Dead Voices (2 page)

“Hello? ... Is anyone here?”

Her voice echoed in the vast darkness with an odd reverberation, sounding close and thick. She felt a tingling through her entire body. She wanted to leave, to close the door firmly shut behind her and forget about the unnerving sensation this room gave her, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the bed and the partially opened windows. Milky light, as powdery as chalk dust, filtered through the lace curtains that wafted in the vagrant breeze. She thought she heard a faint stirring, as though cloth was rubbing against cloth. Hurriedly she pulled back and slammed the door shut.

Back in the entryway, Elizabeth backpedaled until she bumped into something solid. She leaned her back against the closed front door, brutally aware of the chill it gave her as she fought to control her rapid-firing nerves.

At last, when a measure of calm returned, she looked at the closed door to her left, opposite the one she had tried. If that had been the living room on her right, converted into a bedroom, no doubt for an elderly or sick resident, then this door, she reasoned, would open up onto either the dining room or the kitchen. Her feet practically glided over the floor as she went up to the door and gripped the cold brass doorknob.

Her heart gave a tight squeeze in her chest when the door swung open, revealing a room almost identical ... no, not almost —
absolutely
identical to the one she had just left! The four-posted bed, the furniture, the closed closet door, the windows-everything was exactly the same! With a strangled, gagging sound, she staggered back into the hallway.

What the hell is this place? she wondered as she frantically scanned the surrounding darkness. How could I lose my way and end up in the same room?

Outside, the storm beat against the side of the house as hammer fisted gusts of wind rattled pellets of ice against the windows. Elizabeth was shivering wildly as she approached the third door. A cold draft snaked across the floor, tugging at her feet. Her hand shook violently as she turned the doorknob and pushed the door open.

“No ... !” she muttered as she stared, horrified, into the same room again. “This can’t ... This can’t be
happening
!”

Her mind filled with the sudden, terrible knowledge that even if there were a hundred doors in this hallway, all of them — every damned one of them — would open up into this room!

Choking back a scream, she turned and started to run. Her feet slipped on the floor as though her boots were coated with grease. The entryway seemed to distort, and the door, like a life raft to a drowning person, was incredibly distant until, with the suddenness of a car accident, she slammed into its cold wooden panels. She clawed at the doorknob to turn it and practically ripped the door from its hinges as she opened it, expecting to plunge back into the blizzard. Instead, she found herself standing in the darkened bedroom.

Elizabeth wanted to scream; she wanted to fall onto the floor and sob with the knowledge that, no matter what door she opened, she was being forced to enter that room. And now she was trapped, as she had feared ... as she had
known
she would be all along!

Her heart leaped into her throat when she saw that
this
time she was not alone in the room. She could see the darkened silhouette of a person, sitting on the edge of the canopied bed. Elizabeth’s throat closed off, trapping all sound and air inside her lungs.

In the instant of surprise, Elizabeth raised her hand to her mouth, as if she could force even a small amount of air into her chest. As soon as she let go of the door, it slammed shut behind her, echoing with a hollow
boom
. Entirely against her will, she felt herself pulled into the center of the floor even as the room expanded in a dizzying, black outward rush.

The woman!

It was a woman, sitting silently on the edge of the bed. She hadn’t been there\ before, of that Elizabeth was positive ... unless that rasping sound of cloth had been her, extricating herself from under the sheets. In the dim room, Elizabeth couldn’t distinguish any of her features other than a frizzy nimbus of gray hair, hanging loosely around her head and shoulders. The light from the windows behind her made her hair glow like steely smoke.

“Come on in, Elizabeth,” a crackling voice said softly, hissing like a cold wind in the room.

As the woman spoke, the room seemed to brighten slightly. Either that, Elizabeth thought, or else her eyes were adjusting to the darkness.

“What do you ... ? How do you know my name?” Elizabeth stammered. She could see — or else sense what she couldn’t actually see — that this was an old woman. She was dressed in a tatter of filthy rags, the hem of her dress like a tangled spiderweb that melted into the floor. Her shoulders looked slouched and bony thin beneath the bulk of several layers of clothes. The indistinct features of her face looked haggard and cracked.

