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The Voices

The voices were soft at first, so soft they almost sounded like nothing at all. But as Owen pressed himself deeper into the couch, those voices pushed their way into his head like fingers through soft dough. They were everywhere. Worse when he pressed his ear to the couch; there, they seemed to vibrate louder, bullying their way through the atoms and molecules of the leather. They came from below. From the sides. And even from somewhere up above.

He assumed they were just a dream, some hallucination as he skidded across the surface of sleep like a flat stone skipping across a still pond. Sleep could be like that for him sometimes: He would lie there, and just as he started to dip into sleep, he’d pop that perfect bubble and tumble into some terrible dream space, plunging into nameless nightmare before waking suddenly, his heart hammering.

These voices, though, conjured in him a peculiar kind of nostalgia: when you’re a child, and you’re hearing adults talk in an adjacent room, but they’re trying to keep quiet enough not to wake you. You cannot hear their words, only the soft murmur and mumble of the voices themselves. And in that sound, you can detect emotion, you can hear the rhythm and the rise and the fall, but you can’t make out what they’re actually saying . In his case, those moments usually, maybe always, ended with his father yelling at his mother. Then a door slam. Then her crying, still softly, because she tried to keep her sobs a secret. So as not to wake her one son.

Finally, Owen inhaled deeply and sat up, his eyes open.

He still heard the voices.

Hamish was in the crook of the sofa, where it bent, and he too was awake. Looking up and around. The look of someone hearing something.

“You hear it, too?” Hamish asked, quietly.

“The voices?”

“Yeah.” Hamish sat upright, rubbing his eyes. “It’s like when my parents had a fight. Man, they fought all the time. Night and day.”

Owen nodded. “Mine didn’t fight that often, but when they did…” It was mostly his father who yelled. Mom just…went along. He never hit her, never hit Owen. It was always just words, but that whole thing about sticks and stones was a lie. Words hurt as bad as a fist. Maybe worse. Because a fist, maybe you excuse that as oh, he couldn’t help it, he’s just an animal, a primate, his blood was up. But someone cuts you with words? Calls you names, tells you how little they think of you? That bypasses all your armor. A razor sliding across the meat of your heart.

One time, though, his mother came hurrying up the steps as he was going down, and she stopped him midway. Her face was streaked with the runoff of ruined makeup. Her nose rimmed with snot. Mom was usually quiet, usually sweet, didn’t say much, didn’t take up much room, rarely had a bad word to say. But that day, she said in the coldest, cruelest tone, “I hope he hangs himself. He’s miserable enough to do it. You’ll see.”

And Owen remembered nodding along with that. Agreeing with her. And a little part of him felt like maybe, just maybe, things would turn around after that—maybe Mom could stoke that little fire in her belly into a proper bonfire. Maybe she would fight back. For herself and for Owen. But it didn’t happen. After that day, the fire went out and she mostly melted into the background again. Then, when he was in college, came the car accident. A pickup truck T-boned her Chevy Malibu at an intersection—a car she hated but that Dad had bought for her—and she died at the hospital that night. And a few years after that, Dad died, too. Not of suicide, like his mother had hoped. Cancer. He remembered visiting him then and—

He flinched at the coming memory, and cut it off at the knees.

He felt along the ridges of his ears, found a hair there, plucked it. A tiny spike of pain felt clarifying. He wanted to pluck more. He wanted to dig a finger deep into his ear, scrape out the wax. Then stick a pencil even deeper, puncturing the drum. In the fullness of blood he wouldn’t be able to hear the voices through the walls. Owen gritted his teeth; he needed to shake it off.

So he stood up and walked to the wall next to the closet where they’d come in. He pressed his ear to the drywall. The voices were louder this way, but he still couldn’t make anything out. Two people? Three? A man, a woman, at least. A laugh. Then, agitation. Not a happy laugh. More babble and gush. More from the teachers and parents in Peanuts. Womp womp womp womp .

“I think it’s coming from this direction,” he hissed to Hamish, who was on the other side of the room, at the end of the couch near Nick’s head.

But Hamish said, “No, I hear it here.”

Owen went over and listened.

Sure enough, more voices there. Same voices? He couldn’t tell.

“Fuck are you two doing?” Lore asked, plodding over, yawning.

“You don’t hear it?” he asked her.

“Hear what?” she asked, but then she seemed to take a moment. Her head tilted and her face tightened in concern and confusion. “Are those voices?”

They said yeah. Voices.

