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Post by Vaughan on Aug 23, 2009 22:19:48 GMT
Well, Amie. Here you go! Sorry it took so long, I've been sleepy all day. --LOL--
Whispers
It started with something simple. I guess when you get down to it all things start with something simple, it’s only the rest that’s complicated. And so it was here, something as simple as a brief introduction, a quick chat to new neighbours. It started with my indifference, my distractions with work, my writing, everything really.
It was such an insignificant thing to start with. There was no way I could imagine, during those early days, that it would become an obsession. I was innocent, and just didn’t care about such things as neighbours. Sure I’d smile and give brief ‘good mornings’ and ‘good evenings’ as I grabbed my mail from the box, but my usual self-absorption saw to it that I never got involved, never let the worries of strangers become my worries, their burdens my burdens.
You see how it is? I’m not so different from anyone else living in the city. We don’t choose our neighbours, they just are. We’re thrown together by circumstance, not by any great plan. Frankly, if we chose our neighbours the majority of us would choose someone other than we currently have, and the rest would choose to have no neighbours at all.
The fact is, we don’t have anything in common with these people other than living close by. They have their lives, and I have mine. They have their set of friends, and I have mine. And have you noticed how our friends, our really close friends, are never our neighbours? They always live somewhere else. As though we know an unspoken truth – our best friends would make terrible neighbours. I know for sure that I’m a terrible neighbour, after all. Terrible if you want someone to have a cold beer with anyway. Or to watch football with on a Saturday afternoon. Home is a sanctuary from small talk, nonsense chatter, constantly having to entertain. Home is a prison into which I gladly submit myself daily – and no visitors are allowed. It’s how things are, how things should be.
At least it was that way in my life until that moment. I don’t know what happened exactly. My how life was turned upside down by a whisper. Not anything said mind you, not a whisper where I heard all the words and understood them, was insulted or annoyed in some way. No, not at all. This whisper was just that, a hissing exhalation of air, with curves and pits thrown in it by vocal chords and a tongue. Just a whisper.
I’m getting ahead of myself. You don’t know what I’m talking about, this reads like a strange rant from a psychotic idiot. But it’s not that way at all, it’s just that you don’t know what happened. I’m hoping that by writing it down I’ll understand it better myself. At least each step will be clear to you, maybe you’ll realize that you’d have done the same thing as myself, given the same situation.
Okay, so to start at the beginning, that’s always the best place to start. My name is Vaughan. I have a surname of course, but that’s not important. I’m a writer. Not surprising, you’re reading this after all. Like most writers I have to work to support my dreams. When I was younger that really upset me, it seemed unfair somehow. As I got older I guess I just learned to accept that this is the way things were. We all need money to live.
So, as a writer needing money, what else is there to do but write for someone else? In other words, by day I write technical manuals for a software company – boring, laborious, brain dead, formulaic technical manuals full of templates, styles, and tables of contents. By night I write short stories, novels, anything I please. The thing is these details aren’t really very important other than to impress upon you that I need peace and quiet while I’m at home. I sacrifice eight hours of every day just so I can have those hours in the evening to do as I pleased. I treasure those moments at home. My home is my muse.
When I moved to Charrington Street it was out of necessity. My landlord had decided to sell the last property I was in, and I was given four weeks notice to get out. So I took the first place I could find, Flat 7 at 13 Charrington Street.
The building is old, and the landlord, whom I’ve never met, isn’t big on maintenance. I dealt with an agency who didn’t want to know too much about me. Essentially they wanted a deposit, two and half months rent up front, and for me to go away so they could rent a flat to someone else. Which was perfect for me, because agencies are vile things taking money for nothing.
There are eight flats in the building, two per floor. You enter through a door that is directly on the street, and there’s a stairwell that goes up. There is no lift. At the bottom of the stairs, by the door, is a set of mailboxes. We each have a key so we can collect our mail when we want to.
At night, when it’s dark outside, you have to press a large white button at the bottom of the stairs. This turns the lights on. The lights are on a timer, and as soon as you press the button is clicks like a metronome, counting off the time as you climb the stairs. Once your time is up, the lights go out, plunging you into darkness.
The city isn’t a friendly place, and the building at 13 Charrington Street is a perfect microcosm of that. People kept to themselves, and as I have stated already, that suited me perfectly. Over time you get to meet your neighbours, when you’re coming through the door at the same time, in the morning as we all go to work, or sometimes when you’re collecting your mail. At these times there’s a brief ‘hello’, and that’s it. Eventually you got to meet everyone. Everyone that is, except the man in Flat 8.
