Four high school friends slip into an abandoned house hidden in an old park, where rumour says your hidden thoughts can be heard. Inside, the silence starts to answer back.
It was a hot, heavy June evening, the kind that made the air feel close and restless. While the rest of the town pretended the pre-matriculation stress was just another thing to survive, Lena, David, Julia, and Adrian slipped out through the side gate and headed for the old park at the edge of town.
Hidden among the trees stood the house.
It had once belonged to someone important, or so the adults said in the half-finished sentences they always used when the place came up. Now ivy had taken over the walls, the windows were clouded with grime, and the gate hung at an angle as if even the iron had grown tired of standing guard. At school, the story was always the same: if you went inside and listened long enough, the house would tell you what you were hiding. Some people laughed when they said it. Others did not.
Lena had been telling everyone she went because she was curious. That was easier than admitting she had thought about the house more than once a day for the past three weeks. David kept talking as they crossed the park, throwing out jokes that were too quick and too loud, like he was trying to outrun his own nerves. Julia stayed close to Adrian, her fingers brushing his sleeve whenever the shadows thickened between the trees.
When they reached the gate, it gave way with a dry, protesting screech. The sound cut through the evening and seemed to linger far longer than it should have. No one spoke after that.
Inside, the house was cooler than the park, but not in a comforting way. The air felt still, stale, almost pressed flat against the walls. Their footsteps creaked through the hallway and came back to them from somewhere deeper inside, as if the house were listening and answering in the same breath.
The living room was empty except for a sagging armchair and a sheet of pale moonlight falling across the floorboards. Julia lifted her torch, and for one brief second the beam caught dust, peeling wallpaper, and the outline of a staircase leading up into darkness. Then the light died.
The blackness rushed in.
Lena felt her pulse jump. David muttered something under his breath, but even he sounded thin now, stripped of the easy bravado he wore so well outside. Julia stepped back until her shoulder brushed Adrian’s arm.
From somewhere down the corridor came a sound so slight it might have been a breath.
Then another.
A soft murmur, almost human, drifted through the dark, and every one of them heard it as if it had been spoken directly beside their ear. The window beside them shivered with a sudden draught, and in the glass they caught four pale reflections staring back at them.
Except the faces in the window were not entirely their own.
Before anyone could move, a flash of light burst from the corridor, and a voice they all knew too well said, very quietly, “Lena.”