Have you ever heard someone say your name just as you’re falling asleep? Usually when that happens to me, it’s my dad’s voice—a familiar sound my brain has decided to reproduce as I transition to dreamland. Two weeks ago, though, as I lay in the darkness waiting to drift off, I heard my name as a whisper—
shauna
Since I thought it was just a sleepy hallucination, I let myself resume the drifting-off process.
shauna
The second time I heard my name, I still wrote it off.
shauna
The third time, I sat up as quickly as if I’d just felt the first tremor of an earthquake. I live alone. What was that?
shauna (a little louder this time) . . . SHAUNA (louder still, like a stage whisper)
SHAUNA SHAUNA SHAUNA
By now I was frantic, shaking, trying to untwist from my sheets as I scrambled out of the bed, so vigorously pulling the chain to turn on my bedside lamp that it almost fell off the table. The whispers penetrated straight to my eardrums, as commanding as screams. I don’t know why my attention focused on the jewelry box sitting on the dresser, but nevertheless I moved to open it.
SHAUNA SHAU—
The whispering stopped the moment I opened the box. Clammy and breathless, I marched that box outside in the freezing winter air and tossed it in the trash (I’d already lost the ring a month ago anyway). I didn’t know what I was dealing with, but I sure as heck wasn’t keeping that box. When nothing more happened for the next couple of days, I held three competing hypotheses in my mind: one, that I had dreamed it; two, that I was losing it; or three, that there was something in the ring box, but that it was well on its way to the landfill, never to be heard (by me at least) again. Unfortunately, I was forced to confront a fourth hypothesis three days later, as I lay in my bed watching the shadows cast on the wall by the bare branches outside my window.
shauna
Primed to act following the original incident, I began immediately to search for the source of the whisper, hoping that whatever had caused me to home in on the ring box would also guide me this time.
shauna . . . shauna SHAUNA SHAUNA
The whispers stopped when I opened my wicker laundry basket.
At this point I wouldn’t entirely blame you for thinking, So what? A whisper isn’t intrinsically menacing, and all you have to do is open a box to make it go away. But I dare you, dare you, to take a look around your room right now. Find a box, a canister, any container, and see if you can imagine hearing your own name. A soft whisper at first, then louder and increasingly insistent until you find the source.
Of course, I considered the possibility that my second hypothesis was the correct one: I could simply be losing my mind. I thought this particularly likely when the whispers started happening in the daytime, too. But when I answered a call from my mom during an episode—
SHAUNA SHAUNA SHAUNA SHAUNA
—she heard it too.
“Who’s there with you?” she asked, and that was all I needed to know. If I thought finding out I was crazy was bad, turns out finding out I’m not alone in my apartment is worse.
The thing, whatever it was, continued to taunt me, enacting a sick game of hide-and-seek that I had to play over and over and over. I found it in the oven, under the cap of a herbicide can, even, on one horrifying occasion, in the protector for the pillow under my head. I thought leaving the house would give me a break, but it hissed my name from my purse as I walked across the grocery store parking lot in the gathering dusk.
The last time I left my house was three days ago. It was closing time at my local mom-and-pop bookstore, and I was the only patron. The owner, a mustachioed Old Boston type was ringing up a wall calendar while I fumbled for my credit card.
shauna
My head snapped up to see the owner now with his eyes rolled back. The whisper had come from his closed mouth.
SHAUNA SHAUNA
Blood rushed in my ears, but not loud enough to drown it out. I reached forward as if in a trance myself, and placed my finger on his chin. His jaw lowered, gaping wide like a nutcracker. I didn’t stay to find out if he was OK; I ran to my car and blew through every stop sign on my way home. I decided then that I would live off the non-perishables in my pantry, and have groceries delivered when those ran out. There was no way in hell I’d risk interacting with another human again unless I could be sure their face wouldn’t cleave. I didn’t want to think about what would happen if the thing decided to hide inside me—if my eyes rolled back, would I be able to open my own jaw? Maybe it already crawled in and out of my mouth from time to time.
Right now I’m parked a few yards away from a pond garnished with patches of ice. I’m here because earlier on this cold, January night, I made a mistake. When I sat in my living room trying to distract myself with a crossword, I heard—
shauna
—coming from the dingy metal lockbox on my bookshelf. The box has sentimental value (I kept babysitting money in it as a teenager), but I no longer have the key. The whispers got louder and more demanding as I tried and failed to open the box. I’m sure there are tools that would have gotten it open easily, but I panicked.
SHAUNA
I grabbed the lockbox, ran to my car, and started to drive. I was frantic, frantic to make the whispering stop, my body tense as I braced for the next time I would hear my name. I drove to where I’m parked now, got out of the car, and heaved the box into the pond’s dark water. I had two hypotheses, if you can even use that word to describe my wild, grasping thoughts: one, that the thing would simply rematerialize in some other container, maybe even my glove compartment on the drive home; or two, that it would be gone forever. I didn’t consider the third possibility: that it would still expect me to open that drowned lockbox; that it wouldn’t be satisfied until I did; that no matter how far away I got, it would whisper to me from beneath the pond’s surface, the sound as clear to my ears as if it were right beside me.
shauna