Chapter 2: Whispers and Legends

Chapter 2: Whispers and Legends

Sleep offered no escape. It was a shallow, restless state populated by the dry, skittering sound of a million tiny legs. Jonah would jolt awake in his cramped apartment, the sheets damp with sweat, his heart pounding a frantic rhythm against his ribs. He’d stare into the oppressive darkness, listening, waiting. And in the suffocating silence, the whisper would come.

“They can always smell failure, chef. It’s like rot.”

He’d snap on the bedside lamp, the sudden light making him flinch. The room would be empty. Normal. His worn copy of The French Laundry Cookbook sat on his nightstand, a testament to a man he no longer was. A framed drawing by his daughter—a smiling sun with stick-figure legs—was taped to the wall, a reminder of the man he was desperately trying to be again. There were no cockroaches. Not a single one.

But he could still feel them. A phantom crawling on his skin, an imagined twitch in his peripheral vision. The haunting had followed him home from Wolfgang’s. The voice, that dry, intimate murmur, was now a constant companion, a parasite latched onto his psyche. It feasted on his deepest anxieties, always whispering just at the edge of his hearing, always accompanied by the traumatic, chittering echo of his ruin.

He tried to rationalize it. Action, he told himself, was the antidote to fear. He threw himself into the initial cleanup of the restaurant, his desire for this second chance warring with the mounting dread. He scrubbed the grime from the stainless-steel counters until his knuckles were raw, the scent of industrial cleaner a welcome assault on his senses. He tried to focus on the tangible: drawing up menus, contacting suppliers, planning the layout. He was a chef. He solved problems with heat and knives and hard work. He could sweat this out.

But the building wouldn’t let him. As he mopped the filthy kitchen floor, he’d feel a sudden, unnatural cold seep from the corner with the strange, locked door. The word PASSWORD seemed to mock him, a question he didn't know how to answer. He’d hear a faint scratching from behind it and the whisper would return, weaving itself into the scrape of his mop.

“Can’t scrub the memory away, can you?”

He started seeing them. A flash of brown scuttling under a prep table, gone when he looked directly at it. A shape moving in the shadows of the walk-in, vanishing into nothing. He was coming apart at the seams. He knew what this looked like. A man under immense pressure, a recovering alcoholic, cracking up. The explanation was simple, logical. It was also a lie. He hadn't touched a drop in fourteen months. This was something else.

One night, after a particularly bad hallucination—a wave of shimmering brown bodies pouring from the kitchen drains before dissolving like smoke—he fled. He sat in his parked Civic, shaking, unable to go back inside his apartment. He needed an anchor, something real. He pulled out his phone, his fingers trembling as he typed “Wolfgang’s Dry Goods history” into the search bar.

The obstacle of his own sanity was too great; he needed an external one. He needed proof that the building was the problem, not him.

The first few results were boringly corporate. Real estate listings, zoning records. Then he started digging deeper, into the city’s digital newspaper archives and obscure local history blogs. A pattern began to emerge. A long, unbroken line of failure.

Wolfgang’s had been a German delicatessen until 1983, when it closed abruptly after the owner suffered a complete nervous breakdown, claiming the cured meats were whispering obscenities to him. Then came Wham! Arcade, the site of his childhood humiliation, which shut down after a tragedy the papers only vaguely referred to as a “fatal accident on the premises.” After that, the building became a revolving door of doomed enterprises.

The yoga studio in the late 90s, where the owner complained to the local paper about a “vicious, soul-chilling draft” that emanated from a sealed-off basement door, a draft that made her clients sick with anxiety. She went bankrupt in six months.

The independent bookstore in the early 2000s. The owner, a mild-mannered literature professor, was arrested for screaming at his customers, accusing them of "moving the books" to spell out threats in the night. The business folded.

The artisanal soap shop. The coffee house. The vintage clothing store. Each one lasted less than a year. Each was marked by whispers of strange occurrences, of bad luck, of a place that felt fundamentally… wrong. Jonah scrolled through a dozen stories of financial ruin and shattered dreams, each one a chilling echo of his own fears.

He stumbled upon a local urban legends forum, a relic of the early internet that was somehow still active. A thread from six years ago was titled: “What’s the deal with the old Wolfgang’s building?”

The replies were a catalogue of local ghost stories.

GhostHunter22: My grandpa used to say the butcher, Wolfgang, went mad because he heard voices coming from the meat locker. Said they told him to use a different kind of meat.

CityNative81: That place is bad news. It was an arcade when I was a kid. A boy died there. They say he still hangs around, trying to get people to play.

UrbanExplorer99: Tried to get in the sub-basement once. There’s this crazy old door, no keyhole. Feels like a freezer from the other side. My gear went nuts near it. EMF readings were off the charts.

Jonah’s blood ran cold. The locked door. A boy who died in the arcade. He felt a suffocating sense of recognition. This wasn't just in his head. This was real.

Driven by a desperate, terrifying need for confirmation, he created an anonymous account. His hands flew across the tiny keyboard, typing out a post. He kept it vague, careful not to sound insane.

Subject: Question about Old Commercial Property

Hey everyone. Looking at an old commercial space, the former Wolfgang’s building. Great rent, but the place has a seriously weird vibe. Anyone have any experience with it? There’s a strange locked door in the back of the kitchen leading to a basement. Just gives me the creeps. Probably nothing, but thought I’d ask.

He hit ‘post’ and leaned his head back against the seat, his breath fogging up the glass. He felt foolish. What did he expect? More ghost stories? A rational explanation from a stranger? He sat there for a long time, watching the digital clock on his dashboard change from 1:15 AM to 1:16 AM.

A notification pinged on his phone. It wasn’t a reply to his post. It was a private message. The username was simple, cryptic.

AtticCat1290.

Jonah’s thumb hovered over the notification before he finally tapped it open. The message was short, the words stark against the glowing screen.

It’s not the vibe. It’s the building. It’s not a ghost. It’s a system. The door is the entrance. I was a tenant there. You need to get out now.

A second message appeared before Jonah could even process the first.

But it’s probably too late for that. It doesn’t just get tenants. It chooses them. And it sounds like it’s already chosen you.