The silence in the house was an infection, spreading from the dust-choked corners of the basement to the cold, empty spaces between the walls. It wasn't the comfortable quiet of an empty home, but a brittle, expectant hush that vibrated on the edge of hearing, like a high-pitched hum that only dogs and the truly insane could perceive. Liam had bought the house for its silence. He was a sound engineer, obsessed with the purity of isolated acoustics. He wanted to record nothing—the true absence of noise. The property, miles from any road, was perfect. Or so he thought.He set up his sensitive parabolic microphone in the center of the living room, surrounded by foam padding to absorb any stray echo. He put on his studio-quality headphones, the plush leather earpads sealing him off from the world. In this perfect, manufactured quiet, he waited for nothing. And that's when he heard it.It wasn't a sound, not really. More like a lack of a sound.
A momentary, infinitesimal gap in the hum of the universe. It was a silence within the silence, a void in the void. And it was moving.He adjusted his equipment, the digital display on his recorder flashing a perfect, unwavering zero. Yet, the headset in his hands broadcast the chilling, moving nullity. It was circling him, a slow, methodical orbit. The sound of absolute nothingness began to press against the back of his head, then his left ear, then his right. He felt an icy phantom presence, as though something were peering over his shoulder, stealing the very breath from his lungs.Panicked, he tore the headphones off, the cords catching on the edge of the recorder and sending it to the floor. The screen flashed once, a spike of static, before going dark. Now, in the house's unsettling silence, he felt utterly, terrifyingly alone. He stood in the center of the room, heart hammering, but the stillness returned, deep and hollow.
A sudden, jarring thought struck him. The microphone was still on. Its recording light, a tiny red eye, was still blinking in the dark. He crawled towards it, his hands trembling. He had to know what it had captured.He retrieved the device and put on the headphones again, pressing play. He expected to hear nothing. But the playback was different. The first minute was the same, a flat, empty hiss. Then, the nullity returned, the moving vacuum of sound. But it wasn't just circling this time. It was closing in.As the track reached the point where he had torn the headphones off, a new layer was added. A sound. A whisper. Not a whisper of words, but of textures. The dry rustle of old paper, the slick, wet sound of a tongue passing over teeth, and a faint, grating noise like nails on wood. The whisper grew in intensity, until it was a cacophony of small, intimate horrors, all of them so close, so very close to the microphone.He realized the awful truth. The silence he had been so obsessed with wasn't empty. It was just waiting.
The things that lived inside the silence had heard his microphone, had been drawn to its promise of perfect acoustic isolation, a place to finally speak their unspeakable truths.He hit stop, and the whispers died. But he could still hear them, not through the headphones, but in the walls, in the floorboards. The sounds of a thousand tiny, hungry things scratching their way to the surface, drawn to the man who had given them a voice. He looked down at the recorder, its digital display still dark. And then he saw it. Written in the dust on the screen, a single word: Listen.