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Meera Roy had lived in noisy places all her life—horn-blaring streets, congested rooftops, paper-thin hostel walls. So when she found the third-floor flat in the Byatar Apartment Complex, tucked just past a Durga idol workshop on a narrow Kolkata lane, she felt like she’d finally found silence.
The flat was modest: worn wooden floors, a single rusted balcony grill, and a kitchen that smelled of cardamom and old smoke. But it was quiet. She moved in that winter, grateful for stillness.
For two weeks, calm reigned. Meera worked freelance remotely, exchanged pleasantries with the local grocer, and kept mostly to herself. She noticed something odd, though: the third floor only had two flats. Hers, and the one opposite—unlit, unsold, junked with old paint drums and newspaper bundles.
On the fifteenth night, she woke with a jolt. Not from a dream, but from a sound.
Scrrrtch.
It wasn’t loud—but sharp. Like fingernails dragged across thick paper. It came from her wall, the one she shared with the corridor. She glanced at the clock: 3:33 a.m.
For almost five minutes, it persisted. Then silence fell.
In the morning, she checked the wall. No rodents. No cracks.
The next night, again at 3:33, the exact same scratching began. Same pitch. Same location. When a third straight night repeated the ritual, she asked Mrs. Banerjee from the second floor.
“Did you hear that noise last night around 3:30?”
Mrs. Banerjee blinked. “What noise?”
“Like…scratching. From inside the wall.”
“No beta. Our floor’s dead silent at night. Are you sure it wasn’t from outside?”
The watchman confirmed no movement on the third floor during those hours. No deliveries. No cats.
Meera started recording the sound. On night five, she left her phone on. At 3:33 — right on cue — the rhythm began.
Scrrrtch. Scraaaape. Tap. Tap. Scratch.
On playback, her phone registered nothing.
She sent the clip to her college friend Rakhi, who did sound design. Rakhi messaged back: “There’s audio artifacts…but it sounds like reversed mouth clicks? Not sure. Almost like primitive phonetics.”
The idea settled uneasily in Meera’s chest.
She stayed up the next night, pressing her ear against that stretch of wall. As the sound began, she listened more carefully—this wasn’t random at all. The spacing, the repetition…it had structure.
It was language.
In angsty dread, she wrote down the pattern of sounds each night. The sequences occasionally repeated, then lengthened. One week in, Meera realized what was truly horrifying: the “speech” was adapting. Some of the newer patterns mirrored her own breathing. When she had sniffled from a cold, it had tapped in throaty rhythms, echoing her. The wall was learning her.
She began to speak back—quietly—just fragments: “Who are you?” “What do you want?” “Leave me alone.”
And by the tenth night, it responded. There were gaps now in the scratching, spaces where sound waited. It was building a sentence.
One evening, unable to take the tension, Meera visited the too-quiet flat across hers. The lock was broken. Dust clouded her vision. Inside, the furniture was wrong—impossibly narrow doorframes, sloping mirrors, a lampshade that hummed slightly when she looked away. Blackened polaroids lined the mantle. All of them featured blurred people. And behind the farthest wall, there were fresh scratch marks. Long. Like claw gouges that had failed to break through.
Panicked, Meera fled back home.
That night, she plugged earphones into her recorder, left one piece on the wall and another to the speaker beside her bed, hoping maybe the world inside knew something she didn’t.
At 3:33, the sound came again. But this time, for the first time, her recorder captured something—a hiss, then a whispered string of sounds coalescing into a phrase.
“Don’t go to sleep.”
She didn’t.
The next night, it said more.
“They kept me on the other side. Don’t forget. Listen again.”
Through growing dread, Meera replayed every clip, reversed audio, slowed the tempo. And deep within the static, she heard her own voice. Not her recent one. A fragment of her six-year-old self, stammering during a school play, captured somehow between the clicks.
By now, Meera was unraveling. She rarely left her flat. The city felt distant, unreal. Even sunlight dulled near her windows.
On the nineteenth night, the voice said something new:
“We let you return once. But the crack is open again.”
The scratching began not on the wall—but from the floor. Then the ceiling. Then, impossibly, from inside the bathroom mirror.
Doctors said she was suffering auditory hallucinations due to isolation. They prescribed pills and rest. Her parents insisted she come home. She booked her ticket for the next day.
That night, Meera packed. But while zipping her suitcase, she noticed something odd: her reflection did not match her. Her movements lagged slightly. Her face was subtly wrong.
Then, from the reflection, came a single sentence in familiar, raspy clicks:
“You are already on the wrong side.”
Her suitcase slumped open. Her floorboards trembled.
Somewhere behind the mirror, something chuckled—slowly, patiently. Because Meera Roy had never really left the other apartment.
