The Hollow Static

The first time I noticed was at the Armitage House, a sprawling Victorian that had been abandoned for decades. I was twelve, helping my father clear out the overgrown garden, when a low, guttural sound rumbled from the direction of the boarded-up cellar. My father dismissed it as a trapped raccoon, but I felt the cold seep through my gloves, a chill that had nothing to do with the October air.

Over the years, the incidents became a pattern. Whispers in the walls of our new apartment, a shadow that slipped under my bedroom door at night. But the worst was the woman. I was fourteen, lying awake in the dark, when I heard her voice outside my window, thin and desperate. ‘Help,’ she cried, then a wet, starving snarl, and silence. I never opened the curtain.

Then came the fever. I was confined to my bed for a week, aches and nausea clouding my thoughts. On the night of my sixteenth birthday, with the clock striking eleven, the air in my room turned to ice. The sheets beneath me grew damp and cold, as if soaked in freezing water. A low growl vibrated from the corner, and I turned my head, my heart a drum against my ribs.

There, crouched in the shadows, was a dog. But not a real dog. It was a black void, its body a negative space that seemed to swallow the light around it. It had eyes—no, not eyes, but pits—empty sockets that seemed to pull the room’s darkness into them. It stared at me, its growl a vibration in my bones. Then it lunged, a silent torpedo of pure absence, and passed through the wall behind me, leaving a patch of frost on the wallpaper.

I scrambled to the window, my breath fogging the glass. Below, on the empty street, a tall figure stood beneath the flickering streetlamp. It wore a long coat, its face obscured by shadows, but I could see its arm raised, pointing right at me. My blood turned to ice as I realized—it had seen me. And then, as the lamp flickered back to life, the figure was gone, leaving only the hollow static of the night, and a whisper in the static: ‘Found you.’

Since that night, the cold has followed me. I see the dog in the periphery, always at the edge of my vision, always waiting. And the man—I know he’s out there, somewhere, walking with a slow, deliberate pace, counting down the days until he finds me again. I don’t know what they want, but I know they’re patient. And I know the static in my ears never stops, a faint hiss that grows louder whenever I close my eyes, as if the silence itself is hungry.