Survival/Apocalypse10 min read
"The Knock Was in the Audio"
ButterPicks34 views
"I saved the image."
I said it to my phone and to no one else, thumb trembling.
"Why?" Fraser laughed over my shoulder two seconds later.
"Because I'm curious," I lied.
I am Elias Jenkins. I'm seventeen. I was supposed to be asleep, but I was scrolling through a forum at 2:00 a.m. when a post made my stomach go cold.
"Guys, save your shoes. Don't add me. I quit," the top line read, then the doctor started typing like someone trying to outrun a storm.
"It was delivered to our ER," Dr. Remy Allen wrote. "He looked like he'd been dead for days. But then—" He posted a photo.
I tapped it. The photo showed an old man in a black robe walking past a glass window. One eye stared like a white coin. The face was dry and brown, full of patches.
"I saved it," I told Fraser again. "Keep scrolling."
"You're ridiculous," Fraser said, but he stayed. Johanna Feng leaned in from across the aisle. "Don't — Elias, don't stare."
The thread filled up with jokes. Someone called the poster a liar. Someone said corpse-marks. One line I didn't notice at first was a small audio file — "sound_clip.mp3."
"Click it," I whispered.
Someone in the thread had recorded a knock. It was dull and precise: one long, two short. "Dong, dong-dong."
Fraser and Johanna both jumped when they heard it on my phone. The sound seemed wrong — not loud, but heavy, like someone knocking on your chest.
"Scare tactic," Fraser scoffed. "That's staged."
"Save it," I told myself. "Just save it."
I did not sleep. I went to school with the photo under my thumb and the sound in my head. My desk mate, Remy—no, Fraser—whispered jokes. I was yawning through the first math talk, but I kept my skin ready, like someone with a cut that hurts if you touch it wrong.
"Everyone quiet," Mr. Dirk Phillips said that night. "We have a safety lecture."
The man who walked to the front made the word "safety" a lie. Gabriel Fedorov wore a mask, pale as old paper. His eyes were bloodshot. His coat made his ribs show. He spoke slow, like someone counting the breaths he had left.
"Ghosts are real now," he said. "They can't be killed by weapons or fire. Only other ghosts can stop them. Learn their patterns. Learn their clock."
"That's not a safety lecture," someone muttered.
Gabriel smeared chalk on the board and wrote three crude rules.
"Never stare alone."
"Only ghosts stop ghosts."
"Find a pattern."
He looked like death wearing a coat. I had two things in my pocket: Remy Allen's photo and that knock file.
Halfway through his words a shadow moved outside the window. I stood up too fast and flipped my chair over.
"Sit down, Elias!" Mr. Phillips shouted.
The shadow did not belong to the school. A thin, dead man in a black robe stood motionless in the hallway, eyes like empty sockets. Someone screamed. The lights guttered. The room changed as if time had been unspooled; paint fell from the walls like old leaves.
"Don't open the door," Gabriel rasped.
He did not move. He watched.
The old man's knock began — deeper, slower, like the thread's audio in my pocket.
"Record this," Gabriel said to no one and everyone. "Record everything."
The knock sounded through the classroom, through my ribs. It hit like a metronome nobody could stop.
"Why isn't he entering?" I asked Gabri-el — I asked him aloud.
Gabriel's eyes flicked to me as if he'd been waiting. "Some things enter when called," he said. "Some things are summoned by sound. Some things answer your hearing."
"Then stop the sound," someone whispered.
"He is making sounds," Fraser said, "but how can a knock be a weapon?"
Gabriel's hand moved before I thought. He shoved the classroom door open. The old man fell as if someone had tripped him with a hidden string. Gabriel lunged. Under his coat, his belly moved strangely — something inside pushed and wound.
He did something no one in that room had expected. He pulled a hand from under his coat and it looked like a hand, but wrong. It was a pale thing with long nails and an arm that reached like a fishing rod. It grabbed the old man and held him. The lights came back.
"Run!" Gabriel yelled. "Run now!"
"We're leaving!" Fraser shouted and he pushed. Students stampeded, screaming. I pushed too. For a second I saw Mr. Phillips step into the hall and then dissolve into the dark like a page that tore away.
We poured down the stairs, but stairs became strange. We counted and lost count. Floors multiplied. The building cheated. Down became down and down became a maze. Some kids fell through weak floors and did not stand back up.
"Who is dead?" someone cried.
I saw my classmate Denise Lewis on the floor with a steel rod through her neck. Her eyes were open, looking at nothing.
We kept moving. Fear sharpened into hard edges. Gabriel stayed and fought. I kept the photo and the knock file like two small claws.
When the lights went again I felt cold fingers and then nothing — and later, the bathroom swallowed three kids. They went in like animals into a trap. One of them was me once dragged in, but there were hands at the door that were not human and the door closed on them with a dull click. I stood there and watched them disappear because fear is selfish and sometimes smart.
