Chapter 4: The Sound in the Walls

The weeks following the Hudson incident passed in a haze of mounting paranoia and desperate preparation. Alex threw himself into research, scouring the internet for any mention of their address, the previous owners, or similar phenomena. He found nothing—not even trace mentions in local news archives, as if their street existed in a bubble completely separate from the rest of the world.

Tobi, meanwhile, had become obsessed with escape plans. He'd mapped every route out of town, researched temporary housing in three different states, and even gone so far as to rent a storage unit across town where they could stash emergency supplies.

"We should leave," Alex said for the hundredth time as he watched Tobi pack another box of essentials. "Tonight. Right now. Just throw everything in the car and drive until we can't drive anymore."

"We will," Tobi replied, but his voice lacked conviction. "Just... let me finish documenting everything first. If we leave without understanding what's happening here, we'll always be looking over our shoulders."

Alex wanted to argue, but he recognized the stubborn set of his husband's jaw. Tobi was caught between his survival instincts and his need to understand, and the latter was winning. It was the same drive that had made him such a successful journalist, but now it felt more like a compulsion than a choice.

They'd been packing for three days when the house decided to fight back.

It started on a Tuesday morning in early March. Alex was in the kitchen making coffee when he heard Tobi call his name from upstairs. The tone was odd—not urgent exactly, but carrying a note he couldn't quite identify.

"Alex? Could you come up here for a minute?"

Alex climbed the stairs, finding Tobi standing in the hallway outside their office, staring at the closed door with an expression of intense concentration.

"What is it?" Alex asked.

"Listen."

Alex strained his ears, but heard nothing unusual. The house was quiet except for the normal settling sounds of wood and plaster adjusting to temperature changes.

"I don't hear anything," he said.

"It stopped when you came up." Tobi's eyes never left the office door. "But I swear I heard something. Like... whispering. Very faint, but definitely voices."

A chill ran down Alex's spine. Mrs. Hudson's warning echoed in his memory: The whispers'll get you. "What kind of whispering?"

"I couldn't make out words, but..." Tobi paused, his expression troubled. "It sounded like they were calling my name."

They stood in the hallway for several more minutes, but the house remained silent. Eventually, Tobi shook his head and went back to packing, but Alex noticed him glancing toward the office door with increasing frequency throughout the day.

The whispering returned that night.

Alex woke to find Tobi's side of the bed empty. Panic shot through him as he sat up, scanning the dark bedroom. Moonlight filtering through the curtains revealed Tobi standing at the window, his back to the bed, perfectly still.

"Tobi?" Alex whispered.

His husband didn't respond. He stood like a statue, his attention focused entirely on something outside. Alex slipped out of bed and approached carefully, his bare feet silent on the hardwood floor.

"Tobi, what are you looking at?"

When he reached the window, Alex saw that Tobi's eyes were closed. He was asleep, standing upright, his face turned toward the glass as if listening to something beyond Alex's perception.

"Tobi." Alex touched his husband's shoulder gently.

Tobi startled awake, blinking in confusion. "Alex? What... why am I at the window?"

"You were sleepwalking. Do you remember anything?"

"I..." Tobi pressed his palm against his forehead. "I remember voices. Very quiet, but insistent. They were telling me something important, but I can't remember what."

Alex guided him back to bed, but neither of them slept well for the rest of the night. When morning came, Tobi seemed more tired than when he'd gone to sleep, dark circles under his eyes and a distant expression that made Alex's stomach clench with worry.

The pattern continued for the next several nights. Tobi would wake up in different parts of the house—standing in the kitchen, sitting on the living room couch, once even found halfway down the front steps before Alex caught up with him. Each time, he claimed to hear voices calling to him, promising answers to questions he couldn't quite remember asking.

"We're leaving," Alex announced on the fourth morning, finding Tobi standing in the office, staring at the calendar with glassy eyes. "Today. Right now."

"We can't," Tobi replied without turning around. "Not yet."

"Why not?"

"Because they're trying to tell me something." Tobi's voice had taken on a dreamy quality that sent ice through Alex's veins. "The voices. They know things, Alex. Important things. About the house, about what happened to the other families, about how to survive."

"Tobi, listen to yourself. You're talking about voices in the walls like they're your friends."

