The rain hadn’t stopped for three days. Not since the funeral. It tapped a ceaseless, gray rhythm on the roof of Ellen’s empty house, a sound that had replaced the warmth of David’s voice. She sat in his armchair, clutching a cold mug, staring at the space where he used to stand by the fireplace. The silence was a physical weight. It wasn’t just the absence of sound, it was the absence of him. His silly jokes, his off key humming, the way he’d say her name, Ellie, with a smile in his voice. It was in that deepest trench of silence that she heard it.
“Ellie.”
She froze. The mug trembled in her hand. It was David’s voice. Not a memory, not a trick of the wind. It was his exact tenor, the soft rasp he got when he was tired, the particular way he shaped the ‘L’s. It came from the hallway.
“It’s so cold where I am, Ellie.”
A sob caught in her throat. It was him. It had to be. Some part of him had come back. The rational part of her mind, worn thin by grief, simply snapped. She didn’t question. She needed it to be real. She turned. In the shadowed mouth of the hallway stood a figure. It was unnaturally thin, a cutout of deeper darkness against the gloom, draped in a black that seemed to drink the faint light. It had no face, just a smooth, pale expanse where features should be.
“I miss you,”
It said in David’s voice, and the sound was a balm, a drug, flooding the horrible silence.
“David?”
She whispered, the word scraping out raw. She took a step forward.
“Is it… can it really be you?”
The figure tilted its head.
“I’m here. I came back for you. Talk to me, Ellie. Let me hear you.”
That was all she needed.
“Oh, God, David, I can’t bear it. The house is so empty. I keep expecting you to walk in. I made your coffee this morning, I just… I just left it there.”
The words poured out, a desperate, living torrent of her pain, her love, her loneliness. Her voice, uniquely hers, filled the hollow space. As she spoke, the thin figure drifted closer. It made no sound on the floorboards. When she finally paused, gasping for breath, it was right before her.
“Thank you,”
It said, still in David’s comforting tone.
“I needed that.”
It leaned in. Ellen felt not breath, but a profound, pulling coldness, as if the air itself was being siphoned from her lungs towards that blank face. She tried to ask what was happening, but no sound came. A searing, icy vacuum seized her throat. It felt like her very identity was being ripped out through her vocal cords. Her laugh, her whispers, her way of saying his name, all of it drawn into the void where the figure’s mouth should be.
The theft was instant and complete. She clutched her neck, eyes wide with panic, but only a faint, airless wheeze escaped. The Widow’s Echo stood back. It seemed fuller, somehow. Then, it spoke again.
“It will be quieter now,”
it said, and the voice was no longer David’s. It was hers. Ellen’s own voice, perfect and alive, spoken from the faceless thing. It turned and melted into the shadows of the hallway, gone. Ellen stumbled, collapsing back into the armchair. She tried to scream, to cry, to curse. She opened her mouth, straining every muscle.
What emerged was not silence. It was a raw, ragged, and utterly terrified scream. A man’s scream. It was the guttural, final sound David must have made in the instant the truck hit him. A shocking blast of pure, distilled terror and pain that shattered the rainy quiet of the house.
She clamped her hands over her mouth, but the scream just bubbled against her palms, muffled but unmistakable. She tried to whisper no, just a tiny denial. The whisper was the same scream, softer, but no less horrific.
She was a prisoner in her own body, her love for him now forever twisted into a vessel for his death. The rain continued to tap. And whenever the silence became too thick, too heavy, her own throat would betray her, filling the house he once loved with the echo of how he left it.
