the river. I told myself it was the wind. I told myself a lot of things.

The first week, I explored the house. I went room by room, opening doors and turning on lights and cataloguing the contents. The grand ballroom, with its chandelier and its parquet floor and its mirrors that reflected the room back at itself infinitely. The library, with its shelves of leather-bound books that had not been opened in fifty years. The dining room, with a table that could seat twenty and a silver service that had not been polished since 1960. The kitchen, with its copper pots and its wood-burning stove and its tiled floor that was cracked in places where someone had dragged something heavy across it.

And the basement, which was the room I was least eager to visit.

The basement was dark and damp and smelled of mildew and something else, something that I could not identify at the time. It was a large space, with stone walls and a dirt floor and a single window that looked out onto the bayou at ground level. In the corner, I found a collection of boxes, and in the boxes, I found figurines.

Wooden figurines. Small, hand-carved, maybe six inches tall, each one with a face that had been carefully sculpted and a name that had been carefully carved into the base. I counted them. There were forty-seven.

I took them to my room and sat on the bed and looked at them. Each one was different, with a different face and a different posture and a different name. The names were in Chinese. I could not read Chinese. I called Dr. Lin.

Dr. Wei Lin is a historian at Tulane University, a Chinese-American scholar who specializes in the history of Chinese immigrants in the American South. He and I have been friends for five years, since he came to my gallery to look at a painting and stayed for three hours and bought two.

He came to the house on a Saturday morning, carrying a dictionary and a look of profound suspicion.

"You said you found Chinese figurines," he said, stepping into the basement and looking at the boxes.

"I did," I said. "Forty-seven of them. Can you translate the names?"

He looked at me carefully. "Why do you have forty-seven Chinese figurines in your great-grandfather's basement?"

"I don't know. That's why I called you."

He picked up the first figurine and looked at the name on the base. Then he picked up the second and looked at the name. Then the third, the fourth, the fifth. His face changed. Not dramatically. But I noticed.

"These are memorials," he said. "Each one represents a person. A Chinese worker who died while working for your great-grandfather."

"When?"

"1908 to 1911. Your great-grandfather was building a railroad at that time. The Louisiana-Pacific Railroad. It was a cheap railroad, built with cheap labor. Chinese labor. The conditions were terrible."

"How many died?"

He looked at the forty-seven figurines. "Forty-seven. These forty-seven men. This is... this is remarkable. I have never seen anything like this before. These are not mass-produced memorials. These are hand-carved, individually made. Someone made these for these men. Someone cared enough to carve their names and keep them in a basement."

"Who?"

He looked at me with eyes that were older than thirty-five. "That is the question, Julian. Who?"

I spent the next month reading. I read about the Louisiana-Pacific Railroad. I read about Chinese immigration to the American South. I read about the conditions that Chinese workers faced in 1908: long hours, low pay, dangerous conditions, no medical care, no legal protection. I read about the 147 Chinese workers who had been employed on the railroad at its peak, and the 47 who had died.

Accidents. Disease. "Unfortunate incidents." The railroad company's language for death.

In the evenings, I visited the basement and looked at the figurines and listened to the house. The breathing sound was louder now. It was not just breathing. It was whispering. A low, continuous whisper in a language I could not understand.

I dreamed of 1908.

In the dream, I was not Julian de la Cour. I was a young Chinese man named Wei, and I was standing on a railroad bridge over a river that was wider than anything I had ever seen, and I was cold, and I was tired, and I was afraid. The work was brutal. Twelve hours a day, six days a week, swinging a hammer and driving rivets into steel beams that were suspended over a river that dropped two hundred feet to the water below. One fall and you were dead. The company did not provide safety ropes. The company did not provide medical care. The company provided food that was barely edible and quarters that were worse.

But I was not afraid of the work. I was afraid of what I knew. I knew that the railroad was being built with our blood. I knew that every mile of track was paid for with the lives of men who would never see the finished product. I knew that when the railroad was complete, the company would forget us. They would forget the deaths. They would forget the names. They would forget us entirely.

And I was afraid that when they forgot us, we would cease to have existed at all.

