Chapter One – The Call
Rain fell in sheets that night, thick and heavy as if the sky itself was trying to drown the city. The streets shimmered under yellow streetlights, puddles trembling with the weight of the storm.
Carl had been driving for hours, trying to shake off the feeling that something was wrong. He’d ignored the first two calls from Mary. Then the third came—followed by a text that stopped him cold.
“He’s gone, Carl. Colby’s gone.”
He called immediately.
The line clicked. “Mary?”
Her voice was quiet, trembling. “You need to come. Please. Unit 4B. Don’t come alone.”
“Mary, what happened?”
A pause. Then, a whisper: “It’s inside the walls.”
The call ended.
Carl gripped the steering wheel, the sound of the rain hammering against the windshield matching the pulse in his chest. He floored the gas.
By the time he reached Colby’s apartment building—an aging six-story block on the edge of downtown—the street was nearly deserted. The sign above the entrance flickered in and out, spelling WINDGATE APARTMENTS, though most of the letters were missing.
Sallie was waiting under the awning, her blonde hair plastered to her face. Her umbrella had given up, bones of metal bent backwards by the wind.
“You got her call too?” Carl asked, slamming his door.
Sallie nodded. “She sounded… off. I thought maybe she’d seen something again. But—”
“But what?”
She gestured toward the building’s windows. The ones on the fourth floor were all dark—except one. A faint glow pulsed behind the curtains, flickering rhythmically, almost like a heartbeat.
Carl felt it in his gut: something wasn’t right.
Inside, the lobby smelled of wet carpet and old paint. The wallpaper was peeling, and the air was colder than it should’ve been. There was no sound except the faint hum of the flickering lights.
The elevator doors opened before they even pressed a button.
Sallie froze. “Did you—?”
Carl shook his head. “No.”
They exchanged a look.
Inside the elevator, the fluorescent light buzzed and dimmed as they stepped in. The button for the fourth floor was already lit.
“Mary?” Carl called, his voice echoing faintly in the cramped space. “If this is some kind of joke—”
The elevator jerked violently. The lights went out.
For five seconds, there was nothing but darkness and the sound of breathing.
Then, a whisper—not from the speaker, not from the walls—but close. Right behind them.
“Don’t go up.”
Carl slammed the emergency button, and the lights flickered back on. Sallie stood frozen, pale as death.
“Did you hear that?” she whispered.
Carl didn’t answer.
The elevator doors opened with a chime. Fourth floor.
The hallway stretched before them, lined with doors and faded carpet. Water dripped from a broken pipe in the ceiling, forming a dark trail that led straight to 4B.
Mary was waiting by the door, soaked through, her eyes wide and glassy.
“Thank God you came,” she breathed.
“What’s going on?” Carl asked.
Mary’s hands were shaking. “He called me an hour ago. Said he heard scratching inside his walls. Then screaming. Then… silence. I came over, and—” She stopped, swallowing hard. “The walls started whispering.”
Sallie stepped closer. “Whispering what?”
Mary looked up at her, eyes trembling. “My name.”
Carl turned toward the door of 4B. It was slightly ajar. Faint light pulsed from inside, that same slow rhythm they’d seen from the street.
He pushed the door open.
The apartment was empty. No sound, no movement—except the low, rhythmic glow from the television. The screen flickered between static and short bursts of video—Colby’s own security footage.
In one of the clips, Colby stood in front of the camera, whispering something they couldn’t hear. Then he turned his head sharply, as if hearing something behind him. The clip ended.
Carl reached for the remote on the table—and froze.
Carved into the wall above the TV, deep gouges spelled out one word:
“LISTEN.”
Sallie gasped. “Carl, the door—”
It slammed shut behind them, hard enough to rattle the frame.
The lights flickered once. Twice.
Then every bulb in the apartment went dark.
In the suffocating blackness, the whispers returned—soft at first, then growing louder, layered voices overlapping, speaking in tones too low to be human.
Mary clutched Carl’s arm. “It’s him,” she whispered. “It’s Colby. He’s still here.”
Carl strained to listen—just long enough to make out one word.
“Run.”
Then the walls began to move.
Chapter Two – Trapped
The air shifted first.
It wasn’t just darkness now—it was pressure, like the apartment itself had taken a breath and held it. The wallpaper rippled faintly in the glow of the flickering TV, as if something alive was pushing just beneath the surface.
Carl’s flashlight flicked on with a click, the thin beam slicing through the black. “Nobody panic,” he said, though his voice betrayed the tremor in his chest.
Mary was pressed against the wall, her breathing ragged. “Carl, we have to leave. Now.”
He turned toward the door. “Agreed.”
The knob wouldn’t turn. He twisted harder. Nothing. The metal was ice-cold, slick with condensation.
Sallie stepped forward. “Move.” She kicked the door near the latch. The sound echoed—but the door didn’t budge. It didn’t even shake.
“It’s like it’s part of the wall,” she whispered.
Carl aimed the flashlight up and down the frame. The seams were gone. The door wasn’t a door anymore—it was smooth drywall. Seamless.
They were sealed in.
“Okay,” Carl said, forcing calm. “Windows. We’ll go out through the fire escape.”
He strode to the living room window and yanked on the blinds. The view beyond wasn’t the city. It wasn’t anything.
It was black.
Not night. Not fog. Just… void.
Mary let out a choked sound. “Oh God.”
Carl backed away slowly, gripping the flashlight tighter. The beam seemed to dissolve before it even reached the glass.
The whispers started again.
Soft at first—like wind under the floorboards—then louder, rising in a rhythmic murmur that echoed from every direction. The words were indistinct, layered, impossible to separate.
Sallie turned in a slow circle, eyes wide. “It’s behind the walls again.”
Something thudded from inside the wall beside her. Once. Twice. Then fingers—long, pale, impossibly thin—pushed through the wallpaper, pressing from the other side like hands reaching from inside flesh.
