My name doesn’t matter. I don’t know anywhere else I can post this – I do evictions and repossessions for landlords, I know I know, I’m scum of the earth. That’s why my name doesn’t matter. The last house we had a job at, all the tenants had just up and vanished without telling the landlord, and enough time had elapsed that we were set to clear all their shit out. I happened across the following account that had been scribbled into a notebook and left in the basement bathroom. I won’t say anything else except… just read it yourself.
My name is Sam, please consider these my final words. It’s been three days since the party, and I don’t know how much longer my food – or my sanity, will last. He, or whatever it is at this point, has been knocking at my door for the last three days, punctuated only by whispered attempts to convince me to open up, and the singing, the goddamn singing. My phone is dead, and the internet has been shut off, along with power to the basement. I don’t even know why I’m scratching this account out, probably just to have something to occupy my mind while I wait for the end. I feel like I should be more scared, which at one point I suppose I was – but now… now it’s just the constant dark, the endless knocking, and the tiny flame from my lighter as I sit here waiting…. Just… waiting.
I live in a house with three roommates, well… maybe three, though I suspect none are left at this point. I lived with three roommates – Roland, Ned, and Amy. Roland and Ned were philosophy majors like me, who I knew through a few shared classes. When, a few months ago, the two of them had asked me if I wanted to move into the house they were renting, I jumped at the chance to live in a house that promised to be full of good conversation. Oh, right, and Amy is Ned’s girlfriend… I can’t remember her major at this point, nursing maybe, not that it matters.
It’s an old house, built in the forties or fifties on a drained swamp, smack in the middle of Edmonton, near a mall, the university, whyte ave, and a train station – the location is great, and it was only two thousand a month for the four of us. Ned and Amy took the top floor, Roland got the main floor, and I took the basement. We still shared the kitchen and living room, but, contrary to most roommate stories, we all got along great and never had any problems, until now of course, but I don’t even know what to call the current situation if I’m being honest.
All of this started maybe a month or so ago – it’s summer now, so we’re all off school and working at our various jobs to scrape together a bit of cash before the next semester starts, the extra free time had meant that we had time to start organizing the house a bit better. In the back of the laundry room, tucked behind the furnace, there’s a door that’s maybe five feet tall at most – it opens onto a small storage room, that until a month ago was stuffed full of boxes, luggage bags, and shelves of miscellaneous junk.
Roland and Ned wanted to clean the room out and make it into something of a secret hideout – calling it either their ‘speakeasy’ or ‘bunker’. It took Roland a few days, but quick enough the room was cleared, and all the junk moved into the garage. The ‘bunker’, as Roland always referred to it, had cold, rough concrete floors, patchwork brick walls painted a mossy green in places, and a ceiling of exposed insulation criss-crossed with twisting pipes and wires. A small crawlspace that was even lower than the main room led off into a space under the stairs that no light seemed to reach.
Roland, the broke university student is… or was, decided not to furnish the room with anything aside a small table and four chairs arranged in a circle around it. The room looked creepy no matter who you asked, but everyone had to admit it was still pretty cool regardless.
Something that has to be said about Roland and Ned, is that they are… were, two of the biggest social butterflies I’ve ever met. They’d officially throw parties about once a month, but there were almost always people over more days than there weren’t – especially Fridays and Saturdays. The ‘bunker’ was admittedly, a nice place to retreat from a party, have a shot, and swap stories about who was hitting on who, which girls were single, that kind of stuff.
The oddness didn’t begin until about a week after the bunker was clear. One night, some random day of the week, a Tuesday maybe, I had come home from work late and popped my bike up by the back door. I stepped inside and didn’t hear any voices. Nobody over tonight I thought to myself as I descended the stairs to my rooms. My rooms are technically a separate suite, so I have my own door that leads to my space, at the start of a hallway that leads to the furnace, laundry room, and bunker.
I stopped as I was about to put the key into my main door – over the low humming of the furnace I could make out a faint sound down the hall – singing. Roland liked to sing when he was drunk, and he was drunk more often than not, so I presumed he was drunkenly doing some laundry down the hall and shrugged it off, going inside.
