I Am Not Alone

The Accusation

The interrogation room hummed with static silence. Fluorescent lights buzzed above like a swarm ready to strike. Detective Harris folded his arms and stared at me across the table.

“You beat him nearly to death, Ms. Santos.” His voice was calm. Too calm. “Say something.”

I opened my mouth, but the words clung to my throat like wet ash. My lips cracked apart as I tried to make sense of the nightmare I’d woken into.

“I didn’t do it,” I whispered.

But even I didn’t believe it.

There was blood. Everywhere. On my knuckles, dried in the creases of my palms. Soaked into the cuffs of my blouse. His face—what was left of it—barely looked human. A neighbor found me kneeling over him, trembling. Screaming. I couldn’t remember the attack. Couldn’t remember walking there. Just a blur of red, pain, and that awful metallic stench in the back of my throat.

Then came the voices.

At first, I thought it was guilt. My own voice turning on me in whispers.

He deserved it.
You were protecting yourself.
Let us finish what you started.

But it wasn’t guilt. And it wasn’t my voice.

Not really.

---

They didn’t put me in a cell.

Instead, they locked me in the psychiatric wing of St. Cyril’s under suicide watch. That should’ve brought relief, but padded walls can’t muffle whispers that leak from inside your skull.

I started hearing them at night.

3:17 a.m.

Every. Night.

Let us out.
The bones remember.
Your body is just a doorway.

I told the doctors I wasn’t sleeping. They called it stress-induced hallucinations. Delirium. A trauma response. But trauma doesn’t move your limbs while you sleep. Trauma doesn’t leave your fingernails packed with soil you don’t remember touching.

One night, I woke up standing. Face pressed against the mirror. Smiling.

I wasn't smiling.

I smashed the mirror, needing to see if something else looked back. But it was just me.

Bleeding. Confused. Smiling again.

---

They medicated me. Increased observation. Lobotomized me with pills that dulled the voices but never killed them. If anything, they just made them angrier.

Then something worse happened.

I started forgetting again.

Not just hours or days. Parts of myself. My toothbrush showed up in the freezer. I found a torn page from a Bible tucked into my sock.

Jude 1:6 — And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their proper dwelling—these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great Day.

Chains. Like something inside me was bound.

Someone—or something.

---

That’s when Dr. Latchfield stepped in.

“Elena,” she said, her voice trembling under the surface of professional calm, “you mentioned a basement in your dreams. Can you tell me more about it?”

I nodded slowly. “There was stone. Cold stone. And voices. Not whispering. Chanting.”

She leaned in. “Do you believe it was real?”

I met her eyes. “I don’t know. But I can smell the mold when I close my eyes. I feel the rope burns on my wrists. That has to mean something.”

Her face lost color.

That night, she was gone.

Resigned. Transferred. Vanished. No one could tell me why.

And then the voices got louder.

We buried him.
You unearthed us.
We are the memory you were never meant to have.

Then came the question I feared more than any accusation:

Do you want to remember, Elena? Do you want to see?

I said yes.

I shouldn’t have.

The Memory Returns

The memory came back in pieces. Splinters. A scream behind my eyes.

I saw the door first. Weather-worn oak, its surface etched with strange markings I couldn’t read but felt. My fingers twitched when I looked at them. Then came the scent—mildew, rust, something that had died long ago and hadn’t stopped rotting.

I was strapped to a table. Not wood—stone. Cold, unyielding. Damp. My skin stung where leather dug into my wrists and ankles. I struggled, but I was weak. Drugged, maybe. Or something deeper had numbed me.

Candles flickered in a circle. Thick black wax. The flames burned blue.

And he was there.

The man I was accused of nearly killing.

But not a victim.

A priest. Of something old. Not the God I knew. Not anything that belonged to daylight.

He was chanting. Not alone. Others joined in. A half-circle of robed figures, their faces masked in soot and cloth. One stepped forward and pressed something into my forehead. Ash. It smelled like burnt hair.

Symbols were drawn around the table. Some in blood. Some still wet.

There was a jar beside me—filled with teeth.

And bones. Tiny ones.

Children’s bones.

I wanted to scream, but my voice was buried.

He raised a blade—not a knife. A jagged shard of obsidian. It caught the candlelight like it was hungry.

He carved something into my abdomen. Not deep. Just enough to bleed.

I arched. The pain cleared the fog. I looked him in the eye.

He smiled. “You were chosen. The gate must open.”

They weren’t summoning something.

They were freeing it.

Not from another world.

