The Whispering Corridor
3:04 AM.
The scratching had stopped.
But Elias hadn't moved.
He stood in the hallway, one hand pressed against the faded wallpaper. The silence now felt worse than the noise had. Like something on the other side of the walls had been holding its breath — and now waited for him to speak first. The air felt unnaturally still. Stale, like a tomb sealed long ago.
"Find me."
The voice hadn't been loud. It hadn't been angry. It was childlike. Small. Exhausted. But what made Elias's skin crawl was how familiar it sounded. Like a memory warped by time — a voice he'd once known but had long since buried.
He took a step back. His heel grazed the floorboard that always creaked.
And it didn't.
That was wrong.
His breath fogged visibly in the hallway light, even though the radiator in the apartment buzzed on a low hum. He swallowed hard and turned his head slowly.
In the corner of his eye — movement.
The cracked mirror by the entryway. It had fogged again, thin and precise around the frame. Elias walked toward it in halting steps. The message was faint, as if written by a finger dragging through condensation:
"The door isn't where you think."
He stared at it for a moment, not moving, before reaching up and wiping it away. The glass cleared reluctantly.
Behind the message, his reflection stared back.
But it wasn't quite right.
His own face… slightly off-kilter. His lips were parted like they had been mid-whisper. One eye seemed wider than the other, subtly — unnervingly — as if the person in the mirror had only almost remembered how to mimic him.
Elias leaned in closer.
The figure in the mirror didn't move.
Its eyes were calm. Empty. Not panicked like his own.
And as he stood there, heart pounding, something inside that calm expression shifted — a flicker, a tug at the corner of its mouth.
Not a smile.
Something more like recognition.
---
Elias didn't sleep again.
When morning came, it found him slumped at the kitchen table, head bowed, half-awake, coffee untouched beside him. The light leaking through the blinds was pale and dismal, casting the room in washed-out hues. Rain tapped the windows like a metronome for his anxiety.
His phone sat beside the mug. No messages. No missed calls. No new clients.
Rent would be due in a week. The fridge held little more than condiments, half a lemon, and a lonely egg. But it all felt distant. Blurry.
It wasn't hunger or debt gnawing at him.
It was the voice.
Find me.
He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, as if pressure could erase memory. But the hallway. The mirror. The child's voice. All of it hovered like mist in his mind.
He stood. His body ached from tension and stillness. He needed to move. Do something. Anything before his thoughts dragged him somewhere darker.
---
By noon, he found himself back in Dr. Soren Vale's office.
The waiting room lights flickered with the same tired buzz as always, but the receptionist's desk was empty. Her chair swiveled slightly, as if someone had just left.
Vale's office door stood ajar.
Elias hesitated — then knocked once and stepped inside.
Dr. Vale sat at his desk, sorting through files. Light from the blinds painted harsh stripes across the wall and half his face. He looked up, brow furrowing slightly.
"Elias," he said. "You weren't scheduled today."
"I didn't come to talk about appointments," Elias replied, voice flat. "I need answers. About St. Aurum's. That file you showed me."
Vale paused, then gestured to the chair across from him. "You look worse than yesterday."
"That's because I am." Elias sat heavily. "I haven't slept."
Vale's gaze was steady. Clinical. But not cold.
"Are you experiencing hallucinations again?"
"Not like before. This is… different."
Elias leaned forward, arms braced on his knees.
"Do you think people can lose parts of themselves?" he asked. "Not just memories. Identity. Like… forget who they are because remembering would kill them?"
There was a long silence.
"I think," Vale said eventually, "that the mind does what it must to survive. And sometimes that includes cutting pieces of itself off. Like cauterizing a wound."
He opened a drawer and pulled out a folder — thin, old, and dust-marked.
Stamped with the emblem of St. Aurum Psychiatric Research Center.
"I reviewed more of your records," Vale said, flipping through it. "There's a two-month gap when you were fourteen. No entries. No therapy logs. No discharge or incident reports."
Elias frowned. "But I was there the whole time."
