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.
The city tilted. The bridges seemed to hesitate before allowing me to pass. Ferries moved slower, their wakes spreading like torn veils. Shop windows replicated the pendant until every street corner was watching. The fog dug its fingers into the seams of buildings and pulled, exposing a darker brick beneath.
On a Sunday I found the iron gate again, not by memory but by feel—the way a tongue finds a broken tooth. I did not go inside. I stood at the threshold and listened. The building was quieter than before, but the quiet had a pulse. This door was a mouth, sealed shut to keep something from spilling out.
At school, someone had scrubbed the sink until the porcelain bloomed with scratches. The drop of blood was goneand a faint ring remained: not a stain, but a memory. When I turned off the lights, the ring softened and seemed to breathe.
“Why didn’t you see me?” Leyla’s whisper traveled along the lockers and under the classroom doors. It found the back of my neck the way fog finds the throat of a river. I wanted to answer, I see you now, but I couldn’t. I feared what the truth would invite.
That night, I dreamed I was standing inside the sigil. It was not magic in the pretty sense; it was architecture. Lines like bridges; curves like currents tightening around the city’s spine. A pressure rose through my feet into my bones and reorganized my fear into something usable. I woke with the taste of iron on my tongue and the was certain that the drawing in my notebook had grown while my eyes were closed.
The pendant returned to school, not on a neck but in a shadow—its shape cast cleanly on a wall where no object hung. I watched it for a long time. Shadows do not lie, but they are not obliged to tell whole truth.
Burcu cornered me near the staircase. “Your silence sounds like her,” she said, and flinched at the admission. “You laugh like her now. You look at doors like she looks at mirrors.” She wanted me to deny it, and I wanted to give her that gift, but the words I could have used belonged to the girl I had been before the city remembered our names.
I carried my notebook into the courtyard and opened it where the sunlight made the fog look thinner. The page was already waiting: the sigil drawn in my own hand. It was far steadier than I what I couldmanage awake. The lines joined and separated again, forever changing form. I pressed my palm to the paper. The bones in my wrist hummed in answer, as if a string had been plucked in some unseen instrument that now was part of my body.
That evening the city leaned in even further. The call to prayer gathered in the fog until the sound laid over the roofs like a sheet of fabric. In the brief hush afterward, something beneath the streets exhaled. A man walking his dog paused and looked down as if the stone had spoken through his soles.
I did not return to the gate that night, but it returned to me. I saw its shape in the arch of a doorway, in the negative space between two lampposts, in the way ferries queued to dock like teeth along a jaw. The world had learned a new letter.Once learned, it began to read itself aloud.
I stood before the mirror again, and the delay lengthened. The girl inside tilted her head not quite when I tilted mine; she smiled more slowly and with a precision that could only come by thought. Behind her I saw movement that did not exist in my room. It was not Leyla exactly, but it wore her patience and her hunger like a second skin. I reached toward the glass. My fingertips cooled, as if touching water that did not want me.
The screams of lost souls returned, not as echoes but as threads. They tugged gently at the base of my skull, invited me to practice their pitch. I did, softly, and felt the city approve with a shiver in the floorboards. There is a way to call, it turns out, that sounds like warning to the naive and like welcome to the prepared.
“This isn’t us,” Burcu said the next day, her voice raw at the edges. “This isn’t you.” I almost told her she was wrong—that this was exactly us, the version people always suspected and hoped never to meet. Instead, I took her hand and pressed my notebook into it. She opened to the sigil. It looked back, measuring. She closed the book and handed it to me as if returning a knife.
The fog did not lift for three days. When the sun finally found the city again, the light felt thinner. I sat on the cracked steps outside the school and watched my shadow settle beside me. It had changed. It no longer matched my outline perfectly. Part of it reached somewhere I could not follow.
I realized then that the worst part isn’t that no one notices. It’s that those who do will learn how to look away and live. The city had taught them. The city was teaching me.
And somewhere, deeper than the cisterns and older than the stones, something learned my name and wrote it down the way gates keep lists—quietly, saving for a later time.
About the Author
Zeynep Uzun (b. 1979, Istanbul) is a writer of short stories and novellas whose work explores memory, silence, trauma, and transformation. After a long career in finance, she turned fully to writing, studying at various workshops and publishing stories in literary magazines such as Notos. Her fiction blends psychological depth with uncanny atmospheres, often inspired by real experiences, community life, and symbolic imagery. Her novella The Grey of White has been accepted for publication by a UK press. Screams of Lost Souls marks her first international publication. She believes in the healing power of storytelling—both in writing and in reading.