Mary screamed.
Carl grabbed her and pulled her toward the hallway. “Bathroom! Now!”
They burst inside, slamming the door. The room was small, fluorescent-lit, and freezing. Their breaths came in white puffs.
For a moment—silence.
Then the mirror above the sink began to fog.
Sallie took a cautious step forward. “That’s not steam,” she whispered. “It’s writing.”
Three words formed slowly, drawn by invisible fingers.
DON’T LOOK BACK.
Mary spun toward Carl, panic rising. “What does that mean?”
Carl didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. The bathroom door handle was turning—slowly, deliberately.
He lunged forward, throwing his weight against it. The metal burned cold under his hand.
Something on the other side was pushing back.
“Help me!” he yelled.
Sallie grabbed a towel rack, wedging it under the knob. The door shuddered, but held.
Then, silence again.
Mary whimpered, her back pressed to the tile. “It’s trying to get in.”
Carl exhaled, trying to think. “We wait until morning. Whatever this is, it’s weaker in daylight.”
Sallie shook her head. “Carl… look.”
The bathroom window was glowing.
Not daylight—something else. A faint, pulsating light, blue-white like electricity.
Carl stepped closer, wiping the condensation from the glass—and froze.
Outside the window was not the fire escape. It was another room.
Identical to theirs.
And inside that room stood a man—Colby.
He was facing the window, motionless. His skin was gray, eyes black and empty. His mouth opened slowly, too wide, stretching until the jaw cracked.
Then he mouthed the same words scrawled on their mirror:
DON’T LOOK BACK.
Mary started to sob. “That’s not him. That’s not Colby.”
Carl backed away, but his flashlight flickered. The beam dimmed, sputtered, then died.
Darkness swallowed them again.
From behind the bathroom door came a faint creak.
Then, a whisper right at Carl’s ear—low, familiar, and wrong.
“You looked.”
The towel rack snapped.
The door burst open.
Hands—cold, gray, and human—reached through.
Carl swung the flashlight like a weapon, connecting with something solid. A hollow sound, a grunt of pain—and then the thing retreated.
The bathroom door slammed shut on its own, locking them in again.
Mary collapsed against the wall, sobbing. Sallie was shaking, eyes wild.
Carl pressed a hand to his temple, his pulse hammering. “We’re not alone in here.”
The whispers returned, this time forming words—hissing, taunting, impossible words that crawled into their ears like insects:
“You came looking for him. Now you’ll stay.”
The walls pulsed once—like a heartbeat.
Then again.
And again.
Somewhere inside the apartment, a voice screamed.
It wasn’t Colby’s.
It wasn’t human.
And it was coming from inside the walls.
Chapter Three – The Whispers Grow
The scream faded into the distance, swallowed by the walls themselves.
Carl’s breath came fast and shallow. The air in the bathroom was turning thick, heavy—like they were breathing through damp cloth. His flashlight flickered back to life for only a second, revealing Mary crouched in the corner, rocking slightly, whispering to herself.
Sallie pressed her ear to the door. Her pupils were blown wide, her face slick with sweat. “They stopped moving,” she said. “Whatever that was—it’s gone.”
Carl wasn’t so sure.
He knelt beside the mirror. The fog had returned, spreading across the glass in trembling waves. Slowly, words began to appear again—etched by an invisible hand.
WE SEE YOU.
The letters bled down the mirror like tears.
Mary let out a soft moan. “It’s mimicking him,” she whispered. “The voice… the words… it’s using Colby.”
Carl turned toward her. “How do you know that?”
“Because I heard him,” she said, eyes unfocused. “The night before he vanished. He called me. He said the same thing: ‘They see me.’ Then… then the whispering started.”
Sallie backed away from the door, shaking her head. “This isn’t right. We’re dealing with something residual—something that’s feeding on us. The walls, the dark, the voices—it’s using the space itself.”
Carl frowned. “Using it for what?”
Before she could answer, a sound rolled through the apartment—a low, guttural hum that made the floor tremble.
The lights flared white.
Then went out completely.
The next instant, they were somewhere else.
Carl blinked into the dark, his stomach dropping as his flashlight flickered to life again.
The bathroom was gone.
They stood in a narrow hallway lined with doors—each one identical, stretching endlessly in both directions. The air smelled of wet earth and mold.
Mary whispered, “We didn’t move.”
Carl’s voice came out hoarse. “Then the house did.”
A low whisper crawled down the hall. This time, it wasn’t a voice—it was voices, dozens of them, overlapping. Some were crying. Some were laughing. Some were calling their names.
Carl raised the flashlight toward one of the doors. The wood pulsed under the light—something moving just beneath the surface, slow and serpentine.
Sallie grabbed his arm. “Don’t open it.”
But the door opened anyway.
A cold wind rushed out, carrying the smell of rot and dust. The room beyond was small, empty—except for the figure standing in the corner.
Colby.
Or what was left of him.
He was facing the wall, his back to them, head tilted sharply to one side like a marionette with a broken string. His fingers twitched at his sides.
“Colby?” Carl whispered.
Colby didn’t move.
Sallie reached out a trembling hand. “If that’s him, we have to—”
The figure turned.
Its face was wrong. The features were stretched, mouth too wide, eyes too black. Skin hung loose, like something had worn it too long and too tight.
Then, with a crack of bone, it smiled.
“You shouldn’t have come.”
Mary screamed and slammed the door shut.
The whispering exploded, filling the hallway with overlapping, incoherent voices, growing louder, angrier, until the sound became physical—like claws scraping at the inside of their skulls.
Carl dropped the flashlight. The beam rolled across the floor, catching movement along the ceiling—shapes crawling through the plaster, shadows with too many limbs.
Sallie clutched her head. “It’s in my mind,” she gasped. “Carl, I can feel them—inside.”
He grabbed her shoulders. “Stay with me. Don’t listen to them.”