"Exactly." Vale met his gaze. "There's evidence to suggest you were still housed at the facility. But the file acts like you vanished — then reappeared with no explanation."
A chill ran down Elias's spine. "What are you saying?"
"I think someone tried to erase it."
---
The rest of the session felt like it passed underwater.
There were names Elias didn't remember. Terms he only half understood: "mirror dissociation," "trauma-induced fugue," "self-partitioning." Mentions of therapy types he'd never heard of — unregulated, experimental methods piloted in the early 2000s and quietly shelved.
One page stood out.
A scanned note, scrawled in ink at the bottom:
"Subject continues to exhibit mirror-based dissociation. Repeated references to 'the boy behind the door.'"
The boy.
Elias didn't remember ever saying that.
Didn't remember talking to anyone about a boy.
But last night...
"Find me."
---
He didn't go home after the session.
Instead, he walked the streets of Duskmoor without direction. Let the fog and drizzle soak through his coat. The city felt unfamiliar, like someone had recreated it from memory and gotten the details wrong. Streetlights buzzed. People passed, their faces featureless in the gloom.
The memories it stirred weren't safe.
He passed the old hospital. The cinema turned to rubble. The graffiti-stained bridge where he'd once hidden a knife.
And finally, near dusk — he found himself in front of a place he hadn't thought of in years.
Vale House.
A mansion-turned-orphanage. Later a halfway home for disturbed teens. Then shuttered after budget cuts and rumors of abuse. It had been a rumor magnet in the papers once. Then forgotten.
Like everything else.
The rusted gate creaked open with one push.
The front path was choked with weeds. Windows were boarded, graffiti-tagged. Except one — on the top floor. A single window left cracked.
Elias stared at it for a long time before stepping through the threshold.
Dust bloomed in the stale air. The wooden floor whined beneath each footstep. Peeling wallpaper hung like torn skin. It smelled of wet rot and something older.
The silence was complete.
No animals. No wind.
Nothing.
As he climbed the staircase, the light above flickered — once — then went out.
He reached the top floor.
And there, at the end of a narrow hallway, was a mirror.
Tall. Free-standing. Ornate. Covered in dust.
It didn't belong. Too clean. Too new. No graffiti. No rot.
He approached it cautiously, heart pounding.
The reflection in the mirror…
Wasn't his.
---
It was a boy.
Thin. Barefoot. Maybe ten years old. Sitting cross-legged on the floor inside the mirror, like it was a window to another room.
He didn't look at Elias.
Just kept tracing something on the floor with a red crayon. Slow, deliberate strokes.
A door.
Elias's hand hovered inches from the glass.
It was warm.
The boy stopped drawing.
He looked up.
And Elias — in a single, awful moment — knew him.
Not from a file. Not from a dream.
From inside.
That was his face. Or a version of it. Younger. Lighter. Not yet hollowed out.
But the eyes were full of something Elias hadn't felt in years.
Betrayal.
The boy opened his mouth.
And then — the mirror shattered.
Glass erupted outward in a soundless scream. Elias staggered back, arms shielding his face. Splinters of mirror clattered across the warped wooden floor.
When he looked up…
The hallway was empty.
Just a shattered frame.
Just silence.
And on the floor, where the mirror had stood — a child's drawing.
Crude. Shaky.
A stick figure labeled "ME" beside a taller one: "HIM."
They were smiling.
Underneath, in crooked letters:
"He left."
---
Back in his apartment, Elias sat on the floor in the hallway.
The lights were off.
The mirror that had fogged the night before stood silent. Clear.
But he held the drawing in his lap. It felt like proof. Or a warning.
He didn't speak. Didn't cry. He wasn't even sure he could move.
Then the mirror fogged.
No hands touched it.
No breath marked it.
But the message appeared, letter by trembling letter.
"You left me there."
Elias stared at it.
Long and hard.
And for the first time in years — he whispered back:
"I'm sorry."
---
To Be Continued in Chapter 3 – The Man Who Forgot Himself