The silence was not the kind that soothes nor the quiet of contemplation or peace. It was not the hush of snow falling on untouched ground or the lull between breaths at the edge of sleep. This silence had weight. It pressed against the eardrums like a physical force, thick and suffocating, as though the atmosphere itself had congealed into something viscous and watchful. In the dim corridor of the abandoned hospital the absence of sound felt deliberate—an oppressive stillness that seemed to coil in the corners lurking behind peeling wallpaper and shattered glass. The air stale carrying the faint metallic tang of rust and something older, something less definable, like regret or the residue of long-faded screams. No dripping faucet, no groan of settling beams, no distant hum of electricity—only the hollow silence of a place where time had ceased to matter and life had long since turned its back.
He stepped forward his boots echoing not because of sound but because of the way the silence fractured around each footfall like ice cracking beneath unseen pressure. It wasn’t mere quiet; it was presence. An entity. He had come seeking answers—his wife’s last known address had traced back to this decaying structure a derelict psychiatric ward closed decades ago under a cloud of scandal and cover-ups. The official records had been sparse and the staff long scattered, their memories buried as deep as the foundation stones beneath the overgrown ivy. But he had found a note in her handwriting: ‘I remember what they took from me.’ Nothing more. No date and no context. Just those seven words scrawled in a hand both familiar and alien and trembling at the edges.
The deeper he moved into the building, the less the silence behaved like an absence. It began to pulse. A low thrumming, just beneath hearing like blood in the skull during a panic attack. He paused at a doorway, its frame splintered and stared into a room where chairs lay overturned their padding split open like excised organs. A single gurney remained rusted and upright, its leather restraints dangling like dead vines. A calendar on the wall was frozen in October 1983. He reached out fingers brushing the brittle paper and recoiled. The silence swelled. For a fraction of a second he thought he heard a breath—not his own—something thin and strangled exhaled from the walls.
He had always believed silence to be neutral. The space between words, the pause between heartbeats. But this was different. This silence felt hungry. It had swallowed sound and also memory and identity and the very sense of self. He wondered if the patients had screamed here—not in rage or pain but in realization. The realization that their voices had been absorbed and that no one would hear them because the silence itself had been weaponized. Was that what had happened to her? Had she walked these halls only to have her voice consumed and her thoughts folded into the building’s rotten bones?
A cold draft stirred behind him, though there were no open windows and no vents. He turned slowly. The corridor stretched behind him identical in every direction—the same cracked linoleum, the same peeling paint and the same sense of infinite recursion. He could not remember which way he had come. The silence deepened pressing in from all sides and then—just once—a sound emerged from it. A whisper so faint it might have been tinnitus and so close it might have been inside his skull. “You’re late.” The voice was hers but distorted and stretched thin across decades of neglect.
He stumbled backward, heart hammering, yet no echo followed the slap of his palm against the wall. The silence mended itself instantly and seamless. He was being watched. Not by eyes but by the void. The absence had become sentient. Every footprint he left behind seemed to vanish as he passed erased not by time but by intent. The hospital wasn’t abandoned. It was occupied—by silence and by memory and by things that thrived in the gaps between sound and thought.
At the end of the hall a door stood ajar. Light seeped from it—flickering and unnatural a candle flame in a windless room. He moved toward it not because he wanted to but because the silence compelled him guiding his steps like invisible hands at his back. He pushed the door open.
Inside the room was empty but for a single chair facing a cracked mirror. On the seat lay a woman’s coat—her coat. He recognized the frayed stitching along the cuff. And in the mirror, though his reflection stood perfectly centered, another image flickered at the edge: a woman in a hospital gown her face gaunt and eyes wide with a quiet horror. She opened her mouth but no sound came. Then slowly she raised a hand and pressed it against the glass from the other side. The silence deepened curling around him like smoke.
He reached out. The mirror remained cold. But in that moment he understood: she wasn’t trapped in the past. She was trapped in the silence. And now so was he.
And! Beautiful you are…
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