Please understand, I never had any interest with Flat 8. It was just another flat like all the others. The only thing that distinguished it was that the front door was opposite my own. Otherwise it was special in no way, no way at all. I wanted nothing to do with Flat 8. But fate had other ideas I guess.
I’ve over-simplified things a bit. I was trying to move the story along. However there is one point that might be important to you. I drink. I know I shouldn’t, and I know it’s silly and unnecessary. But drink is the best medication around, and you can self-prescribe it anytime you want. If you feel rotten one day you can up your dose, and if you feel really good you can skip a day altogether.
You might be wondering what I’m medicating against. Well I’ll tell you, I’m medicating against sacrifices. It’s all very well to simplify things and say I work during the day to earn some money, and then write what I want at night – but in reality there are times when I leave the office with a huge knot in my stomach. I’m a good writer, and I worked in a business that had no room for a good writer, they wanted words, not writing.
So I stop off at the pub sometimes. A few whiskeys and I feel better about myself. And I swear it helps me write more creatively too. All barriers come down, reality becomes unstable. You know? So I keep a couple bottles of whiskey by my computer at home too, for when I need inspiration. After living at Charrington Street for a few weeks I got to meet everyone in the building. As I said, bumping into them, shaking hands, smiling etc. Everyone except the man who lived in Flat 8. And for a while I didn’t care. If I could have avoided meeting all of them it would have suited me.
But one day I was putting my key into the lock of my door, and I had the strangest feeling I was being watched. It was a certain feeling, palpable, eyes were boring into me straight through to my bones. It felt like a tap on the shoulder and I turned suddenly. But there was no-one there, just me with my key, and the door to Flat 8 behind.
I let myself into my flat that night and went to work as I normally do. It was no big deal. I’d simply been preoccupied, and then when the spell was broken I’d forgotten how I got to my building, I was shocked by the realisation.
However, I guess the feeling did stick with me, because the next evening I met the woman who lived in Flat 1. I’m not too good at small talk, and in the way of making some kind of noise I asked her about Flat 8. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘There’s an old gentleman who lives up there. Lives on his own, don’t see him much. He never seems to even have visitors.’
I laughed, small talk make me jittery, ‘Well, I’ve never seen him!’ I said.
‘Come to think of it,” the woman replied, ‘I’m not so sure I have either!’ And we both laughed and went our separate ways. It was as simple as that. The sort of conversation people have when they don’t want to be having a conversation, if you know what I mean.
At this point the whole thing could have just gone away. I had my answer now, an old man lived there, all alone. Good, I wouldn’t have to think of it again, the mystery was solved. But it wasn’t to be.
I recall pressing the button for the light. The soft clicking reverberated around the stairwell hastening my rush upwards. Tick-tick-tick. I walked up, and by some strange twist of fate I took longer than usual to reach my door because I was reading the envelopes in my hand.
Before I reached my landing the lights switched off and I was cast into darkness. I fumbled for my keys, and dropped my letters in front of my door. I had to bend down to pick them up, and it was then that I heard it. The whispering. I couldn’t make out what was being said, the words themselves blurred into the air. But I know I heard it.
I remember leaning over the railing and looking down into the ground floor of the building, to see if anyone was there. But the light was still off, and I hadn’t heard the front door open. And it occurred to me that the sound could only have come from one place, from behind the door of Flat 8.
I stood there for quite some time, listening, straining my senses to pick up any sound, any slightest indication that I was correct. But I heard nothing. Finally I let myself into my flat. It had been a bad day, and I’d gotten another rejection letter in the mail. I needed a drink.
I poured a drink, and then another. And another. I needed a lot of self-medication that evening. I was cursing the lack of foresight of publishers, an uncaring public that didn’t even know I existed, and the mail service for being so damn efficient with bad news, and so slow with good. Did they have some special system for sorting it? Was there a code written on the front of the envelopes that alerted them to put a rush on bad news?
Soon my mind became clouded. You can only get annoyed at the inevitable for so long. The paths to possible resolutions are so well worn you quickly reach the unavoidable conclusion that you just have to suck it up. But that night there was something else bothering me. A little nit of a thought that had buried itself in my skull – who was the old man who lived on his own in Flat 8 whispering too? Perhaps it was a guest, but I’d been told he never had those. Perhaps he was talking to himself? Maybe, but I didn’t think so. It was my arrival that caused the old man to stir to his front door, and the words had been meant for me.
