Echo Room by Andy Brooke
The first time I heard it, I was unpacking books. A child’s laughter – bright and sudden – followed by a woman’s voice: “Dinner in five, Jamie.” My hand stilled mid-air, the weight of an unplaced hardback suspended between box and shelf. The apartment remained silent, as though waiting for my reaction.
The estate agent had mentioned the room’s unusual acoustics: nineteenth-century design principles combined with the curved ceiling. “Perfect for musicians,” she’d said, tapping the wall with her knuckle, producing a resonant thud like a tuning fork.
I wasn’t a musician. But I was intrigued. Not afraid. Not yet.
Over the next week, I catalogued the sounds. A couple arguing about bills. A birthday celebration. A man practicing violin (always the same passage from Vivaldi, always with the same mistake in the third measure).
One night, I bolted awake to air-raid sirens and a clipped BBC voice announcing German bombers approaching London. Then silence, broken only by the soft tick of my watch counting seconds in an empty room.
I began recording them. Each playback was distorted, voices pitched lower, words reversed, or sometimes just harsh static. But holding the phone to my ear during playback, beneath the distortion, I could make out new voices that hadn’t been there during the original recording. I started a spreadsheet – timestamps, descriptions, duration. The responsible tenant would document the phenomenon properly!
The first anomaly appeared on Tuesday. A weather forecast for heavy snow. In May. I checked my phone: clear skies for weeks.
Two days later, it snowed unexpectedly. The meteorologists called it unprecedented.
That night, I heard a political speech celebrating an election victory. A candidate who wasn’t even running yet.
The voices grew clearer. More frequent. They began to overlap – past conversations weaving through future ones like misaligned radio signals. I stopped sleeping. Stopped recording. There were too many voices.
Then yesterday, I heard my own.
“It’s coming through now,” I heard my voice saying, thin with terror. “Oh God, it’s breaking through the—”
I’ve stopped leaving the apartment. When the walls whisper, I listen.
Last night I heard myself again. “There’s a pattern to when it comes through,” my voice explained calmly. “It’s the acoustics. They’re not capturing sound—they’re eroding whatever it is that separates us from what’s trying to get in.”
I’ve positioned my chair facing the wall with the most resonant point. Notebook open. Pen ready.
The wallpaper has begun to ripple, like the surface of water disturbed from below.
I’m recording everything now. For whoever finds this later.
Andy Brooke is a British writer fascinated by the extraordinary lurking just beyond the ordinary. His fiction explores the uncanny moments where reality seems to shift; where the familiar becomes strange and the mundane reveals hidden depths. Drawing inspiration from classic horror and literary fiction alike, Andy crafts stories that probe the thin boundaries between our comfortable realities and the mysterious forces that exist just out of sight. His precise, evocative prose invites readers to question what might be listening, watching, or waiting behind the wallpaper of their own lives. When not writing, he can be found collecting strange local legends and examining the acoustics of old buildings with suspicious intensity.
Instagram: @onthefringesofreality
Artwork by Caroline Grimshaw
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