Later I learned their names. Some I still remember. I also learned there were things called "ghost-slaves," the bodies of people turned into puppets by a stronger spirit. Gabriel told me in the breath between his coughs to run. He gave me a radio and told me not to trust Matthias Dunn.
"Who?" I asked.
"That boy thinks he knows the future," Gabriel said. "He has a paper."
Matthias Dunn was the kid who smiled like a dog with a plan. He had pushed me into the toilet and pretended to be brave. He had a lighter kind of vein in him and he needed other people to fall. When I was shoved into the dark, something cold gripped my shoulder. I nearly died. The light of my phone saved me.
I played the knock file.
The hand on my shoulder went ice-cold and retracted like a spider burned. I pulled myself out of the dark and into air. I tasted metal. My arm had gone numb and then it came back. Where the hand had touched, red sparkles crawled under my skin for a moment — one hot, then gone.
"That noise is a key," I said to my phone like it was a map.
The school emptied into the yard. The night was a grey bowl. No car lights. No ambulance. It was like the world had forgotten to wake up.
"He's right," Fraser said. "You are alive. You did it."
I had been pulled close to death. Something changed inside me then. Later, when the baby-ghost crawled out of Gabriel like a thing aborted and cheap, I saw how small dark things feed.
A child-baby crawled from Gabriel's opened belly, a black thing with thin nails and no pupils. It ran fast and strangled a girl. I punched it and it chewed my arm. Its mouth was wrong and its teeth were like glass. Pain tore me in two. Later the arm was torn and found its place on the ground. Eyes like red beads began to grow in my flesh — one at first on the back of my hand, then more across my arm. They were not mine, but I could see through them.
I saw things behind me that normal eyes did not see. I saw a tall dark figure nailed to a tree in a place that wasn't a place. I reached toward the red eye and it drew blood like an ember. Pain made my face lose itself; the eye nestled in and the world snapped into clarity.
"Those are the gift and the debt," Gabriel said as he slid me the radio and the last of his strength. "Use them. But the more you use ghost power, the closer they rise. Feed and they will grow."
"How long?" I asked.
"Less than you think," he said. He died that night in a way that was not public and not clean. The baby-thing crawled after us down the stairs. We ran and the baby leapt and stole another girl.
We reached the field. People spread out, desperate and empty. The sun never rose.
Matthias — he had the paper, an old human skin with words on it. He kept saying the piece of skin was from his future self. I thought he lied. Later I understood better. The skin did write itself. When I picked it up, my red eyes opened and it began to draft a message. The paper wanted to be kept.
"Give it to me," Matthias begged when he found me. "Give it back."
"Keep it," I said and tossed it back to him. "I know your kind. You would sell us."
He followed me like a dog. I had learned to steer the old man away with the knocks. You could play the knock anywhere to call the old man. If he heard the knock he came. Not because the knock made him move, but because the knock told him who had heard his sound. The old man hunted hearing.
Matthias used the knock on his phone to try to call the thing to his side. He thought he could bargain. He thought he could hold the paper and be safe.
"Do you promise to give it back?" he asked.
"I promise nothing," I said. "You taught me how to lie."
We walked. The old robe figure found him first. He argued that the paper belonged to him and he should not die. I watched the old man wrap his hand around Matthias' face and squeeze like a fist closing around a candle. Matthias screamed and his phone slid from his hand and echoed.
I had watched him push me toward death once. I waited to see if keeping my hands clean would save me. The old man took no prisoners.
When the old man left, I was quiet. People died. The baby-thing moved and fed and grew. My eyes kept opening, like new rooms learning to see.
We still had to leave the field. The city outside the school was strange and quiet, as if the sky itself had turned the radio off. People scattered. We ran and the dead followed because the edges of the ghost place were no better than its center.
I had a choice. Use the knock sound to bind the old man into a loop and close the space, or run until my bones broke. I could smell the old man's steps even when he wasn't there: metal and dry leaves.
I found a plan.
"If ghosts answer the knock because they hear it," I said to the small group that followed me — Fraser, Johanna, Denise, Raffaella — "then we can use the knock to move him."
"Move him where?" Fraser said. "Anywhere but near me."
"To a place where sound bounces forever. A place of mirrors." I was guessing. It was all guessing anymore. "And a place with no doors."
"You can't trap a thing that was never sealed," Johanna said.
"I will try anyway," I said.
We lured the old man with the recorded knock. We played it through a children's toy speaker I stole from a dead desk that still had batteries because the dead don't recycle. He came, slow and inexorable.
"You'll be the bait?" Raffaella asked, clutching at me.
"If you want to live, you listen to me," I said. "I will not go into the dark again if I can avoid it."
He crawled. The old man's steps were always the same: one long, two short. He came to a plaza surrounded by glass and broken windows, a place where sound would loop. We set the little speaker on a trash can and played the knock again until the sound swelled like a drum.
