All stories › Horror › Sound Events › Episode 3
What He Is Called
Episode 3 of 3 of Sound Events by Theo Vance · free to read
It asked what he was called, and I sat on the floor with my hand over my own mouth until 2:20.
It asked again the next night, and the night after that, and for three nights I said nothing at all.
The counts went up. Eleven, then nineteen, then thirty one. The window held. Never before two, never after twenty past. Whatever else was true, it kept its own hours, and there was something in me that took comfort from that and something else that understood exactly what it meant.
I stopped sleeping in any useful way. I would get an hour before midnight and then lie there doing arithmetic on a ceiling I could not see.
The second night I sat in the hall with the door open and the phone face up beside me and watched the counter go.
Twelve. Thirteen. The gap between them was never the same twice, which is how I knew there was a person in it. Machines are regular. He would ask, and then he would wait, and the waiting was the part I could not stand, because it was patient, and because I could have ended it in a word.
At 2:16 he asked twice with about forty seconds between.
At 2:20 he stopped, the way the spreadsheet said he would, and the house went back to being a house, and I sat there until the furnace came on at six.
I did not answer.
Caleb came back Thursday. I moved his mattress into my room and told him it was a camp out, and he was delighted, and made a rule that we both had to sleep facing the door.
For three nights the app logged him into an empty room and the counts climbed, and none of it mattered, because there was nobody in there to answer him.
I called Neil on Saturday and told him some of it.
“Josie.”
“I’m not asking you to believe it.”
“I think you should talk to somebody. Let me take him a couple of weeks.”
“He’s fine. He’s the only one of us who is fine.”
“That is not what I said.”
I let him think what he was going to think. I had four hundred and six rows and a hang up from a woman in another town, and he had a wife who left him in March, and I know which of those two things sounds more likely from the outside.
Tuesday night Caleb went back to his own bed at some point after eleven, on his own, because his dinosaur was in there and he was not going to leave it.
I woke at 2:09 to the monitor on the nightstand, the little green bar moving.
The man asked.
And I heard my son breathe in, the small sharp one he does before he is about to be polite to an adult.
I was on my feet and into the hall and I got there first.
“Josie Marsh,” I said, into the dark of a room I could not make myself step into. “That’s what I’m called. Josie Marsh.”
The green bar dropped to nothing.
There were no events that night. There have been none since. I have the spreadsheet and the column runs to the bottom of the page empty, and I have looked at it more times than I am going to admit to.
We moved in November, to a second floor apartment over the hardware store with radiators that knock, and Caleb sleeps through and has since the first night. He mentions the man about as often as he mentions preschool, which is never, unless you ask.
In January he asked me, out of nothing, in the car, whether the man got somebody else.
I said I did not know.
“He was nice,” Caleb said, and then he wanted the radio on, and that is the last time either of us has said a word about it.
In December I deleted the app and took the camera off the wall and left it on the counter for Pam.
So it was finished, and I let it be finished, and I got most of a winter out of that.
The folder was still there. I had set it up in July and then forgotten it, the way you do.
In February the folder had a new file in it.
Timestamped 2:14. Twelve seconds. From the camera I left on Pam’s counter, in a room I do not rent, in a house on a street I drive around now.
I checked the file name twice. It carries the room, the way they all do. Room two.
I have not deleted it. I have played it eleven times.
There is a child in it I have never met, and she is cheerful, and patient, and a little bored, and she is answering.
The voice asking was mine.