The Dormitory That Feeds on Silence
On the hill behind the academy, the dormitory at the far end of the North wing waited with windows like blind eyes. The sign above the door bore no name—only the weight of hushed air—because doors, like secrets, open more slowly when you’re not looking. They said the building moved when you weren’t paying attention, that it fed on the quiet in which students learned to disappear.
I arrived with a suitcase that smelled of rain and old paper. The first night, the air felt thick enough to cut, and every floorboard groaned as if asking a question someone refused to answer. When the corridor lights flickered, the building exhaled as one long sigh, and I understood that silence here was not empty; it was listening.
“If you listen long enough, the walls will tell you your name, and then you will forget how to speak it,” my roommate whispered, as if the floor could memorize a voice and swallow it whole.
The dormitory kept its own peculiar rules, scrawled in chalk on the back of the closet door. They weren’t rules so much as warnings—survivor’s notes from nights when the quiet turned hungry. Here are a few that seemed to anchor the room’s hunger:
- Speak only in whispers after midnight, or the quiet will taste your courage and you will become a rumor.
- Do not recite a full sentence in the dorm’s hall; fragments invite the darkness to listen more closely.
- Answer noise with silence, and the building will grant you safe passage through the dark corridors at dawn.
- Never leave the last footstep unmeasured; the floor will count it and duplicate it in your absence.
One evening I found a corridor that did not exist on any map—the walls there breathed with a velvet hush. In a doorway that wasn’t meant to be opened, a figure stood: the Dormitory Itself, a patient, listening thing wearing curtains of sound as if they were wings. It spoke without lips, and the words curled around my ribs, binding fear to memory.
“We do not feed on noise,” it whispered, “we feed on the space where a voice should be.”
I understood then: to leave would require a choice. The dormitory thrived when the room fell quiet, swallowing breath and memory alike; it withered when a truth was spoken aloud. So I did the unthinkable and let a single sentence roll from my tongue, not to break the spell, but to test its strength. The building trembled, and the hallways loosened their grip. My roommate’s eyes held a spark of something long dormant, and for a heartbeat, the lights dared a glimpse of daylight brushing the floor.
From that moment, the ritual shifted. Some students vanished into the quiet, while others found a way to speak back to the walls, choosing words that kept the house honest. The dormitory did not disappear, but it learned to listen differently—perhaps to the courage of those who could still say a sentence aloud without fear. If you listen closely now, you can hear a soft turning in the plaster: a new quiet that does not erase but remembers.