All stories › Horror › Sound Events › Episode 2
The Window
Episode 2 of 3 of Sound Events by Theo Vance · free to read
“Caleb was answering questions,” I said, and Pam Hobart looked at the ceiling of her own rental like it had let her down.
I had gone about the cereal first. That was Friday.
“Does the man come every night?”
“Not when I’m at Dad’s.”
“What does he say?”
Caleb thought about it while he got the last of the milk up the side of the bowl. “He asks things.”
“What things?”
“What I’m called.” He tipped the bowl. “What you’re called.”
“Did you tell him?”
“I told him mine,” he said, and then he asked whether we could get the kind of cereal with the marshmallows in it, and I said yes, and that was the whole conversation.
Pam owns four houses on Halsted and she came by at eleven because I said it was about the furnace.
“Who was in here before us?”
“Dena Ingraham and her boy. Two years. Clean tenant, paid on the first.”
“Did she ever say anything about that back bedroom?”
Pam put her keys in her pocket, which is her way of ending a conversation. “She said he talked at night. Kids talk at night.” She got as far as the porch and then stopped, because she is not a bad person. “She left in January and she never asked for the deposit back. That’s all I know and it’s all I intend to know.”
The old lease was in the kitchen drawer with the manuals. There was a number on it.
It rang for a long time.
“Hello?”
“Is this Dena Ingraham? I’m renting the house on Halsted. I’m sorry to call you.”
The line did not go dead. She stayed on it and said nothing for four or five seconds, and I could hear a radio behind her, and water running.
“How old is yours,” she said.
“Four.”
“Have you answered it yet?”
I said no.
“Then don’t,” she said, and hung up, and when I called back it went to a voicemail that was full.
I did the rest myself, with the export button, because the app will give you a spreadsheet if you ask it.
That night I took one clip and slowed it to a quarter and put it through the cheap earbuds, the ones that only go in one ear properly.
At quarter speed a man’s voice becomes weather. But the shape was there, and the shape was the thing. It went up at the end.
I did another. Up at the end. I did nine more and every one of them went up at the end.
He was not saying anything to my son. He was asking, over and over, and getting an answer about one time in nine, and coming back the next night to ask it again.
I sat with that a while. A man who asks a four year old the same question for two months is a man who has not got what he wants yet.
Which meant there was something he wanted.
Fifteen weeks. Four hundred and six events.
Ninety one of them have a voice in them. Every one of those ninety one falls between 2:00 and 2:20. Not 1:58. Not 2:21. I sorted the column three ways to be sure of it.
Every one of the ninety one is a question. I listened to sixty at half speed and there is not one statement in the whole run. He only ever asks.
The third thing took me until midnight to see. On the nights Caleb answers, the events stop. Not slow down. Stop. There is a run of nine, and then my son says something, and then the column is empty until morning.
On the nights he sleeps through, the count climbs.
Answering ends it. That is not a theory. That is the spreadsheet, and a woman in another town who knew the question I was going to ask before I asked it.
I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the dishwasher and said it to the empty room.
“Then I’ll answer it.”
Wednesday I put Caleb in the car at five and watched Neil’s taillights go up Halsted. I came back and made myself eat something and washed the one plate. At ten to two I went and sat on the floor of room two with my phone face down on my knee.
The furnace went at 2:02.
At 2:11 the air in the room changed the way it does when somebody comes in behind you, and I did not turn around, and a man about four feet from my left shoulder spoke as though we had been talking for a while.
It asked me what he was called.