The silence after Ava was supposed to be absolute.
Soroush had arranged his life around it. He quit his job at the film archive, moved out of their sunlit apartment with its too many memories, and rented this house at the edge of the city—a box of still air and neutral walls. He wanted a place with no echo of her laughter in the hallways, no phantom scent of her jasmine perfume in the bedrooms. He wanted void.
For six months, he got it.
Then, on a Tuesday night with no moon, the clock in his bedroom began to tick wrong.
It was an old analog thing, left by the previous owner. He'd never bothered to replace it. Its sound had been a distant, metronomic background noise. But that night, as he lay staring at the ceiling, the *tick… tock…* shifted. It grew softer, then louder. It developed a lopsided rhythm.
*Lub-dub. Pause. Lub-dub. Pause.*
Soroush sat up, his own heart seizing in his chest. He knew that rhythm. He had fallen asleep to its sound for seven years, his ear pressed against Ava's back. It was the arrhythmic signature of her mitral valve, a gentle flaw in her perfect biology. Her heartbeat.
He ripped the clock off the wall, fingers fumbling with the battery compartment. The plastic back came off, and a single AA battery rolled onto the floor. The ticking stopped. The room plunged into a silence so thick it pressed against his eardrums.
A hallucination. Grief playing its final, cruel trick. He told himself this as he lay back down, the cold battery clenched in his fist. He repeated it like a mantra until dawn bleached the windows gray.
The next morning, he heard it in the kitchen.
The faucet in the sink had a slow, persistent drip he'd been meaning to fix. *Plink… plink… plink…* It was the sound of inconvenience. But as he stood waiting for the kettle to boil, the intervals between the drips changed. They shortened, then lengthened, settling into a familiar, maddening pattern.
*Lub-dub. Pause. Lub-dub. Pause.*
Ice water trickled down his spine. He turned the faucet handles tight until his knuckles turned white. The dripping stopped. He let out a shaky breath, the steam from the kettle fogging the window over the sink.
Coincidence. A pattern imposed by a desperate mind. The human brain seeks order in chaos, he reasoned. He was seeking her in noise.
But the house had other plans.
That afternoon, the ceiling fan in the living room began to click. A soft, rhythmic *thump-thump-thump* with every rotation, perfectly synced to the memory of a pulse he could still feel against his cheek. He turned the fan off. The air conditioner hummed to life on its own, its low drone resolving into a subliminal, throbbing bassline. *Lub-dub. Lub-dub.*
He pulled the main circuit breaker. The house went dark and quiet. In the sudden void, he heard only the frantic hammering of his own heart. And beneath it, a faint, persistent vibration—not a sound, but a feeling—thrumming through the floorboards. A deep, subterranean pulse. The house itself had a heartbeat.
This was no longer grief. This was communication.
Three days passed. Soroush moved through the house like a ghost, disconnecting appliances, unplugging cords, living by candlelight. The pulses came anyway. They migrated. The refrigerator's motor. The pipes groaning in the walls. They were fainter, more scattered, but undeniably present. A persistent, pervasive presence.
On the fourth night, shivering in the candlelight, he understood. The pulses weren't random. The long pause was a dash. The short, double pulse was a dot.
It was Morse code.
His hands trembled as he found a pen and a scrap of paper. He sat on the floor, eyes closed, concentrating, translating the slow, patient signals emanating from the humming water heater.
-.. --- -. .----. - / ... .--. . .- -.-
DON'T SPEAK
- .... . -.-- / .- .-. . / .-.. .. ... - . -. .. -. --.
THEY'RE LISTENING
--. --- / - --- / - .... . / -... .- ... . -- . -. -
GO TO THE BASEMENT
The candle flame guttered, casting frantic shadows. Soroush stared at the words etched into the paper in his own clumsy handwriting. A message. From the house? From the pulses? From… her?
"Who is listening?" he whispered into the cold, dark air.
In response, every dead appliance in the kitchen—the microwave, the stove, the dishwasher—lit up simultaneously for a single, blinding second. Digital displays flashed `ERR0R`, `OVR L0AD`, `HAZARD`. Then, darkness again.
And in that darkness, a new sound. Not a pulse, but a whisper, woven into the residual static in the air, so faint he felt it more than heard it—a voice that was a memory of a voice, speaking a word that was not a word, but a name:
*Echo… Vox…*
The basement door, which he had kept locked since moving in, let out a soft, metallic *click*.
The lock was now open.
**Author's Note:**
This is the beginning of a descent into sound, memory, and a love that refuses to be silenced. New chapters will be uploaded regularly. If this first chapter resonated with you, please consider adding "Gentle Carnage" to your library and voting. It fuels the story. Thank you for reading.