“I Can’t Sleep” - A Short Mystery Featuring Detective Callum Reed

The rain had been falling for hours, soft as static against the windows of the old boarding house on Wren Street. Inside, the wallpaper curled like old parchment, and the air smelled faintly of mothballs and forgotten secrets.

Detective Callum Reed stood in the hallway, coat damp, eyes scanning the dim corridor. He’d been summoned by a call at 2:17 a.m.—a woman’s voice, trembling, barely audible over the line.

Room 6.

He knocked once. The door creaked open.

Maureen Ellis stood in the threshold, her eyes rimmed red, her hands clutching a porcelain teacup that trembled slightly in her grip.

“I can’t sleep,” she said, voice hollow. “Not since the tapping started.”

Reed stepped inside. The room was sparse: a single bed, a writing desk, and a mirror that had been turned to face the wall.

“Tapping?” he asked.

She nodded. “Every night. Same time. From inside the walls.”

Reed glanced at the floorboards, then at the wall behind the bed. A faded photograph lay on the desk—three people, smiling stiffly. One of them was Maureen. The other two were marked with a red pen: Xs over their faces.

“Who are they?” he asked.

“My sister. And her husband. They died last year. Gas leak, they said. But I know better.”

Reed’s gaze lingered on the mirror. “Why turn it around?”

Maureen hesitated. “Because it started showing things that weren’t there. Things I hadn’t seen since the funeral.”

Reed moved to the wall and pressed his ear against it. Silence. Then—faintly—a rhythmic tapping. Three short knocks. Pause. Then two.

He straightened. “That’s not random.”

Maureen’s voice cracked. “It’s Morse code.”

Reed’s eyes narrowed. “What does it say?”

She looked at him, tears welling. “It spells my name.”

Reed returned the next evening with a portable frequency scanner and a notebook filled with wartime signal patterns. The mirror, still turned to the wall, seemed to hum with latent tension.

“May I?” he asked.

Maureen nodded, arms folded tightly.

He turned the mirror. Nothing unusual—until the light shifted. A faint outline appeared in the glass, like condensation forming a shape.

It was a number: 1916.

“That’s not the year they died,” Reed said.

“No,” Maureen whispered. “It’s the year this house was built.”

Reed made a note. “And the year Orford Ness began its secret transmissions.”

Maureen’s breath caught as the number shimmered, then faded. Reed’s hand hovered over the glass, almost reverent. “There’s something else,” he murmured, watching the mirror’s surface pulse gently as if it remembered more than its own reflection.

At midnight, the tapping resumed—faint, insistent, threading through the silence. Each tap drew them closer to the edge of understanding and dread. Reed began to transcribe, matching dots and dashes while Maureen recited childhood memories, searching for connections.

A pattern soon emerged: three short taps, one long pause, and then another sequence—always ending with the same deliberate rhythm. “It’s like a signature,” Reed said. “Someone’s trying to be recognized.”

A distant radio, left on for comfort, caught a burst of static that synchronized with the mirror’s tapping. Maureen’s skin prickled. Old stories of coded broadcasts and lost agents flickered in her mind, but one name echoed above all.

Reed enlisted Dr. Lydia Venn, who specialized in wartime psychological operations. Together, they discovered that the tapping followed a pattern used by MI5 to identify compromised agents—short bursts, pauses, then a signature rhythm.

They traced the rhythm to a file in the National Archives: Agent Moth. A woman who vanished in 1943 after allegedly betraying her unit.

Maureen’s sister had been researching Agent Moth before her death.

But their investigation stalled as inexplicable phenomena mounted. In the half-light, the mirror would sometimes flicker with other numbers—coordinates, perhaps, or dates that vanished before they could record them. Reed felt the weight of unseen eyes watching from the darkness beneath the stairs, the air thick with the unspoken. Maureen, sleepwalking through memories, began dreaming in Morse: flashes of wind-bent grass, a lighthouse beam sweeping the shingle, and a woman’s silhouette waiting by a ruined transmitter.

They grew obsessed. Day after day, Reed reconstructed the strange code, overlaying it on old maps of Orford Ness and cross-referencing names from faded dispatch logs. Maureen’s recollections sharpened, hinting at something inherited—a rumour passed down in lullabies, the names of long-gone radio officers whispered as protection against the dark.

One night, as a storm howled against the eaves, the tapping erupted into a feverish crescendo. A voice—thin, electric, barely more than breath—broke through the static: “Find me.” Reed’s pen stilled. The mirror shimmered again, this time revealing a moth’s outline etched in frost, its wings trembling in the candlelight.

Reed enlisted Dr. Lydia Venn, who specialized in wartime psychological operations. Together, they discovered that the tapping followed a pattern used by MI5 to identify compromised agents—short bursts, pauses, then a signature rhythm.

The discovery unsettled them both. Maureen pressed her palm to the glass, tracing the outline of the moth, as if by touch she could summon its secrets. Reed, hunched over his notepad, scrawled the word again and again: “Moth.” The urgency in the voice, the mirrored numbers, the dreams—they all converged on this vanished woman.

A sudden gust rattled the window; the flickering candle threw restless shadows across the walls. In the wavering light, Maureen whispered, “My sister thought the key to Moth’s story was never in the official reports. She said you had to listen for what was lost between the lines.” Reed nodded, recalling fragments from the dispatch logs—aborted transmissions, jumbled coordinates, messages that seemed to end mid-sentence.

As midnight deepened, the radio’s static grew purposeful, like the faint echo of a wartime broadcast looping through decades. Reed adjusted the tuner, trying to catch the frequency that aligned with the tapping.

Maureen, hollow-eyed but resolute, wrote down each fragment that emerged, her handwriting trembling as the moth’s form lingered at the mirror’s edge.

They traced the rhythm to a file in the National Archives: Agent Moth. A woman who vanished in 1943 after allegedly betraying her unit.

Late one night, Reed received a message on his personal phone. No number. Just a sound file: tapping. He decoded it.

“I can’t sleep. She watches me.”

The next day, Maureen was gone. Her room undisturbed. The mirror shattered.

Reed found a final clue: a note tucked behind the wallpaper.

“The code lives in rhythm. The truth lives in silence.”

Reed begins to unravel. He hears tapping in his own flat. Sees reflections that don’t match reality. Lydia warns him: “The experiment never ended. It just changed subjects.”

He spent hours replaying the taps, sheets of code and cross-referenced ciphers scattered around him like fallen leaves. The silence between beats gnawed at him, each pause charged with a meaning he sensed but could not translate. In Maureen’s absence, he haunted her notes, searching for a constellation of sense among the scraps and scribbled margins.

One night, compelled by a dread both familiar and new, Reed stood before the fractured mirror in Maureen’s room. The candle guttered low, its flame twitching toward the glass as if drawn by unseen breath. The tapping resumed—not in the walls, not in the radio, but deep within the hush that filled the space between his heartbeats. It was as if the code itself had crossed into the room, inhabiting the silence, pulsing through the floorboards, whispering in the shards of glass.

And in that trembling reflection, Reed saw—not himself, but a flicker of something other: the suggestion of wings, the shadow of a woman lost to time, watching through the splintered surface.

He didn’t dare look away.

He gripped the edge of the vanity, knuckles whitening. The tapping intensified, steady and insistent, echoing through the hollow of his chest. With every beat, the reflection fractured a little more, splinters of glass catching the candlelight and scattering it in fevered patterns across the peeling wallpaper.

He whispered.

“I can’t sleep.”