Coming home late tonight, long after midnight…
As I was walking up the driveway, a few stray flurries of snow in the air around me…
I stopped.
A voice, far off . . . one word, harsh and cold and drawn out breathless like the frigid night air.
My name.
Not my real name. The name I grew up with, what I was born with. The name no one calls me anymore.
I wait, listening.
Nothing.
Fair enough, I think to myself as I head inside. You can get back to me when you’re ready.
Sitting alone in the couch tonight, I slowly realize that I can hear someone singing.
Somewhere in the house, a man is singing.
It has a muted quality, as though it is coming from very far away.
I stand for a moment and listen.
I recognize it. The clear voice, the calypso intonation is unmistakeable.
Someone is listening to Harry Belafonte, somewhere.
But, of course, no one in the house is listening to Harry Belafonte, not tonight.
And yet, there it is.
After a few minutes, the music fades.
We awake to a burst of static from the baby monitor. This is not uncommon. It seems like almost anything can set it off, if we don’t put the damn thing in just the right spot.
I reach over and shift the monitor on the nightstand, hoping to move it out of whatever signal is causing the disruption. The noise subsides and I lay back.
The room is dark. I run through the usual late-night fears and paranoia in my head: Home invasion, ghosts, something worse than either of those…
It occurs to me that the static had structure, a vaguely familiar rhythm.
Not musical. Not a heartbeat. I can’t quite place it.
I’m just about asleep when it screeches again.
That rhythm. I recognize it now.
Three short bursts. Three long bursts. Three short bursts.
I grab the monitor and head downstairs. I won’t be sleeping anymore tonight.
A strange atmosphere hanging over The Last House tonight.
The sky outside is heavy with rain, but it doesn’t look like any will fall. The heat is heavy, like a hand on your chest.
Inside . . . everything feels pressurized, oppressive.
There are shadows moving through the rooms, vague shapes darting here and there in the periphery of my vision . . . some pop out into my line of sight, trying to startle me.
Almost clown like, playful. But they want me to be scared.
I feel twitchy, paranoid . . . glancing, looking back over my shoulder as things pass.
It hasn’t been this bad in a long time.
It’s been getting worse by the minute.
It’s going to be a long night.
The voices again tonight.
No music this time, no men.
One or two women, I can’t quite be sure. Possibly a child.
I told my wife about the voices a few days ago. She could tell tonight that I was hearing them again. And, of course, she cannot.
We keep a fan going at night, even in cold weather. White noise.
She suggested I turn it off, just to see if that helped.
She might be right. I honestly can’t say for sure.
Maybe it’s a trick of the sound in the room, the combination of the fan and the hiss of the baby monitor.
With the fan off, we sat there in the dark and waited.
There. Not as loud, not as much. But there.
And again.
“I don’t hear anything,” she told me.
I apologized, turned the fan back on so she could sleep and came downstairs to wait it out.
Down here it’s the usual creaks and hums of the house by night. The fridge ticks over from time to time. The radiators gurgle. The cats snore, dozing. The baby monitor sounds a bit like running water.
And, sometimes, I think I catch a brief murmur underneath it all. Somewhere.
I honestly don’t know. Maybe it’s all just paradoelia.
But . . . I have a vague memory of something similar when I was a child. This would have been when I was maybe six or seven years old.
I remember my two older brothers got to stay up later than me, I remember thinking that it wasn’t fair they got to watch Hawaii 5.0 and I didn’t.
I remember lying there in bed, listening to the pulse of drums and what sounded like singing or chanting –faint and very far away.
I got up to complain that the TV was too loud.
My mother told me that the set was off. It was later than i realized, my brothers had gone to bed, She asked me what I heard. When I told her, she gave my father an odd look.
I would get to know that gesture very well in the coming years — the sidelong glance, lips compressed, a knot of worry in between her eyes.
Two or three times now, I have found myself unable to sleep because of the voices.
It sounds for all the world like two men having an argument somewhere in the house. Sometimes there are women’s voices mixed in. Sometimes there are children.
I can almost just make out what they’re saying. Almost.
Sometimes there’s music as well, faintly.
But I only hear it in our bedroom, only at night.
It’s… disconcerting. Maddening.
Irritating.
Impossible to sleep.
Waking up in the winterdark, I head downstairs. Cold floors and echoes of early morning dreams.
I pass by the front door and see someone out on the sidewalk, a dark shape bundled up against the cold.
Halfway to the kitchen, I stop.
The dark shape picking its way along the crust of snow, another echo in the back of my head. Old, old feelings.
The shape, slightly too tall . . . too tall and too dark.
Not a person, no.
Back at the door, I look one way and then the other. Up and down the street, far as I can see.
Nothing. No one.