Can you hear it?

Listen

Feel the vibrations in the wall as it creeps toward you, seeps toward you, crawls on your skin until it tickles every bone.

Her voice drills in your ear and travels down your neck, through your spine, until it settles into your very core.

Hush

Stop breathing

Close your eyes and stop seeing, stop fleeing, stop needing to escape, because she feels your pain

She feels your fear

She knows you’re near

A moan in the hall, the only thing to let you know you’re still alone, still away, still safe here in her grave

But you feel her fingernails scratching down the stone faces as the ache is in your chest, rumbling like a train and slithering like a viper, a trapper, a sniper, a vine wrapping around your insides and choking them, roping in, invoking this fear that gnaws at your pitted bones.

The sound of subtle silence.

A silence so violent, so strident, so visceral and defiant that it doesn’t sound so much like silence at all, but like a scream echoed through a wood, bouncing off of every tree until carried away by the chill arctic air.

A silence like dead men in a long-sunken ship, mouths open wide, twisting and stripped to the bare ivory stone, silence like hollow eyes of a romance already gone, already swept away by lies.

It’s then you know it’s too late.

Too late, too far gone, she’s at the door, she’s on the throne, she’s in your face, you face disgrace, you face destruction, the discussion of your fate already had and given away.

You realize you’ve given away your last chance for peaceful silence.