From me.

The Awakening

I came back gasping.

The hospital ceiling spun above me. My skin was slick with sweat. My mouth tasted like smoke.

I tried to sit up and felt my abdomen scream. The pain wasn’t imagined.

I threw off the blankets and lifted my hospital gown.

The symbol was there.

Not just a scar.

Fresh.

Bleeding.

I fell to the floor. Crawled to the mirror. Not a big one. Just the polished metal square they bolt to the wall so you can’t shatter it.

My reflection tilted its head.

I hadn’t moved.

Then it smiled.

We remember.

I don’t know how long I screamed. Maybe I never stopped. Maybe I’m still screaming.

They strapped me down again after that. Four-point restraints. Constant surveillance. No mirrors. No windows.

But they couldn’t stop the dreams.

Or the voices.

And worse, they couldn’t stop me from slipping.

It started small. Lost time. A nurse turning around, and suddenly I was across the room. The smell of sulfur when I blinked too long. Words in dead languages forming in my throat.

Then it escalated.

A nurse quit after finding me levitating. I don’t remember it. But I remember her scream.

Another doctor tried to dose me with something strong. She didn’t come back the next day. Or ever.

They said she overdosed.

I think I killed her.

Or something in me did.

But the worst part?

I don’t want it gone.

There’s a power in me now. A knowing. It speaks to me in riddles. In memories that are not mine.

It calls itself The Echo.

A voice from before language. Before time.

And it tells me I was born to host it.

That I am the final gate.

And when I open fully, it will no longer whisper.

It will speak.

The Breakout

I waited until the night shift changed.

That sliver of vulnerability between protocol and routine. The moment the human mind drifts.

They thought I was asleep. I let my breathing go slack. I slowed my pulse. I loosened my limbs beneath the straps.

They forgot the sedatives hadn’t worked in weeks.

I didn’t break the straps.

They unbuckled themselves.

The door didn’t open.

It dissolved.

The hallway beyond smelled like rubbing alcohol and fear. I padded barefoot down the tiles, light overhead flickering with every step.

No alarms. No footsteps. Just the hum of systems failing to recognize me as something that didn’t belong.

Something that had always belonged.

I passed the nurse’s station.

No one looked up.

Their eyes were open, but their minds had shut off.

The Echo kept them quiet.

When I reached the lobby, I stopped in front of the double doors. My reflection in the glass was split down the middle.

On the left: me. Tired. Hollowed.

On the right: it.

My eyes—but deeper. Bottomless.

It nodded.

I walked out.

Into a world that had no idea what I carried.

Into a world that had already let me in.

The Final Confession

They brought me back in.

Not to a hospital.

A station.

A room that looked like the first. Same cheap table. Same flickering light. Same two-way mirror that reflects only judgment.

A different detective this time. Younger. Sweating.

He slid a folder across the table. Photos spilled out. Of the priest. Of the others. Their bodies warped. Split open. Burned from the inside.

He didn’t ask who did it.

He asked what.

And I smiled.

Not because I wanted to.

Because it did.

“I’d like to confess,” I said. My voice layered.

Mine.

And The Echo’s.

He leaned back, visibly shaken. Pressed a button under the table. Reinforcements. Protocol.

Too late.

The lights buzzed. Dimmed. Flickered.

The mirror fogged.

The walls whispered.

We are not one.
We are not alone.
We are the wound that never closed.

I placed my hand on the table. The wood hissed and blackened beneath it.

“You thought this was about one man,” I said. “One body. One mind.”

I looked him in the eye as the shadow behind me grew taller than the room.

“But I am not one. I am the gate. And the gate is open.”

The lights didn’t flicker this time.

They died.

And in the dark, I heard my own voice—

not for them, not for him, not even for me.

A whisper to the void.

A summoning.

Welcome back.

And they came.

The shadows moved.

The mirror cracked.

The last thing the detective saw was my silhouette splitting, stretching, multiplying, until it swallowed the room.

He tried to scream.

But The Echo didn’t need fear.

It needed only a door.

And I had already opened it.

Author’s Note

This piece was written for Jason "Jay" Benskin's “Face The Darkness Within” Horror Challenge on Vocal.

The story began with a single whisper—a woman accused of violence she doesn’t remember, a body not entirely her own. From there, it unraveled into ritual, possession, and something ancient clawing back through memory.

I wanted to explore the space between identity and invasion,
guilt and haunting.

What happens when the voice inside you is no longer yours?

Thank you for reading. May The Echo never learn your name.