If you think silence is golden, you’ve never heard true silence. True silence is heavy. It presses against your eardrums like deep water. But I don’t deal in silence; I deal in noise.
Most people hear a bump in the night, pull the duvet over their heads, and pray it’s the wind. I don’t pray. I pull up a frequency analyzer.
When the tapping started three nights ago, I assumed it was my neighbor, Sarah. Thin walls, right? Part of the "charm" of this converted industrial duplex. But when I isolated the waveform on my monitor at 3:00 AM, the physics didn't make sense. The impact wasn't coming from her side of the drywall. It wasn't coming from my side, either.
The sound—a wet, rhythmic thud-drag-thud—was coming from inside the wall itself. And according to the blueprints, there’s nothing in there but dust and darkness.
At least, that’s what I told myself before I heard the breathing.
My life is dictated by a squiggly green line on a monitor and a pair of Sony MDR-7506 headphones that cost more than my first car.
It was 2:32 AM. The world outside was dead, but inside my headphones, it was rush hour. I was mixing foley for a low-budget indie horror flick—specifically, the sound of a pumpkin being smashed with a baseball bat to simulate a skull fracture. Gross? Yeah. But it pays the rent.
Then came the interruption.
Tap. Tap. Scrape.
I froze, hand hovering over the spacebar. I pulled one ear cup back, waiting. The room was dark, lit only by the glowing LEDs of my interface and the dual monitors casting a sickly blue pallor over my messy desk.
Tap. Tap.
It was rhythmic. Precise. Like someone drumming their fingers on a table, waiting for a check.
"Seriously, Sarah?" I muttered, rubbing the bridge of my nose. "It’s Tuesday."
Sarah was the girl next door. Nice enough, I guess. She was a nurse, which meant her schedule was chaotic, but usually, she was quiet. Lately, though? She’d been loud. Pacing. Bumping furniture. And now, this weird, compulsive tapping.
I’m a guy who hates conflict. I’d rather eat a jean jacket than knock on someone’s door and ask them to keep it down. I’m the guy who writes a strongly worded draft email and then deletes it. But my job requires what we in the industry call "The Golden Ear." I hear everything. A leaky faucet three rooms away sounds like a drum solo to me.
So, this tapping? It was like someone was driving an icepick into my prefrontal cortex.
"Okay," I whispered to the empty room. "You want to play drums? Let’s see how off-beat you are."
I swung my boom mic arm around—a Sennheiser shotgun mic usually reserved for capturing crisp dialogue—and pointed it directly at the shared wall. I armed a new track on my digital audio workstation (DAW) and hit record.
The waveform started drawing itself across the screen.
Tap. Tap. Scrape.
I watched the peaks and valleys form. Just getting the evidence. That was the plan. I’d record five minutes of this, attach the file to an email for the landlord, and say, Hey, Unit B is hosting a drum circle at 3 AM, please advise. Passive-aggressive? Maybe. Effective? Hopefully.
I leaned in, squinting at the screen. I applied a high-pass filter to cut out the low rumble of the fridge and the street traffic. Then I zoomed in on the transients—the sharp spikes of the taps.
A cold shiver, completely unrelated to the drafty window, walked down my spine.
Sound tells a story. If Sarah was tapping on her side of the wall, the sound would travel through her drywall, through the insulation, through the air gap, and then vibrate my drywall. The high frequencies would roll off. It would sound muffled. "Boxy."
This didn't sound boxy.
The transients were sharp. crisp.
I turned the gain up on my headphones and closed my eyes.
Click… drag… tap.
It sounded dry. Like a fingernail against the backside of the plasterboard.
My brain tried to rationalize it immediately. Mice? No, mice scurry; they don’t keep a 4/4 time signature. A loose pipe expanding in the cold? Pipes ping; they don’t scrape.
I took the headphones off and stared at the wall. The paint was that hideous "Landlord Beige," peeling slightly near the baseboards. It looked solid. It looked normal.
Tap. Tap.
It was right there. Eye level. Maybe three feet to the left of my vintage movie poster.
"Go to sleep, Mark," I said aloud, my voice sounding weak in the stillness. "It’s just acoustics. Weird acoustic anomalies. Don't go full conspiracy theorist."
I saved the file as Neighbor_Noise_Complaint_Final.wav, shut down the monitors, and crawled into bed. I put my noise-canceling earbuds in, cranked up a white noise playlist, and tried to ignore the fact that the tapping felt less like a sound and more like a code I was too stupid to understand.
Closing Note：
I must decline all collaboration requests.
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