The whispers began as a mistake.
That was how Elias explained them to himself at first—settling noises, pipes cooling, the old language of a house stretching through the night. He had lived in enough places now to know that buildings spoke. They always had.
But this was different.
The first whisper came just after midnight.
Elias lay awake, staring at the faint crack in the ceiling that resembled a crooked smile. The house had gone still hours earlier. Miriam's door was closed. The clock downstairs ticked with rigid discipline.
Then the sound reached him.
Not loud. Not clear.
A breath of a voice, slipping through the wall beside his bed.
Elias turned his head slowly, pressing his ear to the plaster. The wall felt cold. Too cold.
"…no one listens anymore…"
He recoiled, heart racing.
The words had been real. He knew that with the certainty of a child who had learned too early how to tell fear from imagination. He sat up, scanning the room, half-expecting to see someone standing in the corner.
No one was there.
The whisper did not return that night.
Nor the next.
Elias almost convinced himself he had imagined it—until the third night, when the house spoke again.
This time, the voice came from the locked door at the end of the hall.
Elias stood barefoot on the wooden floor, staring at it. The handle was still, the keyhole dark. The whisper seeped through the crack beneath the door like smoke.
"…he saw everything…"
Elias's pulse thundered in his ears.
"Who?" he asked, his voice barely more than breath.
The whisper stopped.
For a long moment, the house was silent.
Then, faint and deliberate, came the answer.
"…you did…"
Elias backed away, his heel catching on a floorboard. It creaked sharply, and the sound shattered the moment. The house fell quiet again, as if it had never spoken at all.
The next morning, Elias examined the walls.
He traced the faint seams where panels met, the places where paint had cracked with age. He pressed his hands flat against the plaster, listening. The house did not respond.
At school, his teacher asked him to read aloud. Elias stared at the page, letters swimming uselessly. The words in the walls were clearer than the ones in books.
That afternoon, he asked Miriam about the house.
"Has anyone ever… died here?" he said.
Her fork paused halfway to her mouth.
"No," she said too quickly. "Why would you ask that?"
He shrugged, mimicking indifference. "It's just old."
She nodded, but her eyes drifted toward the hallway. Toward the locked door.
That night, Elias dreamed of Alder Row.
He stood in the living room, watching rainwater carry red streaks across the floor. His mother stood at the window, her back to him.
"Why didn't you tell them?" she asked.
"I was scared," Elias said.
She turned. Her eyes were dark hollows. "So was I."
He woke gasping, the whisper still echoing in his ears.
By the end of the week, Elias had mapped the sounds.
They came from the walls near the stairs. From the locked room. From the space behind the wardrobe in his bedroom. Always low. Always fragmented. Never repeating the same words twice.
They did not speak to him.
They spoke about him.
One night, as rain tapped gently against the roof, Elias sat on his bed and made a decision that would shape the rest of his life.
He would stop pretending not to hear.
He rose, stepped into the hallway, and walked toward the locked door.
The whisper was waiting.
And this time, it did not fade when he reached for the handle.