The Quiet Ones / Season 1, Episode 8
Underneath the Silence
Owen’s pencil scratched against the notebook page, the sound sharp in the suffocating quiet of the dormitory. His breath caught in his throat, a shallow rasp, as the words he hadn’t written stared back at him from the paper. “Underneath. Always underneath.” The handwriting was jagged, too heavy, as if the pencil had been pressed down with a trembling, angry force. His own neat loops and slants sat just above it, a question he’d scrawled hours ago in the dim flicker of his desk lamp: What do you want? He hadn’t expected an answer. Not like this. The air in the room felt thicker now, pressing against his skin like damp wool, and the faint hum he’d heard for days—weeks, maybe—vibrated low in his chest, coming from somewhere below the floorboards. He snapped the notebook shut, the clap of paper on paper louder than he meant it to be. His hands shook as he shoved it under his pillow, the coarse linen scratching his knuckles. The dormitory was a long, narrow space, sixteen beds lined up like teeth in a jaw, each with a thin mattress and a single wool blanket that smelled of mildew and old sweat. The other boys were asleep, or pretending to be—lumps of shadow under their covers, their breathing uneven, some shallow, some hitching like...