The Echo Deal

Tamsin uploaded her video at 2:14 AM. She stared at the screen, holding her breath..

Seven views. Seven.

It was excellent work too - those vintage overlays took hours. The story about that Prague subway station where people vanished? She'd researched for weeks. Added her own field recordings. Analyzed the folklore.

But seven views.

She cracked open warm cider, took a swig. Her eyeliner had smudged under her eyes. The ring light made her look half-dead.

"I'd give anything for people to finally hear me," she muttered into the can.

She laughed bitterly and wiped her face. The video was uploaded without that part edited out first.

The morning hit her like a truck. Her phone was blowing up. She got 40,000 subscribers overnight. Her video was going viral.

The comments were full of things like ‘haunting and raw’ and ‘so real.’

She scrolled, numb, until she found it - that comment with no profile pic. The username was just a string of backslashes, and the comment itself was chilling: ‘we heard you. would you like to be echoed?’

"Weird." She tapped. An encrypted link just appeared on her screen.

"Don't click strange links, Tamsin," she told herself, already clicking.

The screen went black. Then the words appeared:

The Echo amplifies what is given freely. Are you ready to give your voice?

✅ Yes, Echo Me

By noon, a sponsorship deal rolled in. Then podcast invites. Her follower count was climbing by thousands every hour. TikToks with her voice were everywhere. Someone even made fan art of her with crows.

"I don't understand," she whispered, half-afraid of her joy.

That night, she saw her words in places she never put them. Spray-painted on walls in Brazil. Projected at protests in Seoul. On a gravestone someone posted to Reddit.

All captioned: "She told the truth first."

"I didn't say that," she murmured, stomach twisting.

The following weeks passed in a blur. The algorithms were boosting her, putting her content everywhere.. She didn't even have to upload anymore - compilations of her work kept her trending.

But at night, her phone... glitched.

Videos she never recorded showing up. Her in the kitchen at 3:17 AM, whispering to a candle. Another with her back to a mirror, voice speaking languages she didn't know.

Delete. Delete. Delete.

Jules called after week three.

"Hey," he said. "We should talk."

"I've been meaning to—"

"Not about the fame thing. About... something else.”

He took a deep breath.

"Your voice was in my apartment last night. Not you — your voice. Whispering from the vents."

Cold spread through her chest. "That's not funny."

"I know."

She hung up.

That night, the comment reappeared, pinned to her latest video.

"The Echo only gives what you ask for. Do you still want to be heard?"

The screen flickered.

Her own voice answered, slow and distant: "Yes. Echo me again."

A frantic drumbeat started in her chest.

She clicked.

Tamsin tried to pretend she was in control.

She bought blackout curtains, then noise-canceling headphones. She deleted all her social apps, but only lasted six hours before reinstalling them. The silence, she realized, hurt worse. Her phone buzzed with life: alerts, tags, theories. She couldn't look away.

"Just riding the wave," she told her reflection. "This is my break. The rest is noise."

But the noise was evolving, becoming more insidious..

A woman with a silver nose ring showed up at Tamsin’s building carrying black tulips. Her eyes were disturbingly bright.

"I heard you lived here." Smile stretched wide. "I heard you."

"How did you—?"

"You helped me so much. The things you say are in my bones now. I hear you in my sleep. Like a lullaby made of teeth."

Security took her away, but as they did, she sang Tamsin's words like a hymn: "Truth only echoes if the bones are hollow."

Tamsin had never said that. Ever.

She tried to disconnect. Go offline.

That night her phone lit up on its own, playing a video she never made — her face, her voice, telling a story she didn't know:

"Once, there was a girl who couldn't be quiet. Not because she was loud… but because something else started speaking through her."

She deleted it and threw the phone across the room. It kept playing.

The next day, Jules was sitting outside her door. Holding one of her old zines, pages fluttering.

"You need to end this," he said.

"I didn't mean for it to get this far."

"Did you make a deal with the devil or something?"

She couldn't answer.

Jules met her eyes. "It's not just in your videos now. I hear you on the radio. In static. I had a dream where you stood over me, speaking backwards."

"Jules—"

"You said, 'You wanted to be heard. But I never said it would be you speaking.'"

She had no words.

He dropped the zine and walked away.

That night she tried to scream. Nothing came out. Just air. All she heard was her own voice from an old video, looping:

"If the story is told enough, does it matter who tells it?"