But Mary was already backing away, her eyes glassy. “They’re saying his name,” she murmured. “Over and over. Colby. Colby. Colby—”
“Mary!” Carl shouted.
Too late.
She bolted down the hallway, disappearing around the corner before either of them could move.
Carl ran after her, Sallie close behind. The hallway stretched longer the farther they went, like the building was twisting itself around them.
They passed door after door, each one whispering as they moved by. The sound grew distorted—moans, laughter, screams—like all the noises of a thousand lost lives echoing from another world.
Then they saw it.
At the far end of the hall, Mary stood in front of a door that pulsed faintly with red light leaking from its seams. Her hand was already on the knob.
“Mary, don’t!” Carl shouted.
She turned her head slowly toward him—and smiled.
Her voice came out in two tones, layered, one human, one not.
“He’s waiting.”
Then she opened the door.
The light flared, blinding white-red.
When Carl and Sallie reached her, she was gone. The door led to nothing but brick and rot—like it had been sealed shut for decades.
They backed away slowly, the air buzzing around them like static.
Sallie was shaking uncontrollably. “We’re losing each other. It’s isolating us.”
Carl turned in a slow circle, the flashlight beam trembling. “Then we don’t separate. Ever.”
From somewhere deep in the walls came a sound like breathing—wet, slow, deliberate.
Then a whisper, clear as day, brushed past his ear:
“Too late.”
The walls began to move again.
Chapter Four – Colby’s Shadow
The walls groaned.
Not creaked, not shifted—but groaned, as if the building itself was straining to contain what was inside it. The sound reverberated through Carl’s bones, deep and ancient, a low vibration that made his teeth ache.
Sallie stumbled, catching herself against the wall. The plaster was slick and pulsing faintly under her palm, like skin over muscle. “It’s alive,” she whispered. “It’s—God, it’s breathing.”
Carl swung the flashlight toward her. “Don’t touch it!”
She jerked her hand back, trembling. The spot where her fingers had been was darker now—veins of black spreading outward like frost.
The hallway around them began to distort. Doors warped, floorboards swelled. Somewhere behind them, something moved, dragging its weight slowly, rhythmically, in the dark.
“Keep moving,” Carl said. “We find Mary. We get out.”
Sallie nodded weakly. “If there’s still a way out.”
They turned a corner and froze.
The hallway had split open.
The floor had cracked, revealing a gaping hole that descended into pure blackness. It wasn’t a basement—there was no end, just a void that hummed faintly like a living throat.
Carl shined the light down. His own reflection stared back up at him from the dark surface below—distorted, stretched. Then it smiled.
He stumbled back. “It’s showing us—”
“Not us,” Sallie whispered. “Them.”
The reflection rippled and changed. It wasn’t Carl anymore. It was Colby.
He looked alive. Breathing. Standing somewhere that looked almost like this hallway, except wrong—rotted, inverted, the light bleeding backward through the cracks.
Colby turned his head, meeting Carl’s eyes directly through the impossible reflection.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he said, his voice muffled, echoing from beneath the floor.
The darkness surged upward like a wave. Carl grabbed Sallie and stumbled back as the floor sealed over again, smooth as glass, the hum fading into silence.
Sallie’s voice shook. “That wasn’t… that wasn’t just an illusion.”
Carl swallowed hard. “He’s here. Somewhere in this building.”
They moved down another corridor—narrower this time, the walls closing in tighter with each step. A single door waited at the end, light leaking from the gap beneath it.
Carl reached for the handle, but Sallie stopped him.
“Wait,” she whispered. “Listen.”
They both leaned in.
At first, it was faint—a low static hiss. Then words began to form, overlapping and distorted.
“Carl… Sallie… help me…”
It was Colby’s voice.
Carl felt his chest tighten. “He’s alive.”
But Sallie shook her head. “Or something’s wearing him.”
Carl opened the door anyway.
The light inside was dim, flickering from a single bulb swaying on a wire. The walls were covered in photographs—hundreds of them. Each photo was of the same hallway they stood in, taken from slightly different angles, some blurred, some burned around the edges.
In every photo, Colby appeared somewhere in the background—sometimes standing, sometimes crouched, sometimes staring directly into the lens.
And in the most recent ones, Carl and Sallie were there too.
Sallie covered her mouth. “Carl… these weren’t here when we came in.”
Carl’s hand shook as he picked one off the wall. It was dated tonight.
In the photo, he and Sallie were standing exactly as they were now.
Behind them—barely visible in the grainy background—was a shadowed figure with its hand on Carl’s shoulder.
He turned instantly.
No one there.
Then the light bulb began to swing faster, throwing wild shadows across the walls.
The whispering started again.
But this time, the voices weren’t random—they were in unison.
“He’s not dead. He’s behind you.”
Carl froze. The air dropped ten degrees. Sallie’s breath came out in a white puff.
Very slowly, Carl turned around.
Standing in the doorway was Colby.
He looked… wrong.
His skin was pale and translucent, eyes milky white, veins dark like ink under glass. His clothes were torn, soaked in something that shimmered black in the light. But it was his face—that calm, empty expression—that made Carl’s stomach twist.
“Colby?” Carl whispered.
Colby tilted his head slightly. His mouth opened, but when he spoke, the voice wasn’t his own.
It was dozens of voices—men, women, children—all speaking through him.
“He’s gone. We took him. Now we take you.”
Sallie screamed as Colby’s body convulsed violently, bones cracking, limbs jerking at impossible angles. His skin began to stretch, tearing down the center of his chest as something pushed through from inside—something wet and black and formless.
Carl grabbed Sallie, pulling her back toward the hallway, but the door slammed shut on its own.
Colby—or what wore him—lifted its head, face splitting into a grotesque grin.
“You should have listened.”
The lights burst, plunging them into darkness.
And then the whispering filled the room again, louder than ever—thousands of voices whispering the same two words over and over, merging into a roar that shook the floor:
“STAY HERE.”