I play keyboard and guitar and like to record and mix my own music – so after a quick dinner I sat down to working on some music editing and shut the world out for a few hours. I stay up late, so I decided around eleven to do some laundry. I took my headphones off and took my basket out to the laundry room, where I heard it again – singing. It was definitely Roland singing, somewhat muffled and somewhat quiet, but singing nonetheless, and singing from the bunker. I couldn’t tell you what song was being sung – Roland had some odd tastes in music, but I shrugged it off and threw my laundry in.
As soon as I banged the washer door shut, the singing stopped, and I looked at the bunker door. I took a few steps over and knocked quietly at the door.
“Yes?” Roland called through the door.
I opened the door, and the room was pitch dark, the single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling was off, with only the laundry room light throwing a few patches of light along with my shadow into the room. Roland was leaned back in a chair, his arms crossed, and his legs propped on another chair. He was still dressed in the business casual work clothes you typically saw him in, and a half empty bottle of cheap whiskey stood on the table in front of him.
“Whatcha doing?” I asked, looking briefly around the cold dark room. He didn’t answer me aside from nodding his head towards the bottle on the table, and then returning his eyes to mine.
“Alright.” I said, breaking eye contact and giving a half awkward smile as I shut the door behind me. Granted, me and Roland were never super close, but when we did chat he was always a lot more animated and chatty – especially if he had had something to drink beforehand. The silence was odd, but I had seen him fall into a few contemplative states before, so I didn’t pay too much mind to it.
The next week was pretty much the same as usual, people came and went, and every few nights I would hear the faint singing coming from down the hall mixed in with the hum of the furnace or the drumming of the washing machine. The next odd event came maybe a week after the singing. I was laying on the couch in the living room, flipping randomly through youtube videos, when I sat up with a sudden start to a voice behind me.
“Hey Sam, how was work?” Roland said, standing at the door of the living room with a beer in each hand and a smile on his face.
“Hey sorry, scared me there – it was good, pretty slow.” I replied with a quick smile.
“Beer?” Roland asked, holding one of the cans out to me.
“Sure, thanks.” I said as I grabbed the can and cracked it open. “How was work for you today?” I asked but received no reply. I turned around after a few seconds to see that Roland was gone. I shook it off and went back to watching my videos, trying to push the odd feeling out of my head.
Now you might ask what was so weird about this – and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t know Roland. The fact he had just… appeared was what unnerved me. Roland isn’t fat per say, but he definitely isn’t thin - long story short, you can always hear when he’s around, he’s always blustering or stomping around or cursing at something, so to have him appear completely silently threw me for a loop.
At this point, I was definitely feeling odd, and would only do my laundry during the day, trying whatever I could to keep away from Roland’s bunker. I also kept a wary eye on the man himself, as he seemed to have become… cheerier in the past two weeks. Where before he was social but often gruff, he was now nothing but smiles and small talk whenever you saw him and would have people over almost every night if he could manage it.
The last straw that finally made me tell someone what was going on, was a Friday night that I had come home from work and entering through the front door I found Roland laying on the couch watching some old war movies on the TV. I had a brief chat with him before I went back to the basement – stopping briefly to grab a drink from the fridge.
I froze halfway down the stairs and my heart began to race – I heard the singing. I must have stood paralyzed on that staircase for a good five minutes trying to rationalize how Roland could have made it downstairs past me, but try as I might, there was absolutely no way he could have soundlessly gone behind me while I was opening the fridge, I would have seen him.
Slowly, legs trembling, I walked backwards up the stairs and slowly returned to the living room. The couch was empty, the TV still on. I looked around me, eyes wide. Am I going insane? I asked myself. I returned to the basement stairs again, and slowly descended them, halfway down, the faint singing could be heard again.
I fumbled in my pocket for my keys, hands shaking, and slammed my door open and closed so quickly that I surprised even myself. I immediately took out my phone and texted Ned and Amy, asking them if they had noticed Roland acting weird in the last few weeks. Both of them replied that they hadn’t really, aside from the fact he seemed happier. They never hear the singing I thought to myself. Ned knew Roland better than I did, so I asked him if he could talk to Roland and ask him how things were going, which he agreed to.
