To Forget, To Hear

For most of her life, Julie Whiteman feared going mad. Not in the flamboyant, cinematic way — no voices, no sudden violence, no descent into delusions. What haunted her was the slow kind. The kind where you lose things- a word here, a time there. The kind where you start to forget that you’ve forgotten. Her grandmother had died that way. Her mother was following the same path. And Julie was thirty-eight, single, and well aware of the ticking clock in her own brain.

That’s why she bought the house. It was old, silent, nestled at the edge of a Vermont forest. It had been empty for years. A good price. Space to breathe. No distractions. She told people she needed peace to finish her second novel. That was partly true. But deeper down, she believed if she could just control the noise of the world around her, she could control the noise inside her head.

The first few weeks were bliss. She rose early. Walked in the cold mist. Wrote until the words began to mean nothing, then made tea and read. Her phone stayed on silent. She didn’t keep a television. The house, with its creaking pipes and drafty charm, seemed to accept her like it had been waiting.

Then she heard the footsteps. They came at night. Light, deliberate. From the attic directly above her bedroom. She knew the sounds of the house by then — this was not wood settling or raccoons. These were steps. Human.

The first night, she froze. The second, she told herself she imagined it. By the third, she was upstairs with a flashlight, heart racing, hands shaking. She found nothing.

But they kept coming. She tried to reason through it. Maybe she was hearing echoes from the woods. Maybe it was a dream slipping into wakefulness. Maybe — and this one sat heavy in her stomach — maybe it had started.

She made a recording. Her phone, propped on her nightstand, captured eight hours of darkness and one clear sound at 2:41 a.m.- three slow footsteps, above her head.

She played it over and over. Relief flooded her. It wasn’t her imagination. Something was there. She wasn’t losing her mind.

But what was she hearing? She called the police. They found nothing. No signs of break-in, no footprints in the dust upstairs. “Old houses do strange things,” the officer said, not unkindly. “You sure you’re not alone too much?”

That night, Julie locked the attic door from the hallway. The footsteps came again. Clear. Close. Unmistakable.

She didn’t sleep. At dawn, she went into town and bought motion sensors. Installed them at the attic door and inside her room. She waited.

The sensors never triggered. But the footsteps came. Night after night.

Worse, things began to disappear. Small things at first- a pen, a hairbrush. Then her keys. Then entire pages from her manuscript. Not just missing, but torn from her notebook, nowhere to be found.

She set up cameras. They showed nothing. Not nothing happening — just literally nothing. Footage glitched during the times she heard the noises. Static. Black screens. One showed her sleeping, then skipped ahead thirty-seven minutes. When the feed resumed, her bedroom door was open. She remembered closing it.

She was slipping. She could feel it. She stopped writing. She stopped walking. She stared at the attic ceiling for hours. Waiting. Listening. Her mother had started hearing things too, back when it began for her.

But her mother never found footprints on her pillow. Julie did. Tiny, child-sized. Dirt smudges. Clear as day.

Whisperkin, she thought. The name slid into her mind like an old rhyme, half-remembered. It felt too familiar.

She ran. Drove into town. Booked a room. Didn’t sleep. Called a friend, babbled too fast, tried to explain. Her friend offered to drive up, but Julie said no. What could she say? Her house was haunted by something that walked at night and erased its tracks?

She went back the next morning. The footprints were gone. But so was her notebook. She walked through the house, every room. Nothing out of place. No sign of a break-in. Her hands shook. Her mouth was dry. But something else happened. A strange clarity settled in.

If this was madness, she thought, it was neat. Precise. Inventive. If it wasn’t? Then something wanted her afraid. Something like the Whisperkin.

That night, she stayed up. Lights off. Motionless. No music, no cameras. Just her, under the covers, eyes open, ears straining.

At 2:39 a.m., she heard the first step. Then another. Then a third. Then silence. Then the attic door creaked open. Then she heard breathing. It wasn’t hers. Slow. Shallow. Right above her bed. And then, clear as rain, a voice- "You hear me now."

She knew that voice didn’t belong to a man, or woman, or child. It belonged to the Whisperkin.

That’s when she screamed.

Neighbors said they heard her. That’s how the police arrived. They found Julie in her yard, barefoot, bleeding from her hands, eyes wild. There was no one inside the house. They committed her two days later.

Doctors called it acute psychosis. Stress-related hallucinations. Sensory misfires. She didn’t fight it. Didn’t argue. Just kept asking for her notebook.

They told her she never had one.

Weeks passed. Medications changed. She grew quieter. Still. She stared at walls a lot. At ceilings. At night, she didn’t sleep.

Then, one evening, a nurse brought her a package. No return address. Just her name, written in blocky, uneven letters.

Inside — a notebook. Her notebook.

She opened it. The pages were blank. Every one. Except the last. On it, in jagged handwriting — I hear you now too.

Julie sat alone at the edge of her hospital bed, fingers grazing the worn cover of the notebook. Her breath was shallow, eyes unblinking. She didn't tell anyone about the page. What would be the point.

She began writing again. At first, fragments. Memories. Dreams. Then dialogue. Descriptions. Her second novel took shape faster than the first. She hardly slept, but she didn’t need to. Not now. Something kept her sharp.

Sometimes she heard tapping above her in the asylum ceiling. Light footsteps. She never looked up.

One night, her roommate vanished. No explanation. The nurses said she'd been transferred, but Julie found something stuffed under the mattress the next day — a torn-out notebook page. One word on it. "LISTEN."

The Whisperkin leaves messages, she thought. For those who hear. Julie kept it.

Months passed. Her case was reviewed. She was deemed stable. Improved. She was quiet, polite, productive.

She was released.

She didn’t return to the Vermont house. She rented a small apartment near a train station. Sparse furniture. Thick curtains. Blank walls. Except for one shelf, where her notebooks lived.

One night, while writing, she heard the footsteps again. But this time, they came from beneath the floorboards.

Julie stood. Calm. Walked to the center of the room. Stared down. She whispered —"I hear you."

And the Whisperkin stirred.

Then she began to write. Not fiction. Not anymore. She wrote what it told her. And it had so much to say.