The rain had been falling steadily for hours, a relentless whisper against the steepled glass of the room’s lone window. Outside, the trees swayed under a restless wind, their skeletal branches scraping a hollow rhythm that seemed to gather in the bones. Alex sat alone, hands flat on the cold wood of the desk, the lamp’s amber light casting brittle shadows across his face. His apartment was a cramped affair on the seventh floor, walls barely thick enough to drown out the city’s distant murmur. But on this night, it was as if the world had been swallowed by silence.
He hadn’t left since morning. The letters he’d received — black-edged, typed in a font too precise for comfort — kept piling on the desk. They were all the same, identical except for the date and the time, which matched the moment in which he read them. The instructions cruelly simple: “Listen. Wait. Don’t speak. Not until you hear the sound.”
He could feel the fraying edges of his patience brush against the fragile membrane of sanity. The city’s usual cacophony had been replaced by an oppressive hush, each tick of the clock pressing against his eardrums like a nail. He strained to hear something—anything—but it was only the rain, and the thudding pulse of his own heartbeat.
The first letter had arrived that morning, slipped beneath the door without fanfare. A typewritten note with no sender, no signature, just those haunting words. At first, Alex thought it a prank—something juvenile from his sister, maybe, or one of his former classmates looking to unsettle him. But the letters came rhythmically, as if orchestrated by some meticulous hand, and with them, the weight of dread built.
By afternoon, the apartment felt colder, less like a refuge and more like a tomb. The yellow light of the lamp hummed softly, a broken symphony to the monotony. Alex’s throat tightened with thirst and disuse; the instructions forbade speaking, so no one could know he was here. He hadn’t answered the calls or texts from friends; he didn’t want to alert them that something was unraveling in his mind.
And then, just after midnight, it came.
A sound so fragile and erratic it folded the room in on itself. At first, Alex thought it was a stray mouse, or perhaps the building settling under the weight of the storm. But as he listened closer — breath held, nerves taut — the sound grew distinct, an intricate, gasping melody like a voice being torn apart and reassembled underwater.
It was him. His own eerie reflection plucked from the void.
The sound came from behind the wall, subtle beneath the rain’s sigh and the wind’s cry, yet unmistakable. It was the echo of his whispered thoughts and fractured memories, emanating as if the room itself had become a vessel, a hollow chamber where his soul was playing a spectral tune.
His fingers curled into the desk’s grain, knuckles white. A part of him screamed to leave, to break the silence, but the letters’ command tethered him like a chain. Listen. Wait. Don’t speak. Not until you hear the sound.
The sound was here now, undeniably more insistent, old and new all at once, a voice desperate to be heard. It scratched at the boundary between self and other, shredding the air with quiet lament.
Alex pressed his ear against the cracked wall, where the sound streamed like a fragile river, each note a shard of memory bleeding through. All his fears, regrets, and broken moments whispered back at him — some as clear as a child’s laughter, others as jagged as a scream swallowed by the dark.
The rain outside tapered to a dying breath. The city’s shadowed silhouette faded into the mist, as though the world had peeled away in secret.
And then… silence.
Minutes passed with the kind of gravity that settles deep beneath skin and bone. No letters slid beneath the door, no new sound disturbed the stillness. Alex felt lost, suspended in a void, where time stretched on endlessly.
He whispered just one word — “Why?” — and his voice roared in the vacuum, shattering the fragile peace.
Suddenly, the lamp flickered and died, plunging the room into a darkness so complete that it swallowed the edges of his being. The air thickened; the walls seemed to close in, the boundaries of his apartment dissolving. Somewhere, deep inside the void, the sound began again — only this time, it was not his own voice. It was a chorus, hundreds of voices layered over one another like an unfinished symphony of despair.
The letters, the silence, the sound — they were never about him. They were about all of them. All those who had ever waited, listened, and lost themselves inside the hollow.
Alex realized then that the sound wasn’t just coming from behind the walls. It was coming from within the room, the building, the city itself—and from inside his own mind. The voices were what remained of those trapped, unwilling or unable to break the silence.
With the fragile lamp broken and no other source of light, he fumbled in the dark and found the last letter wedged beneath the door’s frame. With trembling fingers, he traced the final instruction:
“Speak now. Or disappear forever.”
His breath caught like a savage wave, lungs burning from disuse and fear. The silence thickened, waiting.
In that moment, Alex spoke. Not to plead or to explain, but just to speak.
A single word, cracked and raw: “Hello.”
The wall groaned, the voices crescendoed into an unbearable howl, then shattered abruptly. The darkness lifted, replaced by cold, grey dawn light filtering through the window. The apartment was empty, the desk bare except for a final note in neat cursive:
“You were never here.”
Outside, the city awoke under a sky washed clean with mist. The rain had stopped. But somewhere, in the soft rustle of the wind against the trees, the faintest trace of a whisper remained—a sound, hollow and endless, waiting to be heard again.