I felt a bit better at that point, after which doubt began to creep in – He’s what? Happy, quiet, and has started singing, what the hell is creeping me out so much? I couldn’t rationalize my fear to myself, something was off, but I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly it was.
As I got into bed, I received a final text from Ned asking where Roland was, and when I told him he was in the bunker, he replied that him and Amy would go have a chat with him.
I woke up late the next day, having tossed and turned all night, unable to get to sleep, with one or two nightmares that consisted of nothing but Roland singing his strange songs in his strange room. I emerged from the basement late into the afternoon and found my roommates all busily cleaning up the house. Right, Saturday, party night. I thought to myself.
Everyone said good morning as I made myself some coffee, and Ned winked at me when the other two weren’t looking. I sighed in relief hoping that maybe I wasn’t crazy, and that Ned could fill me in later how the conversation went. I helped with some cleaning before I parked myself on the couch to wait for the party to start, and lost myself in binge watching some shows on Netflix.
By nine o’clock, the party was in full swing, with maybe some thirty or forty people over at the house. People were in the backyard having a fire, some people were listening to records in the living room, and I’ll admit, I was pretty buzzed at that point. After chatting with the people around the fire for a bit, I got the impulse to bring out my guitar, and before you say it, I know, I’m one of those guys.
I stumbled back inside and made it halfway down the basement stairs before my heart turned to ice in my chest and my stomach dropped. It was the singing. But it wasn’t just one voice. It was three. It sounded as though Amy and Ned had both joined into the chorus. Nope nope nope nope nope. I said to myself as I rushed back up the stairs. The room spun around me as I rushed back into the kitchen, where someone asked if I was alright. It wasn’t just someone who asked if I was alright though – it was Roland.
They say we all cope with fear in different ways, sometimes in pretty stupid ways. And the way I coped that night was by drinking myself into oblivion. The rest of the night became a blur as I poured as much alcohol into my stomach as I could possibly manage. I faintly remember overhearing Roland telling a few people at the party that they should come check out his ‘bunker’, but as far as I could remember, I was too far gone to care.
I woke up the next day with the sun shining bright on my face – I had slept in the hammock out back. I checked my phone to see that it was almost 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and saw a few texts from friends saying what a great time they had at the party. My head was pounding, and when I stood up, my stomach immediately betrayed me and I puked all over the ground.
I managed to stumble back downstairs through the mess of empty beer cans and solo cups that littered… well… everything, and made it back to my bed. My back hurt, my head hurt, my stomach hurt, everything hurt. I fell back into a terrible sleep that was nothing but nightmares – nightmares of strange singing from the strange room, with infinite voices, the voices of the entire world joined to the chorus, drowning out my smallest thought.
It wasn’t a dream. God, I wish it was a dream.
I woke again when it was dark – it was pitch black outside of my tiny basement window, but the noise was overwhelming. The singing of dozens of voices was echoing throughout the entire house. I tried to turn on the lights, but they didn’t work – I checked my phone, no internet, no signal. No nothing, only singing. The singing of forty voices was joined together – but unlike before, it wasn’t coming from the bunker, it was coming from right outside my door.
I stood before the door and let the tidal wave of fear and sound wash over me, which was interrupted by a knocking at the door.
“Sam, come have a drink with us, I wanna show you something in the bunker, everyone says it’s awesome!” Roland’s voice echoed through the door, barely audible over the swelling chorus.
That was three days ago. The knocking starts back up every hour or so, and Roland’s voice rises over the choir to invite me out into the hallway. The sun doesn’t come up anymore. The singing never stops now. It’s always dark outside of the window. My phone is dead, my computers are dead, there’s no power. I’m not even scared anymore. It’s too loud to sleep, it’s too loud to be scared. My lighter is running out of fuel, so soon enough I won’t get to watch the dancing little flame in my hand. I don’t even know why I wrote all this. They’ve started singing to me recently, but it’s not even songs anymore, it’s just the same chorus, over and over and over.
Where o’ where is quiet Sammy!
Quiet Sammy, can’t be saved!
Where o’ where is quiet Sammy!
Quiet Sammy, quiet grave!
That’s me. I’m Sam. Quiet Sam.