Evelyn Harper had always been sensitive to sound. As a child, she would cover her ears at the slightest noise—a slamming door, a barking dog, even the hum of the refrigerator. It was no surprise that she became a composer, crafting intricate symphonies out of silence as much as sound. But after the accident, silence became her enemy.
It happened on a rainy night, the kind of night where the world seemed to blur at the edges. Evelyn was driving home from a concert, her mind still humming with the melodies she had conducted. She didn't see the child dart into the road until it was too late. The thud, the scream, the screech of brakes—it was a cacophony of horror that ended in silence. Deadly, unbearable silence.
The child survived, but Evelyn didn't. Not really. She sank into a deep depression, haunted by the accident and the guilt that gnawed at her. She quit composing, stopped leaving her apartment, and severed ties with everyone she knew. Silence became her constant companion, a suffocating void that echoed with the memory of that night.
Then the whispers started.
At first, they were faint, almost imperceptible. Evelyn would hear them when she was alone, drifting through her apartment like fragments of a forgotten melody. She told herself it was her imagination, a product of stress and isolation. But the whispers grew louder, more insistent. They spoke in a language she didn't understand, their voices cold and alien.
Evelyn tried to drown them out. She played music at full volume, but the whispers seeped through, twisting the notes into discordant noise. She screamed, begged them to stop, but they only laughed—a harsh, mocking sound that made her blood run cold.
As the weeks passed, Evelyn's mind began to unravel. The whispers became voices, distinct and familiar. She heard the child from the accident, their voice pleading and accusatory. She heard her mother, who had died years ago, saying things she could never have known. And she heard herself, her own voice taunting her, reminding her of every mistake, every failure.
The voices followed her everywhere, even in her dreams. She stopped sleeping, terrified of what she might hear in the darkness. Her apartment became a prison, every corner filled with echoes of the past. She tried to write again, thinking it might help, but the notes on the page twisted into words she didn't recognize. Words that spoke of death, of guilt, of inevitability.
One night, the voices reached a crescendo. They screamed in unison, their words overlapping into a deafening roar. Evelyn clutched her head, tears streaming down her face, and ran to the bathroom. She stared at her reflection in the mirror, her face pale and hollow, her eyes wide with terror.
"Make it stop," she whispered.
The reflection smiled, a grotesque, unnatural smile. "You know how," it said in her voice.
Evelyn's trembling hands reached for the razor on the sink. The voices fell silent as she made the first cut, the pain a fleeting distraction from the noise in her head. Blood pooled on the floor, the sound of dripping echoes filling the silence.
When the paramedics found her, she was still alive, barely. She was rushed to the hospital, her wrists bandaged, her mind shattered. But the voices were gone. For now.