The Echo House

The real estate agent hadn't mentioned the echo. How could she? It was the kind of thing you only noticed after living there. After making sounds and waiting. After listening. We moved into 447 Riverside Drive on a Tuesday. My wife Sarah, our daughter Emma who was seven, and me. The house was beautiful: Victorian architecture, original hardwood floors, a huge backyard. We'd been searching for months and couldn't believe our luck when this place came on the market at such a reasonable price. The echo started on our third night. I dropped a glass in the kitchen. It shattered, and I heard the crash. Then, exactly seven seconds later, I heard it again. A perfect duplicate of the sound, as if someone had recorded it and played it back. "Did you hear that?" I called to Sarah. "Hear what?" I tried to explain, but it sounded ridiculous. Old houses make noises. Everyone knows that. Still, I started paying attention. A door closing would echo seven seconds later. Emma's laughter would repeat itself. Our footsteps would replay. Always seven seconds. Always perfect replicas of the original sound. "The house has good acoustics," Sarah said when I finally convinced her to listen. "It's probably something about the architecture." But then the echoes started changing. It began subtly. Emma would laugh, and seven seconds later, we'd hear her laugh again—but a little different. The pitch slightly off. The timing altered by a fraction of a second. I convinced myself I was imagining things. Until the scream. Emma screamed because a spider crawled across her book. A short, startled shriek. Seven seconds later, we heard her scream again—longer, more terrified, full of genuine fear. The kind of scream no child should make. "What was that?" Sarah whispered. Emma looked confused. "I only screamed once." We stood in the living room, the three of us, listening. The house was silent now, but somehow the silence felt expectant, waiting. That night, I researched the house's history. Three previous owners in the past fifteen years. All had moved out within six months. No explanation given. I contacted the most recent owner, tracked him down through public records. He didn't want to talk. "Just get out," he finally said. "Before you hear your own death." "What does that mean?" "The house echoes seven seconds ahead, not behind. You're not hearing the past. You're hearing the future." He hung up. I sat in my office, trying to process this. Seven seconds ahead. Which meant Emma's terrified scream... we'd heard it before it happened. Or before it was supposed to happen. But what would make her scream like that? I didn't have to wait long to find out. The next morning, Emma was playing in the backyard when I heard her scream—that same terrified shriek from yesterday. I ran outside and found her staring at the old well we'd been meaning to cover. She'd dropped her ball in it and leaned over to look, nearly falling in. If I hadn't gotten there in time... "The echo was warning us," Sarah said that night. "It's trying to help." Maybe. Or maybe it was just showing us what would be, and we got lucky enough to prevent it. Either way, we started listening more carefully. When we heard a crash seven seconds before it happened, we'd brace ourselves, ready to catch whatever was about to fall. When we heard angry voices echo before we spoke, we'd choose different words, averting arguments that hadn't happened yet. For a week, it almost seemed like a gift. We were living seven seconds ahead of our problems, able to prevent disasters before they occurred. Then I heard Sarah crying. Deep, broken sobs. The kind of grief that comes from losing something irreplaceable. I was in my office, and she was downstairs. I checked my watch and waited. Seven seconds later, I should have heard her start crying for real. Silence. She didn't cry. Which meant she wasn't crying yet. She was going to cry. Something was about to happen that would break her heart so thoroughly she'd sob like that. I ran downstairs. She was in the kitchen, preparing dinner, humming to herself. Emma was at the table doing homework. Everything normal. Everything fine. "Don't go upstairs," I said. "Whatever you do, stay down here." "Why? What's wrong?" How could I explain? I walked upstairs alone, my heart pounding. What was I going to find? What could cause that level of grief? Emma's room was empty. Our bedroom was empty. The bathroom— I found it in the guest room. The future. Not literally, of course. But I saw what would happen. The ladder I'd left out from painting. The window I'd left open. The wasp nest I'd noticed but hadn't removed yet. I saw the scenario play out in my mind: Emma, curious, climbing up to look at the wasps. The ladder slipping. The fall. The window. The two-story drop. I removed the ladder. Closed the window. Called an exterminator. And Sarah never cried those terrible sobs. I'd heard a future that didn't happen. We should have left then. That would have been the smart thing. But we'd started to feel powerful, in control. We were cheating fate, seven seconds at a time. Our hubris lasted another three days. I was in the kitchen when I heard something impossible. My own voice, seven seconds ahead, screaming: "Sarah, no! Emma, run! Oh God, oh God, it's in the—" The echo cut off abruptly. Silence. I stood frozen, waiting for those seven seconds to pass, waiting to understand what I was about to scream about. But here's the thing about hearing your own future death: knowing it's coming doesn't mean you can stop it. The basement door burst open. Something came out. I don't have words for what it was—a darkness that moved wrong, that bent light around itself, that smelled like years and dust and the space between seconds. It had been living in our basement, feeding on our futures, growing stronger every time we changed what was supposed to happen. Every time we prevented an echo from coming true, we created a paradox. A moment that should have existed but didn't. And those moments had to go somewhere. They'd been piling up in our basement, congealing into something that was hungry for the present tense, for the now that we kept stealing from. I screamed my warning. Sarah ran. Emma ran. We got out of the house and didn't look back. We left everything—clothes, photos, our entire lives. We just ran. The house still stands on Riverside Drive. It's for sale again. The listing doesn't mention the echo. Future owners will discover it themselves, after living there, after making sounds and waiting. After listening. They'll think they're special. They'll think they can outsmart fate. They'll prevent futures they don't like and celebrate their cleverness. And in the basement, something will grow stronger, feeding on the moments that never happened, getting hungrier for the moments that are. Seven seconds. That's all we're given to see. And that's seven seconds too much. Some gifts are curses. Some houses are traps. And some futures are meant to happen, no matter what you hear. If you're looking at the listing for 447 Riverside Drive, admiring the original hardwood floors and the Victorian architecture and thinking about what a great deal it is, let me give you one piece of advice: Listen to the echoes. And when you hear something terrible coming, don't try to stop it. Run. Just run. Because the alternative—the thing that happens when you keep stealing from the future—is so much worse than anything you might hear in an echo. Trust me. I heard it. Seven seconds before it reached us. Seven seconds wasn't enough. It will never be enough.