The Concrete Choir

In the autumn of my ninth year, our class was moved to the old annex—a squat, brutalist block of raw concrete that seemed to swallow the weak afternoon light. There were only seven of us students: me, my best friend Tomas, the twins Mia and Mara, quiet Jonah, sharp-tongued Petra, and little Elsie. Our teacher, Mr. Vance, a man with chalk-dust permanently etched into his blazer, tried to make the best of it, but we all felt it: the room was wrong. It was always cold, no matter how high the radiators cranked, and the walls seemed to breathe a stale, mineral breath.

Elsie was five, with a mess of copper curls that escaped her white bonnet and a perpetually runny nose. She was a strange child, prone to long silences and sudden, unsettling pronouncements about things she couldn’t possibly know. She claimed she could hear the worms under the playground, and once she pointed at a passing funeral procession and said, ‘They’re not crying for the body, they’re crying for the thing that got out.’ We laughed, nervously. She was just a weird kid.

The first incident happened in late October. Mr. Vance was droning on about fractions when a soft tap began on the far wall—a bare concrete expanse with a faint water stain shaped like a crooked hand. We all turned. Tap. Tap-tap. It was rhythmic, almost like a heartbeat. Mr. Vance paused, chalk frozen mid-air. ‘Probably pipes,’ he said, but his voice was thin. The tap grew louder, became a persistent knock, then a bang that shook the flimsy portable shelf of dictionaries. The windows rattled. And then, as suddenly as it started, it stopped. We all exhaled. But Elsie was staring at the wall, her eyes wide, her lips moving silently.

The next week, the whispers began. It wasn’t a voice we heard in our ears; it was more like a pressure inside our skulls, a vibration of words that we felt more than heard. ‘Leave,’ it seemed to say. ‘Leave this place.’ It was a single, silent word, repeated until our heads throbbed. The banging became a nightly occurrence, something we grew accustomed to by the sheer necessity of having to sit in that room. Mr. Vance, ever the pragmatist, suggested we ignore it. ‘Phantom drafts,’ he’d say, but his hand trembled when he wrote on the board.

One particular afternoon, with the sky the color of a bruise, the banging intensified and synchronized with the rhythm of our heartbeats. The air grew thick and heavy, pressing against our eardrums. Then, for the first time, we heard a whisper—not in our minds, but in the air, as if from a dozen tiny mouths hidden in the grout between the concrete blocks. ‘Get out,’ it rasped, a chorus of dry, withered voices. ‘Get out before it wakes.’ The door slammed shut on its own. The lights flickered. Petra screamed. Mr. Vance rushed to the door, but the handle was scorching hot, and he recoiled with a yelp. We were trapped. The banging was no longer on the walls; it was on the floor, beneath our feet, as if something was trying to claw its way up from the earth.

I wanted to cry, but I was frozen. Tomas grabbed my arm, his nails digging into my skin. The twins hugged each other, whimpering. Jonah was chanting something under his breath—a prayer, I think. But little Elsie was calm. She walked to the center of the room, her white gown dragging on the dirty floor, and she began to hum a tune I’d never heard—a strange, minor-key lullaby. As she hummed, the banging grew softer, the whispers quieted, and the door clicked open. The lights steadied. The oppressive air lifted. We all stared at her, dumbfounded. She turned, and for a fleeting second, her eyes were not a child’s eyes. They were ancient, milk-white, and utterly empty.

Mr. Vance yanked the door open and we fled, stumbling over each other, into the hall. We never went back to that room. The school declared it structurally unsound and sealed it off. But after that day, Elsie was never quite the same. She would sometimes stand in the middle of the playground, her head tilted, as if listening to something beneath the soil. And sometimes, in the dead of night, I’d wake to the sound of tapping on my window—soft, rhythmic, almost like a heartbeat. And from somewhere deep inside me, I’d hear a whisper, dry as old bone, saying my name.

Years have passed. The annex was demolished, and a new library now stands in its place. But I still dream of that concrete room. And in my dreams, the walls are sweating, and there is a choir of tiny voices singing, ‘We are the ones who stayed. We are the ones who remember.’ And in the center of that choir, I always see a little girl with copper curls, her white bonnet askew, and she is smiling. But her eyes—her eyes are not her own.