"Maybe they are." Tobi finally turned, and Alex was shocked by what he saw. His husband's eyes, usually bright with intelligence and curiosity, had become distant and unfocused. "Maybe they're trying to help us."

"Help us?" Alex's voice cracked. "By making you sleepwalk around the house at night? By filling your head with whispers you can't even remember?"

"You don't understand," Tobi said, moving closer with movements that seemed too fluid, too graceful. "They've shown me things. The truth about this place. About what we need to do."

"What truth?"

"That running won't help. The calendar isn't a warning—it's a schedule. And June 19th..." Tobi's smile was wrong, too wide and filled with an anticipation that made Alex's skin crawl. "June 19th is going to be wonderful."

Alex grabbed his husband's shoulders, trying to shake him back to awareness. "Tobi, this isn't you talking. Whatever's in this house, it's getting inside your head."

For a moment, Tobi's expression cleared, and Alex saw a flicker of the man he'd married. "Alex? I... what did I just say?"

"You don't remember?"

"I remember the voices, but they're getting louder. Clearer." Tobi's hands trembled as he pressed them against his ears. "They won't stop talking about June 19th. About what happens when I go outside."

"Then we leave. Right now, today, this minute."

"I can't." The words came out as a whisper of pure anguish. "I want to, Alex. God, I want to run so far from this place. But every time I think about leaving, the voices get angry. They show me things—terrible things that will happen if we don't stay."

"What things?"

"You." Tobi's eyes filled with tears. "They show me you dying in car crashes, house fires, random accidents. Over and over, in every possible way we might try to escape. They say the only way to keep you safe is to stay here and listen."

Alex felt his world crumbling around him. The entity—whatever it was—had found the perfect way to trap them. It wasn't threatening Tobi directly; it was using his love for Alex as a weapon, making him believe that leaving would doom the person he cared about most.

"Tobi, those aren't real visions. It's psychological manipulation. This thing, whatever it is, it's lying to you."

"How can you be sure?"

"Because I know you. And I know that the real you, the Tobi I married, would never let fear keep him from protecting the people he loves."

For a moment, hope flickered in Tobi's eyes. Then the distant expression returned, and when he spoke, his voice carried harmonics that seemed to come from the walls themselves.

"But what if leaving really would hurt you? What if the only way to keep you safe is to understand what this place wants?"

"And what does it want?"

Tobi's smile returned, terrible in its serenity. "To show us wonders, Alex. To teach us truths that the rest of the world can't handle. All we have to do is step outside on June 19th, and everything will become clear."

Alex backed away from his husband, horror washing over him in cold waves. The thing in the walls had won. It had taken the man he loved and twisted him into something else, something that looked like Tobi but spoke with the voice of whatever malevolent intelligence haunted their home.

"I'm going to pack the car," Alex said carefully. "And then we're leaving. Both of us."

"You can try," Tobi replied, his head tilting at an unnatural angle. "But I don't think you'll make it very far. The voices know all the ways out. And they're very, very good at preventing people from leaving when it's not time."

That night, Alex lay in bed listening to his husband's quiet breathing and planning their escape. He would wait until Tobi was deeply asleep, then wake him suddenly and drag him to the car before the whispers could reassert their influence. It wasn't much of a plan, but it was all he had.

He waited until midnight, then carefully shook Tobi's shoulder.

"Tobi. Wake up. We need to go."

His husband's eyes snapped open, but they weren't Tobi's eyes anymore. They were empty, reflecting the moonlight like black mirrors.

"Going somewhere?" Tobi asked, his voice carrying that same otherworldly harmony.

"We're leaving. Right now."

"No," Tobi said with gentle certainty. "We're not."

Alex tried to pull him from the bed, but Tobi's grip on the mattress was impossibly strong. When Alex tried to lift his arms, it was like trying to move a statue.

"The voices say it's not time yet," Tobi explained, his terrible smile never wavering. "June 19th, Alex. That's when we'll be free to go outside. That's when everything will make sense."

Alex spent the rest of the night sitting in a chair, watching his husband sleep and listening to the soft whispers that seemed to emanate from every surface of their beautiful, cursed home.

Three months. He had three months to figure out how to save the man he loved from whatever had taken residence in his mind.

But as dawn broke over their neighborhood, Alex couldn't shake the feeling that he was already too late.