Chapter 1: The Murmur

Chapter 1: The Murmur

The August air under the overpass was a physical weight, thick and wet, tasting of diesel fumes and decay. For Leo Vance, it was just air. The world had long ago flattened into a two-dimensional stage play of needs and wants, and his only pressing need was the familiar, chemical burn that promised to mute the edges of everything. His world had shrunk to this concrete purgatory, a forgotten artery of the city where the rumble of traffic above was the only reminder that a different reality existed.

He sat with his back against a piss-stained pillar, legs splayed out in the grime. His gaunt frame was swallowed by a filthy hoodie, and his sunken blue eyes watched a fly buzz a lazy circle around a puddle of indeterminate origin. He was 23, but the reflection that sometimes caught him in a shop window showed a ghost, an old man’s weariness etched onto a young man’s bones. He ran a trembling hand through his matted hair, the itch under his skin a low, insistent hum. In the pocket of his jeans was a crumpled ten-dollar bill, his sole focus, a paper key to a few hours of blessed nothingness.

“You hear it, don’t you?”

The voice was like gravel grinding in a cement mixer. Leo didn’t look up. Unwanted conversations were part of the landscape, like the rats and the rot. Ignore it and it goes away. That was the rule.

“The buzzing. The chittering. The little song they all sing.”

Leo’s eyes flickered to the source. It was Silas, an old man who was a permanent fixture of this underpass, a monument of layered rags and wiry grey beard. Most of the time, Silas was silent, staring at a spot on the concrete only he could see. Today, he was lucid, and his lucidity was always more disturbing than his silence. His eyes, surprisingly clear in his leathery, wrinkled face, were fixed on Leo.

“Leave me alone, old man,” Leo mumbled, his throat dry. He needed to get up, to walk the ten blocks to his dealer, but a leaden apathy held him pinned to the ground.

“Can’t,” Silas rasped, shuffling closer. The smell of him—stale sweat, cheap wine, and something else, something acrid and strangely metallic—made Leo’s nose wrinkle. “Not when you’re so loud. Your cage is rattling something fierce, boy.”

Leo finally turned his head, a spark of irritation cutting through the haze. “What the hell are you talking about? Cage?”

Silas smiled, a ruin of yellowed teeth. “This.” He slapped his own chest, a hollow thud against his layers of clothing. “This meat. This bone. We’re just the shells. The carriers. But what’s inside… it wants out. It’s always wanted out. Can’t you feel it?”

Leo scoffed, turning away. A classic burnout, fried his brain years ago. He’d seen dozens like him. It was probably what his own future looked like. He pushed himself up, his joints protesting. The ten-dollar bill was calling him.

“Don’t walk away,” Silas’s voice was suddenly sharp, commanding. “I can show you. I can make you understand why the noise is so bad today.”

Against his better judgment, Leo stopped. There was something in the old man’s tone—not madness, but a chilling certainty. A sliver of curiosity, an emotion he thought long dead, pricked at him. “Show me what?”

Silas’s grin widened. He sat down, crossing his legs with a surprising limberness, and beckoned Leo closer. “You’re one of the quiet ones. Empty. That makes you a good listener. Sit. Watch.”

Wariness battled with inertia. Sitting was easier than walking. Leo sank back down a few feet from Silas, his posture exuding weary indifference. He’d humor the old man for a minute. Then he’d go get his fix.

Silas began to unbutton his filthy flannel shirt, then the stained t-shirt beneath it. He pulled the fabric aside, exposing a chest like a topographical map of hardship—ribs prominent, skin like weathered parchment. But it was his thigh that he revealed next, hiking up a ragged pair of trousers.

“The world is full of doors,” Silas whispered, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial hush. “Most people just don’t know where the knobs are.”

His gnarled fingers went to a spot on his upper thigh. Leo expected to see a scar, a sore, some mark of a life lived on the streets. What he saw made the sluggish blood in his veins turn to ice.

