No way she didn’t hear it. The crying saturated the space, filled up every crack, made the glass between us vibrate. It was everywhere at once. Like the sound was trapped under our skin.
I went still, ears straining. It got louder, a fever pitch, then dipped again, breathless, desperate. My hands curled. Instinct. I wanted a weapon. I wanted a reason to kill something.
Her voice trembled. “Is there someone else down here?”
I shook my head, slow. “Doesn’t sound… right.”
Because it didn’t. The sound didn’t change when we talked. Didn’t change with the room. It looped. Broken, mechanical, just a second off.
She cringed, clutching her knees. “Make it stop, make it stop…”
I almost snapped at her, just to drown it out. But I was too locked in, pulse slamming, every muscle tensed.I scanned the blackness, body humming, but there was nothing. No footsteps. No doors. Just that endless, pitiful sobbing.
Then I got it. The bile crawled up my throat.
He was fucking with us. The psycho. He’d run wiring through the guts of this place, let the ghosts haunt us when he didn’t want to come down himself.
A recording. A trick.
Rage firebombed through me. I slammed my palm into the barrier. The echo thundered back, but the crying kept going.
“Fuck you!” I roared at the walls, voice shredded. “You think this is going to break us?”
Nothing. Just the noise, skipping, on and on.
Amelia flinched with every outburst, her nails digging into her elbows so deep I thought she’d draw blood.
“He wants us to lose it,” I growled, but my voice sounded thin, even to me. “It’s all a goddamn show.”
Her head jerked. “Why?”
I snorted. “Because he can. Because he likes it.”
Her breathing came shallow, dizzy fast. I could see her shaking.
And I wanted to punch the wall until my fists caved in.
But I didn’t. I just watched the way the sound hollowed out her eyes and turned her into something brittle, the kind of break that never heals right.
The sobbing trailed off, slow at first, then cut. The silence after was sharp enough to bleed.
We sat in it. Hours, maybe. Or just a handful of minutes stretched into torture.
It got worse after the crying stopped.
Not the echo, no, the echo lingered, haunted every scrap of silence, but the real horror was the way time folded in on itself. An hour could’ve been a day, or a minute. The dark didn’t care. All it wanted was for us to forget what shape we were supposed to be.
I tried to nurse my anger, wrap it up like a shield, but the truth was transparent: every time she looked small, I felt like a piece of shit.
Reminded me of those days after school, when my father would dish out his lessons and I’d run to the creek and punch rocks until my knuckles bled. Reminded me of the last time I saw her cry andhow much easier it had been to hurt her than admit what it did to me.
She startled me, voice a soft, bruised thing. “Why do you do that?”
I blinked, picking up a splinter from the floor. “Do what?”
She rolled her eyes, but it was weak. “Act like you hate me every time you do something… nice.”
“Nothing about this is nice,” I said, voice flat.
