“Can you hear it yet?”
The blonde woman stared at me with a look of urgency on her face.
“Can you hear it yet?” She asked, her head tilted ever so slightly up to meet my eyeline.
“I don’t understand.” I replied, but the woman’s face showed no acknowledgment of the fact I’d even spoken.
“Can you hear it yet?” She repeated for the third and final time.
And then I woke up, sweating and screaming.
-—-
Robin was making herself coffee when I came downstairs but she looked concerned.
“Bad dreams?” She asked.
I didn’t know how to reply.
“I don’t know. I guess.” I said after a pause.
“You guess? I could hear you from down here you know.”
I shrugged.
“It’s just one of those things, you know? Nothing scary was actually happening but somehow in the dream it seemed like the scariest thing in the world. It was just a woman say-“
Suddenly a realisation hit me out of nowhere.
“It was Anna! The woman in my dream, it was Anna!”
Robin turned around brusquely to make a cup of coffee for me as I played the dream through my head again.
“It’s so strange. I haven’t thought about Anna in forever and then she just pops up in the worst nightmare I’ve had in years. And that I didn’t recognise her in the dream at all, even though she was right in front of me.”
Robin passed me the coffee and shrugged.
“I guess dreams are just weird like that. Look, I have to pop into work for a couple of hours so I-“
“Huh? Since when?”
Not everyone would be able to look annoyed at an interruption and apologetic for disappearing simultaneously, but that is one of my wife’s many skills. She continued to use this skill at full force as she answered me.
“Something came up. I won’t be long, okay?”
Robin’s job didn’t have excessively unreasonable hours and did pay very well but one of its major downsides was that she would sometimes get called in at weird times, including weekends or days she was supposed to have off. Considering how long she had worked at the company and the fact that her job wasn’t anything where lives were at stake (she was an actuary at a local firm) I didn’t understand why she always just went along with these demands and so it could sometimes be a source of friction between us.
I let it go.
“Do you need anything doing whilst you’re out?” I asked her.
Robin looked at our fruit bowl, a place where our promises of health go to die.
“You could always bake some of your banana bread.” She said hopefully. “I mean, it doesn’t need to happen. But, maybe if you’re bored?”
I looked at the increasingly sorry looking bananas.
“Hm, I don’t know.” I said as I assessed them optimistically. “They’re still good. We might eat them.”
She didn’t believe me, which is fine because I didn’t either.
“Okay, sure. Anyway, I have to run.”
-—-
I love music, I always have. But I think that was maybe the first day of my life that I needed to listen to music instead of just wanting to. My general tastes in music are incredibly varied but I usually have one particular type of music I prefer at any one time. Sure, I might listen to classic rock one evening, smooth jazz another and showtunes the evening after that but I don’t usually blend the whole lot together in a single hour’s worth of listening.
That day was different though. I listened to the first five seconds of maybe twenty songs before settling on one and skipped away from that one half way through. I was looking for something, desperately seeking it even, but I didn’t know what. Anna’s face loomed in the back of my mind as I searched and it was driving me almost crazy. I spent hours searching through songs, my ears examining every note in minute detail. Whatever was looking for, I didn’t find it and eventually I shut the music off in defeat, more upset than made and kind of sense to me.
“It’s still stuck in my head.” I told Robin over dinner.
“Hmm?”
“Anna saying ‘Can you hear it yet?’ It’s weird. I feel like she’s trying to tell me something.”
Robin put down her fork and looked at me, concerned.
“I think you’re overthinking it. You were in a band together, surely she must have said things like that to you all of the time.”
“I was in a band?”
Robin looked suddenly alarmed, like a kid with their hand in the cookie jar or a married man with his dick in a mistress. Only for a moment though, then the expression disappeared as quickly as it had surfaced.
“I don’t remember that.” I pressed. “Why don’t I remember that?”
Robin shrugged.
“I don’t know, maybe because it was a while ago? Maybe because most of us forget or try to forget half of the stuff we did at uni?”
As I frowned and tried to remember this band she pressed on.
