The Kitchen Radio

I grew up in a small, two-bedroom flat above a bakery on the outskirts of Haarlem, in the Netherlands. The building was old, with creaky floorboards and a single, narrow staircase that always smelled of stale bread and damp plaster. My mother worked nights at a hospital, and my brother, five years older, was usually out with his friends, so from a young age I was used to being alone in the evenings. But ‘alone’ never felt quite accurate.

It started when I was six. I would lie in my narrow bed, listening to the sounds of the building settling—the groan of the pipes, the patter of mice behind the walls—and then, without fail, I would hear a voice. It was a man’s voice, low and muffled, as if he were speaking from behind a heavy door. Sometimes he would seem to be reading aloud, the cadence of words rising and falling like a bedtime story, though I could never make out a single word. Other times, he would hum a tune, a sad, meandering melody that I still find myself humming to this day. I never told anyone, because I thought every child heard such things, like the creaks of a house or the hooting of an owl.

Years passed, and the voice became a constant, a kind of white noise to my childhood. I grew up, moved to Amsterdam for school, and eventually returned to Haarlem for a job after my mother passed. I inherited the flat above the bakery, but the bakery had long since closed, and the building was now owned by a developer who was planning to convert it into offices. I had one month to clear everything out before the demolition crew arrived.

I went back to the flat on a crisp autumn day. The furniture was exactly as I remembered it—the worn sofa, the Formica table, the brown wallpaper with its pattern of fading roses. The air was thick with dust and the ghost of my mother’s cooking. I started in the kitchen, opening drawers and cabinets, tossing out old utensils and broken appliances. And then I found it: a small, portable radio, the kind with a leather strap and a dial for tuning. It was tucked at the back of a cupboard, coated in grease and cobwebs. I remembered it vaguely—my father used to listen to it when I was small, before he left. He had a collection of old jazz records, and he would play them on the radio’s built-in speaker.

I turned the radio over in my hands. The battery compartment was empty, and the plug was bent, but on a whim, I pressed the power button. To my surprise, the dial lit up softly, and a faint hiss came from the speaker. I turned the tuning knob, expecting to find a station, but the hiss only varied in pitch. Then, beneath the static, I heard it: a voice. A man’s voice. Low, muffled, exactly as I remembered. My blood ran cold. I dropped the radio, and it clattered to the floor, the voice cutting off.

I stood frozen, my heart pounding. It couldn’t be the same voice—I hadn’t heard it since I was a child, and my father had been dead for over a decade. But the melody was the same, that sad, meandering tune. I picked the radio up again, my hands trembling. This time, I didn’t turn it on. I wrapped it in a cloth and took it to my rented car, determined to dispose of it that evening.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. The memory of the voice was too vivid, too close. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, when I heard it again. Not from the radio, but from the hallway outside my apartment. It was the same low, muffled speech, but clearer now, as if the speaker were right outside my door. I got up, my legs weak, and peered through the peephole. The hallway was empty, but the voice grew louder, almost as if it were coming from inside the walls. I pressed my ear to the wood, and I heard a clear sentence for the first time in my life: ‘Are you still there, little one?’

I stumbled back, knocking over a chair. The voice didn’t stop. It continued, a soft, soothing murmur, like a parent reading to a child. It spoke in short phrases, pausing as if waiting for a response. I recognized the story—it was the tale of a rabbit and a fox, one my father used to tell me from a book I still had somewhere. But my father was dead, and the voice was not his. It was deeper, older, as if it had been waiting all these years to finish the tale.

It dawned on me that the voice had never been in my childhood bedroom. It had been in the walls, in the radio, in the very fabric of that building. And now it had followed me home. The radio sat in the trunk of my car, but the voice was here, in my apartment, insinuating itself into my new life.

Over the following days, the voice became more frequent. I would wake in the middle of the night to find my apartment filled with the sound of a man humming that tune. My colleagues asked why I looked so tired, why I jumped at the sound of a phone ringing. I tried to leave the radio somewhere, but it always reappeared—once on my kitchen counter, once inside my briefcase, its batteries mysteriously fresh, the dial set to a frequency that produced only static and that haunting murmur.

One night, I had had enough. I drove to the old building, convinced that I could end this by facing the source. I let myself in with the keys I still had. The flat was dark, the electricity long cut off, but I carried a flashlight. I went straight to the kitchen, where the radio had been, and searched the walls. Behind a loose panel, I found it: a gap in the brickwork, and inside, a small, rusted spoon. I reached in, my fingers brushing against something soft. I pulled out a child’s cloth doll, stained and crumbling. It was one I had forgotten—a gift from my father, which I thought I had lost years ago. I had been told he took it with him when he left, but here it was, hidden in the wall.

I sat on the dusty floor, the doll in my hands, and the voice began to speak. It was not a man’s voice anymore—it was the high, reedy voice of a woman, and it said, ‘Did you think I would let you leave without saying goodbye?’

I understood then: the voice had never been male. It was the voice of the bakery’s previous owner, who had died in that building before I was born. She had lost a child in infancy, and she had taken to whispering to the walls, to the pipes, to the radio that she had left behind. When my father found the radio, he unwittingly became her conduit. She had been speaking through him, to me, trying to find her own child in the sound of my breathing, my heartbeat.

I dropped the doll and ran, but as I reached the door, I heard the radio click on in the kitchen. The voice was calm now, almost gentle. It said, ‘Your father knew. He left the radio for you. It’s the only way I can reach you. Stay, little one. Stay with me.’

I didn’t stay. I fled down the stairs, through the darkened shop, and into the street. But I knew it wasn’t over. The radio is in my car, wrapped in a cloth. The voice is in my apartment. And every night, when I close my eyes, I hear the woman in the walls, humming a lullaby, waiting for me to come back.