The Veil

The first time Jacob heard the whisper, he was ten. It slithered through the empty spaces of his childhood home, curling into his ear as he lay in bed, small hands clutching the sheets.

"Jacob."

The voice was neither warm nor cold, neither kind nor cruel. Just there, like breath on the nape of his neck.

He turned to his bedroom door, expecting to see his mother, but the hallway was dark, too dark, the kind of blackness that felt hungry.

The next night, it came again.

"Jacob."

And then the sound of something wet dragging across the floor.

He told no one.

By the time he was twenty-five, the whisper had become a presence. It coiled around his thoughts like black ink in water.

"Don’t take the highway today."

He obeyed. That afternoon, a pile-up killed seventeen people.

"Stay inside."

He listened. A man was stabbed to death in the alley behind his building.

"That man in the suit—walk the other way."

Jacob turned down a side street instead. Later, he saw the man’s face on the news.

Wanted for dismemberment.

The whisper had never been wrong.

The one time he ignored it—stepping off the curb when it warned, not yet—a city bus shrieked past, its side mirror clipping his shoulder hard enough to spin him to the pavement.

And then, for the first time, the whisper laughed.

Not in his ears, not in his mind—in his bones.

The voice changed after that.

No longer just warnings. Now it planted seeds.

"You ever wonder how easy it would be?"

"She doesn’t love you. She pities you."

"They would never find them, Jacob. Not if you’re careful."

It started with little things. A twist of a kitchen knife in his palm, watching the way the skin split. Holding his breath underwater just a second longer than was comfortable.

Nora, his girlfriend, noticed the changes. She would touch his arm when he drifted too far inside himself.

“Are you okay?”

Jacob blinked at her. Okay. The word meant nothing.

One night, she came home late, smelling like whiskey and someone else’s cologne.

"She lied to you."

The whisper curled around his brain, thick and alive.

"Test her. See if she tells the truth."

And so, Jacob asked where she had been. She smiled, too quickly. Lied.

The whisper hummed.

When she disappeared, the police asked him questions. He gave them answers. Yes, they had argued. No, he didn’t know where she went. He wished he did. He missed her terribly.

The whisper slid against the inside of his skull.

"Good boy."

And then, the whisper began to show him things.

The mirror didn’t reflect him the way it should. The thing inside it smiled when he did not.

The shadow at his feet twisted in ways light could not explain.

The woman in the corner of his bedroom.

She did not belong to this world. Her veil did not fall—it writhed, moving as though spun from muscle and sinew instead of fabric. The longer he stared, the more it bled.

Jacob did not speak.

He knew who she was.

“I’ve done everything you asked,” he whispered.

Her lips curled back, too wide, revealing teeth that weren’t shaped for eating, but for tearing.

And for the first time, the whisper was not inside his head.

It was behind him.

A wet breath at his ear.

"We’re not done yet, Jacob."

He turned.

The walls convulsed. His own face peeled open in the mirror. The shadow beneath him was not his own anymore.

The whisper had always been inside him.

Now, it was wearing him.