As a certain young man found himself, quite without meaning to, exploring a hallway that may or may not have been allegorical, he became aware of a scuttling from behind the wall to his right.  "That's curious," he thought to himself, and having decided that it was curious, concluded that the hallway he found himself in must also belong to him in some way, perhaps a seldom used corridor in his own home, which he also at that moment realized, he occupied alone.

He examined the wall, partly to determine the source of the unexpected noise, but also to determine the nature of the wall itself.  He decided that it was made of that old sort of lathboard and plaster that is common in older American houses, rather than of drywall, and that it therefore seemed quite unlikely to have any gaps underneath that a mouse could be running around in.  It then occurred to him that this sort of wall usually had wainscotting along the bottom, and just so, he noticed that there was indeed wainscotting.  It was the color of mahogany, but the certain young man well knew that mahogany is seldom used in wainscotting, and that it was rather more likely pine stained a darker color, a fact that was easily confirmed by how easily he was able to make a crease in its surface with his thumbnail.

He held his palm flat against the surface of the wall, which he now decided was papered with a dark green and gilt pattern above the wainscotting, to see if the sound would reoccur.  As he expected, it did, and he could feel a slight scritching underneath the paper at the apparent source.  The young man, in addition to being quite certain, was also what is commonly called a "picker", which is to say that he enjoyed pulling up at the edges of things to reveal the surface underneath.  His mother often chastened him for this habit, as it prevented scabs from healing properly, and was hard on the various laminate surfaces in the house where he grew up.  He wiped the surface of his hand along the wallpaper, with a scraping noise that made him realize just how quiet it had been in the corridor.  He found the texture satisfying, observing the grain of the paper.  He wondered, perhaps aloud, why he hadn't noticed the roughness before, and decided that the lighting in the hallway must be poor.  Indeed, he noticed the wall sconces held candles in them, which also accounted for the warmth of which he was now aware.

The pads of his palm encountered what seemed to be the edge of the paper, and he quite automatically began to pull at it with the nails of his thumb and forefinger.  Stubborn at first, the paper soon tore away from the wall underneath in a great swath that the young man found shiveringly satisying.  With a grin, he pulled up the rest of that section, took two steps back to look at the underlying surface, and jumped slightly as the scuttling sound that he had momentarily forgotten, engrossed as he was in the defacing of the wall, reoccurred.  Not content to remove the wallpaper, which now lay cast aside in a crumple on the parquety, be began to explore the edges of the laths which had been revealed, crusted up and smoothed over with grey plaster.  As it was very likely his house that he was in, he saw no harm in pulling up one of the looser laths, which happened to be at eye level, and blowing away the dust of the dry plaster.

Behind the lath, in the aforementioned dim light of the hallway, he saw what appeared to be a pair of eyes.

His first urge was to press close to the revealed gap between the boards and peer in, but if they were eyes, they were rather close to the gap, and a mixture of timidity and good manners kept him from getting to close to what may have been another's face.  Again, he heard and/or felt the scritching coming from beneath the wall.  Encouraged by this sign, he responded by running his nails along the wall, far enough beneath the revealed gap so as not to be taken as aggressive.  He was answered from the other side by the same sound, also considerately well below eye level.  He knocked twice on the lathing, and a bit of plaster fell away.  Two knocks came in response.  Still conscious of his manners, the young man tried to indicate by his posture that he meant well, raising his shoulders in a gesture of uncertainty that was not entirely conscious.  I n this posture, he pulled away the next lower board , and confirmed that is was indeed a pair of eyes underneath.  Suddenly less concerned with avoiding offense to the owner of the eyes than with completing his removal of the laths, he pulled away a section of the wall broad enough to reveal that the eyes belonged to a slender male face, set four inches or so back from the surface of the wall.  The young man knocked on the plaster again, this time with a syncopated dum dadadum.  He was answered with the same rhythm.

Forgetting his manners, now desperate to complete his removal of the wall between him and his new acquaintance, he pulled away the lathing and plaster all the way to the wainscotting, releasing a cloud of mummified dust and splinters, and cupped his hands over the edge of molding, pulling it away with a jerk and the creak of finishing nails.  He felt a rush of satisfaction as a wide section of the wainscotting tipped forward into the hallway intact.  It was just as though a big scab had come away from his own skin, and not one of those surface scabs either--one that went down into the meat a little bit.  He brushed the crumbled bits of wall off his arms and examined what stood before him.

It did not seem to be a person, as he had first thought.  Rather it was a portrait, one he remembered or decided that he painted himself many years ago, of a young man with a deep gaze and a slender face, wearing a cap with the letter A embroidered on the front.  He was wondering what the A stood for, and also why he had painted it, when another knock came from behind the wall.  He nearly fell over, having forgotten all about the noise and lost in examination of the painting.  He approached the wall again, his heart rate now quite elevated, and his skin suddenly cold.  He touched the painting near the shoulder, appreciating the smooth texture of the surface, which was not canvas, but something smoother.  He was quite proud of his work, and stood looking at it for a few minutes.  How nicely he had captured the shadow of the fellow's arm, whoever he was, and the lines of his neck muscle.  It was a shame that it was only an image.  Whatever or whoever lay behind it couldn't possibly be so perfect, and may in fact just be the dyspeptic pumbling.  He decided to leave the image alone, perfect, intact, but as he rubbed his hand across the clean surface, his hand brushed what seemed to be an edge.

And that is what it's like to meet a new person.