Screams of Lost Souls

Our high school rose above Istanbul like a mausoleum, and its corridors steeped in mildew and silence. Every stair groaned like a coffin lid, the walls bled with forgotten mosaics clawing their way back to the surface, and it sounded as if the building had learned to exhale slowly, the way the sea does before a storm.

Leyla was one of my closest friends, if you could call her that. She was more of a shadow than flesh, a hush in human shape. Burcu came into our group later, a flickering light. Even our friendship couldn’t drown the whispers that seeped along the baseboards of students vanishing, voices sighing from empty classrooms, screams without mouths.

“This place is breathing,” Burcu whispered, watching darkness pool in the corners like a deep black ink. She was right. The city was alive around us, old and patient. It watched from between the stones.

Leyla’s movements were always a fraction too precise, as if she were answering cues only she could hear. One afternoon she showed us a pendant  she’d found in the Grand Bazaar that was bronze, tarnished, and warm to the touch. On the frontwas an old sigil, a gate drawn in a steady hand. “It carries secrets,” she murmured, and her voice softened. Burcu rolled her eyes, but I saw how Leyla’s gaze clung to the pendant.

Soon after Leyla showed us her pendant, a drop of blood appeared in the girls’ restroom—bright against the rusted rim of the sinkr. Burcu’s breath snagged. “Is it… from one of the lost?” The question recoiled, bouncing around the room for an answer. Leyla was gone again, swallowed by the building’s seams. She knew the places where the floor forgot to hold.

Nights thickened. Fog smothered the lamps; the hills on both sides of the Bosphorus strait leaned closer, listening. I felt breath that wasn’t mine on the back of my neck. On my door one evening, a slip of paper was waiting for me:

Secrets are going to come to light.

Beneath the sentence Leyla's sigil burned and left smeared ash that  would not wash away. When I blinked, the lines of the note seemed to crawl around the page, working hard to remember their original shape.

A week later after Leyla had returned and my note was but a strange occurrence, a new girl appeared in our class. Zümrahad a smile too bright and eyes that reflected more than they revealed. Leyla and I both saw the necklace that hung around her throat. Leyla’s face tightened at the sight 

“Don’t talk to her,” she told me, and the words emerged like frost. Burcu, stubborn and kind, spoke to Zümra anyway and came back cheeks flushed and laughing.

One day Zümra did not come back at all.

No messages. No calls. Just a hollow where her desk had been, a snowfall of rumor settling on the chairs. At night, the whispers learned a new name.

I found the reason in glass. Passing the antique shop Leyla haunted, I saw Zümra’s necklace hanging in the window—not hers exactly, but its twin. The reflection doubled and tripled, each pane another mouth keeping the same secret. I pressed my hand to the cold. The glass fogged. When it cleared, the pendant looked closer, as if the window had exhaled it toward me.

At dusk, Burcu and I followed Leyla. Istanbul’s narrow veins threaded us between facades that crumbled like old teeth. Damp laundry lines sagged and the fog looked like bone in the alleyways. Leyla moved quickly, never looking back. She passed through a rusted iron gate that groaned open as if remembering her.

Inside the building the air carried iron and damp earth and something older—a cellar scent from a city that stores its memories below. Chains shifted gently, without wind. On the walls, childlike paintings layered over one another until faces blurred into unrecognizable figures.

Zümra lay on the floor, pale as spent wax. Around her, our photographs were pinned like butterflies—private moments we had not given, caged under a stranger’s gaze. The sigil was carved into the concrete under her body, large enough to step inside. I could feel it—not warmth, but a slow pressure, a tide turning without water.

Leyla sat at a table, humming as she methodically wiped a blade. Her eyes were a shark’s: all surface, no shore. Her shadow stretched past her feet and kept going, sliding along the wall like a separate animal. When she looked up, I understood: the glass separating  us and the city had thinned, and something had come through our friend.

“Why didn’t you see me?” she asked, and the building carried her question the way the Bosphorus carries a cry. “You were supposed to protect me. But you let me drown. Everyone loves you. Everyone sees you. It’s your fault. All of it.”

It wasn’t rage that filled the room. It was grief, old as the stones. Istanbul breathed in and the lights dimmed; it breathed out and the sigil darkened. Burcu grabbed my wrist. We ran, our steps skittering over dust that wasn’t dust at all but the soft remainder of burnt things. Behind us, chains tapped each other gently as if counting.

Once a gate is drawn into your eyes, it redraws your sleep. You cannot unsee it. The school quieted, but that quiet was only a promise to the deaf. Shadows clung more stubbornly than mold. I woke most nights with my lungs aching, as if something had been drinking from my breath. In my notebook, circles nested themselves where I had left no mark. Keys formed without teeth; eyes opened without lids. The sigil learned my hand.

The mirror developed a delay—a half-second in which the girl inside lingered and the girl outside waited to be returned. Behind my eyes lived a hunger that watched me with patient courtesy. I stopped telling Burcu anything. She stopped asking. Our friendship became a hallway we crossed at different hours to avoid seeing ourselves in the other’s face.