Under the Floorboards

Asya sat alone, surrounded by the silence of the night. Heavy eyes flittered towards the clock, its hands worming closer to midnight. She should have been asleep hours ago, but an inexplicable restlessness bit at her mind, keeping her ever wakeful.

As if on cue, a faint noise disturbed the quiet. At first, it was nothing more than a sigh, a subtle scratching that danced at the edge of her perception. Asya froze, her heart up in her throat. Her straught ears, searching for the source of the worry. But the noise dragged on, growing harsher with each passing moment.

It seemed to emanate from beneath her feet, beneath the floorboards of the apartment. With tottery hands, she reached for a flashlight, her breath unable to exit her lips. She shinned down into the murk of the hallway, the wooden planks creaking beneath her mass.

With each step, the pother intensified, morphing into a cacophony of mutterings and static that seemed to bleed through the walls themselves. Asya’s pulse squealed in her ears as she hunched down, pressing an ear against the floorboards.

Amidst the symphony of sounds, she heard it—words spoken, asthenic and disfigured, but unmistakably human. It spoke in hushed tones, weaving tales of madness and woe. Asya recoiled, her mind reeling with alarum.

Crazedly, she began to tear at the floorboards, her hands clawing at the wooden planks in a frenzied bid for escape. But with each board she ripped away, the words only amplified louder, the words rang inside her skull.

Hours passed in a fog of panic and wildness until, at last, she bared the source of the racket—a hidden chamber veiled beneath her apartment, a forgotten relic of a bygone era. And there, in the eclipse, she found the remnants of a life long lost—a skeleton bound in chains, its empty sockets staring up at her unforgivingly.

As horror consumed her, Asya stumbled backwards, her mind unweaving with each passing second. Just as she reached her maximum, sudden lightning stuck her—a telling so nauseating, so unthinkable, that it sent chills down her backbone.

For the voice that had haunted her all along was not that of a stranger, but her own—a cochlear parroting of inward dreads and inkiest urges, lying in wait within the core of a fissured psyche.