THE SILENT APARTMENT

THE SILENT APARTMENT —Episode 2: The voice in the floor

Title: The Silent Apartment – Episode 2: The Voice in the Floor

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Lila thought leaving Apartment 3B would end it.

She had moved across town, signed a lease in a sunlit fourth-floor walk-up with no history, no eerie silences, and definitely no sealed walls. She had told herself she was being paranoid — trauma manifesting as superstition. Everyone has their breaking point, and maybe hers had just been a little… louder.

For the first two weeks, things were normal. Her phone worked. The lights didn’t flicker. The nights were blessedly quiet — no rhythmic knocking, no ghostly whispers. She finally began to sleep again. But then, exactly seventeen days after she left 3B, Lila received a voicemail.

There was no number listed.

The message was only seven seconds long.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

…pause…

Knock. Knock.

…pause…

Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock.

Then silence.

Her breath caught. She deleted the message. Blocked the number. But deep down, she knew — she hadn’t imagined any of it. And something, somehow, had followed her.

The next night, she woke to a sharp pain in her ear. A high-pitched ringing. Her apartment felt colder than usual, the kind of cold that didn’t come from drafty windows. She pulled the covers over her head.

That’s when she heard the floor creak — inside her bedroom.

She lay frozen.

No footsteps. No movement. Just one, drawn-out creak, like someone had pressed their weight down slowly. Then a whisper, right by her ear.

“…why did you leave me…”

She screamed.

The lights snapped on instantly — no flicker, no delay. Her room was empty.

She didn’t sleep.

The next morning, she visited a local library and dug up everything she could on the building at her old address. Public records, renovation permits, historical documents. At first, it was dry. But in the archives, buried in a yellowed newspaper clipping from 1953, she found it:

“MISSING GIRL PRESUMED DEAD: Local nurse Mary Caldwell vanished from her residence at 4137 Braxton Avenue, Apartment 3B. Authorities suspect foul play. No body has been recovered.”

Mary Caldwell.

The forgotten girl.

Lila remembered the shoe. The chains. The writing.

She scanned the article for more. At the bottom, one chilling line:

“Neighbors reported hearing knocking in the weeks following her disappearance, but no evidence was found inside the walls.”

Lila sat frozen. The same knocks. Over seventy years later.

What if Mary never left?

That night, Lila dreamed of chains dragging across the floor. She stood in a room that wasn’t hers, dim and narrow, and Mary was there — her eyes black, her mouth sewn shut. She was trying to speak, but the sound came out as knocking. Always knocking.

When Lila woke, her feet were dirty. Dust and splinters clung to her soles.

There were scratches on the floorboards by her bed.

She stared at them, unblinking. Four vertical lines, parallel. One short diagonal crossing them.

Five marks.

Like someone was keeping count.

By the next evening, she could barely function. She skipped work. Kept the lights on. Moved her bed away from the marked area. But at 3:17 a.m., she heard it again — this time from below.

Three knocks. A pause. Two knocks. A pause.

Then, four. Followed by a low groan, like a floorboard being pried open from underneath.

She stood, grabbed her flashlight, and pried up the loose panel where the scratches had been.

What she saw underneath wasn’t just floor.

It was cement — smeared with something dark and cracked.

But the center was strange. Softer. Recently patched.

A plastic evidence tag lay half-buried in the dust. It read:

“B1-4137 / Caldwell / DO NOT REMOVE”

Her stomach flipped.

She backed away.

The knock came again — this time from inside the cement.

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The police didn’t believe her when she called. “Old record,” they said. “Probably left behind during the previous investigation.”

No one came.

That night, she stayed at a hotel.

But at 3:17 a.m., the hotel phone rang.

Lila let it ring.

She unplugged the cord.

Still, the knocking came — from inside the headboard.

And the whisper:

“…I remember you…”