The doctor couldn't find anything wrong with her throat.

"There’s no swelling or trauma. Physically, your vocal cords are fine."

Then why can't I talk? she wrote.

"I don't know. It's like your voice has... dissociated."

He hesitated. "Have you been under stress?"

She laughed without sound.

That evening, a new video appeared on her account: her face in candlelight, mouth still, but voice clear. It was speaking about "the moth-lunged ghost that eats silence," in a language she'd never learned.

Caption: "She has become the voice. Let her echo."

Three days passed without sleep.

She moved like a shadow through her apartment, avoiding mirrors and unplugging everything. The clock on her microwave stuck on 3:33. Her speaker, disconnected, still whispered her name.

Her voice was everywhere: commercials, white noise, other people's mouths. A toddler on the train spoke with her voice: "The echo is always listening. Even now."

She found a leather-bound notebook on her shelf that hadn't been there before. Its cover etched with a spiral of tiny mouths. Inside, a handwritten dedication:

To the One Who Asked.

Inside were dozens of entries in fading ink:

"Echo is a god born from forgotten voices." "She rides the throat of prophets, poets, and the mad." "She speaks loudest through those who wish to be heard."

There were drawings of mouths stitched shut. Ears growing from skulls. A girl standing before a mirror that spoke back.

One phrase underlined in red seemed to jump off the page:

To unbind the Echo, you must make others hear the silence.

Her heartbeat stuttered.

That night, she livestreamed in total darkness except for the light from a single candle. She didn’t speak, she couldn’t speak, so she wrote words up her arms in black ink.

The chat exploded.

what is this?

she's summoning something

finally something real

queen of analog horror

omg look at her eyes

She stared into the lens as her candle flickered. And then her voice returned, like it was being pulled from underwater:

"Not every voice should echo. Not every listener should follow."

The stream started to glitch, and then the chat froze.

Her follower count exploded—two million, then three, then five—spreading impossibly fast. The screen split into dozens of windows, each showing viewers speaking with her in unison.

It was working.

She thought it was working.

Until everything went black.

She woke on the floor. The laptop screen was cracked, and the candle had melted to nothing.

Her phone was vibrating beside her.

The top comment was pinned and glowing:

"You didn't unbind the Echo. You fed her."

She turned to her mirror.

She saw herself smiling—not her reflection. Her reflection was still asleep.

The smiling version leaned closer:

"You thought it was about being heard. It was always about being repeated."

The glass rippled as her reflection reached out.

Tamsin ran.

She left everything else behind, except the notebook. Her voice was back—barely. It was a rasp that cut her throat. But it wasn’t really hers. Not yet.

She took the train to nowhere. A place where streetlights died. There was no signal, no connection.

It was quiet.

The moss-covered cabin found her. It was small and sunk into earth like it was trying to hide. The weathervane pointed east although the wind was blowing from the west. But it had a lock. And silence.

For the first time in weeks, she couldn't hear herself.

She fell to the floor and cried.

In the quiet, she read.

The notebook's final pages were in her handwriting. Entries she didn't remember:

"I thought I wanted to be known. But what I really wanted was to be seen. To matter. To last." "The Echo doesn't care what you say. Only that you keep saying it." "The only thing louder than a voice… is the silence it leaves behind."

And then:

"Tell them the truth. All of it. Then vanish."

She found an old cassette recorder under the bed and made one last message.

"I made a deal because I was desperate to be heard. And I was. But what echoed... wasn't me. It was what the world wanted. Until I was hollow enough for something else to crawl inside."

Her voice trembled, but it was hers.

"If you're listening... speak carefully. Not everything that hears you wants to help. Some just want to wear your voice like a mask."

Click.

She buried the recorder beneath the floorboards and disappeared.

Tamsin was never seen again.

Her accounts vanished overnight. No videos, no posts, nothing. Even old mirror selfies gone from web archives. They theorized everything: a rebrand, performance art, possession, an ARG, even that she’d been destroyed by her own fame.

But some followers—who watched every frame—noticed something.

In her last stream, right before everything cut out, some noticed her eyes shifting, her lips forming words as if talking to someone... or something.

Years later, Jules started a podcast: Whispers Between Worlds.

He never used her name, but in season three's finale, told a story about a woman who made herself unforgettable—and lost everything that was hers.

"We all want to echo," he said. "But maybe the bravest thing is to stop speaking—and listen."