MidnightScreams

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I never should have taken the job. I knew that the moment I stepped into the tunnels.

At first, it was the silence that got to me. The kind of quiet that presses against your eardrums, making you painfully aware of your own breath. My flashlight cast a feeble yellow glow on the damp brick walls, flickering as if the darkness itself resisted illumination.

The tunnels had been part of an old mining operation that was eventually converted into a secret underground shelter. It had been abandoned for over fifty years. Nobody knew why, not really. Some said a gas leak poisoned everyone inside. Others claimed something was found beneath the rock—something never meant to be disturbed.

The man who hired me, an eccentric historian named Gregory Watts, wasn’t interested in urban legends. He was looking for proof, documentation of whatever had happened down here. He had offered me more money than I’d ever been paid for a job, and against my better judgment, I accepted.

I wish I hadn’t.

My first few hours were uneventful. Just long, curving tunnels that stretched further than I expected. Strange markings lined the walls—carvings I didn’t recognize, symbols that felt wrong to look at. The air was thick with damp earth and something else, something metallic.

Then I heard the whispering.

It started soft, like a breeze carrying distant voices, but there was no wind down here. I turned my head, expecting to see a rat scurrying through the dark. Nothing. Just endless passageways.

I pressed on.

The deeper I went, the stronger the whispers became. They weren’t words, not at first. Just sounds—guttural, rhythmic, a pattern of speech without meaning. But as I listened, I realized something chilling.

They were repeating me.

Every breath I took, every shuffle of my boots, every nervous swallow—the whispers echoed it all. Not immediately, but a second later. Like a delay in an old recording.

I called out, my voice shaking. “Who’s there?”

A second passed.

Then, from the darkness ahead of me, my own voice responded:

“Who’s there?”

The flashlight shook in my grip. The voice had been identical to mine—every inflection, every ounce of hesitation.

I should have turned back then. Should have run.

But I didn’t.

I took a step forward, and so did something in the dark. I heard the scuff of movement, the echo of my own steps a beat too late. I moved left; the sound mimicked me. But it wasn’t an echo. It was deliberate.


I wasn’t alone.

Swallowing my fear, I raised the camera I had strapped to my chest and switched it to infrared. The screen flickered, then adjusted to the blackness.

And then, I saw it.

Not a person. Not an animal. But something… shifting.

It had no defined shape, no solid form—just darkness that moved against the walls, stretching, rippling like liquid shadow. And it was watching me.

I turned and ran.

The whispers surged, filling the tunnels with a deafening, overlapping chorus of my own voice. Every footstep I took, it mimicked. Every panicked breath, it mirrored.

I reached the ladder leading back to the surface and scrambled up, lungs burning, fingers slipping on the damp metal rungs. The voices rose to a scream—my scream, my own voice thrown back at me with inhuman distortion.

Then silence.

I burst onto the surface, gasping. The tunnel entrance yawned beneath me, a gaping maw in the earth. I backed away, my heart hammering.

I never went back. Never spoke to Gregory Watts again.

But sometimes, in the dead of night, I hear it.

A whisper that comes a second too late.

A breath that isn’t mine.