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Meera Patel moved into her new flat in Whitefield, Bengaluru on a Tuesday. It was a compact, eighth-floor apartment nestled in a silent, under-construction complex with more cement dust than neighbors. A tech project manager at a growing analytics firm, Meera considered solitude a gift. The flat came with nothing but blank walls, powerful WiFi, and a sweeping view of indifferent grey skies.
That first night, as she was unpacking, her phone buzzed. A message from the apartment’s WhatsApp residents’ group popped up, and her Google Assistant inexplicably read it aloud without being prompted.
“Meera did not see the window latch. She will fall.” said her phone, in her own voice — as if mimicking her speech, only slightly warped, flattened, like a corrupted voice-note.
She stared at the screen. The message wasn’t there.
But exactly twenty-seven hours later, it was. The same sentence, word for word, appeared in the residents’ group, posted by an unfamiliar number. It came right after she had opened her window to shake a curtain and nearly lost balance.
Her stomach sank.
She turned off the voice setting, checked app permissions, googled voice malware, even factory reset the phone. A week passed with silence, until the next Wednesday night.
This time, the voice said: “Someone will see the basement door, at 2:17 a.m. It is a mouth.”
Chilled, Meera did not check the time. But at some sleepy hour deep in the night, she heard the elevator groan and stop at the first floor. No one entered. The next morning, she saw on the building WhatsApp group a photo: An old, rusted basement door hanging ajar. Caption: “Creepy stuff! Who opened this? Caught on CCTV, exactly 2:17.”
That was the day she stopped sleeping with her phone nearby.
But the voice continued.
Each new week, one message. Always on Wednesday night. Spoken from her phone when she wasn’t looking. Always posted into the group chat the next day. Each more disturbing than the last.
“Do not speak to Flat 804. It wears her skin, but it is not her.”
“The plumbing is not broken. It is them trying to breathe.”
“There will be a funeral before Friday. It will be noisy.”
She tried telling the building manager. He smiled awkwardly, then laughingly admitted, “That group’s weird, na? Sometimes I think people are… playing games.”
Her office hours became stressful. She stopped going into meetings. At night, Meera scrubbed her floor, kept lights on, watched old cartoons with volume maxed. Nothing would drown the sound of her own voice telling her what would happen.
Then one Thursday morning, her own mother called in a panic: Meera’s WhatsApp avatar was changed — to a photo of her sleeping. Taken from above.
She hadn’t posted it.
She opened the app. Her group profile picture had indeed changed. Just a blurry overhead shot of her curled up under blankets, pale, bruised arm dangling over the bed’s edge.
That night, she slept with her phone locked in her car downstairs.
Still, at 2:44 a.m., her bedroom echoed with that voice. This time, it didn’t come from a phone.
It came from under her bed.
“You shouldn’t have unplugged. Now we have to stay.”
She bolted, barefoot down concrete stairs, past the half-painted floors and flickering tube lights. Marching across the parking lot, she jumped in her car and drove off into what remained of the night.
Two days later, news spread.
Flat 809 — hers — was declared abandoned. The building CCTV showed her walking out barefoot at 2:47 a.m., with blood on one heel and tangled hair. She did not return.
But on Sunday night, the WhatsApp group buzzed again.
A new message appeared, sent by a contact only marked as: ‘+44 8080 808080’.
No one had that number saved.
The message was a voice note.
Meera’s voice.
It said: “This week, someone else will dream in someone else’s timeline. You will think it’s only yours. But we overlap now. Completely.”
Several residents left the group in panic. The admin tried to delete the message. It returned apocalyptically every time — interval after interval — like a transmission in a radio that couldn’t be turned off.
No one saw Meera again.
Her profile still lights up every Wednesday night, with a status that reads: “Reading next week in advance.”
And sometimes, someone hears their name said out loud — in Meera’s prophecy-voice — before they see a single message appear.
Not even Google’s engineers can explain why.