“I know ... a lot of things about you,” the old crone whispered as she looked down at the floor. apparently in deep thought.

Elizabeth’s eyes were also drawn to the floor where, only faintly, she could see ... something. Oddly, it looked like a large shopping bag, the kind the department stores hand out at Christmas time.

The curtains in the bedroom windows seemingly shifted back and forth to the heavy sigh of ragged breathing, but Elizabeth wasn’t at all certain if it was the old woman’s or her own.

The whimper in Elizabeth’s throat began to build steadily, and she knew that it would become a full-scale scream if this ... this
vision
didn’t go away. This was impossible! her mind shrilled. This can’t be happening!

Peering up at Elizabeth, the old woman’s face glowed like an eerie gray blotch on the darkness. Her skin was a tangled network of dark wrinkles that deepened as she looked at Elizabeth and smiled. At least half of her front teeth were rotted and missing, but it was her eyes that caught and held Elizabeth’s attention; they glowed with a deep, lambent red, like hot coals fanning to life on a hearth.

“Come over here, Elizabeth,” the ancient woman said. Her voice was as cracked and rotten as her teeth. It whispered like a sightless moth in the darkness. “Come over here and sit down.”

Saying that, she reached down to the floor and raised her shopping bag up level with her glowing eyes. Opening the mouth of the bag wide, she held it out in Elizabeth’s direction. The paper crinkled like a blazing fire.

“See what I have ... ?” the crone said. “See what I’ve got for
you
?” Her voice had an irritating whine now, like an engine, racing futilely as it rose in intensity.

Elizabeth’s mind was swirling as she craned her neck and, against her will, peered into the blackness inside the bag. Without any sense of motion, she found herself being drawn toward the old woman, being pulled inexorably toward the open bag and whatever was inside it.

“
No ... I ... “

That was all Elizabeth could say; nothing more than a strangled cry as the icy blackness inside the bag drew her helplessly toward it ...
into
it, as though it wanted to swallow her.

She screamed, and the room, the woman, and the shopping bag she was holding instantly transformed into Elizabeth’s own dimly lit bedroom. With one convulsive grunt, Elizabeth found herself sitting up in bed. Her face was bathed with sweat, and both of her hands were pressed hard over her mouth. Her eyes were wide open and staring, horrified, at the black rectangle of her closed bedroom door, its shape a visual echo of the closet doors she had seen in her dream and of the gaping mouth of the old crone’s shopping bag.

Slowly lowering her hands, Elizabeth took a deep breath. A jab of pain slid like a knife in under her ribs, but she barely noticed that compared to the sense of dread and horror she still felt from the nightmare. After several shallow, shuddering breaths, she felt her panic increasing, rather than lessening. It quickly spiked to needle-sharp intensity, and another sharp scream threatened to rip out of her mouth. Only with effort could she force her mind to accept fully that it had only been a dream.

Elizabeth reached for the bed-stand light and flipped the switch. Warm, lemon yellow light instantly filled the room, making her eyes sting, but that pain didn’t measure up to a tenth of the numbing fright she could still feel coiling like a black snake around her heart. Glancing at the clock by her bedside, she saw that it was almost three o’clock in the morning. The last thing she wanted to do, other than return to that frightening house and its occupant, was to wake up her mother and father. At thirty-eight years old, she told herself, she was much too old to wake up from a nightmare, afraid of the dark.

As her heartbeat slowed down and her breathing seemed deeper, calmer, Elizabeth snapped the bed-stand light off and settled back into bed. In the darkness, she tried to find the courage to smile contentedly to herself and let herself feel cozy and safe in her old bedroom. Just knowing that her mother and father were nearby if she needed them, to tell her things were all right, should have made her feel better; but alone with her thoughts and the disturbing memory of the nightmare, she felt no real security or internal strength.

Maybe, she told herself, she had been silly to expect that coming home would change anything ... silly because, no matter what she told or didn’t tell her parents about what had happened between her and Doug before she showed up this evening on their doorstep, she knew deep inside that she hadn’t left many — or
any
— of her problems behind when she left her husband back in New Hampshire.