Who was this old fool that he hid behind his door whispering? Didn’t he know what kind of day I’d had? The last thing I needed right now was small talk with him. I just wanted to be left alone. But the thought turned around and around in my head, aided by the whiskey. The whiskey made everything turn around, my thoughts, the room, the whole apartment building that suddenly felt as though it was floating in the middle of a choppy ocean.
That night I wrote a new short story. It was the worst story I’d ever written. It made no sense, I repeated phrases over and over, and everyone in the story whispered, no-one spoke out loud. It was horrible.
If not for that story I might have forgotten about the whole thing. The following day I awoke to a drum beat pounding in my very soul. The regular beat followed my every step. I was sweating, and fine layer stuck to my forehead.
I got through my day by following the boring rituals of writing about installing a database server. I fed myself lots of black coffee, which contrary to common wisdom actually does nothing for a hangover. The only things that work are sleep or more alcohol to numb the pain. It’s a cruel irony sent to test us.
Yes, I’d have forgotten about it if it wasn’t the fact that the short story was waiting for me when I got home. It was customary for me to write a story one evening, and to edit it the following. When I got home I found the new story and read through it. I wasn’t at all sure it was worth editing, so I tossed it aside. But the characters, mysterious people with no names, and no voices to speak of, reminded me of that itch. I wrote a new story, and to my chagrin the people in that one didn’t speak either. They hissed.
I finished up quickly and went to bed, sleeping off the previous nights over-indulgence. When I woke in the morning I felt better. All was well until I closed the door behind me on my way to work. The click of the lock on my door was echoed, as though two doors had closed at the same time. Had I just missed the occupant of Flat 8?
I suppose it was then that I decided that I would have to confront the old man. Or at least bring my feelings to some kind of conclusion. For the first time in my life I knew that I couldn’t have a complete stranger living near me. It wasn’t as though I wanted to be friends or anything, but at least I knew what the other people in the building looked like. I had to know what this man was like, or I couldn’t settle.
That evening I decided I would visit the man. I’d knock on his door and introduce myself, just say ‘hello’ and leave it at that. All I needed was a face to put to the front door, to the number 8. We would speak once and that would be the end of it, there’d be no reason to ever speak again.
For some reason I was quite nervous. I had a drink to relax myself and found that only made me feel worse. So I had another drink, and a third. I poured a fourth, but before I could bring the glass to my lips I realized how ridiculous I was being. It was an old man, a neighbour, and I was only going to shake his hand.
So I left my flat and pushed the stairwell light switch. The old man might not open the door if it’s dark outside. It was only five steps from my front door to his, and I took them boldly. Without hesitation I used my knuckles to knock on the door. And I waited.
My heartbeat was thumping along with the tap-tap-tap of the stairwell light mechanism. Seconds felt like minutes. The man was old, it might take him a while to get to his front door. So I waited, not wanting to knock again so soon. But eventually the light went out. Surely the man was home?
I pressed the light switch again. I knock on the door again.
And no-one came.
Eventually I gave up and went back to my own flat. My feelings of neighbourliness, of kindness and well being, was pretty much gone by this point. Why had the man failed to open the door? He never went out, and no-one seemed to have actually seen him, so he must be in there.
I drank, I wrote some, and I went to bed. I’d tried, after all. There was nothing more to be done. When I came to think of it, it really wasn’t important. If the old man wanted to be left alone, well so be it.
But it didn’t work out like that. For the next two nights I’d get home and enter my flat, sit and have a drink, and start to get angry at my neighbour. The old fool. Why had he been whispering at me? Why did no-one see him? Why didn’t he open the door? I couldn’t get it out of my head, and all my stories had doors that wouldn’t open, characters who didn’t speak, or strangers without faces.
So I was driven to go back to the door and knock. That evening I walked across the hall and rapped, loudly this time. No-one came to the door, I heard nothing inside. Annoyed I retreated after ten minutes or so.
And next evening, and the next, I went back time and again. Was there something wrong with me that this old man didn’t think I was worthy of a few minutes of his time?
It became a ritual. I gave up writing, what was the point? Everything was coming out the same, the stories weren’t any good. They got shorter and shorter, until in the end I could put all my neuroses into a single paragraph – no-one wants to read a single paragraph!
Things got so desperate that the next morning I knocked on my way to work. I knocked, waited a few seconds, and then turned on my heel, convinced that I’d get the familiar lack of response. And then the strangest thing happened, I heard the door lock click. Stunned I stepped back into place. And sure enough, ever so slowly, the door opened just a tiny bit, an inch or two.
