Elias had always been a man of silence. As a sound engineer, he spent his days immersed in the nuances of audio—isolating every tone, every frequency. But lately, the stillness of the world had started to feel… suffocating. An unbearable quiet that gnawed at him, as if something was missing from the world.
One evening, after a restless week filled with sleepless nights, he received an anonymous message. No words—just a location. The message was accompanied by an eerie static, and then… silence.
It was as if the universe had forgotten to include sound.
The coordinates led him to a hill on the outskirts of town, where the fog clung to the earth like an old wound. There, standing like a forgotten monument to oblivion, was a house. An unnatural house. There had been no record of it in the town's history, and none of the locals could recall it ever existing. Yet, as Elias drew closer, he could feel something pulling him toward it—a magnetic, unsettling force.
He stepped across the threshold. The air felt thick, a tangible silence that enveloped him, strangling the faintest sound. His shoes hit the wooden floor, but there was no echo. No creak, no shuffle of fabric—nothing.
Elias pulled out his recorder, his trusted tool, the thing that connected him to the world. He pressed record and listened for the familiar hum, the comforting buzz of ambient sound. Nothing. The recorder was silent.
He moved deeper into the house, and the silence grew more suffocating. The furniture was covered in white sheets, like corpses wrapped in burial cloths. He could feel the house watching him, listening to his every movement, though there were no eyes.
He reached the center of the house—a room that wasn't on the map. No windows, no doors, just a black circle in the center of the floor. It hummed.
Elias knelt down. The hum was coming from the circle. It wasn't just sound, it was a pulse—a rhythm. Something alive. He leaned closer, wondering if his recorder would pick it up.
He dropped it into the circle.
Silence.
He waited, but nothing came back. No buzzing, no static. Just an emptiness that stretched through time.
Then the house seemed to shift. The floor groaned, and the walls seemed to breathe, their surfaces rippling like flesh. Elias recoiled, stepping back, his heart racing. But the silence—it was still there, suffocating, pressing in from all sides.
Suddenly, the house responded.
It wasn't with a sound, no. It was a sensation, a pressure that built around Elias like the tightening of a vice. His limbs grew heavier. He tried to move, but his feet felt rooted to the ground, as though the house itself was pulling him in.
It remembers you. A voice, not spoken but felt, reverberated through his skull. His mind screamed, but his lips could not move.
The house was alive—not with flesh or bones—but with memories. It didn't need to speak. It fed on time, space, and most of all, sound. It devoured everything around it. The house consumed life, but in a way that left only fragments behind—empty moments, echoes of what had been.
Elias fought to break free, but it was too late. His body was already changing. His ears began to bleed, and his veins twisted like the roots of an ancient tree. The pulse from the center of the room grew louder, filling his mind with an overwhelming sensation of emptiness—of being devoured, of being erased.
His legs buckled beneath him, and he fell into the black circle.
The world collapsed.
When Elias awoke, he was no longer himself. His body was there, but the man who had once lived in it was gone. The house had consumed him—not just his voice or his presence, but his identity.
It had swallowed his memory.
The house had fed, and in doing so, it had become him.
And now, his voice was part of the house's endless hum—the hum that never ends.
In the distance, a group of strangers stumbled upon the hill. They saw the house. They heard nothing. No wind. No footsteps. No words.
And the house… it waited. It was hungry once more.