The Dormitory of Whispers
On the southern edge of Greyvale Academy, the dormitory rose like a tired ship of stone. They called it the Dormitory of Whispers because every night the walls learned the names that lay awake within the floors, and the walls spoke them aloud to those who listened.
I arrived after the last bus, under a moon that looked almost silver in the rain. The corridor smelled of damp wool and old rainwater, as if the building had saved every storm it ever survived. The door to Room 13 creaked a greeting I could swear was sentient, and the corridor seemed to lean closer, as if it wanted to tell me something I would forget in the morning.
The whispers arrived not with fear but with a patient invitation: stay a little longer, listen, and you will understand the school’s ledger. In the dormitory, each bed held a memory—tufts of hair from someone who combed them in the dark, a pencil mark that never finished, a rain-soaked cough that never left the chest.
We are the verbs the walls remember, the breaths that learned to vanish before dawn.
Over the next nights, I began to translate the whispers into warnings:
- Do not answer when the corridor calls your name after curfew.
- Do not swap dreams with the person in the next bunk; they may steal your waking hours.
- When the ceiling leaks a thread of rain that does not fall from clouds, the dorm is asking for a guest.
One evening I found a diary behind a loose panel in the wardrobe. Its pages smelled of ink and winter. A line stood out, scribbled in a hurry: “The dormitory does not keep memories; it trades them.” The entries spoke of a pact—the school would permit the living to stay as long as they recorded a name each night, and when the register ran dry, the dorm would wake fully and claim a body to carry its centuries-old secret.
That night I wrote the name “Mira” in the margins of my own notebook, just to hear the room breathe differently. The whispering paused, then rose in a chorus that felt like a long exhale: you are chosen, the time is now. The door behind me sighed open, and a cold draft pressed against my spine as if the dorm itself were leaning in to listen.
In the morning, the bed next to mine was empty and the air carried the faint scent of rain that never touched the window. I do not know if I slept through a transfer of ownership or if the dorm had merely teased me with a taste of what waits beyond awake. The building still hums at midnight, and sometimes the phrase it repeats is simply this: sleep is a harbor, and we are the tide that never leaves.
Aftermath
Whispers linger in the timber and in the lining of the wardrobe. Some mornings the corridor sighs with relief for a secret kept; others ache for the memory it could not spare. If you listen closely, you may hear the dormitory choosing its next listener—and perhaps its next keeper.