Sleep wasn't sleep anymore. It was surrender.
Elena hadn't closed her eyes for more than twenty minutes at a time in three days. Every time she drifted, voices coiled around her dreams—Maya begging, her mother singing, Mrs. Gable screaming through clenched teeth. So she stayed awake. Pacing. Drinking bitter coffee. Counting floorboards like rosary beads.
But the body betrays even the most vigilant mind.
She must have dozed off on the couch just before dawn, wrapped in Maya's quilt, a kitchen knife clutched in her lap like a promise.
And that's when it took her.
Not in a dream.
In the between.
One moment, gray light seeped through the curtains. The next—static.
Not sound. Not image. A wall of white noise so dense it had texture, like crawling insects made of radio snow. It filled the room, swallowing furniture, walls, windows—until there was only her and the hum.
Then, from the center of the static, a shape emerged.
It didn't walk. It unfolded.
Taller than a man, but not human. Its form shifted constantly—rippling like heat haze over asphalt, then snapping into jagged focus: a torso woven from tangled phonograph wires, limbs made of overlapping mouths, all whispering at once in voices Elena knew too well.
Maya's laugh.
Her mother's lullaby.
Mrs. Gable's prayer.
Ben's childhood nickname for her: "Ellie-bug."
And beneath them all, a deeper voice—not sound, but vibration—pulsing through the floor, up her spine, into her skull:
"You are so loud inside."
The thing tilted its head—or what might have been a head—a cluster of eyes blinking open in the static, each one reflecting a different memory: Elena crying at her mother's funeral, slamming the door on Maya, ignoring the last voicemail.
"All that guilt. All that love. All that silence you've carried… it sings."
It reached for her. Not with a hand, but with a tendril of distorted audio—a looping snippet of her own voice saying "I'm sorry" over and over, fraying at the edges into shrieking feedback.
She tried to scream, but her throat was full of cotton and static.
"Give it to me," it whispered, now in perfect unison—every stolen voice speaking as one. "Your voice is tired. Let me carry it. Let me be you."
And in that moment, she understood.
It didn't want to kill her.
It wanted to replace her.
To wear her voice, her face, her grief—so perfectly that no one would ever know the difference. Not Ben. Not the world. Only she would remain trapped inside, screaming into a mouth that wasn't hers, watching her life play out like a ghost in her own skin.
The thought was worse than death.
With a surge of terror-fueled will, she jerked backward—and slammed into the coffee table.
Pain exploded in her elbow.
The static shattered like glass.
Morning light flooded the room. Birdsong. Distant traffic. Normalcy.
She was on the floor, gasping, sweat-soaked, the knife still in her hand.
But on the armchair across from her—the one she'd been sitting in—sat a single object.
A cassette tape.
Labeled in neat, familiar handwriting:
ELENA – FINAL MESSAGE
Her blood turned to ice.
She hadn't owned a cassette player since college.
And she'd never recorded a final message.
Hands shaking, she picked it up. The plastic was warm. As if just played.
From upstairs, the attic floorboards creaked.
Slowly. Deliberately.
Like someone walking toward the stairs.
Coming down.
To deliver the rest of the message.
End of Chapter 8