Carl swung the flashlight wildly, but the beam caught only shadows—shifting, crawling, closing in.
Something cold wrapped around his wrist.
He looked down—Colby’s hand, gripping him tight, pulling him toward the dark.
Sallie screamed his name.
Then everything went black.
Chapter Five: The Hidden Floor
The house had gone silent.
Too silent.
After the events in the hallway, no one spoke much. The air hung thick with something unseen, and every step echoed as if the walls themselves were hollow. Carl tried to sleep that night, but every time his eyes closed, he heard the faint dragging of footsteps somewhere below the first floor—where there shouldn’t be any rooms at all.
By morning, Sallie had already been pacing the kitchen, clutching a cup of coffee that had long gone cold.
“I heard it again,” she said quietly. “Under the house. Scraping. Like someone moving furniture.”
Mary looked up from her notebook. “The blueprints didn’t show a basement. I checked them twice.”
“Well, something’s there,” Sallie replied. “It’s been there all night.”
Colby came down the stairs last, looking pale, his hair damp with sweat. “I—uh—didn’t sleep either,” he said. “There was knocking in my room. Not on the door. Inside the wall.”
The four of them stood in uneasy silence. The house seemed to be listening.
By noon, Carl decided to investigate. He gathered flashlights, ropes, and a crowbar. “We find where it’s coming from,” he said. “If there’s a crawlspace, a cellar, anything—we end this now.”
They began in the hallway where the noise was loudest. Beneath the faded rug, the floorboards were uneven, some newer than others. Mary knelt down and ran her fingers over a thin seam of nails. “Someone patched this,” she whispered. “Recently.”
Carl pried the boards loose one by one. Beneath them was a square opening—narrow, dark, and reeking of rot. A wooden ladder descended into blackness.
Sallie covered her mouth. “That’s not on any plan of this place.”
Carl tested the first rung with his boot. It creaked but held. “I’ll go first.”
“No,” Colby said suddenly, grabbing his arm. His pupils looked too wide, his voice trembling. “Let me. I… I think I’ve been down there before.”
Mary froze. “What do you mean? You’ve never been—”
But Colby was already climbing down.
The light followed him into the dark, revealing a narrow shaft of concrete walls and wooden supports. The deeper he went, the colder it grew. Water dripped from somewhere unseen. At the bottom, his flashlight cut across a corridor lined with rusted pipes and doorways sealed with warped planks.
Carl followed after him, then Sallie and Mary. The air was heavy—like breathing through wet cloth.
Colby stopped at the end of the corridor, his hand pressed against a section of wall. “Here,” he whispered. “It’s behind this.”
Carl lifted the crowbar and wedged it under a board. With a loud crack, it came loose.
A breath of stale air poured out, followed by a sound none of them could mistake—whispering.
But this time, it wasn’t faint.
It was furious.
Hundreds of overlapping voices surged from the gap, chanting words that made no sense—like language stripped of sanity. Mary screamed and stumbled back. The flashlight flickered violently, then died.
Colby turned toward them, his eyes wide, his face streaked with tears.
“They’re saying my name,” he said in a voice that wasn’t quite his own.
And then the floor beneath them groaned.
The ladder collapsed behind them, sealing the only way up. Dust rained down like ash. The whispers grew into a shriek.
Carl tried to force the broken planks aside, but something on the other side pushed back—something strong.
Sallie grabbed Colby by the shoulders. “We have to move! Now!”
They ran deeper into the corridor as the walls pulsed and the floorboards trembled underfoot. The air was alive with voices—mocking, pleading, crying. One whispered close to Mary’s ear, You shouldn’t have come back.
At the end of the hall, they found another door—metal, half-rusted, with symbols carved into its frame. It hummed faintly, like the walls themselves were breathing through it.
Carl grabbed the handle, pulled hard—
And the door opened onto a space that shouldn’t exist.
A staircase spiraled downward, impossibly deep, lit by dim bulbs that flickered like dying stars.
Mary’s voice broke. “This isn’t a basement. This is—”
“Something else,” Carl finished. “Something built under the world.”
They looked at each other, trapped in the dark, the whispers closing in from every direction.
And Colby—smiling faintly now, eyes gone black—whispered,
“I told you. I’ve been here before.”
Chapter Six: Fractures in the Mind
The spiral staircase seemed to go on forever.
Each step creaked under their weight, echoing in a hollow space that shouldn’t have existed beneath the house. The deeper they descended, the stronger the air pulsed—thick with whispers that crawled along the walls like veins of sound.
Mary’s flashlight beam jittered over wet stone. The walls down here weren’t made of concrete anymore—they were carved, ancient, and pulsing faintly like something alive.
“How far down does this go?” Sallie whispered, gripping the rail until her knuckles went white.
Carl counted silently. Fifty steps. Sixty. Ninety. His breathing grew heavier, and the air pressed closer, as if they were walking inside a lung that exhaled once every few seconds.
When they reached the bottom, they found a hallway—smooth black walls that reflected their light in broken flashes. Doors lined both sides, each marked with crude chalk drawings: circles, hands, spirals, and words that twisted away from meaning when they tried to focus on them.
Colby stopped in front of one door. His hand hovered near the symbol carved into it—a spiral of interlocking eyes. “This one’s mine,” he whispered.
Carl grabbed his shoulder. “Colby. You’re not making sense. We’re not splitting up.”
But Colby’s voice was calm, eerie. “I remember this place. Before you came. Before I forgot.”
Mary’s breath hitched. “Colby, what are you talking about?”
He turned to her slowly. “They showed me. In my dreams. The stairs, the voices, the cracks in the world. I used to belong here.”
The flashlight flickered, and for half a second, Mary saw something ripple across his face—like his skin didn’t fit quite right, like someone else was wearing him.
Carl moved between them. “We’re getting out of here. Now.”
But the corridor behind them was gone.
