The old house wasn't haunted. Not in the way people meant. There were no spectral whispers or rattling chains. The terror was far more intimate, a slow, quiet creep that began with the light.It started subtly. A lamp flickered, just for a moment, and then returned to normal. A single, dusty bulb in the attic went out, plunging the space into a darkness that felt thicker than it should. The shadows in the corners of the living room seemed to deepen, to gather and pool like ink. I told myself it was the wiring, the age of the place. A little disrepair, nothing more.
But then the stillness came.It began at night. I would be lying in bed, trying to sleep, when every sound would simply cease. Not a gradual fading, but a sudden, absolute cessation. The hum of the refrigerator, the distant cry of a siren, the rustle of leaves against the windowpane—all of it would be snuffed out. The silence was a physical weight, pressing in on my ears until they ached. It wasn't a peaceful quiet, but a waiting one.I discovered the source one night. The stillness always originated at the end of the long, narrow hallway that led to the guest room, a room I never used. Driven by a morbid curiosity, I crept out of bed. The floorboards, usually so creaky, were silent under my feet. The air grew colder with each step I took toward the end of the hall.
There, the darkness was complete. A thick, sucking blackness that didn't just obscure my vision but seemed to absorb the light from my phone's screen. My heart hammered against my ribs as I peered into it. And that's when I saw it. Or, rather, felt it.A presence. Something vast and formless, not evil in a malicious way, but in a way that simply did not belong. It was a hole in reality, a tear in the fabric of what was, and it was expanding. And it was hungry for noise. For light. For everything that made the world real.It wasn't a monster with teeth and claws. It was an absence, a negation. And it was beginning to crawl down the hallway, eating the sounds and the light as it came.I slammed the door to the guest room shut, and for a moment, the stillness vanished.
The house hummed back to life with a rush of sound. But the quiet returned the next night, and the night after that. It was always closer, the zone of silence creeping further down the hall. I started to notice small things missing. A photograph from the wall, a houseplant from the windowsill. The things closest to the guest room were always the first to go.One morning, I awoke to find my own reflection missing from the bathroom mirror. The glass was there, but it showed only the wall behind me.I've moved out. I'm in a new apartment now, far away. But sometimes, when I'm lying in bed at night, I hear it. A moment of perfect, absolute quiet.
And I know the stillness has found me. It's somewhere in my new building, at the end of some hallway, waiting. And this time, there will be no escaping the final, terrifying silence.