Wiggling her head deep into the well of the pillow, Elizabeth closed her eyes so tightly that spiraling patterns drifted in front of her eyes. She wished with every fiber of her being that traces of the nightmare she’d just had-or thoughts about how much she should tell her parents she had been through this past year and a half-wouldn’t disturb her sleep the rest of the night. For better or worse, in sickness or in health, just like those vows she had taken — and broken — with Doug, here she was, back home again. And no matter
how
many reasons she might have to do it, she vowed she absolutely wouldn’t disturb her parents’ sleep just because she’d had a nightmare.

2.

The sun was up but hiding behind a thick bank of fog when Elizabeth went outside for an early morning walk. Her father was already at work in the bam, so she avoided heading out that way to see him, if only to clear her own mind before the inevitable intense discussion about what had happened between her and Doug. Last night, when she had arrived at her parents’ door so late, she had only hinted at the situation, and she realized that, in the days ahead, both her father and mother, in their own ways, would grill her on the impending divorce she had announced.

Elizabeth’s lungs filled with the cool, moist air as she measured a brisk pace down the driveway and turned right, heading up Brook Road toward town. She couldn’t possibly tally how many times she had walked down this road to town while growing up here in Bristol Mills, Maine. Unlike most of her friends, she had not been allowed to get a car in high school, so, partly as a defense, she had made a virtue of walking the three miles to downtown, where everyone hung out at what was now the 7-Eleven. Back then, the store had been called Frank’s Variety. As an adult, she had maintained walking as her exercise of choice, and even though she had slacked off over the past few years — the last year and a half, especially — now that she was back home, she was determined to become an avid walker, if only for her physical health. Her mental health ... ? Well, that was something else.

The steady
slap-slap
of her feet on the pavement and the wind blowing into her face did a lot to remove the last vestiges of her nightmare. Although unnerving traces of its frightening memory still lingered, right now she was intent on letting her mind dwell only on more pleasant thoughts-on memories of her childhood, of happier times, and on positive thoughts about her future, such as being able to spend more time getting to know,
really
know, adult to adult, her parents and her two aunts, Junia and Elspeth, who still lived in town across the street from the 7-Eleven. Over the past year and a half she had worked quite intensively with Dr. Gavreau, trying to fit the pieces back into her life. She wasn’t going to let bad thoughts — and
certainly
not silly nightmares — ruin the good things she had begun to feel about herself.

But as she walked down Brook Road, sucking the moist morning air into her lungs in greedy gulps, the muffling fog and the chill in the air all worked against her positive thoughts. It didn’t take long to realize why; she was less than a half mile from the intersection of Brook Road and the Old County Road, and, looking ahead and to her left through the gray fog that blanketed the road and surrounding woods, she could just barely distinguish the black iron fence that surrounded Oak Grove Cemetery.

“Oh, boy ...” Elizabeth muttered, as she involuntarily slowed her pace and stared ahead at the twining tendrils of fog. The sun, no stronger than a forty-watt light bulb, was trying with little success to force its way through the mist. She shivered and let her breath out with a long, heavy sigh.

The closer she got to the cemetery, the more Elizabeth could feel her tension mount. It was the same icy tension she had felt last night in her nightmare. Beyond the cemetery fence off to her left, the sloping hill was littered with tombstones. Even the closest ones were no more than vague lumps, looming out of the morning mist. The silent rows of stone vanished behind a gauzy gray curtain at the top of the hill. She couldn’t see them, but she knew they were up there.

A chill deeper than the morning air gripped her shoulders and shook her. She remembered how cold she had been in the abandoned house of her nightmare.

“Don’t be stupid,” she commanded herself as she wove across the road to the opposite side. She wanted to put as much distance as possible between herself and the cemetery, but she was unable to tear her gaze away from the heavy iron grillwork of the headhigh fence, or from the slouch-shouldered tombstones. She tried to think only about how the cemetery had made her feel as a child. Sure, it was spooky, and just about every Halloween someone pulled some kind of trick out there; but she and her friends had actually enjoyed playing around up there and pulling a few of their own scary pranks.