The staircase they’d come down had vanished, replaced by smooth wall. The air trembled, humming low, and the whispering surged back like water flooding the space.
Sallie clutched her head. “Stop! Stop it!” she screamed, but the whispers grew louder. They weren’t just around them now—they were inside them.
Carl felt a flash of something—images that weren’t his: a group of people standing where he stood now, decades ago, chanting, cutting symbols into the walls. The house above them was newer then. But the darkness beneath had been here much longer.
He staggered, holding his head. “It’s showing me things—”
Mary’s flashlight burst, plunging them into darkness. Then, the hallway filled with dim red light seeping from cracks in the walls.
Colby stood in it, smiling faintly. “You see now,” he said softly. “The walls remember us. We built this place to contain them. But when the last door was sealed, the voices didn’t die—they went inside.”
Sallie’s voice trembled. “Inside who?”
Colby blinked slowly. “Me.”
Something slammed from behind one of the other doors. Then another.
The walls began to breathe—inhale, exhale, inhale.
Mary stumbled backward, tripping over something metallic. Her hand brushed a plaque bolted to the floor, nearly hidden by grime. She wiped it clean and read aloud:
PROPERTY OF BLACKWOOD INSTITUTE — PROJECT VEILFALL.
Her heart stuttered. “This isn’t part of any foundation… this was a containment site.”
Carl knelt beside her, tracing the words. “Blackwood shut down in the ’80s. Experimental psychic research… possession studies.” He looked up at the walls, horror dawning. “This isn’t a basement—it’s an old test facility.”
Colby began to laugh—a broken, hollow sound. “They wanted to separate mind from spirit,” he said. “But they failed. And I was the last subject.”
Mary stepped toward him. “Colby, listen to me. That’s not who you are now.”
He tilted his head, eyes black as oil. “Then who am I?”
The light dimmed again. A hand—long, pale, too thin—slid out from the crack beside the door he’d claimed as his own. It reached for him like it knew him.
And Colby didn’t move away.
Carl lunged forward, grabbing his arm. The contact was electric—Colby’s skin burned cold. For a second, Carl saw flashes in his mind again: a child in a glass room, electrodes on his temples, whispers being fed into him through speakers.
He jerked back, gasping. “They made you listen to them.”
Colby smiled, tears streaking down his face. “They’re not whispers anymore, Carl. They’re memories. And they’re waking up.”
The walls around them began to crack. Light poured from the fissures—white and red, twisting like veins of fire. The floor buckled under their feet.
Mary screamed, grabbing Sallie as debris fell from above.
Carl turned toward Colby, shouting, “You can fight this!”
Colby shook his head. “You don’t fight what you are.”
The last thing Carl saw before the tunnel exploded with light was Colby stepping backward into the open door—vanishing as it slammed shut behind him.
The red light went out.
Silence.
Only the faintest whisper remained.
“Now you remember too.”
Chapter Seven: Possession
The light was gone. The world had gone hollow.
Carl came to with a sharp gasp, the taste of dust and iron thick on his tongue. Somewhere close, Mary was crying—quiet, controlled, like she didn’t want whatever was listening to hear her. Sallie’s flashlight flickered weakly in the debris-strewn corridor, painting jagged shadows over the walls.
“Colby?” she whispered into the dark. “Colby, where are you?”
But there was no answer. Only the faint hum of the walls breathing, like something alive beneath their hands.
Carl sat up slowly, wincing. His vision swam, but one thought cut through the haze: they had to get out. He found Mary clutching her shoulder, trembling. “It’s dislocated,” she whispered. “I—can’t move it.”
Carl gently pulled her close, fixing it with a wet pop. She stifled a scream, and the sound echoed far too long.
When it finally faded, Sallie turned her light toward the end of the hall. The metal door Colby had vanished through stood closed—but now, faint cracks of light spilled through the edges, pulsing like a heartbeat.
Mary’s voice shook. “He’s still in there.”
Carl shook his head. “Whatever’s in there isn’t Colby anymore.”
The air thickened again, pressing against their skulls. Whispers slithered through the hall, brushing their ears, their thoughts. The words came in fragments: Open… remember… we are many…
Sallie gripped her cross necklace so tight it cut into her palm. “They want him. They always wanted him.”
Carl turned to her sharply. “What do you mean?”
“He said he was one of them,” she whispered. “But what if it’s worse than that? What if they used him as a vessel—something to contain what couldn’t die?”
The light leaking from the door pulsed harder. The metal bent inward like something was breathing behind it.
Carl took a step closer, raising the crowbar. “If he’s in there, I’m not leaving him.”
Mary hissed, “Carl, don’t—”
Too late. He jammed the crowbar into the seam and pried. The door groaned, screaming like metal in pain. The moment it cracked open, a wave of freezing air hit them. The light inside wasn’t light at all—it was movement, a swirl of shifting shapes that looked human only when you didn’t stare too long.
And standing in the middle of it was Colby.
His body hung limp, suspended inches off the ground, head tilted back, eyes rolled white. His veins glowed faintly beneath his skin, black threads crawling like ink.
Sallie dropped the flashlight. “Oh, God…”
Colby’s eyes snapped forward. The light died.
“You shouldn’t have come back,” his voice said—but layered, hundreds of voices speaking through him, overlapping in a hideous harmony. “The walls were sealed for a reason.”
Mary backed away, whispering prayers under her breath. “Colby, please—”
He stepped forward. The ground shook.
The whispering turned to screaming—angry, desperate. Carl tried to grab his arm, but Colby’s skin burned cold and slick, like oil over ice. The contact sent visions flooding into Carl’s mind—flashes of experiments, children hooked to machines, their minds split open while unseen things crawled inside.
Carl staggered back, gasping. “They—used him as a gateway.”
Colby smiled faintly. “Not used. Chosen.”
The walls began to pulse faster. Black fluid leaked from the cracks, spreading across the floor like veins. The whispers circled them, forming words that made no sense yet felt like commands.
