The manila folder contained seven pages of rules, each one more unsettling than the last. Ash read them again, his hands trembling slightly as he sat in the sterile break room of the Meridian Research Facility.

Rule 1: Never look directly into the hole for more than three seconds at a time.

Rule 2: If voices emerge from the hole, do not respond. Do not acknowledge them. Do not let them know you can hear them.

Rule 3: When your shift ends, lock the door behind you. Use both deadbolts. The key must never leave your possession during your shift.

The previous hole keeper, Martinez, had lasted six months before requesting a transfer to the night cleaning crew. Before that, Johnson had made it eight months. The record holder was someone named Chen—two years and three months before she’d simply stopped showing up to work entirely.

“The pay’s good,” Dr. Reeves had said during the interview, avoiding eye contact. “Triple overtime, full benefits, and a completion bonus if you make it a full year. The work itself is… simple. You just sit in the room and monitor the hole.”

Ash had needed the money. Student loans, his mother’s medical bills, rent on his shoebox apartment—desperation had a way of making even the strangest job opportunities seem reasonable.

Now, standing outside Room B-7 with the key heavy in his palm, he wondered what he’d gotten himself into.

The room was smaller than he’d expected, maybe twelve by twelve feet, with concrete walls painted an institutional beige. A single fluorescent light hummed overhead, casting harsh shadows across the space. In the center of the room sat a metal folding chair, positioned exactly three feet from the hole.

The hole itself was perfectly circular, about four feet in diameter, cut into the concrete floor with surgical precision. The edges were smooth, almost polished, and when Ash glanced into it—careful to keep his gaze brief—he saw only darkness that seemed to swallow the light from above.

He settled into the chair and checked his watch. 11:47 PM. His shift would end at 8:00 AM. Eight hours and thirteen minutes of sitting in a room with a hole in the floor. How hard could it be?

The first hour passed quietly. Ash scrolled through his phone, read a few articles, played a mobile game. The hole remained silent, just a dark circle in his peripheral vision. He began to relax, thinking maybe the previous keepers had been overly anxious types, people who let their imaginations run wild in the sterile silence.

At 1:15 AM, he heard the first whisper.

It was so faint he almost convinced himself he’d imagined it. A soft susurration that might have been air moving through underground pipes or the building’s ventilation system. But then it came again, and this time he caught a word: lonely.

Ash’s grip tightened on his phone. Rule 2: If voices emerge from the hole, do not respond. Do not acknowledge them.

He kept his eyes on his screen, but the whisper came again, clearer now: “So lonely down here.”

The voice was soft, almost childlike, with a quality that made Ash’s skin crawl. It reminded him of his sister Emma when she was seven, the way she’d whisper secrets under her blanket fort. But Emma had been dead for fifteen years, killed in the same car accident that had left their mother with chronic pain and mounting medical bills.

“Is anyone there?” the voice asked. “Please, I’ve been waiting so long.”

Ash forced himself to keep reading the same paragraph over and over, though the words blurred together meaninglessly. The voice was definitely coming from the hole, echoing up from whatever depths lay beneath the facility.

By 3:00 AM, there were multiple voices. A man’s voice, deep and resonant, asking about the weather. A woman humming a lullaby that Ash recognized from his childhood. An elderly voice reciting what sounded like a grocery list. They overlapped and intertwined, creating a cacophony of conversation that made his head pound.

But the worst was the child’s voice—Emma’s voice—that kept asking why no one would talk to her.

Ash pulled out the rules and read them again, focusing on the precise wording. Do not respond. Do not acknowledge them. Do not let them know you can hear them.

The voices weren’t random, he realized. They were testing him, probing for reactions. When the man asked about the weather, Ash had unconsciously glanced at the window. When the woman hummed, he’d found himself tapping his foot to the rhythm. Each time, the voices had grown slightly louder, more insistent.

At 4:30 AM, Emma’s voice changed tactics.

“Ash?” she called. “Ash, is that you? I can smell your cologne. That cheap stuff you wore in high school.”

His blood turned to ice. He wasn’t wearing cologne. He never wore cologne. But somehow, the voice knew his name.

“I’ve been waiting for you, big brother. Down here in the dark, waiting and waiting. Mom’s here too, you know. She wants to know why you haven’t visited her grave.”

Ash’s hands shook as he gripped the chair arms. His mother wasn’t dead. She was in the care facility across town, alive but struggling with the pain that had consumed her life since the accident. The accident that had been his fault. The accident that happened because he’d been driving, because he’d been seventeen and stupid and showing off for his friends.

“She forgives you,” Emma’s voice continued, sweet and terrible. “We both do. But you have to come down here to get your forgiveness. You have to come home.”

The other voices had fallen silent, as if they were holding their breath, waiting for his response. The fluorescent light flickered, casting dancing shadows across the walls. In the brief moments of darkness, Ash could swear he saw shapes moving at the edge of the hole—pale hands reaching upward, faces pressed against the rim.

But when the light steadied, there was nothing. Just the hole, dark and waiting.

At 6:00 AM, Ash understood why the previous keepers had quit.

The voices had grown louder, more demanding. They knew things they shouldn’t know—his social security number, his mother’s maiden name, the exact words he’d whispered to Emma as she died in the wreckage. They painted pictures of his guilt in excruciating detail, offered absolution that came with a price.

“Just one step,” Emma pleaded. “Just lean forward and look. Really look. See what’s down here waiting for you.”

Ash found himself rising from the chair, his legs moving without his conscious command. The hole seemed larger now, its edges blurred and indistinct. The darkness within wasn’t empty—it was full of movement, of whispers, of promises.

His phone buzzed with a text message, jarring him back to reality. It was from his mother’s care facility: Your mother is asking for you. She had a good day today and would love a visit.

The spell broke. Ash stumbled backward, his heart hammering against his ribs. The voices from the hole rose to a crescendo of rage and disappointment before falling silent.

At exactly 8:00 AM, he heard footsteps in the corridor outside. His replacement—a tired-looking woman in her fifties—knocked on the door.

“Time’s up,” she called.

Ash grabbed his jacket and the key ring, his hands still shaking. As he unlocked the door, he glanced back at the hole one last time. For just a moment, he thought he saw Emma’s face looking up at him from the darkness, disappointed but patient.

He locked both deadbolts behind him and handed the keys to the next keeper.

“Any advice?” she asked.

Ash looked at her tired eyes, at the way her fingers trembled slightly as she took the keys. “Don’t listen,” he said. “Whatever you do, don’t listen.”

He walked away, but he could still hear Emma’s voice echoing in his head: We’ll be waiting, Ash. We’ll always be waiting.

That afternoon, he visited his mother for the first time in three months. She smiled when she saw him, her eyes bright with medication and love.

“I dreamed about Emma last night,” she said, squeezing his hand. “She was calling for you. She said you’d found her.”

Ash’s blood turned cold. “What did you tell her?”

“I told her you’d come home soon,” his mother whispered. “I told her you always keep your promises.”

That night, Ash lay in bed staring at the ceiling, Emma’s voice still echoing in his mind. He’d made it through one shift, but he knew he’d be back. The money was too good, the guilt too heavy, and the hole too patient.

Some promises, he realized, were impossible to break.