On Silas’s skin was a perfectly formed rectangle, about the size of a credit card. It wasn't a tattoo or a brand. It looked like a seam, a faint, discolored line in the flesh as if a patch had been expertly grafted on. As Leo watched, Silas hooked a dirty fingernail under one edge of the rectangle.

And began to peel it back.

There was no blood. No tearing of muscle or tissue. The flap of skin lifted away with a quiet, wet sound, like separating two pieces of damp leather. It revealed not the red of meat or the white of bone, but a cavity, a dark, slick-walled pocket within the man’s body. A window. A Skin Window.

Leo’s breath hitched. His mind, accustomed to the slow, syrupy pace of his addiction, snapped into sharp, terrifying focus. He couldn't look away.

From the darkness within the cavity, something stirred.

A glistening, black, chitinous leg, thin as a needle and jointed in too many places, unfurled slowly. It was followed by another. A small, compact body, like a fist-sized knot of polished obsidian and gristle, shifted into view. It had no discernible head, but a cluster of tiny, multifaceted eyes glittered in the gloom of its nest. It was insectoid, but no insect he had ever seen or could ever imagine. It moved with a silent, alien grace, its limbs clicking soundlessly against the walls of its fleshy prison.

The creature’s eye-cluster swiveled, and for one heart-stopping moment, it focused directly on Leo. He felt a jolt, a static shock of recognition that went deeper than his eyes. It was a feeling of being seen, truly seen, by something that did not belong in the light of day.

Just as quickly as it had opened, Silas pressed the flap of skin back into place. It sealed itself with the same unnatural seamlessness, leaving only the faint rectangular outline. He calmly buttoned his trousers and shirt.

“See?” Silas breathed, his eyes gleaming with a manic fire. “A cage.”

Leo was speechless, his body rigid. The image was burned onto the inside of his eyelids. The leg. The eyes. The slick, dark hole inside a living person. He scrambled backward, kicking up dust and grit.

“What… what the hell was that?” he finally managed to choke out.

“That was the Murmur,” Silas said, his voice soft again. “The thing that whispers. The thing that wants to grow. The reason you can’t ever feel full. The reason you’re always so empty.”

And then it happened.

As Silas spoke the word ‘Murmur’, a switch flipped in Leo’s brain. A new channel of sensory input flooded his consciousness, a sound he had never heard before but recognized with an ancient, primal dread.

It was a faint chittering, a high-pitched, frantic scraping. It came from Silas. It wasn't a sound made with a mouth or lungs; it was the sound of the creature, a psychic static that now buzzed directly in Leo’s skull.

He clapped his hands over his ears, but the sound wasn’t external. It was inside him. He stared at Silas, and the noise grew louder, a desperate, scratching symphony of confinement.

“I—” Leo started, but his voice was drowned out by a new wave of sound.

Above them, on the overpass, the rhythmic clump of footsteps echoed. A woman in business attire, talking on her phone. A man walking his dog. A group of teenagers laughing.

Before, it was just noise. Now, it was a chorus.

From the woman, a low, wet clicking. From the man, a dry, rustling scrape, like dead leaves skittering on pavement. From the teenagers, a cacophony of high-pitched whines and frantic scrabbling. Each person passing overhead was a source, a unique broadcast of the same essential message: out, out, let me out.

The world had been muted, and now the volume was turned up to a thousand. Every living person was a cage, and for the first time, Leo could hear the rattling of every single prisoner. The Murmur wasn't just in Silas.

It was in everyone.

The desire for a fix, for the comforting numbness of heroin, was vaporized and replaced by a singular, all-consuming terror. The apathy that had been his armor for years was shattered, and in its place was a horrifying, vibrant awareness. He looked at his own hands, his pale, thin arms.

Was one in him, too?

The underpass, once a refuge of quiet decay, was now the epicenter of a shrieking, invisible orchestra, and Leo Vance was its sole, terrified audience.