Short Story

Whisper in the Dark

Duncan Wilson
New North
Published in
3 min readMar 16, 2023

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A Story of a Long Forgotten Evil

Photo by Joël de Vriend on Unsplash

In a corner of a small dark room, in the back of an unremarkable structure, deep in the woods of a forgotten corner of the world, a soft whisper, a small shiver of a shudder, slips in and out of a crack in the splitting stones. The world long ago lost the memory of the sound. The world aged. The world grew. The world moved on to a new age of whim and wonder and left all such things in the past.

Yet…. The murmur drifted about, aimlessly, seemingly simply to serenade this long forsaken speck of the here and now. It was alone, abandoned ages ago, when time was far younger and the minds of men much more malleable to mutterings of malicious monsters, mortal or otherwise. There was none that listened to the sound now. No mortal man nor beast tread among these trees, not even creatures that crawl or creep. None but what grows from the ground surrounded the sepulcher or the sound within, and even the nearest of these had withered and died as time tried to forsake the cabin and the whisper within.

None else dared grow or live nearby, for fear of what they would hear, of what they would do, of the cost to their very souls. It was not a kindly spirit that dwelt alone, so far from life, and it did not dwell there, so far from life, by choice. Once, it had held sway in so many heads, so many hospitable hosts, heedless and headstrong, dancing from mouth to ear, spreading like the cancer it was, infecting the hearts and minds of men, infesting multitudes with madness, and many were the evils that were perpetrated for its purposes. Then, the whisper was not so soft, as it was the roar of rabbles, the tirades of tyrants, the shouts and screams of the savage, the babblings of the basest of beasts befouling the foundations of the free and the fair, and those that fell prey to its partisans pleaded and prayed for pity in vain.

Now the whisper was but a small and insignificant sound, barely audible to all of the nothing that was about, not even managing to effect an echo upon the bare walls it rambled about. Its disciples were dead, destroyed by all who would build a better world, free of such madness as the sound would see. It had been buried here, in the hopes it would never again torment or terrorize, in the hopes that it might languish so far from the living. It was not tired, it never tired, but it was weak, and steadily, it was losing shape in the waning of the eons of existence, slowly shrinking into silence, long after the memory of it had gone from the wider world.

Softly sawing upon the ragged edges of the cracks in the walls of its tomb, the sound could not escape its fate anymore than its sufferers so long ago. So many sacrificed for the siren song of the sound, so many instigations of ignominy in the name of an ideology that served none well in the end. In the corner of a small dark room, in the back of an unremarkable structure, deep in the woods of a forgotten corner of the world, where the words had worn off of the plaques and inscriptions meant to serve warning to any who would wander that way, the last breaths of a singularly sinister sound slipped into stillness and was no more, and none were those who heard or cared. Slowly, the birds and the beasts returned to that corner of the world, and new trees grew once again where before there was death. The land had lain fallow long enough and had been renewed, old evils had passed and life was brighter once more.

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Duncan Wilson
New North

I'm an avid author, pensive poet, and annoying alliterator with two novels, six novellas, and many short stories published on patreon, amazon, and here.