The silence in the house between 2:00 and 2:10 AM was not peaceful; it was a physical presence. Sarah had thought the real estate agent was joking, or that it was some eccentric old owner’s bizarre form of poetry in a legal document. But the clause in the contract was starkly, legally clear: Between the hours of 02:00:00 and 02:10:00, all occupants of the property must remain silent and in their designated beds, with the master bedroom door firmly closed. Failure to comply constitutes a breach of contract.
“It’s probably just an old noise ordinance thing, honey,” Mark had said, grinning as he’d carried her over the threshold of the beautiful, Victorian-style house they’d gotten for a song. “Maybe the previous owner was a shift worker. Ten minutes of silence is a small price to pay for all this space.”
That was two weeks ago. For thirteen nights, they had obeyed. They set silent, vibrating alarms on their watches for 1:55 AM. They placed a water glass by the bed. They made a game of it, a strange, shared ritual. At two, Mark would gently close the heavy oak door of the master bedroom, and they would lie in the profound stillness, holding their breath, listening.
And there was nothing to hear. No creak of a floorboard. No hum of an appliance. It was a vacuum of sound, so absolute it made Sarah’s ears ring. At 2:10, the spell would break. The house would sigh back to life—the faint groan of its timber bones, the whisper of the central air. They would laugh, a little nervously, and go back to sleep.
On the fourteenth night, their two-year-old son, Liam, developed a croupy cough.
At 1:30 AM, he was wheezing in his crib down the hall. Sarah sat by his side, stroking his hot forehead, her anxiety a cold knot in her stomach. The digital clock on his nightstand glowed: 1:48.
“It’s getting worse,” Mark whispered from the doorway, his face etched with worry.
“We have to take him to the ER,” Sarah said, her voice tight.
“We’ll go right after,” Mark said, his eyes flicking to the clock. “Just… just a few more minutes. We have to be quiet.”
1:55. The vibrating alarm on Sarah’s watch buzzed against her bone. She looked at Mark, her eyes wide with a fear that was no longer for her son’s cough. The rule. The terrible, nonsensical rule.
“Mark,” she breathed.
“We’ll be quiet. He’ll be quiet. It’s just ten minutes.”
They stood frozen in Liam’s room as the clock ticked over to 2:00 AM.
The change was instantaneous. The gentle night sounds of the house didn’t just fade; they were sucked away. The soft hum of the refrigerator vanished. The distant, almost imperceptible tick of the grandfather clock in the foyer ceased. The air itself grew thick and heavy, pressing in on their eardrums. It was the silence of a tomb, of deep space, of nothingness.
Liam, stirred by the sudden pressure change or his own discomfort, let out a weak, raspy cough.
It was not loud. In the daytime, it would have been lost in the ambient noise of a living household. But in this imposed, absolute silence, it was as shocking as a gunshot.
Sarah’s blood ran cold. She clutched Mark’s arm. They stood, statues, waiting.
For a moment, there was nothing. Just the suffocating quiet.
Then, a new sound began.
It started as a dry, rustling whisper, like dead leaves skittering across pavement. It seemed to come from the walls themselves. Slowly, it grew closer, coalescing into a soft, shuffling drag, as of something heavy being pulled slowly down the hardwood hallway toward Liam’s room.
Sarah’s breath hitched. Mark’s grip on her arm tightened to the point of pain.
The shuffling stopped right outside Liam’s door.
They could see the shadow of it then, a darkness deeper than the night, blotting out the thin line of light from the streetlamp that usually seeped under the door. The doorknob, an old glass fixture, began to turn. Not with a sharp click, but with a slow, grinding creak, as if it were rusted shut and being forced by immense, patient strength.
“No,” Mark whispered, the word a puff of air.
He lunged forward and threw his weight against the door just as the latch gave way. The door shuddered in its frame, held fast by the security chain they had installed the day they moved in.
The thing on the other side went still. The oppressive silence returned, somehow more menacing than the sounds had been. Sarah stared, paralyzed, at the inch-wide gap allowed by the chain. The darkness in the hallway was impenetrable, but she could feel it there, a presence of immense age and profound emptiness, listening. Considering.
Then, a single, long, pale finger, cold and waxy like a candle, slid through the gap. It didn't claw or search. It simply rested there, pointing into the room. It was not a threat. It was a statement. A claim.
Liam, sensing the terror of his parents, began to cry in earnest, a thin, reedy wail that shattered the last of Sarah’s courage.
As her son cried, the finger slowly retracted. The shadow under the door vanished. The heavy, dead air lifted. The familiar, faint hum of the refrigerator kicked back on. The grandfather clock in the foyer chimed the quarter-hour, its sound unnaturally loud.
It was 2:10.
Mark slumped against the door, gasping. Sarah snatched Liam from his crib, holding him close, his sobs muffled against her shoulder. They stood there, trembling in the center of the room, bathed in the mundane light of the streetlamp.
They never spoke of the clause again. They never broke the silence after 2:00 AM. They learned, as the previous owners had, that some rules are not mere eccentricities. They are warnings. And some houses are not just quiet. They are listening. And for ten minutes every night, they are waiting for an excuse to be heard.
Bio:
Sani Ibrahim, a librarian and writer from Katsina Nigeria, i have fondness for old houses and their secrets.My stories often find horror in the quiet spaces of everyday life.