I couldn’t see into the flat, though I assumed it was just like my own, but anyway I was concerned only with the face. It was mostly hidden behind the door you understand, but what I could see took my breath away. I could only see one eye, a left eye, and the cheek and corner of the mouth. That was all, but what I knew for sure was that this wasn’t the face of an old man, it was a young boy.
‘YES!’ It said, loud, the sound filling the stairwell and making an awful hollow echo. I stumbled back, my mouth was suddenly dry, I was paralysed as though I’d just received an electric shock.
“I’m…” I mumbled, ‘your neighbour.”
The face showed no expression, or no sign of an expression I could ascertain from my limited viewpoint. In a strange way I was relieved when the door closed without acknowledging me. I was no longer sure what else I had to say.
A young boy? Not an old man. Maybe a boy just like me, someone who liked to be left alone. Surely the woman had been wrong about the old man, she certainly wasn’t right about his having no visitors.
I walked down the stairs, still a little startled. The resolution to my obsession, my mystery, had caused only more mystery. I’d just have to let it go.
But it wasn’t to be, because when I got home that evening I met the young professional from Flat 3. He wanted to make small talk, and I didn’t know what to say, and without thinking I said: ‘I met the young boy from Flat 8 today.’ I hadn’t meant to have a conversation about it, but really, what else were people in an apartment building going to have small talk about?
‘Young boy?’ The man had said, ‘there’s an old man up there, I’m not aware of a young boy.’
‘Oh,’ I replied, ‘so you know him then?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t say I know him. But I’ve been here for two years, and I remember being told there was an old man up there when I moved in, and no-one has moved out other than the terrible incident with Mr. Andrews.”
‘Mr. Andrews?’
‘Flat 8, the incident.’
‘But I’m in Flat 8.” I replied.
The young man laughed, filling the space with sound, ‘Of course!’ He said. ‘No, no. I meant the guy that in the flat before you. Strange guy, went completely mad.’
‘Mad?’
‘Lost it,’ he said. ‘One night he just started screaming, carrying on, pounding on all the doors, waking everyone up. Said he’d seen something, something terrible. The police came, of course. I don’t know the details, but from what I know they took him to a hospital.’
I didn’t know what to say. The agent hadn’t mentioned any of this, but then they wouldn’t, would they. ‘Nice flat, Flat 8, previous tenant was barmy, completely mad, was driven insane and had to be put in a straightjacket. Now, about that deposit…’
The story shook me. I was nervous. Something wasn’t right. Either the people in the other flats were out of touch, or I was. And let’s face it, they had been there much longer than I.
I admit, my drinking increased around this time. I’d have a couple of drinks at lunch time, skipping my meals. I missed a deadline at work and things hadn’t gone well. I was sitting in my cubicle and I overheard a colleague make a joke about my lack of effort. When I overheard it it sounded like a whisper. And that resonated somehow, was annoying. Why were people whispering about me all the time? I stood up and addressed the guy, ‘If you have something to say I’m just here you know, right here, right now!’ I’d said.
That wasn’t a good thing to do. My boss heard me, everyone heard me. He called me into his office. It was after lunch and I knew he could smell the alcohol on my breath. My tie was pulled down, my shirt sleeves rolled up. I hadn’t shaved for three days.
‘Everything alright?’ He asked.
‘Yes, yes,” I stammered, ‘everything is fine.’
‘It didn’t sound fine.’ He said.
‘Oh, sorry, I got carried away.’
‘Have you been drinking?’
‘No, no.’
But of course he knew I’d been drinking. My lie was an automatic response, and once I’d said it I couldn’t back out, couldn’t reverse myself. But even I could smell the whiskey on my breath. Not only that but the alcohol had loosened my voice, my tie, my dress sense. I wanted to get out of his office, get out right now. But it wasn’t to be.
‘You’ve missed two deadlines.’ He said. Nailing me, torturing me.
‘One,’ I said.
‘One?’
‘Yes, I missed one deadline.’
‘Is that supposed to sound better?’ His sarcasm was a dull-edged weapon, cracking my skull. I was frustrated. This man was a second rate nobody, I didn’t like nor respect him, yet my mind was fogged, I couldn’t respond to the simplest comment.
‘It’s only a user manual; no-one reads the damn things anyway.’ I heard myself saying.