Mary’s flashlight beam swept over Colby’s face—and for a second, she saw others moving beneath his skin, faces pressing against his like reflections trapped inside.
“Colby, fight it!” she screamed. “You’re stronger than them!”
He tilted his head. “There’s no them anymore.”
The light above them shattered, plunging them into darkness. And then—Colby’s hand shot out, grabbing Carl’s throat. His strength was impossible. The voices roared inside Carl’s skull, showing him things—rooms beneath rooms, doors that opened both ways, the truth that the house wasn’t built over the dark, it was built by it.
Carl choked, clawing at his arm. “Colby, please…”
For a moment, something flickered in his eyes—familiar, human. “Carl… run…”
Then the blackness swallowed him again.
Sallie screamed and swung the flashlight at him, the glass cracking across his temple. The impact barely slowed him. But it was enough for Carl to break free.
They ran.
Down the corridor. Through the pulsating hall. The whispers followed like a storm.
Behind them, Colby’s voice rose—dozens of tones layered over his own:
“YOU OPENED THE DOOR. NOW WE WALK.”
They burst through a rusted gate at the far end of the facility, slamming it shut behind them. On the other side of the bars, the shadows writhed like something alive.
Mary leaned against the wall, gasping. “We can’t help him anymore.”
Carl stared into the dark, chest heaving. “Then we end it. However we have to.”
The whispers quieted, but only for a moment—enough to leave one last, chilling echo in the air:
He’s not trapped down here with you. You’re trapped down here with him.
Chapter Eight: The Truth Beneath
The silence after the whisper was almost worse than the noise.
It pressed in from every direction, heavy and deliberate, like the house was waiting for something—breathing with them, watching. Carl leaned against the cold metal bars, the weight of the crowbar still in his hands. His grip trembled, not from exhaustion but from rage he didn’t know how to aim.
Mary sat slumped against the opposite wall, her shoulder bandaged with torn fabric. Sallie crouched beside her, flashlight trembling in her hand. None of them spoke for several minutes.
Finally, Sallie broke the silence. “We can’t keep running in circles,” she said, voice thin. “We’re just feeding it. Whatever this place is… it’s using us.”
Mary’s eyes were wide and glassy. “Colby’s gone,” she whispered. “I saw his face—there were others inside him. Faces. Souls, maybe.”
Carl forced himself to look at them both. “No. Not souls. Experiments.” He pushed himself upright and gestured to the decayed walls. “Project Veilfall wasn’t a haunting—it was an attempt to merge consciousness. To bridge the gap between the living and the dead.”
Sallie frowned. “You think the Blackwood Institute made contact with something?”
“They didn’t just make contact,” Carl said, his voice low. “They opened a door. And Colby was the last one through.”
The corridor beyond the gate stretched on, lined with flickering bulbs and rusted doors that led into forgotten laboratories. Broken glass, decayed papers, and mold-blackened medical instruments littered the floor. The deeper they went, the worse the smell became—metallic, like blood and ozone.
Mary found a clipboard on the floor and lifted it carefully. The paper was yellowed and flaking, but the words were still legible:
SUBJECT 13: C. HARPER — ANCHOR PROTOCOL
Result: Incomplete merge. Physical containment required. Subject displays residual link to Layer Two entities.
Her breath caught. “C. Harper… that’s Colby.”
Carl leaned over her shoulder. “Anchor Protocol,” he repeated softly. “They used him as a tether—to keep something bound to this plane. But when they sealed the facility, he must’ve survived. The link never broke.”
Sallie’s face went pale. “So when we came here…”
“We woke it up.”
A sudden crack split the silence—a door slamming open down the hall. All three of them flinched. The light above them flickered once, twice, then steadied into a dim red glow.
Carl motioned for them to stay behind and approached the open door. Inside was a control room—rusted panels, shattered monitors, and in the center, a massive machine like a metal spine fused into the wall. Wires fed into it from all sides, some disappearing into the floor.
Sallie’s flashlight beam landed on a cracked plaque.
VEIL INTERFACE NODE 01
Mary’s voice trembled. “Carl… this looks like a neural interface. Like they used it to link the mind directly to whatever they were studying.”
He nodded grimly. “If we shut it down, maybe we can cut off the connection—stop whatever’s inside Colby from spreading.”
“But what if it kills him?” Sallie asked.
Carl hesitated. “Then maybe that’s mercy.”
They began working fast. Mary scavenged through old toolboxes, finding wire cutters and rusted levers. Sallie held the light steady while Carl traced the main conduit. The machine still thrummed faintly—alive, even after all this time.
He found a thick cable feeding into the center hub, pulsing faintly like it had a heartbeat. “This is it,” he said. “If we sever this, it ends.”
A voice drifted through the static-filled intercom above them—soft, low, familiar.
“Carl…”
Mary’s face went white. “That’s him.”
The voice grew louder, layered again, half Colby and half something far older. “You think you’re stopping me. But you’re still inside me. Every thought, every fear—you’re part of the merge now.”
Carl gritted his teeth. “You’re lying.”
“Am I?” The voice almost smiled through the static. “Tell me, Carl… when was the last time you heard your own thoughts?”
Carl froze. For a moment, he couldn’t tell if the whisper was from the speaker—or from inside his skull.
Mary grabbed the cutters from his hand. “Don’t listen to it. Just do it!”
Carl raised the tool—and plunged it into the cable.
The world screamed.
The machine convulsed, spewing black smoke. Lights exploded, sending sparks across the room. The walls rippled like liquid, and the air filled with the sound of hundreds of voices shrieking in unison.
Sallie fell to her knees, clutching her head. Mary screamed something he couldn’t hear. The floor cracked open beneath the machine, revealing a pit of swirling darkness that pulsed with faces—thousands of them, all whispering, reaching.
And standing above it, suspended like before, was Colby.
