The Sound Beneath the Floor
At first, it was only the quiet that felt wrong.
Her new apartment was too still. The air was too heavy, like it hadn't been touched by breath in years.
The day she moved in, the landlord had said the place had "good bones."
But sometimes, in the dead of night, the bones creaked — long, slow sounds that traveled through the walls like sighs.
She'd tell herself it was the pipes. Or the wind.
But some nights, the sound came from under the floor.
Something moving.
Something breathing.
Elena wrote letters to her family every week. At first, she described the sunlight through her window, the stray cat that sometimes visited her balcony, the bookstore across the street that smelled like dust and rain.
But soon, her handwriting began to tremble.
The words lost their order.
The cat stopped coming.
And the walls started whispering her name.
She couldn't sleep.
Every night, she'd wake at the same time — 3:09 a.m. — to the faint rhythm of tapping beneath the floorboards.
Once, she pressed her ear to the ground.
The sound was steady, almost like fingers drumming, or a heartbeat muffled by wood.
She whispered, "Is someone there?"
The tapping stopped.
Then something whispered back.
"You left us."
Her breath hitched. "Who's there?"
"You shouldn't have gone alone."
And then silence again.
She crawled back into bed, shaking, but when her hand brushed her nightstand, she felt something rough.
A line had been carved into the wood.
Four words, uneven and jagged:
Remember the pact.
She told herself she must have written it.
That maybe she was sleepwalking again — like before, when she'd been thirteen and the woods had been calling.
But the next morning, when she looked at her reflection in the mirror, she noticed dirt under her fingernails.
And the faint scent of smoke clinging to her hair.
The days bled together.
She started sketching again — trees, always trees. Their roots tangled into faces, their shadows crawling across the paper like veins.
Sometimes, she'd draw one tree over and over. The same hollow at its center.
And each time, it looked wider. Deeper.
She mailed those sketches home too, but after the fourth one, she tore the rest apart.
The letters she sent afterward were simpler — short, nervous sentences that felt more like confessions than updates.
"I think something's here."
"It smells like earth after rain, even when it's dry."
"There's knocking inside the walls."
"It's not the house. It's me."
One evening, the sun set too early.
Or maybe it just looked that way — the sky swallowing its light all at once, leaving the town drenched in the same gray she remembered from the woods.
The trees outside her window didn't sway, even though the wind screamed.
And then she heard it again — the voice.
"You were supposed to stay."
She stood, dizzy, gripping the edge of her desk. "I did," she whispered. "I came back."
"You came back wrong."
The floorboards splintered beneath her feet.
Something dark seeped through the cracks — not quite liquid, not quite shadow. It pulsed faintly, like it had a heartbeat of its own.
Elena staggered back.
The lights flickered.
And when she turned toward the mirror, her reflection didn't follow.
The next thing she remembered was being outside.
Barefoot.
The air smelled of ash.
Her fingers ached. Her palms were streaked with black soil.
And beside her — half-buried — was her sketchbook, open to a torn page.
In her handwriting, shaking and uneven, it read:
"I think the tree followed me."
She dropped the pen.
Somewhere in the dark, the whisper came again — softer now, almost kind.
"You kept your promise."
And then, the sound of tapping beneath the ground.
Once.
Twice.
Then nothing.