These days I say things without thinking. As soon as the words tumble out I want to retract them, but you can’t. Once they’re out there, once they’re in the air, they pervade the space, get into peoples heads. They analyse it, think about it, form opinions and make decisions. All over a few empty words.
‘I’m considering your position.’ He’d said. And I knew right away what that meant, it meant he had already considered my position and had come to a conclusion. Not one that was favourable to me.
That was my last day at the office. I didn’t mind all that much in a way, I hated that job. But when I sat at home, drink in hand, and thought about it, thought about how I had ended up losing my feeble little work, I came to the inevitable conclusion – it was that boy in Flat 8. It was him that had scrambled my brain, got me drinking more, got me sacked.
I spent two days inside my flat. I expected someone to call, didn’t I have any friends at the office, was no-one surprised, was no-one interested in my side of the story? Apparently not. So I drank some, slept, drank some more.
Of course I needed to find work again. I wasn’t independently wealthy, I needed to work, even if I didn’t want too. At the same time I knew that I’d just end up with the same problem. If I didn’t resolve this thing with my neighbour then my problems would continue to escalate.
I had to know who my neighbour was, why he hid. These thoughts had been in my head for too long, I could no longer write, I could no longer think. Twenty four hours a day it was inside my head.
Strangely it was midnight I think, the time when the witches and ghouls take to the skies, that I decided I simply must know. I must. I had been up for hours, sitting by my own front door, listening for any tell-tale sign, any indication of movement from across the hall. There’d been none.
Sometimes silence, nothingness, is as bad as the loudest noise. I wanted there to be a sound, I needed there to be a sound. Without a sound all I had was the question, and the question was like a disease.
So it was midnight. I braced myself, fortified myself with a drink, and then stepped out into the hall. This wasn’t going to be good, I supposed. It was late, I was drunk, and who wanted a stranger knocking on the door at such an hour? But there was nothing I could do. It was now or never. I wanted to know who the boy was.
So I walked across the hall and knocked on the door. In my haste I forgot about the lights, that didn’t matter now. I knocked and I waited. There was no reply, and I knocked again. Nothing. I knocked again.
‘I’m not going away, you know!’ I shouted. ‘Just open the door and we can sort this out!’ I banged at the door now, banged and banged. The door shook in its frame but held firm.
And then I heard it. A voice.
‘It’s that man.’ It said.
And I anticipated the door opening, anticipated asking my questions. But the door didn’t open, instead I heard, yes I heard, a reply – a whispered response: ‘What does he want?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Ignore it.’ I banged on the door again, ‘I can hear you in there, open up!’ I screamed.
And I heard the sound of a security chain being put into position. I took a deep breath, the door lock clicked, and the door swung back three inches, pulling the chain taut.
I saw the face, the same face, the face of a young boy. He seemed to be thirteen or so, youthful. In my haste I had forgotten to use the stairwell light, so the details were lost in darkness, but I could see a silhouette of the face against lights inside the flat.
I stared into that eye, the boys left eye and made my demand, ‘Who else is in there?’ I asked.
‘No-one.’ Was the simple response.
‘I know there is someone else in there, I heard you talking to them!’
‘There is no-one else here.’
‘Where is the old man?’ I wasn’t asking now, I was hunting my prey. This young boy, whoever he was, was up to something. He was hiding a secret, something I must understand.
‘There is no-one else here.’
The blood surged through my veins, my heart pumped. My temper was short and I didn’t have all night to debate with the boy. He wasn’t cooperating with me, and I was on a mission.
He made a move to close the door, but I read his mind. What good are security chains? People install them onto flimsy door frames, and I knew a sharp kick would tear it from its place. And I did kick, and it did tear out with a crack.
The boy stumbled back, surprised by my action and hit by the door as I forced it back. I burst into the flat. The figure fell backwards onto the floor. I could see him now as his features fell into the direct light from a table lamp.
And what I saw chilled my soul.
Spread-eagled on the floor before me was a monster. A two-headed monster. A deformed devil with both wisdom and youth. One head was of the young boy. I could see now that his features was pallid, weak. The other was the head of an old man.
The boy screamed, pleading for help. I stamped my foot down on the face, I wanted to silence it forever. Blood poured from a wound, draining into the carpet. I stamped again.
And at that point I knew I was mad. For only a madman could see this, experience this. Every vestige of caring, of reasoning, drained away. I itched, my scalp, my arms, my legs. It felt like something was crawling over me. My brain oozing over my shoulders, I wanted to laugh. I did laugh!
The other face looked at me, eyes wide.
And whispered.
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