Whispers in the Static

The tape began with silence.

Then, a faint hum — like electricity breathing.

Dr. Adrian Vale leaned closer to the speaker, pen trembling in his hand.

It was the seventh cassette sent to his office in two weeks. No return address. No explanation.

Just his name on the envelope.

He pressed play again.

And then he heard it.

“Adrian... I remember what you did.”

His pulse stuttered.

The voice was distorted, somewhere between male and female, static and whisper. It crawled through the wires like it knew him — like it wanted him to remember too.

Adrian wasn’t an ordinary therapist. He specialized in trauma patients — people who claimed to see things, hear things, feel things that weren’t there.

He was good at his job. Too good.

Until three months ago, when one of his patients — a quiet young woman named Lila Cross — killed herself after a session.

She had whispered something strange before leaving his office that day:

“If I disappear, promise me you’ll listen to the tape.”

He thought it was a metaphor. Some poetic plea for attention.

He was wrong.

By the time the third cassette arrived, Adrian had stopped sleeping.

He played them every night, writing down fragments:

“The room is not empty.”

“You never stopped the experiment.”

“Check the reflection.”

The recordings were always one minute and thirteen seconds long.

Always ending with a faint click — like someone turning off the recorder beside his ear.

His office camera showed no intruders. The locks were untouched.

And yet… one morning, he found a smear of red on the tape deck.

It wasn’t ink.

He told himself it was coincidence.

That Lila’s death was tragic but unrelated.

That the voices weren’t real.

But then he noticed the shadow.

Every time he listened to the tapes, it appeared on the wall behind him — faint, flickering, like a figure standing just beyond the sound. It didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.

It just watched.

He tried to record the playback on his phone, but the moment he hit “record,” the voice changed.

“That won’t help you, Adrian. You already recorded it once.”

His blood ran cold.

He dug through old files, desperate for logic.

There it was — The Vale Experiment, an abandoned study from his early career.

The goal: to cure trauma through audio regression therapy.

He had recorded patients’ voices, layered them with sound frequencies that could “retrigger” memory.

Lila Cross had been Patient 017.

The only one who heard her own voice speak before she spoke it.

He shut the project down after she began bleeding from her ears mid-session.

But what if she never stopped hearing?

What if… the tapes were the experiment trying to finish itself?

That night, Adrian returned to his office.

The lights flickered. The air buzzed with faint static, like the room itself was holding its breath.

He found an unlabeled cassette sitting on his chair.

This one was different — new.

He played it.

“Session thirteen,” his own voice said from the speaker. “Subject: Adrian Vale. Purpose: to locate the origin of guilt.”

He froze.

He never recorded that.

“Tell me, Adrian,” the voice whispered — his voice, warped, overlapping itself — “how does it feel to hear your own confession?”

Then came another voice.

Lila’s.

“You made me remember everything, Doctor. Now I’ll help you remember too.”

He ripped the tape out, heart pounding. The lights went black.

In the dark, the shadow finally moved.

The next morning, his secretary found the office door locked from the inside.

No sign of Adrian Vale.

Only the cassette, still spinning in the deck — static filling the air like breath.

When police arrived, they catalogued the tape.

The final line recorded before it stopped:

“Session complete. The subject has accepted integration.”

They never found his body.

But every few weeks, another envelope arrives at a therapist’s office somewhere in the city.

No return address.

No message.

Just a single cassette inside, labeled in neat handwriting:

“Session Fourteen.”