The First Tape
1249 Words
Rain drummed softly against the windows.
Adrian did not notice.
His eyes remained fixed on the cassette player.
SESSION 11.
The label looked old, its edges worn by time, yet the handwriting was strangely familiar.
It looked like his own.
He pressed PLAY again.
Static filled the room.
A low humming sound followed, like an old fluorescent light struggling to stay alive.
Then came the doctor's voice.
"Session Eleven. Observation begins."
Silence.
A child sniffled.
A chair scraped across the floor.
The little girl spoke first.
"Are you still watching?"
A boy answered.
"Yes."
"You won't leave?"
"I won't."
Another pause.
The girl's breathing became steadier.
Then she whispered something Adrian almost missed.
"When you look at me... I don't disappear."
The tape ended with a loud click.
Adrian remained perfectly still.
The sentence echoed inside his head.
I don't disappear.
It sounded absurd.
Impossible.
Yet something deep within him reacted before logic could.
A headache bloomed behind his eyes.
Fragments of memory flashed across his mind.
A white room.
Cold lights.
A glass wall.
A little girl sitting alone with her knees pulled against her chest.
Gray eyes.
Watching him.
The images vanished as quickly as they had appeared.
Adrian grabbed the edge of the table until his knuckles turned white.
"No..."
His own voice sounded unfamiliar.
He hated memories that arrived without permission.
The rain grew heavier.
Across the street, Elara's apartment was dark again.
She had disappeared after pointing toward the cassette player.
Why?
Why send him the tape?
Why reveal herself now?
Nothing made sense.
Adrian stood and walked to the window.
For three years, he had believed he was the observer.
Now he wasn't sure.
His gaze drifted to the notebook lying open on the table.
Every page contained careful notes about Elara.
Dates.
Times.
Habits.
Patterns.
Thousands of observations.
Suddenly, the notebook felt different.
Less like evidence.
More like... proof.
Proof that someone had wanted him to keep watching.
His phone vibrated.
Unknown Number.
Listen to the beginning.
Adrian frowned.
He had already heard the tape twice.
Still, he rewound it.
This time, he increased the volume and closed his eyes.
Static.
The doctor's voice.
The scraping chair.
The little girl.
Nothing unusual.
He was about to stop the recording when another sound emerged beneath the static.
Almost impossible to hear.
A faint rhythm.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Adrian opened his eyes.
Someone had been knocking.
Not on a door.
On glass.
He rewound the tape again.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Three knocks.
Always three.
The same pattern he had heard earlier at his apartment door.
His pulse quickened.
That couldn't be a coincidence.
Adrian moved into his small workspace.
The room contained shelves filled with audio equipment collected over the years.
Old tape decks.
Signal processors.
Waveform analyzers.
Restoring damaged recordings was what he did best.
If someone had hidden something inside the tape...
He would find it.
An hour later, a digital waveform filled his computer screen.
The knocking became clearer.
But there was something else.
A voice.
Barely audible.
Hidden beneath layers of noise.
Adrian isolated the frequency.
The sentence slowly emerged.
"...don't let him..."
He adjusted another filter.
"...forget..."
Again.
"...don't let him forget..."
The voice belonged to a woman.
Not the doctor.
Not the little girl.
Someone else.
He replayed the phrase over and over.
Each time, it became clearer.
"Don't let him forget."
Forget what?
A sudden knock startled him.
Three slow knocks.
Adrian spun toward the apartment door.
Silence.
Again.
Three knocks.
He walked quietly across the room.
No footsteps.
No voices.
He looked through the peephole.
The hallway was empty.
His heartbeat slowed.
This had happened before.
Carefully, he opened the door.
Nothing.
Only another black envelope lay on the floor.
Adrian stared at it.
He almost left it outside.
Almost.
Instead, he picked it up.
Inside was a single Polaroid photograph.
His apartment.
Taken years ago.
The furniture looked different.
The walls were still white, but the bookshelf stood near the opposite corner.
Adrian turned the photograph over.
A date.
Eight years ago.
His chest tightened.
He had not lived here eight years ago.
He was certain of it.
Wasn't he?
He searched his memory.
His previous apartment...
Where had it been?
He frowned.
He remembered moving.
He remembered unpacking.
But he couldn't remember the address.
Not even the neighborhood.
It was as though someone had erased that part of his life.
His phone buzzed.
Memory is fragile.
Another message followed immediately.
Evidence isn't.
Adrian looked at the photograph again.
The window.
The chair.
The notebook.
Everything was there.
Except...
Someone stood outside the window.
Only a silhouette.
Watching.
Adrian moved closer to the lamp.
The image was blurry.
He scanned it with his phone and enlarged it.
Gray coat.
Black hair.
The figure's face remained hidden.
His breathing slowed.
Someone had been watching him...
Long before he met Elara.
Midnight arrived.
Sleep never came.
Adrian placed every item on the dining table.
The cassette.
The old photograph.
The bookmark.
The child's drawing.
The black envelope.
He studied them like pieces of a puzzle.
One detail finally caught his attention.
Every object smelled the same.
Old books.
Dust.
Paper.
Libraries.
His eyes widened.
Rare books.
Elara worked as a rare-book conservator.
Was the scent intentional?
Or had every object passed through her hands?
His thoughts were interrupted by another vibration.
This time, there was no message.
Only a location pin.
A place in the northern part of the city.
An abandoned public library.
Below it, five words appeared.
Tomorrow. 6:17 a.m.
Adrian stared at the screen.
A trap.
Obviously.
He should ignore it.
Report everything to the police.
Delete the messages.
Destroy the tapes.
Instead, he opened his notebook.
On a fresh page, he wrote one sentence.
Abandoned Library — 6:17 a.m.
He closed the notebook.
His decision had already been made.
At exactly 2:11 a.m., the lights in his apartment flickered.
Once.
Twice.
Then darkness swallowed the room.
The power had failed.
Adrian reached for the flashlight beside his desk.
Before he could switch it on, a soft sound drifted through the silence.
A music box.
The melody was slow.
Gentle.
Childlike.
It seemed to come from somewhere inside the apartment.
Adrian froze.
He lived alone.
The music stopped.
His flashlight clicked on.
The narrow beam swept across the living room.
Empty.
Kitchen.
Empty.
Bedroom.
Nothing.
Then the light reached the hallway.
At the far end, something rested on the floor.
A small wooden music box.
Adrian was certain it had not been there before.
He approached cautiously.
The lid stood open.
Inside was no mechanism.
No gears.
Only a folded piece of paper.
He unfolded it.
Three handwritten lines waited.
You always remembered the details.
But never the beginning.
Come find it.
The apartment lights suddenly returned.
Adrian looked down again.
The music box was gone.
Only the note remained in his hand.
He blinked.
Had he imagined it?
No.
The paper was real.
His fingers tightened around it.
Across the street, a light appeared behind Elara's curtains.
Just for a second.
Long enough for Adrian to see a silhouette standing perfectly still.
Watching his window.
Watching him.
Then the light disappeared.
Adrian looked at the note one last time.
For the first time in years, he felt something stronger than curiosity.
Fear.
Not because someone was watching him.
But because, somewhere beneath the broken pieces of his memory...
...he was beginning to believe he already knew who she was.
He had simply forgotten.
- Writer