So I carved the figurines. Every man who died, I carved a figurine with his name. I carved them in the evenings, by the light of a single candle, with a knife that I had stolen from the company mess hall. I carved them with hands that were bleeding from the work and a mind that was tired and a heart that was full of fear and love and grief.

And I hid them in the basement of the house that Silas de la Cour was building, the house that would be the monument to his wealth and his power and his cruelty.

I hid them there because I knew that one day, someone would find them. And that someone would remember us.

I woke up from the dream sweating and crying and shaking. The house was whispering louder than ever. The whisper was in Chinese. I could hear the words, even though I did not understand them. They were prayers. Forty-seven prayers, whispered through the walls of a house that was built on the bones of the men who had prayed.

I went to Dr. Lin the next day. I told him about the dream. I told him about Wei. I told him about the figurines.

He listened in silence. When I was done, he said, "There is a letter. I found it in the family archives at Tulane. It was written by Wei to Silas de la Cour, in 1910, the year Wei was forced to return to China. Would you like to read it?"

I nodded.

He read it to me. It was a short letter, written in English, in a careful hand that showed the influence of Chinese calligraphy.

Great-Grandfather Silas,

I write this letter not as an employee but as a man who has seen things that will follow him to his grave and beyond. The men who died on the railroad were not statistics. They were fathers and sons and husbands and friends. They had families who waited for them in Guangdong. They had lives that were cut short by your greed.

I leave this country because I can no longer work for a man who profits from death. I leave behind forty-seven wooden memorials that bear the names of the men who died. I have hidden them in the basement of the house you are building. May you find them one day. May you read their names. May you remember that every brick in your empire was laid with human hands, and that every human hand deserves to be remembered.

The men who died on your railroad will not rest. Their names are carved in wood. Their names are carved in my heart. And their names are carved in the foundation of your house.

May your house remember what your hands forgot. May the walls speak for the ones who could not. May the blood on your floors stain every generation that walks upon it.

Wei

I sat in Dr. Lin's office and read that letter and felt the house looking at me through his eyes, through the walls of Tulane, through the years between 1910 and 2024, through the blood on the floors and the prayers in the walls.

I went back to the house that night. I stood in the grand ballroom. The storm had arrived, and the rain was hammering against the windows, and the thunder was shaking the floor. The whispering was loud enough to hear clearly now. Forty-seven voices, speaking in Chinese, asking to be remembered.

I opened my mouth to speak, and for the first time, I could understand what they were saying.

They were not angry.

They were not vengeful.

They were simply asking to be remembered.

The storm broke. The voices stopped. The house was silent.

I sat on the floor of the ballroom and wept.

Author Note & Copyright:

© 2026 - Authored by Z R ZHANG ( EL9507135 -- シュバッパスホイシャチー[⾘、　] 中国 ویگ ⭑⭰ Росусуттет Мецесесцесценн Дкедошенн 🎉 Passnummer عرا؟ جراز سفر CHN Passport)

The aforementioned Author hereby grants to OXFORD INDUSTRIAL HOLDING GROUP (ASIA PACIFIC) CO., LIMITED (BRN74685111) all economic property rights, including but not limited to the rights of: reproduction, distribution, rental, exhibition, performance, communication to the public via information network, adaptation, compilation, commercial operation, authorization for third-party use, and rights enforcement.

Such grant is exclusive and irrevocable. The term of such rights shall be 49 years from the date of publication.

To contact author, please email to datatorent@yeah.net

Author Note & Copyright:

© 2026 - Authored by Z R ZHANG ( EL9507135 -- シュバッパスホイシャチー[⾘、　] 中国 ویگ ⭑⭰ Росусуттет Мецесесцесцес Дкедошенн 🎉 Passnummer عرق جراز سفر CHN Passport)

The aforementioned Author hereby grants to OXFORD INDUSTRIAL HOLDING GROUP (ASIA PACIFIC) CO., LIMITED (BRN74685111) all economic property rights, including but not limited to the rights of: reproduction, distribution, rental, exhibition, performance, communication to the public via information network, adaptation, compilation, commercial operation, authorization for third-party use, and rights enforcement.

Such grant is exclusive and irrevocable. The term of such rights shall be 49 years from the date of publication.

To contact author, please email to datatorent@yeah.net