My favorite way to spend an evening is with a good book, in my plush easy chair, by the French windows at the front of my house. The windows overlook my front yard, which has some bushes, a lush lawn, and a beautiful oak tree. I love to sit down, turn on my soft, warm reading lamp, and recline with a good story. Tonight was no different. My wife Sheila and I had gotten the kids, Tim and Emily, to sleep, and Sheila had turned in early. She had had an unusually long day at work and I had shooed her off to bed while I took care of the dinner dishes.
Tonight, I sank slowly into my chair and enjoyed the feeling of the thick, soft carpet under my feet. I was about one-third through my most recent book, an interesting piece of science fiction, and figured I might be able to get through another third before bed. I reclined slightly, picked up my book, and cracked it open to the bookmark, a glossy strip of brass, and set the bookmark on the small table at my elbow.
I had only made it through a few pages when something pulled me out of the story. I looked up and around, and peered outside. It wasn't that a sound had disturbed me, more like the absence of sound had. Normally, the sound of crickets and other buzzing insects, the hum of the street lights, and the occasional passing car would have made a quiet but noticeable background noise, but everything was dead quiet tonight. Outside, the sky was overcast, the stars and moon obscured by a layer of clouds, but the clouds were low enough that light from the city reflected off of them, illuminating everything dully but uniformly.
The silence was so conspicuous that I got up, put on my shoes, and walked outside. The cool night air was refreshing, but it was still eerily quiet. I looked up and down the street and saw no movement of any kind. I went back inside and sat down but was still unable to focus on my book.
The phone rang. I glanced at the screen and saw a number I didn't recognize, so I let it ring. And ring. And ring. Finally, it stopped, and I leaned over to pick up my book, only for it to ring again. It was the same number, but this time something piqued my attention. Maybe it was the deafening silence between the rings, or maybe it was something else. But, in the end, I felt a strange compulsion to answer it.
“Hello?” I said quietly. There was a lot of noise on the line, but after a few seconds, a raspy voice came through.
“Do your doors lock from the outside?” it said.
“What?” I responded. “Who is this?”
“Do your doors lock from the outside?” I heard again, over the noise.
Some stupid prank, no doubt. But I answered anyway, expecting some kind of joke. “Of course they do.”
Instead, I heard the raspy voice say, “Get everyone out of the house, and lock the doors from the outside.” Then the line went dead.
I sat, stunned for a moment. It wasn't much of a punchline for a prank call, and it wasn't trying to get me to do something... financially stupid. It should have been easy to ignore, but for a strange feeling I had. It was like tinnitus. The silence before the call gave way to some kind of directionless hum. I could feel my heart beating faster, reacting to some danger only perceptible to my subconscious.
I was too disturbed to continue reading, so I paced once around the house. The hum seemed to get louder, bit by bit. I opened the door and leaned outside, and outside it was still as quiet as before. Something was wrong, and if the worst that happened was that we all stood outside sheepishly for a few minutes, maybe that wasn't so bad.
I headed to my bedroom and woke up Sheila. I told her to get dressed and meet me outside in five minutes. When she protested, I told her to just do it, and walked out of the room. I went to Emily's room and told her to go with her mother. She was groggy, but nodded and climbed out of bed. Finally, I crossed the hall to Tim's room and shook him. He rolled over and complained, and I told him to meet us outside in five minutes. He groaned and nodded.
I went around the house and closed and locked all the windows and the back door. As I did, I had a strange feeling that the hum was getting louder and lower. I still couldn't pinpoint where it was coming from. It seemed like it was filling the whole house. Satisfied that all of the doors and windows were locked, I stepped out the front door and locked it behind me.
Sheila was standing outside in sweat pants and a t-shirt, holding Emily in her arms. I looked around, but Tim was nowhere to be found. I walked over to them and asked Sheila if she had seen Tim, but she shook her head.
