I woke in the dark.
The hum was gone, but the air was thick, dense with something unseen. The world around me felt altered, as if it had slipped just slightly out of focus. My eyes fluttered open, but they didn't find what they expected.
There was no echo, no voice. No figure standing in the shadows.
But something had shifted. Something had changed.
I rose slowly, the floor beneath me unnaturally cold, as though the world itself had frozen in place. The room I stood in was no longer my apartment, nor any place I recognized. It was larger, more cavernous, the walls lined with shelves, all filled with tapes, microphones, and old recording equipment that hummed softly, as though alive.
The silence, while deafening, felt like a temporary truce.
I didn't understand what had happened. Or where I was. But I knew one thing with terrifying clarity.
I wasn't alone.
I stepped forward, my feet hesitant, the very air seeming to pull me deeper into this unfamiliar space. The tapes—so many tapes—lined the shelves like a library of memories, each one labeled with dates and names that meant nothing to me.
I reached out and picked one at random. It was labeled Chapter 29 in my handwriting.
I didn't need to see the label. I knew it was my voice in the recordings. I could feel the weight of it. I'd been here before.
I clicked the tape into the nearby player, my fingers moving with an eerie certainty.
The machine whirred to life, and my voice filled the space.," it began, "This is where we begin to forget."i stood and was very frighten
I froze.
The voice wasn't mine. Not completely. It was… me, but not me. It was distorted, warped, as though another force had taken my words and twisted them into something unfamiliar.
The hum came back then—quiet, but present—sliding in beneath the layers of sound. A presence lingered, just on the edge of perception.
"You think you've escaped," the voice said, and I recognized it at once. It was speaking through me. The echo had found a new way to speak.
The figure, the thing in the shadows, had never truly left. It had woven itself into me—into my words, into my memories, into the very fabric of the silence I had tried so hard to keep.
I swallowed, my throat dry.
"You can't outrun what you are," the voice continued. "You can't escape yourself."
I didn't want to hear more. I reached for the power switch to stop the recording, but my hand faltered, trembling. I couldn't move it.
It was controlling me.
"You never stopped listening," the voice taunted. "You never stopped recording. You never stopped speaking. And now, it's too late. This is who you are now—the speaker."
The weight of those words hit harder than any punch. I had thought the silence would protect me, that if I stopped talking, if I stopped listening, I could break free. But I was wrong.
The silence had never been a refuge. It had been a cage.
And now the door was open.
"You will always speak. You will always listen. Even when you think you've forgotten, even when you try to run, it will always find you," the voice whispered, now so close that it was no longer just a sound. It was a feeling—inside me, around me, suffocating me.
The echo had learned me.
I pulled my hand back from the machine, but it wasn't enough. The sound had burrowed too deep. It had woven its roots through me, through everything I thought I knew about myself.
The tapes.
The recordings.
The voice.
It was all the same.
And then I understood.
The echo wasn't something I could control. It wasn't something I could escape.
It was me.
The machines around me hummed louder, the walls vibrating with sound, and then, from all around me, a chorus of voices filled the space, overlapping, distorting, blending into a single, unified voice.
It was no longer just my voice. It was everyone's. It was the people I had never met, the ones I had never heard, the ones whose stories had been forgotten. The ones whose voices had been lost in the static. They were all here now.
And they were speaking through me.
"Finish it," the voice demanded, all of them now. "Finish the story."
I opened my mouth to speak, but the words didn't come from me.
"Chapter 29," I heard, but it wasn't me. It was them. All of them. "This is where the voices come together. Where we remember everything. Where we never stop telling the story."
The hum swelled, becoming a tangible thing, wrapping around me, binding me in its resonance. The room felt infinite, expanding, stretching in every direction, folding in on itself.
And then, the voices began to repeat.
Over and over again, they spoke the same words.
"Finish the story."
I tried to resist. I tried to pull away, but the hum filled me. It filled everything. It consumed everything.
And in that moment, I understood.
The story was never mine to tell.
It was theirs.
It had always been theirs.
I opened my mouth again, not knowing what would come out, and felt the words flow, not as my own, but as part of something much larger. Something older. Something that had never been finished.
I didn't speak. I was spoken through.
And somewhere, deep in the echo, the story continued—unwritten, unfinished, unbroken.
Forever.