"There are places where silence sounds like someone trying to speak."
—
I returned the next day.
And the day after that.
And again, like clockwork that refused to tick forward.
Same door that breathed when opened.
Same cold lamp humming above the back table like it had something trapped in its throat.
Same book—Her Name Was Yesterday—resting in its pool of amber light like an artifact time had forgotten how to categorize.
But something was different.
Not just once. Every time.
The book had changed.
Not in any obvious way—not torn, not rearranged in a child's prank. But deeper. Quieter. More like how a river changes from one season to the next—still water, still flowing, but never exactly the same twice.
Sometimes, I'd flip to a familiar paragraph only to find it gone.
Sometimes, what was once the middle had become the beginning.
And once, I turned a page that had been blank only yesterday—now thick with ink, a memory I didn't recognize written in a voice that wasn't quite mine but wore my rhythm like a borrowed coat.
It felt like the book wasn't just recording me.
It was remembering me.
Or worse—
Correcting me.
—
By the third day, the air began to shift when I read aloud.
Not temperature. Not pressure.
Just… awareness.
The kind of tension you feel when someone enters the room and doesn't say a word, yet you know—you know—you are no longer alone.
The silence was listening.
So I brought a recorder.
Not for proof. Not anymore. That stage had long passed.
I just needed something real.
Something I could rewind. Something that wouldn't be rewritten by grief or time or madness.
I pressed record and read aloud:
"He dreamt of a house where the mirrors didn't reflect, only listened.
In every dream, she stood beside him but never looked his way.
She only whispered one thing:
'You left me in the part of you that forgot how to need.'"
My voice came out cracked.
Sleep-deprived. Frayed at the corners.
But then—beneath it—something else rose.
A breath.
Laced with words.
It wasn't an echo. It wasn't me.
It was a second voice. Whisper-thin. One syllable behind. Like a ghost with stage fright.
Then it spoke—clear, deliberate, not written anywhere in the book:
"You were never supposed to remember all of it."
I stopped.
The recorder slipped from my fingers, clattering onto the floor.
The sound echoed through the archive like glass breaking in water.
Something folded in me.
Not fear. Something colder.
Recognition.
—
I don't remember leaving the archive.
The next clear memory is sitting on the concrete stairwell outside that forbidden door, back against the wall, hands trembling like they were afraid of their own skin.
The building was too quiet.
Then—footsteps.
A shadow crossed the edge of my vision, followed by a woman's voice, kind and careful:
"Are you alright?"
She crouched beside me.
A librarian. Mid-fifties. Iron-gray bun. Eyes the color of old photographs left too long in sunlight.
Her kindness wasn't rehearsed.
But it was tired.
I swallowed once. Hard.
"Do you know who Elara Morrin is?"
The effect was immediate.
She flinched—not visibly, but internally.
Like a thread had been pulled behind her eyes.
She straightened. Her kindness didn't vanish, but it did something worse: it withdrew.
"You've been here a long time," she said quietly. "You should go home."
"Please," I said, voice breaking against the name like a wave, "you must've seen it—the book. Downstairs. It's real."
She paused.
And then, in a voice so soft I almost missed it:
"There's no such book in our catalog."
The silence that followed hurt.
"But I've been reading it—"
"There never was," she said. And then, almost like a reflex, almost like a warning not meant for me:
"Some stories write you back. Be careful which ones you open."
She walked away.
She didn't look back.
—
That night, I sat on the floor of my apartment.
Back against the wall. Recorder in my hands.
Light off. Curtains drawn.
I pressed play.
At first, it was just me.
Reading.
Pages turning.
Breath catching.
Then, buried just beneath the sound—so clear it made my heart pause mid-beat:
"Aiden, you forgot who found you."
I dropped the recorder again.
Not out of terror.
But something lonelier.
Because I knew that voice.
It was mine.
But not the me I was now.
It was the boy I used to be—the one who still believed in magic, who hadn't learned yet how to grieve without forgetting.
The boy who had known her.
And lost her.
—
I didn't sleep.
I sat by the window all night, watching the street empty itself.
I waited for yellow.
For the shape of a raincoat caught in the edge of a streetlamp's glow.
For a flicker in the reflection. For boots—one red, one black—stepping into frame.
But she didn't come.
Only the silence.
Pressed up against the glass like it was trying to whisper something through it.
—
By morning, I knew.
The book wasn't enough.
The voice wasn't enough.
And I could no longer trust the version of myself who remembered.
But maybe there was another trail. One I'd left before.
So I climbed onto a chair.
Reached into the back of the closet.
Pulled down a box that smelled like damp years and forgotten boyhood.
Inside were pieces of my younger self.
Old drawings. Torn paperbacks. Cracked cassette tapes.
Notebook pages filled with nonsense.
Postcards from places I'd never been.
And near the bottom, folded carefully into itself like it was hiding:
A letter.
Aged.
Yellowed.
Edges soft from being touched too many times.
The ink running like it had been rained on, or cried on, or both.
In my own writing, but with a tremble that didn't match my hand, it said:
"You said if I ever disappeared, I should follow the echo.
That's what I'm doing now."
—E
On the back was a drawing.
Not detailed.
Not good.
But heartbreaking.
A house.
Crooked, like it had been drawn from memory rather than life.
No clocks. No lights. A cracked mirror where the front window should've been.
And a boy—small, hunched, watching his own reflection.
While the reflection leaned forward to whisper something back through the glass.
—
I didn't go to the library the next day.
I went looking for the house.
⸻
To be continued…