The Static in the Walls

My name is Elara, and I need to tell someone what’s been happening. It started two days ago, but I can’t shake the feeling that it began long before I noticed.

I live in an old house my late grandmother left me, a creaking Victorian with peeling wallpaper and a basement that always smells of damp earth. After she passed, I inherited a box of her vinyl records, each one a relic of a time I never knew. I set up her ancient turntable in my study, a room that used to be her sewing parlor. It felt like a way to keep her close.

Yesterday, I was reading in that study, and the turntable clicked on by itself. The record, a scratched copy of a 1940s big band album, spun but produced only a low, continuous static – the kind you hear at the very end of a record, the needle circling in the run-out groove. I stood, my heart hammering. I’d never touched it that day. I tried to lift the needle, but it seemed stuck, and the static hissed louder, as if the room itself was breathing. I fled downstairs, the sound following me like a bad memory.

I told myself it was a malfunction. But this morning, I found something worse. I’d left for work and returned to take a nap in my bedroom, a room I rarely use since grandmother’s passing. When I pulled back the duvet, there it was – a record, not from the big band stack, but a classical piece, one I’d stored in a cabinet on the second floor. It lay on my pillow, perfectly centered, as if placed with care. And it was cold, colder than the room should be.

This was the record I’d last listened to with my grandmother the week she died. She’d been playing it, and I’d turned it off when she fell asleep. I never touched it again. I keep it wrapped in a cloth in that cabinet. Or I thought I did. When I checked, the cabinet was open, the cloth discarded on the floor, and the record slot was empty.

I don’t know what’s happening. It’s been a year since she passed, and I’ve never felt so watched. The static from the turntable seems to have seeped into the walls, a faint hiss that follows me from room to room. And tonight, as I started writing this, I noticed a small, circular scratch on the wall beside my bed – exactly the size of a record’s label. It’s as if the house is trying to tell me something, or worse, it’s trying to make me listen.