The Whispering Room

By AliZai

Sami wasn’t new to silence. As a freelance writer, he had learned to make peace with the quiet. But the silence in Flat 207 didn’t feel empty — it felt aware. Alive.

The apartment was a dusty, two-bedroom unit tucked on the top floor of a crumbling building in the old quarter of the city. Peeling paint, flickering hallway lights, and a broken elevator that hadn’t worked in years — everything screamed neglect.

But the rent was cheap, and Sami, being chronically broke and slightly optimistic, took it without question. Only later, just as he was about to sign the lease, did the landlord look at him and mutter something strange.

“Don’t use the second room at night. And never write in there.”

Sami blinked. “I’m sorry—what?”

The old man smiled, though it didn’t reach his cloudy eyes. “Old walls. They... remember things.”

Sami laughed it off. Another eccentric landlord. Maybe the room had a mold problem or weird creaks. Nothing he hadn’t dealt with before.

The first few nights were uneventful. The apartment was quiet, maybe too quiet. Even the city’s usual noise — traffic, footsteps, dogs barking — felt like they avoided this corner of the street. Still, Sami got to work, setting up his writing desk in the main room, using the second room as storage.

But by the fourth night, things began to change.

It started as a faint rustle. A soft sound, like a whisper. Not outside, not from the pipes — from inside the second room.

He paused his music, tilted his head, and listened. Nothing. He dismissed it.

But the next night, it returned. Louder. More distinct. Words.

"Write… please… write…"

Sami stood frozen in the hallway, staring at the closed door of the second room. A cold draft leaked out from under it, and the doorknob rattled ever so slightly, as if something inside was waiting.

Against his better judgment, he opened it.

Empty. As always.

The room was colder than the rest of the flat. The air had a strange stillness, like a breath being held. His boxes were stacked untouched in the corner. But on top of one, lay his old leather-bound notebook — open, with a fresh sentence scrawled across the page.

“The man returns to the room that remembers. The room that wants to be written into existence.”

His heart stopped.

He hadn’t written that. Had he?

The handwriting looked like his, but messier, rushed. Possessed. He tore the page out, threw the notebook back in the box, and closed the door.

But the whispers didn’t stop.

They grew louder, clearer. They knew his name.

They begged. Pleaded. Threatened.

So finally, on the seventh night, he gave in.

He entered the room just after midnight, carrying a pen and an empty notebook. The light flickered overhead as he sat on the cold floor, back against the wall, heart racing.

The moment he touched the pen to paper, the whispers stopped. Utter silence.

Then, as if pulled by invisible strings, his hand began to move.

“A boy once lived here. Alone. Forgotten. He used to speak to the walls, and the walls listened. Until the night he disappeared, and the whispers began.”

Sami didn’t know what he was writing. The words just poured out of him. A story about a child who had vanished from the same flat thirty years ago. A diary left behind. A secret crawlspace behind the closet.

He stopped writing when the lightbulb above him exploded.

Inside, he found a small tin box wrapped in decayed cloth. When he opened it, he found a child’s shoe, a drawing of a boy and a dark room, and a final page of a diary:

“He won’t let me leave unless someone else writes the ending.”

Sami dropped it, his hands trembling.

The whispers returned. But now, they were clearer. And they were inside his head.

"Finish the story, Sami."

"Set us free."

"Or stay here… forever."

Now, he writes every night. Not because he wants to — but because he has to.

And in the second room of Flat 207, the pen never stops moving.

Even when his hands do.