Chapter 2: The Echo in the Hallway

Chapter 2: The Echo in the Hallway

Twelve years. Twelve years I had spent meticulously building a life on a foundation of logic and fact. As a historical archivist, my days were governed by the tangible—brittle paper, faded ink, the verifiable truths of other people’s pasts. I restored documents, pieced together fragmented histories, and brought order to the chaos of time. It was a profession I had chosen deliberately, a way to prove to myself that every mystery had a solution, every question an answer waiting to be unearthed.

But my own past remained a sealed room, its single window nailed shut.

The whisper had never truly left me. It was a phantom echo, a chilling sub-bass thrum beneath the surface of my orderly life. This is mine. The words would surface in moments of quiet vulnerability—late at night, staring into my own reflection in the dark glass of my apartment window, or when the air in a quiet library stack grew suddenly, inexplicably cold. For twelve years, I had dismissed it as a scar on my memory, a trauma-induced artifact from a terrified sixteen-year-old’s mind.

But lately, the echo was getting louder.

My desire to understand had sharpened into a desperate need. I needed corroboration. I needed the only other person who was there. I needed Luis.

Finding him wasn’t difficult; he drifted through the city’s underbelly like a ghost himself, leaving a trail of short-lived jobs and cheaper apartments. His latest was a crumbling brick tenement on the industrial side of town, a place that smelled of damp concrete and despair. The hallway leading to his door was dim, the air thick with the smell of stale beer and boiled cabbage. It was the antithesis of the pristine, unnaturally tidy prison we’d grown up in.

The obstacle, I knew, would be Luis himself.

He opened the door a crack, his face a ruin of the boy I remembered. At twenty-four, he looked a decade older. The same dark hair was now an unkempt mess, and a permanent, bruised-looking shadow lay beneath his eyes. He had the defensive, slouched posture of a man perpetually expecting a blow.

“Elara.” His voice was rough, laced with suspicion. “What do you want?”

“Can I come in?”

He hesitated, his gaze darting nervously over my shoulder down the empty hall, a tic I remembered from our childhood. Finally, he sighed and swung the door open.

His apartment was sparse and chaotic. A mattress on the floor, a scattering of clothes, an ashtray overflowing on a wobbly end table next to a half-empty glass of amber liquid. He saw me looking at the glass and gave a cynical, humorless smile. “My anesthetic. What’s yours? Old books?”

I ignored the jab. This was too important. “I need to talk to you, Luis. About the house. About that summer.”

His entire body tensed. “No.” The word was flat and final. He turned away, picking up his glass. “We’re not talking about that. Ever.”

“Why not?” I pressed, my voice rising with an urgency I couldn’t control. “Don’t you ever think about it? Don’t you remember what it was like after you opened the window?”

“I remember Dad acting like a psycho and nailing it shut,” he shot back, his voice turning volatile. “I remember Mom looking like she was about to faint. That’s what I remember. Them. That’s all it ever was.”

“No, it wasn’t,” I insisted, stepping closer. “It was more than that. The room, Luis. It was so cold. And the smell… like flowers left to rot.”

He flinched, a tiny, almost imperceptible tremor running through him. He took a long swallow from his glass, his knuckles white. “It was an old house. Old houses are drafty. They smell weird. You’re overthinking it. You always do.”

He was trying to rationalize it, to shrink the memory down to something manageable, something that could be explained away by drafts and parental tyranny. But I couldn't let him. My sanity felt like it was hanging in the balance.

“I heard something,” I said, my voice dropping to a near whisper. “That night, and other nights after. A voice. It whispered to me.”

Luis slammed his glass down on the table. The liquid sloshed over the rim. His eyes, when he turned to face me, were wide with a terror he was trying to mask as rage. “Stop it, Elara! What do you get out of this? Digging all this up? Some things are supposed to stay buried. You need to leave it alone!”

“I can’t!” I cried, the desperation finally breaking through my carefully constructed composure. “It whispered to me, Luis. It said… it said, ‘This is mine.’”

The color drained from his face. For a heartbeat, the mask of cynical anger fell away, and I saw the terrified twelve-year-old boy again, the boy who slept with his back to the wall. He knew. He remembered.

But then the walls slammed back into place, thicker and higher than before. “You’re crazy,” he spat, the words like stones. “You’ve been locked up with dusty old papers for too long. You’re inventing things. Now get out.”

He pointed a shaking finger at the door. “Get out, and don’t ever bring this up again.”

The meeting had failed. Worse than failed. It had shattered my hope for validation, leaving me alone with a memory that now felt like a delusion. I walked out of his apartment, the door slamming shut behind me, the sound echoing the finality of my father’s hammer all those years ago.

The turning point occurred on my drive home, the city lights smearing past my windshield. The cold dread from Luis’s apartment clung to me, a residue I couldn’t shake. Was he right? Had I spent so long searching for patterns in the past that I’d started inventing them in my own? The thought was terrifying. Maybe I was the one who was broken, haunted not by a ghost, but by my own mind.

I pulled into the parking garage beneath my sterile, modern apartment building. My sanctuary. A place of quiet and order, a thousand miles and a hundred years away from that suffocating childhood room. I switched off the engine, plunging the car into silence and near-darkness.

That’s when it happened.

First, the cold. It was sudden and absolute, a wave of frigid air that had no source. It wasn’t the car’s air conditioning. This was a deep, invasive chill that sank into my bones, the same damp, cellar-cold from that summer. My breath fogged in front of my face.

Then, the scent. Faint at first, then overwhelmingly strong. Wilted lilies and damp soil, the smell of a freshly dug grave. It filled the small space of the car, thick and cloying. Panic, sharp and electric, seized my heart. This wasn't possible. This wasn't real.

My eyes darted to the rearview mirror. My own face stared back, pale and wide-eyed in the gloom. I was alone. Of course, I was alone. It was just my mind, my memory playing its cruelest trick yet.

But as I watched, my reflection seemed to waver, to thin. And behind my own terrified eyes, for the briefest fraction of a second, I saw another pair. Piercing, sorrowful, and burning with a cold, ancient rage.

A dry, rustling sound breathed from the back seat, right behind my head. It was the sound of dead leaves, of brittle paper, of a voice that had not drawn breath in a century. It was not a memory. It was not an echo. It was here.

And it whispered.

“This is mine.”