The Quiet Ones / Season 1, Episode 6
Secrets in the Dark
Owen’s pencil scratched against the notebook page, the sound sharp in the pre-dawn stillness of his dormitory room. His desk lamp cast a weak, yellow pool over the paper, the edges curling inward like a secret trying to fold itself shut. The air bit at his knuckles, cold seeping through the window’s cracked pane, and the faint smell of damp stone lingered, as if the walls themselves were sweating in the dark. His breath hitched as he wrote, each word a deliberate press, a tether to something he could control. I heard it again. Under the floor. Not tapping this time. Scratching. Like nails on wood. Like it’s trying to get up. He stopped, the pencil hovering. The dormitory was quiet, but not empty-quiet. It was the kind of silence that pressed against your ears, heavy with the promise of sound. His gaze flicked to the corner of the page, where the words he hadn’t written still sat, stark in their slanted, unfamiliar hand. Closer. That’s what it said last night, the ink darker than his own, as if it had been pressed too hard into the paper. He’d torn the page out, crumpled it, shoved it under his mattress, but when he’d checked this morning, it was back in the notebook, smoothed flat, waiting for him. His stomach twisted,...