Never before had the phone rung so early. Especially not for him—Edward Whitmore, a local GP with thirty years’ practice, a man of unshakable routine. Every morning began at half past seven: a strong cup of tea, the morning paper, a slow walk to the surgery. Life was measured and predictable, as steady as a grandfather clock. But not that day. At twenty to six—when even the city still slumbered, wrapped in thick silence—the phone jarred him awake, its ring as harsh as an unhealed scar.
He rose, threw off the blanket, fumbled for his dressing gown in the dark, and lifted the receiver without turning on the light.
“Yes?”
“It’s Margaret… from flat sixteen… You might not remember me. My neighbour—Anthony… I think… I think he’s dead.”
Her voice was cracked, fragile, like an old tape playing at the edge of ruin. There was no hysteria—only confusion and fear, as if this were all a bad dream from which she couldn’t wake.
“Call an ambulance,” Edward replied, though he already knew it was likely too late.
“I—I’m afraid to go down there alone… He’s in the cellar. Said the light only worked till six. Told me to fetch you if… if anything happened.”
He fell silent. His breathing was heavy, the way it was outside a hospital room where hope had long since faded. This—this was something no medical school, no years of practice, had prepared him for.
“He said… if I heard the creaking, that’d be it. The end,” she whispered.
And in that moment, the doctor knew: sleep would not come again.
Forty minutes later, he stood before a crumbling postwar terrace on the outskirts of Birmingham. The house sagged with exhaustion—peeling paint, grimy windows, a silence too thick to bear. Margaret met him in a thin housecoat over her nightdress, arms tucked into her sleeves, eyes downcast.
“Yesterday… he claimed someone was calling him from the cellar. I laughed it off. Then last night—a scream. A horrible creaking. Then… nothing.”
She spoke in hushed tones, as though even the walls were listening. Edward nodded. No words needed.
The cellar door was round the back. Broken steps, an iron door hanging loose on its hinges, swaying faintly in the wind. He gripped his torch, clenched his jaw, and descended.
The air was thick with damp and mildew, as though no one had set foot there in decades. The flickering bulb died with a final sputter. He switched on his torch. The beam cut through cobwebs, old crates, moth-eaten furniture—and then a figure.
A man crouched in the corner, facing the wall. His coat hung open, hands limp on his knees. Edward stepped closer. His heartbeat thudded in his ears.
“Anthony?”
Silence. Only when he was almost within reach did the man’s shoulders twitch.
“I hear them,” the man whispered. His voice was not his own—something hollow, unrecognisable, as if spoken by another lurking inside.
“Who?”
“The ones who stayed… beneath us. They whisper. They remember. They’re waiting. They know… everything.”
He turned his head. His eyes were empty, lifeless, like snuffed-out glass. Edward placed a hand on his shoulder. No response.
“It’s too late,” Anthony murmured. “I’ll let them in.”
And then—from the depths of the cellar—came the creak. Long. Metallic. Piercing. And Edward Whitmore heard it too. He trembled. Not from fear, but from knowing: some things cannot be unremembered.
The ambulance arrived in fifteen minutes. Anthony was found against the wall—unconscious, but alive. The diagnosis was swift: acute psychosis, severe depression, guilt gnawing at the edges. The duty doctor wrote it all down without question. No one asked what the man had truly heard beneath those stairs.
Edward did not go home. He sat by the cellar door. Lit a cigarette—the first in twenty years. Drew the smoke in slow, as if breathing in another’s pain. He thought not only of Anthony. He thought of himself. How, with time, each of us grows our own staircase downward—sometimes narrow, barely there; other times steep, treacherous. Always without railings.
And how, when the dark comes, what matters most is that someone follows. Not to save you. Just to stand beside you. So the creaking isn’t the only sound left in the silence.
He stubbed out the cigarette. Stepped outside. The morning was grey, but within that greyness, light still lived. And Edward Whitmore understood: today, he was needed. By someone. Even if only by himself.