“Hell, I used to be a backing dancer for one of the more popular bands at my college. They weren’t even a big deal to anyone who didn’t go there but I followed them around to all of their gigs, grinning like a lunatic and shaking my ass to the beat. It makes me cringe just thinking about it, can you even imagine?”
I grinned.
“Hmm… imagine you shaking your ass? I don’t know, I’m not sure I can manage it. Maybe I need a demonstration?”
She rolled her eyes but it was done in good humour. I almost forgot the earlier parts of the conversation until I lay in bed that night.
-—-
I don’t usually have problems falling asleep but last night’s bad dreams were causing me to struggle to drift off so I went back downstairs and continued to listen to music on my headphones. At first I thought I was skipping between them at random but then I realised that I was following the exact same pattern over and over with only the last song being different each time. It was almost trancelike and I reached the conclusion that I must be even more exhausted than I’d thought. I headed back upstairs to bed and settled down.
“Don’t you… try to pretend. It’s my feeling, we’ll win in the end-” a sultry female vocalist sang as I stood in an unfamiliar club.
The backing instruments were quite different from those which usually accompany this song but it was pleasant nonetheless. I wandered around, weaving my way between faceless dancers as I tried to find the stage. Once I found it though, I was frozen in complete terror.
This song doesn’t usually have any place for a violin but the existence of a violinist alone wasn’t any cause for surprise. After all, I’d been able to hear each of the instruments long before I’d seen any of the musicians on the stage. The fact that I was the violinist was far more alarming. The fact that Anna was singing the vocals filled me with the same panicked dread as the last dream she’d featured in. I wanted to run but instead I just continued watching her as she finally noticed me and locked her eyes with mine.
“Don’t you… forget about me…”
I woke up shaking and suddenly, just like I had the night before. I think I must have been screaming again because Robin ran up the stairs and looked at me with concern.
“What were you dreaming about?” she asked.
Don’t tell her.
The thought was unprompted and inexplicable. It was a little embarrassing that I had gotten into such a state purely from a dream about a college friend singing but this was my wife we were talking about - we’d seen each other sick and drunk before now. I knew she was scared of craneflies and she’d comforted me when breaking my favourite mug had literally reduced me to tears. Being as effected as I was by my nightmares would have been an embarrassing thing to share with most people but was no reason for me to even have to think about whether it would be okay to talk to her it. But despite all of that, I chose to lie.
“It might be the horror film from the other night. I’m usually fine with horror but those mind controlling aliens really got to me, haha.”
The laugh didn’t sound genuine to my ears but she seemed to accept it. She nodded as if it all made sense now.
“Well, I was just on my way out. See you later.”
I smiled at Robin as she picked up her bag and headed out of the door but my smile fell away the moment she’d actually left. Adrenaline was coursing through me and on top of that was the guilt that I felt this desperate urge to hide my fears from the woman I loved. Even though she hadn’t noticed that anything was wrong I still wanted top make it up to her. After I had showered and gotten ready I noticed the bananas on the counter and remembered what she’d said yesterday. Maybe baking some banana bread would clear my conscience.
We didn’t have all of the ingredients so I headed off to the store, walking rather than driving in the hopes that it’d help clear my head. Usually I listen to music on even the shortest walks but today I left my headphones at home, mildly disturbed by the frantic nature with which I’d been listening to music yesterday. Maybe if I hadn’t, the noise of a group of people leaving the cinema at once wouldn’t have caught my attention. There was nothing unusual about it, just people leaving a showing, and the cinema was on the opposite side of the road so the sight of people filing out was unlikely to have caught my attention. As it was though, I looked across. And I saw Robin.
Robin had said she was going to work. The cinema wasn’t close to her office and even if it was, nothing that she’d said about her job previously had led me to believe that they’d be comfortable with her taking film long breaks for no reason. In fact unless it was an incredibly short film it was likely she’d told me that she was going to work and then come straight here. She wasn’t looking across the road but I ducked into a nearby stationary store anyway, my heart pounding.
Was Robin cheating on me? She didn’t talk to anyone the entire time I watched her walk away and didn’t seem part of any particular group but she could have met someone inside and left separately. Had she lost her job and was trying to hide it from me? She honestly didn’t seem like the sort of person to neglect to tell me something like that but no theory I could come up with for her pretending to go to work so that she could watch a movie made any kind of sense.