I glanced around once more, and what I saw startled me. There was a man walking up our driveway, dressed in a priest's garb, a trim black suit with a collar. I tried to ask him what was going on, but he walked right past me without a word. He walked straight up to the front door, and that's when I saw what was in his hands. In his left hand, there was a piece of parchment with writing on it that I couldn't read in the dim light. In his right hand, he was holding a hammer.
He walked right up to our front door and positioned the parchment on the door. Then he pulled a nail out of his pocket and lined it up to nail the parchment to the door.
“Wait!” I cried, taking a step toward him. I felt a sense of danger that I couldn't place. “My son is still inside!” He ignored me completely, and raised the hammer, bringing it down on the nail. Something inside me snapped. I suddenly knew something horrible was happening, and I had no idea how to prevent it.
The hammer came down. Thud.
“Hold on, what do you think you're doing?”
The priest slowly wound up for another blow. Thud.
“My son is still inside there, wait!”
The movements of the priest were slow and mechanical. Thud.
“I said stop what you're doing!”
I walked up behind him and grabbed him by the shoulder, spinning him around. And I looked into two eyes that were the deepest black I had ever seen. He shook himself free of my hand, and began to walk away. Sheila and Emily stood stock-still as he walked past them without any acknowledgment. Before I could do anything, he had walked down to the sidewalk and was gone, vanished into shadows.
Then it started. The low hum that I had heard inside the house was audible from the outside now. I watched as every door and window began to shake, the reflections of the streetlights on the windows dancing wildly as tremors shook the entire house. I heard the glass rattle, and the doors clatter, and I heard the sounds of objects inside falling and crashing to the ground. I stumbled up to the piece of parchment nailed to the front door and tried to read it, but it was written in a hand I couldn't decipher, in a language that didn't seem familiar. The parchment waved gently as the door creaked so much I thought it would come off its hinges.
Then, everything stopped. The silence came back over us like a shroud, and I watched in disbelief as the nail and the parchment crumbled into dust. Somehow, I knew it was over, and I unlocked the door and told my wife and daughter, shaking in fear, to stay there for a minute until I checked out everything inside.
Most everything was just as we had left it. A few small things had rolled off tables and shelves and lay on the floor. Every latch on every door and window was nearly unlocked, as if the vibrations had been deliberately trying to open them. But in Tim's room, every piece of furniture that had been standing, had toppled over. His dresser laid on a pile of flipped drawers and a heap of clothing. His shelves had fallen away from the wall and all of his things were scattered across the carpet. The sheets and comforter on his bed were in disarray, but empty. There was no sign of him whatsoever. Not a hair. I looked around the rest of the house, but he was nowhere to be found.
Finally, I brought Sheila and Emily in. I was running on adrenaline, barely holding it together. Sheila was almost catatonic, and needed my help to put Emily back into bed. Then she followed me to Tim's room and saw the state of things. She raised her hands to her face and fell to her knees, sobbing intensely. I didn't know what to do, other than try to comfort her. She kept asking, “Where is he? Where is he?” and I couldn't answer, because I didn't know myself.
We filed a missing persons report the next day. It was terrifying, because it looked as if he had left in a struggle, and it seemed like we would be under some kind of suspicion, but what else could we do? Everyone who knew us vouched for us, and no one had an unkind word for us, or our bonds as a family. No one ever found any sign of him, and it was all we could do as a family to pull together and try to move forward. But we would never forget that night--the silence, the hum, the rattling, and the sound of that hammer driving a nail into our door.
# # #
Thanks for reading! This one was a little weird, but I think I didn't give the horror parts of it enough time to breathe, upon coming back to it. Maybe you'd like to check out a more polished work of cosmic horror that I wrote? Check out What the Soul Still Fears, my novella!
You might also like my free short story The PAEAN Project, which is decidedly a bit more cosmic of a horror, but still has that feeling of isolation and loss.
Also, the cover image is based on a picture by Donny Jiang, courtesy of Unsplash.
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