When I first stepped into the Thorne House, I could feel it breathing.
It wasn't the draft under the warped floorboards or the groan of old beams. No, this was rhythmic—subtle but unmistakable. A long inhale, a slower exhale, as if the walls themselves were pulsing with life. I should've left the moment I felt it. But I didn't. I told myself it was imagination. I was good at that—rationalizing what I shouldn't.
The house had belonged to my uncle. He'd lived there alone for years before he slit his wrists in the attic and bled out into a circle of salt and black feathers. His suicide note was a single sentence, scrawled in charcoal across the wall:
"It finally answered."
He had no phone. No computer. No friends. Only notebooks—hundreds of them—filled with diagrams, overlapping symbols, and page after page of handwritten text: "Listen. Listen. Listen."
I came to settle the estate.
I came alone.
The house was rotting in slow motion. Wallpaper peeled like dead skin. The ceiling sagged. Black mold bloomed in corners like bruises. It smelled like copper and wet leaves, and something sweet just beneath—something wrong.
The electricity barely worked. The lights flickered like candle flames, shadows bending at the corners of my vision. Every mirror had been smashed. Every single one. Even the shards had been swept away, as if my uncle had feared what they might show him.
The attic was locked. Thick chains across the door. A crude warning carved into the wood:
"IF IT SPEAKS, DO NOT ANSWER."
I should've left. But the silence in that house was a hook, and it sank deeper each night.
I started hearing it on the third night. A soft whisper, low and genderless, curling just beneath the edge of hearing like a voice spoken underwater. It never came from the same direction twice. Sometimes it echoed from the vents. Other times, from inside the walls.
I couldn't understand the words—not yet. But it was speaking to me. Of that I was certain.
I stopped sleeping. I paced. I listened. I read my uncle's journals until the ink blurred from my tears.
He hadn't gone mad.
He'd made contact.
On the sixth night, I found the hidden room.
Behind a bookshelf in his study, a false panel led to a narrow staircase that spiraled down—far deeper than the foundation should've allowed.
At the bottom was a room with no windows, lined with salt and soot. Candles sat in melted clusters on every surface. Their wicks were burned black. On the far wall was a massive mural drawn in what looked like blood.
It showed a figure—not human, not quite. A silhouette of jagged angles and too many arms, its head an open mouth, screaming. Beneath it, a line of text:
"What answers has no tongue, and never sleeps?"
There were speakers on the floor. Dozens of them. All unplugged. And yet, I could hear sound from them. The same whisper I'd been hearing in the house. Clearer now. Hungrier.
I ran.
But when I reached the top of the stairs, the house had changed.
The hallway stretched longer than it should have. Doors I didn't recognize lined both sides. The wallpaper shifted patterns when I blinked. I heard laughter—my voice, but wrong, echoing from somewhere behind me.
When I finally got back to my room, I locked the door and sat on the floor for hours, shaking.
The house was trying to show me something.
Worse—I think it liked me.
The next day, the photographs changed.
I'd found an old photo album in the living room. Childhood birthdays. My uncle in his 20s. A Christmas tree in the corner of the room.
But when I looked again—people were missing. Faces blurred. Then, I saw myself. In photos I wasn't in. Wearing clothes I didn't recognize. Standing in the background, staring at the camera.
In one photo, I was sleeping. In my bed. Last night's pajamas. The angle matched the corner of the room where no camera existed.
That's when I smashed the album and burned the pieces.
But the photos returned.
Neatly stacked on my bed.
The whisper grew louder. It knew my name. It said it over and over—sometimes lovingly, sometimes with contempt.
"Eli... Eli... Eli..."
I started answering.
Only in my head, at first. I asked what it wanted. Why it was here. Why me.
And then—one night—it answered.
Out loud.
Its voice poured from the walls like syrup and ash.
"Because you are empty... and I will fill you."
I vomited. Blood and black liquid. My eyes wouldn't stop watering. The air throbbed.
I tried to leave that night.
The front door was gone.
Only a blank wall remained, smeared with handprints that pulsed faintly as if freshly made.
The house laughed. I heard it through the pipes.
The next morning, there was another journal on my desk.
It hadn't been there before. The handwriting wasn't mine. Or my uncle's. It was tighter. Inhuman. Precise.
The first page read:
"You are ready."
The rest was blank. Until I blinked.
Then a sentence appeared.
"Go to the attic."
I cut the chains.
The attic smelled like sulfur and dried blood. The circle was still there—chalk and salt and something darker. In its center: the mirror.
The only one left.
I stood in front of it, heart hammering, unable to see my reflection. Just a dark void where I should've been.
Then... the whisper behind me.
"Turn around."
I did.
And I saw myself. But not me.
It had my face, but its eyes were glassy, mouth stitched shut with barbed wire. It stepped forward from the shadows like peeling wallpaper. Its skin was gray and wet, its breath shallow.
"I've been waiting," it said through teeth not meant to speak.
I couldn't move.
It smiled, opened its stitched lips wide enough to tear.
And crawled into me.
I don't remember much after that.
Only that when I woke up, the sun was shining through windows that shouldn't have existed. The house looked new. Fresh paint. Clean walls. The rot was gone.
So was the attic.
So was the mirror.
But I still hear the whisper.
Now, it comes from me.
I speak it in my sleep. I wake up facing the walls, eyes wide, chanting. Sometimes, I scratch words into my skin. Most mornings, I don't remember. But the marks are there.
People think I left the Thorne House weeks ago. That I moved on.
But I never did.
The house came with me.
It's inside me now.
It is me.
And at night, I sit by the window.
I wait for someone else to inherit it.
So I can whisper.
And be heard.
But there's something else now. A shift. I feel it when I sleep—that thing that crawled into me is... growing.
Sometimes, I wake up outside.
Feet dirty. Mouth full of salt.
One morning, I had a small stone idol in my hands. It looked just like the thing in the mural. Same twisted limbs. Same screaming mouth.
I buried it, but I found it again the next day—on my pillow.
Last night, I dreamed of the basement again. Only this time, it wasn't empty.
The speakers were playing a voice.
My voice.
"Let me in," it said.
"Let me out."
It was both.
I think... it wants a body.
Not just mine.
Yours.
And I think I brought it here for that.
If you've read this far...
It knows you now.
Listen closely.
Can you hear it?
It's whispering your name.
Just once.
For now.