His body was twisted, his skin pale and translucent, the black veins now glowing red. His mouth moved, but the sound came from everywhere.
“You’ve broken the seal,” he said. “Now there’s no boundary. The world above will hear them too.”
Carl staggered forward. “Colby, fight it! You can still stop this!”
Colby’s head tilted. “Stop it? I am it.”
The darkness rose higher, flooding the floor, devouring the machinery. The lights began to pop one by one, plunging the room into chaos.
Mary’s voice broke through the noise. “Carl! Run!”
But Carl didn’t move. He stood there, staring at Colby, realization dawning in his eyes.
“This was never about containing them,” he whispered. “It was about creating a bridge.”
And now, that bridge was open.
Chapter Nine: The Confrontation
The air was thick with smoke and the metallic tang of electricity. Sparks rained from broken bulbs, and the walls pulsed like living tissue, vibrating under the weight of countless whispers. Carl, Mary, and Sallie had barely time to catch their breath before the shadows surged toward them.
Colby hovered above the pit, the black veins across his body glowing a sickly red. His mouth opened wide, and the voices of hundreds—no, thousands—poured out simultaneously, screaming, whispering, commanding.
“You brought them here,” Colby’s voice layered over itself, almost impossible to parse. “You opened the path. And now… you will join the merge.”
Sallie grabbed Carl’s arm, dragging him backward. “We can’t fight him! He’s… he’s not just Colby anymore!”
Carl shook his head. “He’s still in there! Somewhere! I can feel it!”
Mary stepped forward, holding a clipboard she’d grabbed from the control room. Her hands shook violently. “The interface node—if we destroy it, we can sever the connection. Cut off whatever’s using him. But we have to get close.”
“Close?” Carl spat, glaring at the floating figure. “Do you see him? That’s not Colby! He’ll tear us apart!”
The shadows swelled around them, slithering along the walls and floor like living ink. Shapes pressed out of the darkness—faces twisted in agony, hands clawing, mouths opening and closing, screaming silently. They were memories. Pain. Death. All feeding into Colby.
Carl clenched his fists. “We don’t have a choice. We either stop this now, or we—”
The floor trembled violently, cracking along the edges of the pit. One massive tendril of darkness shot upward, wrapping around Colby’s arm. He didn’t resist; instead, he laughed, a sound both human and inhuman.
“Come closer, Carl. Feel it,” Colby said. His eyes, still glowing red, flickered for a brief instant. A glimpse of the boy Carl remembered—the friend who laughed at jokes no one else found funny—shone through.
Carl felt it—a pull in his chest, a tugging at his mind, drawing him toward Colby. Memories, fears, regrets—all spilling into his consciousness. The whispering voices now inside him, feeding on his thoughts, forcing visions of impossible horrors: children screaming in empty rooms, the Blackwood scientists standing over them, Colby’s body twisted in pain…
Carl’s head snapped back. “No! You’re not taking me!”
He sprinted forward, dodging the writhing shadows, Mary close behind him. Sallie followed, swinging the flashlight like a weapon. Sparks flew from exposed wires, and the darkness writhed violently as if alive, reacting to their presence.
They reached the machine—the interface node at the center of the pit. The thick cable that fed Colby glowed bright red, pulsing like a heartbeat. Mary raised the crowbar. “On three,” she yelled over the cacophony.
“One… two…”
Colby’s voice cut through the air like a knife. “Three?”
Carl swung the crowbar with all his strength, smashing the cable. Sparks erupted, and the machine convulsed violently. The shadows screamed, coiling around Colby and shooting toward the ceiling like black lightning.
The glow in Colby’s veins flickered, and for a moment, he seemed human again, trembling violently, eyes wide with fear and recognition. “Carl… Mary… run…”
The floor beneath them buckled. Carl grabbed Mary’s hand and Sallie’s, pulling them toward the edge. The darkness lashed out, tendrils trying to drag them down, but they stumbled free, landing on the cracked concrete of the far corridor.
Colby’s scream echoed like a chorus of the dead. The interface node overloaded, sparks arcing wildly as the machine groaned and hissed.
“You saved yourselves,” he whispered, voice almost human again. “But… I… can’t…”
The shadows collapsed inward, and with a final, guttural scream, Colby’s body fell through the pit, disappearing into the void beneath the facility. The glowing veins faded, leaving only the twisted, lifeless shell of the boy they once knew.
Mary sank to the ground, sobbing. “He… he’s gone.”
Carl knelt beside her, silent. The air was still, the whispers finally gone—but the smell of ozone and rot lingered.
Sallie wiped her eyes, voice shaking. “We ended it, didn’t we?”
Carl looked down the corridor, toward the spiral staircase leading upward. “Maybe… but the house…” He hesitated. “Whatever this place is… it’s still here. Waiting.”
Mary whispered, almost to herself, “And Colby… the part of him that was left… is it really gone?”
Carl didn’t answer. He didn’t want to.
The three of them climbed the spiral staircase slowly, each step echoing in the emptiness. Outside, the sky was gray and still. The air smelled of rain and wet asphalt—normal, but carrying the weight of everything they had lost.
Behind them, the house remained silent. But in the walls, if one listened carefully, faint whispers persisted, like a reminder that some doors, once opened, can never be fully closed.
And some shadows… never leave.
Chapter Ten: The Last Seal
The house loomed above them, silent now, deceptively still. Rain slicked streets reflected the pale gray sky, casting the building in twisted shadows. Carl, Mary, and Sallie stood at the edge of the property, the weight of everything that had happened pressing down like a physical force.
Colby was gone. They had watched the darkness swallow him, the interface node reduced to a smoking ruin. And yet, the memory of his twisted body, his layered voices, the black veins under his skin, clung to them like a stain.
Carl ran a hand through his hair. “We have to seal it. If we leave it standing like this… whatever that thing was… it’ll find another way out.”
Sallie shook her head, fear and exhaustion etched into every line of her face. “We already risked our lives inside. What else is down there? What else is bound to that place?”
