The truth is, you're not supposed to hear everything. Some sounds exist only to be ignored. The soft click of a door that was meant to stay closed. The low hum of electricity behind your walls. The way your name sounds when spoken by someone who shouldn’t know it. I wasn’t supposed to be home. I wasn’t supposed to be awake. But insomnia doesn’t care about plans. Insomnia is a stalker with long fingers, always tapping on the windows of your brain. So I'm sitting on the living room floor of my one-bedroom apartment, knees to my chest, drinking lukewarm tap water and watching the shadows twitch like nervous insects on the ceiling.
Then I hear it. My name. Three syllables, whispered. Not yelled. Not spoken. Whispered. Like a prayer. Like a secret that already knows how it ends. I freeze. That’s what animals do when they sense a predator. Not run. Not fight. Just freeze. Like death is based on movement. And in that silence, I realize the voice is coming from the hallway. Outside my door. I move like a ghost to the peephole. My building is old, the kind of place that makes you feel like it’s watching you, too. Down the hall, nothing. No feet. No shadows. No movement. But the door to apartment 6B is open. Just a crack. Just wide enough to let the whisper slip through.
The couple who live there—Mr. and Mrs. Whispers, I call them—they fight every Tuesday. Loud, theatrical fights with broken plates and slammed doors and apologies that sound like courtroom confessions. But tonight is Wednesday. That’s what bothers me. That’s what cracks the reality I live in. I wasn’t supposed to be home, and they weren’t supposed to be fighting. But I hear them.
“He heard it,” she says. Mrs. Whispers, her voice the texture of sandpaper wrapped in silk.
“Then he can’t leave,” he replies. Mr. Whispers, calm like people are calm just before they do something irreversible.
I press my ear to the door. My heart is trying to punch its way out of my chest. Every logical thought I have is screaming to step away. Lock the door. Call someone. But logic doesn't live here anymore. Only the sound does.
I don’t sleep that night. Or the next. I start seeing patterns. The man at the corner store who always smiles now watches me too long. The woman at the bus stop wears the same coat every day, even when it rains, even when it’s boiling. The TV turns on by itself. Static. Always static. And in the static, I swear I hear the whisper again. My name. My name like a warning. My name like a countdown.
I try to write it off. Maybe I’m losing it. Maybe it’s stress. Work has been hell. Rent is late. My plants are dying. I Google “auditory hallucinations.” I avoid the search results that mention schizophrenia. I try to laugh at myself. But then an envelope appears under my door. No address. No return label. Just my name, written in shaky capital letters. Inside is a cassette tape. On the tape, a label: "REWIND EVERYTHING."
I don’t own a cassette player. Who does anymore? I find one in a pawn shop run by a man with too many teeth and not enough blinking. When I play the tape, it’s just six seconds long. My name. Repeated three times. But each time it sounds… older. More decayed. Like something trying to imitate a human voice and getting worse at it.
I start to think about moving. Packing everything, vanishing like I never existed. But before I can, my job lets me go. Downsizing, they say. But I catch the HR guy looking at me like he knows exactly what I heard. My bank account locks itself. My landlord claims I never paid last month, even though I have proof. My phone rings in the middle of the night with no number. When I answer, I only hear myself breathing.
Eventually, I go to the police. I walk into the station, a man unraveling at the seams, and I tell them everything. I say I heard something I wasn’t supposed to. I say I think someone is watching me. They ask if I’ve been drinking. I ask them to listen to the tape. They do. One of the officers goes pale. She excuses herself. Never comes back. The others smile. Not nicely.
On the way home, I realise I’m being followed. A black car. No plates. I take six turns, double back, and sprint through an alley. Still behind me. I duck into a store, hide in the bathroom. When I come out, the store is empty. Abandoned. As if no one’s been there in years. But the lights were on. The shelves were stocked. I saw a cashier. I swear I did.
That night, I play the tape again. Slower. Backwards. That’s when I hear it. Beneath the whisper, there’s a second voice. Deeper. Mechanical. It says coordinates. I trace them. An abandoned warehouse on the edge of the city. A place the maps don’t name. I go. Because of course I go.
Inside, rows of chairs. People sitting. Eyes closed. Headphones on. All whispering names. Different names. Over and over. Like mantras. Like rituals. I walk forward. No one stops me. Mrs. Whispers is there. She turns. Smiles.
“You’re early,” she says. “Most people take longer to break.”
They strap me to a chair. Put headphones on me. Play the sound. It’s not my name anymore. It’s someone else’s. A child. A man. A woman. A voice that doesn’t belong to anyone but still feels familiar. They tell me I’m a node now. A transmitter. My brain is the frequency. My body, the signal.
When I wake up, I’m back in my apartment. Nothing has changed. Except now there’s a recorder beside my bed. Every night it captures me whispering names. I don’t remember speaking. But the tape doesn’t lie. The names start disappearing. I see the obituaries. I see the missing persons reports. I stop reading.
And now you’ve read this. Which means the sound has spread. That itch at the base of your skull? That ringing in your ears? That sudden silence when you're alone? That’s how it starts. You’ve heard something you weren’t meant to. And now it hears you too.
This is what happens. This is how it spreads. And there’s no going back.
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