THE SECOND VOICE - by Onlyreal

The first voice was mine. The second one introduced itself. It happened on a Tuesday at exactly 2:47 a.m. I woke up because someone whispered my name. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just enough to pull me from sleep. “Sochi.” My room was empty. The fan hummed overhead. The streetlights bled through the curtains, painting pale stripes across the floor. I reached for my phone. 2:47 a.m. As I unlocked it, a thought drifted through my mind. “Don’t check under the bed.” I frowned. Weird. The thought didn’t feel like mine. I laughed nervously and rubbed my eyes. “I’m dreaming.” “No.” The reply came instantly. Not from the room. Not from outside. Inside my head. My heart stumbled. “Who’s there?” No answer. Just silence. Then— “You heard me.” I sat upright. Every horror movie I’d ever watched rushed back into my mind. “This isn’t funny.” “Neither is what crawled into your room twenty-three minutes ago.” I looked toward the bedroom door. It was still closed. Locked. Exactly how I’d left it. I swallowed. “What are you talking about?” “Don’t move your feet.” I froze. The voice sounded calm. Patient. Almost… concerned. Then I heard it. A slow scrape. Under the bed. Like fingernails dragging across wood. Once. Twice. Then stopping. I stared at the darkness beneath the frame. Nothing. Nothing I could see. “It’s waiting for you to look.” ⸻ Morning came. Everything seemed normal. No scratches. No footprints. Nothing under the bed. I convinced myself I’d imagined everything. Until work. Around noon, I caught myself thinking about lunch. Before I could decide what to eat, another thought interrupted. “Don’t sit by the window.” Again. Not my thought. I ignored it. Sat by the window anyway. Five minutes later a delivery truck lost control outside and slammed into the café, shattering the exact window beside my chair. Glass exploded across the table. If I’d been sitting there… I would’ve been crushed. The voice never said, “I told you so.” It simply whispered— “You’re welcome.” ⸻ Days passed. Then weeks. The voice never left. It knew things. Tiny things. A stranger would lie before they opened their mouth. A power outage would happen thirty seconds before the lights died. Someone would call before the phone rang. It never explained how. It just knew. Slowly… I stopped questioning it. We talked. Sometimes for hours. It knew memories I’d forgotten. Embarrassing moments from childhood. Dreams I’d never told anyone. Even the exact wording of conversations I’d had years ago. One night I asked the question that had been haunting me. “Who are you?” The answer came immediately. “I’ve always been here.” “No.” “Long before you noticed.” ⸻ The nightmares began after that. Every night I dreamed of the same hallway. Endless. Dark. Covered with hundreds of doors. Behind every door… Someone was whispering. Thousands of overlapping voices. Some crying. Some laughing. Some begging to be let out. Only one door remained silent. The voice in my head always said the same thing. “Never open that one.” Naturally… One night I did. Inside wasn’t a room. It was another hallway. Exactly like the first. Except every door was already open. And every whisper stopped the moment I stepped inside. Something enormous breathed in the darkness. Not angry. Hungry. I woke screaming. 2:47 a.m. Every clock in my apartment read the same time. Even the microwave. Even the watch in my drawer whose battery had died months ago. 2:47. ⸻ The voice changed after that. It sounded… tired. It hesitated before speaking. Sometimes it whispered things that made no sense. “It’s getting closer.” “What is?” “The one that listens.” “There are others?” No reply. ⸻ Then I started hearing a third voice. Not often. Only when I was alone. It never spoke directly to me. It spoke to the second voice. “You weren’t supposed to wake him.” The second voice answered. “He deserves to know.” “He deserves to survive.” I couldn’t tell who was speaking anymore. Sometimes they argued for hours. Sometimes they both fell silent at the exact same moment. Those moments frightened me most. Because silence meant… something else was listening. ⸻ Then came the recordings. I would wake to find my phone had recorded eight hours of audio while I slept. Most files contained nothing. Static. Occasional breathing. Then one recording changed everything. At 2:47 a.m., my sleeping voice said, “I can hear you.” Five different voices answered at once. “We know.” Another voice—one I had never heard before—laughed. Then it said, “He’s almost empty.” The recording ended. I never remembered saying any of it. ⸻ My reflection became… unreliable. Sometimes it blinked after I did. Sometimes it smiled before I smiled. One evening I walked past a mirror in my hallway. The reflection didn’t follow. It stayed behind. Watching me leave. When I looked back… It was normal again. The second voice whispered, “Don’t trust mirrors anymore.” ⸻ The apartment began changing. Doors opened into rooms that didn’t exist yesterday. Closets became deeper than the building itself. The hallway outside my apartment grew longer every night. Neighbors disappeared. No one remembered them. Photos changed. Family portraits slowly replaced familiar faces with strangers. Except I still remembered. The voice remembered too. “It’s rewriting everything.” ⸻ Sleep became impossible. Because every time I closed my eyes… I could feel someone counting. Not aloud. Inside my thoughts. One. Two. Three. Always stopping at nine. Never ten. I finally asked why. The second voice answered, “Because ten means it has found you.” ⸻ One night, exhausted, I shouted into the darkness. “What do you want from me?” The apartment fell silent. The fan stopped. Traffic disappeared. Even the city seemed to stop breathing. Then every shadow in the room leaned toward my bed. Not physically. Impossible. But unmistakably. Thousands of whispers merged into one sentence. “We don’t want you.” A pause. “We want the one hiding behind your thoughts.” For the first time… The second voice sounded afraid. Truly afraid. “Don’t answer them.” The darkness laughed. “You still think you’re the first person he’s protected?” Another laugh. “Ask him his real name.” I whispered, “…What’s your name?” The silence lasted so long I thought it was over. Finally, the second voice answered. “If I tell you…” “You’ll remember why you forgot me.” The room shook. Every mirror cracked. The lights exploded. Something began crawling across the ceiling, too fast to see clearly. The whispers became screams. Then— Everything stopped. Morning sunlight spilled through the curtains. The room looked normal. No broken glass. No cracked mirrors. No signs of anything unusual. My phone buzzed with a notification. A voice memo had been recorded overnight. Duration: 00:00:01 I pressed play. It was my own voice. Calm. Clear. Smiling. It said only one sentence. “The first voice was never yours.”

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