Mary held the clipboard tightly, the remnants of the Blackwood plans clutched to her chest. “The institute… they left instructions. There’s a last protocol—a final seal. Something to contain the breach. It’s risky. We could die.”
Carl’s jaw tightened. “We have no choice. If we don’t, more people… more Colbys… will pay the price.”
They approached the front of the house. The doors were warped and swollen from years of neglect, but a faint glow leaked from cracks between the boards, pulsing in rhythm with a slow, unnatural heartbeat.
Mary studied the clipboard. “The seal requires all three of us. Physical placement at three points, simultaneous activation. It channels energy from the nodes we destroyed to… collapse the space beneath.”
Sallie’s flashlight flickered as the whispers returned—soft at first, coaxing, almost gentle. But underneath it was something darker, a promise of pain.
Carl nodded. “Then we do it. Together.”
They split into positions as described on the plans. Mary stood at the base of the front stairs, placing her hands on a carved sigil embedded into the concrete. Sallie was at the far corner of the porch, fingers pressed against a similar mark. Carl stood opposite her, hands trembling on the final glyph.
The glow beneath the boards flared suddenly, a deep crimson. The whispers swelled into a roar, filling their minds with voices—Colby’s laughter, cries, and countless others echoing from the void.
“Focus!” Carl shouted. “Don’t listen to it!”
Mary closed her eyes. The energy from the glyphs pulsed into her hands, rising through her arms. Sallie matched her rhythm, gasping as the power thrummed beneath her skin. Carl felt his own glyph burn into his palms, the energy vibrating like a living thing, feeding on fear and memory alike.
The ground quaked. The house shuddered violently. A shadowed figure appeared in the doorway, Colby—or what he had become—his form flickering between human and void. “You think you can contain me?” His voice layered, distorted, infinite. “I am the bridge now… and you are part of it.”
Carl gritted his teeth, struggling to hold the glyph’s energy steady. “No! You don’t get to hurt anyone else!”
The figure lunged, and the shadows writhed toward them—but the glyphs flared brighter, creating a barrier of light that held the darkness at bay. Colby screamed, a sound that shook the world, then faltered as the seal’s energy coursed into him.
Mary’s knees buckled, sweat and blood mixing as the power flowed through her. Sallie groaned, eyes white with strain. Carl’s vision blurred, and for a moment, he saw all the memories of Colby, the Blackwood Institute, the countless lost souls, flowing into the glyphs, being drawn in, compressed, and finally—pulled into nothing.
A final, deafening shriek filled the night. The glow exploded outward, then collapsed inward, leaving only silence.
When the world settled, the house looked inert—normal, almost peaceful. The air smelled of rain and ozone. Carl, Mary, and Sallie lay on the porch, battered, bleeding, but alive.
Mary sat up first, gasping. “It’s… done?”
Carl nodded slowly. “The nodes… the seal… everything beneath is… gone. At least for now.”
Sallie hugged her knees, staring at the house. “And Colby?”
Carl closed his eyes. “He’s… finally at rest. I think.”
The rain fell steadily, washing the blood and grime from the porch. The house loomed silently, its shadows harmless for the first time in decades. But somewhere deep in the walls, a faint pulse remained—a heartbeat, steady and slow, as if reminding them that darkness never truly dies.
Mary whispered, almost to herself, “We’ve survived… but we’ve changed. None of us will ever be the same.”
Carl looked at the other two. “We faced it… and we won. That’s all we can do.”
Sallie nodded, voice trembling. “All we can do.”
And together, they walked away from the house.
Behind them, the storm began to fade, leaving only silence.
Epilogue
Weeks had passed since the night they sealed the house beneath the Blackwood property. Rain had washed the streets clean, and the sky had cleared to a pale, washed-out blue. On the surface, the world went on—cars honked, people hurried along sidewalks, and the city pulsed with its usual chaos.
But for Carl, Mary, and Sallie, nothing would ever feel normal again.
They met at a small café on the outskirts of town, silent at first, each lost in their own thoughts. The memories clung stubbornly, fragments of whispers, shadowed corridors, Colby’s distorted face, the voices that had echoed in their minds.
Mary stirred her coffee, staring into the swirling liquid. “I keep thinking I hear them,” she admitted softly. “Even now… faint whispers when it’s quiet.”
Sallie nodded, staring out the window. “I feel like part of that place went home with us. Like it’s… in the back of my head, waiting.”
Carl rubbed his eyes, tired beyond measure. “We did what we had to do. We stopped it from spreading. That has to count for something.”
They were silent for a long moment, each processing the trauma in their own way.
At night, Carl dreamed of Colby—not the twisted, shadowed figure they had fought, but the boy he had known. He laughed in the rain, standing in front of a house that shouldn’t exist. Carl reached out, but Colby faded with a whisper: “Thank you…”
Mary kept a small notebook, scribbling symbols and observations. She didn’t know why she did it—part research, part memory—but the act kept the darkness at bay, or at least gave her the illusion of control.
Sallie carried her cross everywhere, rubbing it whenever the shadows returned in fleeting flashes: a trick of the light, a crack in the wall, a whisper too faint to fully grasp.
Months later, the Blackwood property was condemned and scheduled for demolition. Carl watched from a distance as crews arrived, machines tearing into the walls. He felt a pang of unease, remembering the rooms beneath, the hidden floors, the spiraling staircases, and Colby’s final sacrifice.
But the sun shone. Birds chirped. And for the first time since that night, the wind didn’t carry whispers.
Carl exhaled slowly. “It’s over,” he whispered.
Maybe it was.
But in the cracks of the world—beneath walls, behind doors, in forgotten foundations—shadows waited. Always patient, always silent, always watching.
And sometimes, when the wind shifted just right, Carl swore he could hear a faint, familiar laugh, carried from the other side.
A reminder. That darkness never truly dies.
The end.