Leo had always craved silence. The city’s constant roar had frayed his nerves to threads. When he found the old apartment on Hemlock Street, its profound quiet felt like a sanctuary. The agent had called it “blessedly soundproof.” Leo called it peace.
The first week was bliss. He read, he wrote, he breathed without the city’s static. Then he noticed the first peculiarity—the complete absence of sound. Not just quiet, but a vacuum. No hum of a refrigerator, no creak of floorboards, no distant traffic. It was a silence so deep it felt solid, a substance filling the rooms.
By the third week, the silence began to feel attentive. Leo would turn suddenly, feeling a presence just behind him, but there was only the stillness, waiting. He started talking to himself, just to break the void. His voice sounded thin, swallowed by the air before it could echo.
One evening, he dropped a glass in the kitchen. It shattered on the tiles, but the crash was muted, absorbed into nothingness. He stared at the glittering shards, his heart hammering in a chest that felt too tight. That’s when he saw it—the silence had a shape. A faint distortion in the air, a humanoid outline of absolute nothing, standing over the broken glass.
It was learning his sounds, stealing them. It was learning *him*.
Now, Leo sits frozen in his armchair. He doesn’t blink. He doesn’t breathe too loudly. The thing made of silence stands in the corner of the room, a hole in the world, and it is watching him. It is patient. It knows he will have to make a sound eventually. And when he does, it will take that, too.