I HEARD A LOW MURMUR FROM MY FATHER’S ROOM – IT WASN’T HIM TALKING TO HIMSELF
I heard a low murmur from my father’s room, paused outside his door, and it was slightly ajar.
I leaned closer, heart pounding against my ribs like a frantic bird. The air in the hall was suddenly cold, but inside his room, it felt oddly warm. I could hear my father’s frail voice, slow and raspy, talking about the old house on Elm Street, the one we sold years ago.
He kept repeating a name, “Margaret,” over and over. It wasn’t Mom’s name, or any nurse, or anyone I knew. There was a strange, sweet floral scent, like old perfume, thick and cloying, hanging in the air right near the doorframe. Then I heard him say clearly, his voice gaining a shocking strength, “You can’t tell her where I hid it. Not ever.”
Hid what? My breath caught in my throat. He sounded more lucid than he had in months, maybe years. Was he talking to a ghost? To an imaginary friend? Who was this Margaret, and what was hidden? A sudden, deep chill ran down my spine, despite the warmth from the room.
I was so focused on listening, I didn’t hear anything else until a floorboard creaked *hard* right behind me in the hallway, sudden and loud, making me jump.
Then a hand clamped hard on my shoulder from the darkness of the hallway.
👇 Full story continued in the comments……My heart leaped into my throat. I spun around, arm instinctively raised, expecting… I didn’t know what. A figure coalesced from the shadows of the hall, not a spectral form, but solid and familiar.
It was my brother, Mark. His hand was still on my shoulder, gripping tighter than he perhaps intended. His face, usually relaxed, was etched with concern in the dim light filtering from the room.
“What the hell are you doing sneaking around?” he whispered, his voice low and strained. “You okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I sagged with relief, though the residual terror of the unknown voice still prickled my skin. “It’s Dad,” I breathed, the words catching. “I heard him talking. He’s talking about the old house, about someone named Margaret, and… he said he hid something there. And he sounded… Mark, he sounded completely himself for a second.”
Mark’s brow furrowed. He glanced towards the crack in the door, then back at me. “Margaret? The old house? That doesn’t make any sense. He hasn’t mentioned Elm Street in years, let alone… Margaret. Who is that?”
“I don’t know! But listen, there’s this weird sweet smell… and he sounded so clear, so *strong* when he said ‘You can’t tell her where I hid it. Not ever.'” My voice trembled. “It was like… like he was talking to someone right there.”
Mark hesitated, his skepticism warring with the genuine fear in my eyes and the strange atmosphere emanating from the room. He finally nodded slowly. “Okay. Let’s… let’s go in quietly. See what’s happening.”
We pushed the door open gently. The air inside *was* distinctly warmer than the hallway, and the cloying floral scent was still noticeable, though fainter inside the room itself, seeming to hang heaviest near the doorframe. Our father was in his bed, lying on his side, facing away from us. He was quiet now, his breathing soft and regular, the shallow breaths of sleep. The sudden lucidity and strong voice were gone, replaced by the frail man we knew.
There was no one else in the room.
We exchanged a look of confusion and unease. Was I hallucinating? Had Dad been having a incredibly vivid dream or a momentary surge of clarity brought on by something we couldn’t understand?
Over the next few days, my brother and I couldn’t shake off the mystery. We talked to Mom – she’d never heard of a ‘Margaret’ connected to Dad, not from his past or recent life. We carefully sifted through some of his old boxes from the Elm Street house, packed away in the attic, looking for any clue.
It was Mark who found it, tucked at the bottom of a trunk filled with old photo albums and forgotten paperwork. A small, tarnished silver key, unlike any key in the house, and a faded, undated photograph of our father, decades younger, standing in front of the old house on Elm Street, arm-in-arm with a beautiful woman with kind eyes and a gentle smile. On the back, written in elegant script, was the single word: “Margaret.”
Suddenly, the pieces began to click into place. A hidden part of our father’s history, locked away not just by time and his illness, but intentionally. The key, the old house, the name, the whispered secret about hiding something. The strange floral scent? Perhaps a lingering trace on an old item in the room, or even a scent associated with Margaret that a fleeting memory brought forward, triggering the vivid ‘conversation’.
We decided we had to go back to Elm Street. We contacted the current owners, explaining our father’s condition and our discovery of an old key that might belong to something hidden from his past. They were surprisingly understanding, allowing us to visit and look around briefly.
Standing in the familiar, yet now alien, rooms of the old house, memories flooded back. We searched based on a hunch, a faint clue from the photograph where Dad and Margaret stood near the old, slightly crooked fireplace in the living room. Running our hands along the stonework, we found it – a loose brick, expertly concealed. Behind it was a small, wooden box, just large enough to fit in two hands.
Inside, nestled amongst dried flowers that still held a faint echo of that sweet, cloying scent, were letters tied with ribbon. Letters between our father and Margaret. They told a story of young, passionate love, cut short by circumstances beyond their control – perhaps family disapproval, distance, or illness hinted at in Margaret’s later letters. The “hidden” item wasn’t a treasure map or a dark secret, but a small, exquisite locket, engraved with both their initials and a date from long before he met our mother.
The ‘you can’t tell her where I hid it’ wasn’t about keeping something from our mother in a deceitful way, but perhaps a promise to Margaret, or a reflection of the secrecy their relationship required, or even just the confusion of a declining mind merging past and present secrets. He wasn’t talking *to* Margaret; he was reliving a powerful, hidden memory out loud.
We returned home, the box heavy in our hands, not with gold, but with the weight of unspoken history. Looking at our sleeping father later that night, he was just the frail man again. But now, we saw him differently – not just as our father, but as a man who had loved deeply, carried secrets, and lived a life with hidden chapters we had only just begun to understand. The mystery wasn’t supernatural, but deeply, profoundly human. We placed the box back in his trunk, a quiet testament to a love story we had never known, a secret he had kept safe until, in his final years, the boundaries between past and present momentarily dissolved. The house was quiet, the strange scent gone, replaced by the familiar smells of home, but the low murmur from his room would forever hold a new, bittersweet meaning.