In Silence

The voices started when I was young—five, maybe. When I was seven I realized they only came when I was alone in silence. Until I was eight, I kept my sanity by whispering to myself, or humming a tune, or letting the TV play—anything that kept silence at bay. My parents, concerned, by dependence on sound, tried to talk to me about why I didn’t like silence.

“It never stays quiet,” I told them. I told them about the voices, how they came when silence crept upon me whenever I was alone. They listened, as parents should, and took me to a child psychologist.

She asked about the voices—when they came, what they were like, and how long I had been hearing them. I told her, just as I had told my parents, about when I heard them. I told her how they were like loud whispers, always right next to my ear.

“What do they say to you?” she asked. I didn’t know. There were always too many—too many layers to pick through to understand what any of them said.

Monophobia. That was what she told my parents I had. An intense fear of being alone, a misdiagnosis so far from the truth it’s almost laughable. The voices, she claimed, were hallucinations, an effort by my mind to make me feel like I wasn’t really alone. There were no medications available for children to rid me of the hallucinations, and since it was clear my parents had no idea how to help me, the best thing to do was to continue the sessions, at least for a little while longer.

At eight I convinced my dad to get me CD player while we were out shopping for a birthday present for mom. “If I have this I won’t have to talk to myself anymore,” I explained. It was a lie, of course. The truth was that sleeping was getting more difficult. It was ten hours of lying in the dark quiet, all alone. The exact opposite of what I wanted to do.

Neither of us were music buffs, so my first CD was decided by a random pulling from a large bin of marked down albums. It was Louis Armstrong.

For two years I never went anywhere without that CD player. Kids at school had started to catch on to my troubles and actively avoided me; I was the freak and I was alone much more often than any child should be. And that’s when the voices first pulled me in.

I was careless, when it happened. I was walking home from the bus stop, so caught up in Armstrong’s playful scatting, I didn’t notice the group of boys walking behind me. They were four boys from school, known for harassing anyone even slightly vulnerable. Until this point I had just avoided them. I kept to myself as much as I could, and since others preferred to avoid me, it was easy. But, in hindsight, I was the most vulnerable student at school, and it was only a matter of time before I caught their attention. And I was never more vulnerable to them than when I was swinging and swaying to Louis’ trumpet, my eyes closed as I pretended to play my own while I walked towards home.

My ‘playing’ was abruptly ended when two hands to my back sent me plummeting towards the hard cement. I was shocked, at first, caught unawares as I was. My arms felt burned where I landed on them, but my real concern was my CD player; I didn’t know what I would do if it were to break. I turned around to see who had shoved me, and the sight of the four boys in front of me erased all thoughts of CD player and the pain I felt radiating from my arms from my mind. The sun was on their side, forcing me to squint just to make out their silhouettes. I don’t remember their taunts, they were never relevant, but I remember that my silence angered them. I remember the largest one—Devin—getting on top of me and the sudden pain I felt when his fist landed on my jaw. Once, twice, three, four times he hit me, shouting something all the while. But I couldn’t hear him, I couldn’t hear anything because of the shock. That was when the voices came.

They were different this time, though, somehow more concrete—more solid, if voices could ever be described as such. It was like falling asleep, when they pulled me. One moment I was lying on the sidewalk, trapped beneath a boy almost twice my size, the next I was back home, lying in my bed. I didn’t understand it; the day hadn’t been a dream, so how had I managed to get back home? Even stranger was the lack of pain. I was beaten by Devin and his friends, I knew I was, yet nothing hurt. I had to see it for myself—my face that Devin had punched so many times.

It was on my way to the bathroom that I noticed how eerily quiet the house was. And dark. I walked faster, suddenly afraid of the dark, and flipped the light switch frantically as panic started to set in. The light came on, illuminating the still darkening hallway. Only after I shut and locked the door did I calm down.

I was examining my face in the mirror, in both fascination and confusion, when I thought I saw something in my peripheral vision. I turned. There was nothing. I faced the mirror again, this time greeted by a little girl rather than my reflection. She was like a little girl you would see in a horror movie: small and dolled in a pale pink dress; her brown hair fell in curls just past her shoulders; her eye blinked, shifting between soft, brown eyes, to demonic black holes.

Heart racing, hands shaking, I fumbled with the lock, only managing to open the door after what felt like an eternity, and then I ran. It was dark—too dark to see—but I didn’t care. I raced down the stairs, holding onto the railing so I wouldn’t fall. The front door, my only exit, was right in front of the stairs. It opened with ease, exposing a world of light beyond the house’s pitch black.

I woke gasping for air in a hospital room. Immediately someone’s hands were on mine. I looked up to see my dad sitting in a chair beside me. He had been there for two days. My mother had left while I was at school two days ago. I guess she and dad had been arguing for a while and she had finally had enough.

The only words I spoke were to tell him how everything hurt, which led to him asking the nurse if I could have any more pain medication. I could, and I did, and it lulled me into an empty sleep. The next time I woke my dad was still there anxious for me to tell him what had happened. When I didn’t come home after school, he called the school to make sure I got onto the bus. I did, they told him. Like any frantic and panicking parent, he called 9-1-1, whose operator told him that because it hadn’t been twenty-four hours yet, I wasn’t technically missing. He raced to my bus stop, hoping to find some clue as to where I went, but instead found me, lying limp on the ground, bleeding and bruised.

I was vaguely aware of the concept of a ‘snitch’ and that being one was frowned upon, but I didn’t care, and somehow, I knew that my dad needed something to direct his fury towards. That’s what I like to tell myself, anyway. So, I gave him their names, and just before I my mind was pulled back into a peaceful oblivion, I saw him pull his phone from his pocket, ready to start his hunt. Truth be told, though, I wanted retribution; I wanted to see what hell they would go through once I turned them in to my father.

Unfortunately, I never had the chance. All four of them—Devin, Liam, AJ, and Ben—were found dead in their beds the morning I woke up in the hospital.