Lore blinked. “There are people here. Other people.” Hope bloomed on her face. “We have to find them. Where are they?”

“I think they’re…everywhere,” Owen said.

Murmur, mumble, hum, and babble. Muted susurrus of conversation.

Nick slept through it all, because of course he did.

In a whirl of motion, Lore stalked to the pair of doors at the far side of the room and threw both of them open. They remained what they were: one an entrance to a small bathroom with shattered mirror glass everywhere, the other a dark room, with just the barest of shapes outlined in the black.

The voices came from neither.

Hamish shuddered and moved around Lore to shut both the doors.

“Sorry,” he said, defensively. “In here, open doors feel…weird.”

Like a threat, Owen thought idly. A cruel promise .

Lore moved back to the other side of the room. Ear to the wall. Then she started pounding on the wall. “Hello?” she called. “ Hello! ”

But the voices continued, unabated, no response.

So she pounded louder, and yelled louder.

Nick, at this point, snorted awake. “Jesus fuck,” he grumbled.

Lore dragged over a chair and started yelling at the wall, the ceiling, just saying, Hello, can you hear us, are you there? over and over again, and she hit the ceiling one last time and—

The voices paused.

Then:

Mumblemumble

Murmurmumble?

Mum

Mrrm

Womm wemm numm!

Suddenly, the voices erupted. A man yelling. A woman ending his tirade with a dire scream, the kind of scream that was one of fear and torment and pain—then, finally, a thud . It shook the room.

Silence in the aftermath.

They all looked to one another before Nick interrupted with: “What was that? Were there people? Are there other people?” He struggled to escape the trap of the couch but finally managed to stand. “We need to go. We need to go and find them, they could know Matty—”

“I…don’t think so,” Lore said.

“What?”

“We don’t know what that is. Or who that was,” Owen said.

Hamish pointed at Owen as if to say, Yeah, exactly . “Last voice we heard came out of a dead girl with her throat slit.”

“And those voices we just heard? They didn’t sound friendly.”

“But one of them was a woman. And she could be hurt.”

“She could be dead, ” Nick said, bluntly. “Or dying.”

Hamish had an of course look on his face. “God. It’s them. It’s the people who owned this house. That sound, the thump…”

He didn’t have to finish the thought. They all understood what that meant. The father of the house killing his wife. As one, they again turned to look at the bloody glass sculpture on the bookshelf.

“We should go. We have to go. I mean—” Lore shrugged. “Not like we’re going to be going back to sleep. The rooms haven’t changed. Still a bathroom. Still a dark place. We’ll just—we have our phones, yeah? Power them up, we can use the flashlights to make it through.”

Owen sighed. Fear prickled his skin. He didn’t want to leave because—well, this room was safe. Safe enough, anyway. No dead girls, no thumbs on cakes. Just some dead fish and ugly greige. It would be easier to stay here. To remain here. To wait and stop and be safe and shrivel up and deliquesce until you’re just a comfortable, soft gelatin soaking into the gray-beige carpet. That thought, sung to him like a song from outside himself. A lullaby of sorts. The comfort of doing nothing. The peace of waiting. The easy contentment of slow death .

That’s what you’ve been doing your whole life, he realized.

Just watching and waiting and—

And dying .

He shuddered.

Lore was right. They had to go. They had to move .

“Good?” Lore asked, rhetorically, not waiting for an answer before she said, with some finality, “Good. Meanwhile—I can’t believe I have to say this, but it’s like we’re going on a road trip. That means if you have to go to the bathroom, do it now, since we…have a bathroom. We’ll go in one at a time, but keep the door open . No room for embarrassment here, cool? Door open.”

They all nodded.

“Line up for potty breaks,” she said. “Except I’m first, because I know you animals are going to soak the seat.”

She headed off to the bathroom. Nick followed after.

Hamish took Owen aside. “Fuck, man. I don’t know about this. I don’t know if this is a good idea.”

“I don’t know either. But I don’t think we can stay here.”

“Tell me we’re going to be all right.”

“If you’re looking to me for reassurance, we’re pretty fucked.”

Hamish shrugged. “I still need it. I still need to know we’re going to be okay, that we’re going to get out of this place, man.”

It dug into him to see Hamish rattled. Hamish, who for so long lived what could best be described as an unexamined life, looking to Owen, who lived what could only be described as an overexamined life .

“We’re going to be fine,” Owen lied.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Covenant?”

“Covenant.”

They hugged.

It was the last time they’d do so for a long while.