He didn't speak of the tower. Not when the bells rang, not when the stewards found him walking down the upper stairwell alone. They scolded him, of course—told him he had no permission to be above the second floor, that wandering outside of regulated corridors was a reportable offense. But they were distracted, uneasy. Too many things had gone wrong that morning to spend long punishing a silent child.
Three children hadn't woken when the bell rang.
The dormitory hall remained quiet as the stewards moved them, checking pulses, shaking their shoulders. Their bodies were warm. Breathing faint. But they would not wake. The others avoided their cots for the rest of the day, whispering theories. Foul air. Chemical leaks. Punishment from the sky. No one knew for certain. No one asked too loudly.
The boy—now aware of what he was—kept his distance. He could still feel the spiral under his skin, pulsing with something more than warmth. It beat like a second heart, quiet but steady, and sometimes when he looked at the others too long, he felt a pulling sensation, as though something was trying to reach through them and take what didn't belong to him.
He spent most of the day in silence. Mealtime came, and he took the tray they gave him, but he didn't eat. The food tasted dull, like paper soaked in brine. He chewed once, twice, then set it aside.
Voices echoed around him, but none felt real. Every word was slightly out of rhythm. He watched one of the older girls laugh, then blinked—and in that blink, her expression changed. The same laugh, just one breath delayed. A scene repeated with the wrong cadence.
By evening, his head hurt. The light in the halls stung his eyes, and the white bricks seemed to ripple when he stared too long. He went to the washroom and stood beneath the rusted pipe. Cold water dripped onto his shoulder. It helped.
But the whisper never left him.
It didn't speak anymore. Not clearly. But it lingered beneath the surface of sound—between the drip of the faucet and the creak of the floorboards. A presence without voice.
That night, they moved the sleeping children to the infirmary wing. The boy followed at a distance, unseen in the shadow of a maintenance cart. A steward wheeled one of the cots through the south corridor, and he watched from the corner of the stairwell. The child's face was pale but peaceful. Almost like he was dreaming.
Except he wasn't. None of them were.
He slipped out of the dorm again after curfew. This time, he didn't go up. He went down.
The staircase beneath the boiler rooms hadn't been cleaned in years. Dust lay thick along the stone rail, and spiderwebs stretched across the broken slats of light from the furnace grates. He counted the steps. Thirty-two down, just as before.
But the stone hatch at the bottom was sealed shut.
He knelt and pressed his palm to the floor. The surface was warm, but not alive. Whatever door he had passed through the night before had vanished, or buried itself beneath the folds of the world.
A small part of him hoped it would never open again.
He sat there for a while, legs curled beneath him, hands flat against the stone. He listened—not for voices, but for the quiet. He wanted to know if the world had changed for good, or if it would forget what had happened and stitch itself closed again.
He wanted to feel real.
Eventually, he stood. As he turned to climb the steps again, he noticed something.
A line of dark liquid stretched across the wall. Not blood—too thin. Not water—too dark. He touched it with his fingertip and brought it to his nose.
Ink.
Someone had drawn a spiral.
But this one was incomplete. A broken loop, jagged and erratic. It bled downward from the crack between two stones, as if the wall itself had wept it out.
He stepped back. The mark pulsed once. A sensation like déjà vu washed over him—cold, damp, wrong. Then it passed.
Back upstairs, the hallways were empty again. He slipped into the dorm and lay on his cot without a sound. The other boys were asleep. A steward had left the hallway lamp burning by mistake, and its light flickered through the slit at the top of the door, casting moving shadows on the wall.
He closed his eyes.
But he didn't sleep.
In the stillness, the whisper returned—not a word, not even a breath, but a presence that curled around his mind and hummed.
He saw the figure again. Not in a dream. Just behind his eyelids. That faceless shape in gray, seated in the tower beneath the bell.
And behind it, far behind, a great shape in the dark.
The Hole.
Waiting.