There was a second hand electronics store on the way on the way to the store and it was at this point that I did something alarmingly out of character. I went inside and asked the bored salesperson behind the desk something stupid.
“Do you sell things that can track cars?”
“Like a GPS tracker? Sure.” he said and walked me over to a selection of small objects in the back corner.
I looked at them with confusion.
“What’s the difference?” I asked.
“Well, those ones are airtags,” he said as he pointed at some small circular keyrings, “so it only works near iphones and if your husband has an iPhone then it will alert him to the fact you’ve put one in his car. Or you know, whoever. These other ones are a few different prices and none of the ones we have in right now will alert his phone and the differences in prices are mostly due to reliability and battery life. I’d go with that one personally.”
I looked at the tracker he was pointing at. It was the second most expensive one in the store so he could be showing me an overpriced piece of junk in the safe assumption I didn’t know any better but given I didn’t have a clue I went with his recommendation.
“Is this really legal?” I asked as we walked back to the desk.
“Legal to sell. As for using it then I suppose it depends what you do with it, like software that tracks what someone does on their phone and all that. It’s perfectly legal for you and your husband to decide that you want a tracker on his car so you can find him easily if he’s in an accident and doesn’t come home. It’s legal to install software on your kid’s phone so if they accidentally see something they shouldn’t have then you’ll know about it. If you’re being sneaky about those things then, I don’t know.”
My face flushed with shame the second I put the tracker in my bag. Three days ago I’d have done anything for my wife. Now I was figuring out how best to stalk her.
Putting the tracker on Robin’s car wasn’t nearly as difficult as I’d expected. She generally showers after work and the tracker only needed to be affixed to the underside of the car with a magnet. My heart was racing the entire time I did it but Robin had no reason to suspect me. I felt a wave of guilt as soon as I’d done it and a second one when she noticed the banana bread and told me how wonderful I was for making it.
If I had installed the tracker and it hadn’t showed anything suspicious then I wouldn’t be writing this. If it had merely showed that she was cheating then maybe I’d have been writing something but I wouldn’t be posting it here. But the truth turned out to be far more complicated than an affair and the evidence which prompted that realisation didn’t actually come from the tracker at all.
I don’t know the passcode to my wife’s phone. Some partners might see this as concerning but she’s never asked me the code to mine either so I’d always been under the impression that we were both just fine with giving each other a little personal space. I still don’t know the code and given everything I know now I have every reason to believe that it was probably fairly random and secure. However, despite everything I just said, I was able to get into her phone fairly easily.
My wife sleeps with her eyes open. It isn’t every single night and I’ve never told her about it because it’s just never come up. But that night I saw her open, unseeing eyes and decided to see if I could use her face like that to unlock her phone. It worked straight away and I made a beeline for texts under the name of – Shelley Emmerson. I was dreading sexts. How did it end up being worse than that?
Robin: She’s started talking about Anna. Do I need to bring her in?
Shelley: What is she saying exactly?
Robin: No specifics about the project, just that she’s had dreams about her and Anna. She knows that they were in a band together but nothing else has come up in conversation. The dreams with Anna in are nightmares, I don’t know if that matters.
Shelley: I see. For now, just continue to observe. We already knew that her time at university wasn’t entirely scrubbed clean and it didn’t need to be to remove all knowledge of the project. A gap where years of her life should’ve been would have been too suspicious anyway. Along as nothing gets worse, this is an acceptable amount of memory.
Robin: Understood.
Shelley: If she remembers any additional details then let me know asap. And if she mentions a single detail about the project then that means that the initial wipe didn’t work so relying on a second one is far too risky. So if she recalls anything like that then there’s no point bringing her in. Just eliminate her.
On reading the last text I dropped the phone and let out a strangled squeak. My eyes darted towards my sleeping wife as she stirred but thankfully I hadn’t managed to wake her. I locked the phone and put it back exactly where I’d found it as I lay back down in bed, terrified beyond belief.
Just eliminate her.
What the hell had I gotten myself caught up in? And what even was ‘the project’?