Whispers from the Hollow Bunker
In the days after the sirens faded, the Hollow Bunker waited—moss creeping along its steel ribs, rain threading through its vents, and the concrete keeping its silence like a patient in a fever dream.
My job was simple: check the power cells and seal the flood gates. Simple, until the door breathed when I approached. The hinges sighed, not with rust but with a long, shallow exhale that felt almost like a greeting.
The first whisper came as a draft behind my ear, not a scream but a careful, polite whisper, as if someone were reminding me of something I forgot to do. The bunker was never truly empty; the walls remembered every visitor, every minute of fear, every whispered plan that died in the dark.
“Turn back,” the whisper said, almost tender, like a grandmother’s warning. “Not all doors go forward.”
I pressed deeper, flashlight beam pinned to the walls where numbers were scuff-marked in chalk. The air tasted of copper and rain, the kind of air that tells you you’re not alone even when your feet are the only ones that move. The generator hummed in a rhythm that sounded like a heartbeat, and with every pulse the whispers grew closer, as if the bunker itself leaned in to listen.
- Faded photographs pressed between panels, faces smiling in a light that never existed in the real world.
- A radio that crackled to life with a single word: “Remember.”
- A map on the floor, its ink smudged by moisture, revealing a path that loops back to the starting hatch.
In the sealed chamber, a door barred by a rusted wheel yawed open on its own, revealing shelves full of jars filled with clippings and something that glowed faintly behind glass. The whispers poured through the walls now, a chorus of remembered names, each one a thread pulling at my wrists, tugging toward a final, irrevocable choice.
“If you listen, you learn the truth of your arrival,” a voice intoned, no longer a whisper but a weathered echo. “This hollow keeps its own.”
I stood at the threshold and understood at last that the bunker did not house the living and the dead, but those who refused to leave. The door breathed with me, a promise and a threat: stay, and become part of the hollow; leave, and carry the hush back into the light.