"He's listening to it," Fraser said.
The old man stood still in the center. For a moment he looked like a statue made of rot and patience. Then he reached for Matthias' paper — the human skin — which Matthias had dropped in the panic.
The skin began to thrash and write itself like a living thing. Letters crawled and scraped the air. It wasn't writing with ink. It was rewriting the world.
"Matthias—" I shouted.
He was already screaming. The old man caught his face and the scream stopped.
That's when I did what Gabriel had done — what he had done because he had to — and used the terrible hand trick he showed me. The thing in Gabriel's belly had been copied, in a small way, into my own flesh when the eyes came. I did the only human thing and stretched my own arm like his arm had stretched and grabbed the old man.
The world expected me to be afraid. I was.
"Hold him!" I yelled.
Fraser, Johanna, and Raffaella pulled. The old man did not resist like a living creature. He resisted like an idea.
The paper — Matthias' skin — warmed and burned and then folded in on itself. Words unmade.
"There!" Johanna cried. "Play the file!"
We blasted the knock file as loud as the toy speaker would go. The sound turned inside the glass courtyard like a clock going on too long. The old man froze, then twitched.
"Now," I said.
We pushed with everything we had. The old man was like wood soaked in winter. He began to crumble. I do not know if we broke him or if we forced him through a door that closed his path.
The courtyard glass cracked like ice. The knock kept repeating. A hundred echoes of the one long, two short filled the space. The old man's robe fell apart like paper. His head rolled and did not turn. The red eyes inside me flared. For a moment I felt like something else and then I felt like myself again.
When the last echo faded the courtyard stopped being a yard and the glass stopped being glass. The plaza was empty but for a shape on the floor that was not a man any more. Matthias' skin lay on the ground and it was quiet.
We stumbled away. The first real sun I had seen in two nights was like a question. People were looking up. The city was breathing again, slowly, as if it had woken from a long fever.
"Are we safe?" Johanna asked.
"No," I said, and I meant it. "But for now: better."
I thought the story ended that day. It didn't.
Weeks later, I sat in my room and watched the last words on the skin we took — because some things you cannot leave to rot — disappear like wet ink. The parchment had promised truths and had lied. It had rewritten itself to trap anyone who trusted it.
I kept it anyway, because curiosity is a hunger harder to starve than an empty stomach.
"You're going to hurt yourself," Fraser said, sitting on my bed. He had a cut on his temple. We all did. The world had not fixed us.
"I'm going to learn how to use it," I said.
He laughed, a small broken thing. "You mean get more eyes? Join Gabriel and become someone whose belly houses a child-badness?"
Gabriel had died with his ribs hollowed and his voice a memory. He had not wanted his fate for anyone.
"Not that," I said. "I keep the eyes because they saw the thing no one else can. I want to see so I can stop it. The more I use it, the closer it comes. But I can learn to move first."
"You're speaking like a plan," Fraser said. "You're going to write 'hero' on that skin next."
"I might write my death on it," I said. "But not now."
Some things you accept as debt. The eyes on my arm blinked and woke like small moons.
Someone knocks at the door that night. I don't answer. I have learned the sound of that knock.
"Who is it?" I say, from the dim.
"Delivery," a voice says, and it sounds ordinary.
I don't open. The sound of the knock doesn't obey the door. It knows whether you listen.
Later, when the city seems to sleep, I press the paper to my palm. The letters move. They promise to rewrite the future if I let them. They promise to make me safe.
"Not yet," I tell them.
I tear a little corner. A bead of red slides into my skin like a seed. It does not hurt much. It will grow.
I put my hand on the window and watch a streetlight die, then glow again. The world is brittle. The dead are not finished with us. The eyes on my arm roll open and close like bad weather.
If you ask me if I am a monster now, I would say no. If you ask if I'm still human, I would say I don't know. If you ask if I can stop more old men from coming, I would say yes — and I would be lying and true at the same time.
The last thing I did before the sky went pale was write a single line on the skin with my own blood: Leave this place.
I pinned the skin to the school's bulletin board.
No one saw what I did, but the paper held a message now that was mine. When I walked away, the board was empty except for a single scrap of human-skin pinned like a badge.
"Will you come back?" Fraser asked as we left the school that morning.
"I will," I said.
He didn't ask why.
I have learned three things for sure: a sound can be a key, a hungry thing grows inside the people who use the power to fight it, and the dead are very patient.
At dawn I walked away with four beating strangers who trusted me because I had stopped something that was killing them. Behind us, the school's glass glowed faintly like a memory.
On my palm the red eye blinked once. I felt it like a pulse.
"One day," I told no one and everyone, "I'll close every door that makes that knock."
And then the red eye blinked again, like a clock starting.
The End
— Thank you for reading —