It all started with a whisper.
I was nearing the end of a recurring dream, one in which I was late for class and could not remember my locker combination, a predicament not apparently shared by any of my nearby classmates. I have this dream frequently. If I were to rank my nocturnal reruns, among the greatest hits would be this one, the one where it’s finals week and I realize with horror that I haven’t attended a single class all semester, and the one where two or more of my teeth randomly begin falling out. Jenna, bless her, claims to never dream, or if she does, she doesn’t remember any of them. I envy her that.
The dream always ends with me, alone in the hallway as the other students had successfully departed with their armloads of textbooks, struggling at the combination lock, the next period bell screaming overhead. Only this time, the dream ended differently. Someone stepped up behind me, so quietly that I did not know that they were there until they whispered in my ear. Their breath was not warm on my neck, but icy cold, and their voice was in a strange, sexless register, too high for a man but too low for a woman. And this voice whispered a single word. A name.
“Nancy.”
I sat up in bed. Though the voice had spoken softly, I could almost hear it echoing through the bedroom, remnants of it clinging to the walls like cobwebs of sound, and I wondered if in fact I had dreamed what I had heard or if it had been spoken in the waking world, rousing me from sleep. But the room was still and dark and empty of anything, or anyone, unusual.
I glanced over at Jenna, but she was sound asleep, her breathing deep and steady.
It happened again the next night. My fingers were frantically turning the dial on the unresponsive combination lock as the school bell screamed accusatorily overhead. This time, just as the voice spoke into my ear, I felt the pressure of a single finger on my upper back, poking the muscle with uncomfortable force, causing pain, the coldness of the digit just as frigid at the voice itself as it whispered:
“Nancy.”
I once again shot up in bed, wide-eyed, a small groan falling lamely my mouth as I did so. I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head, shedding the dream.
Jenna stirred. “Are you okay?” she inquired from the darkness.
I sucked in a deep breath. “I think so,” I responded as I exhaled.
She placed a hand on my back and immediately withdrew it. My skin was covered with an icy sweat.
“You’re soaking wet,” she said.
“Bad dream,” I said, and fell back onto my pillow. The clock beside me glowed 3:13. I was still awake when my cellphone alarm chimed at 6:15.
When I stepped out of the shower that morning, Jenna was sitting on the closed toilet lazily brushing her teeth, her blonde hair stringy and falling over her eyes. Foamy toothpaste threatened to drip from her bottom lip. She gave me a tired, adorable smile that I returned wanly, grabbing my towel from the rack.
“Rough night?” she mumbled over her mouthful of paste and brush.
“You could say that.” I walked over to the sink and used my towel to wipe steam from the mirror before wrapping it around my waist. My reflection showed me a mask of exhaustion, heavy bags under my eyes, my lids drooping with sleepiness. I looked terrible.
Jenna joined me, her step springy, and held back her messy hair in one fist as she bent over to spit into the sink.
“Hey, how’d you do that?” she asked my reflection as she stood up again.
“Do what?”
She pointed at my back with a look of concern. I pivoted my right shoulder forward until I could see a small portion of my upper back in the mirror. There was a deep blue, penny-sized bruise there. Round, surrounded by a halo of greenish yellow. My mouth fell open slightly and I furrowed my brow.
“It looks painful,” she said. “How did you do it?”
“I have no idea,” I answered.
Jenna poked it.
“Ouch!” I protested, but when I saw her playful grin, I couldn’t help but smile in return. I moved as if to grab her, and she ran quickly from the bathroom, giggling. As soon as she was gone, my smile disappeared too.
There was no dream on the third night. I realized this when my alarm woke me from a deep sleep at 6:15. I silenced it immediately and looked over at Jenna. She turned away from me, placing one pillow over her head to block the morning light slowly infiltrating the room.
I stood and stretched, still sleepy but feeling rested, stepped into the bathroom as quietly as I could, turning the knob so that the door would shut silently. I dropped my boxers on the floor and walked into the shower, shivering under the blast of cold water, allowing it to wake me up as I waited for it to warm.
By the time I was done, the water was piping hot and there was a thick fog of steam filling the room. I grabbed my towel from the rack, dried off, and stepped toward the sink.
There, on the mirror, written in the moisture, was the word: Nancy.
My wet skin broke out in goosebumps. I stared at the name dumbly for several seconds. Eyes still on the mirror, I sidestepped to the bathroom door and opened it gently. Jenna remained asleep, or was at least pretending to be, an immobile lump in the near-darkness. The easiest explanation was that she had written on the mirror while I showered, a playful morning prank, but then I remembered that I had never told her the details of the previous two nights’ dreams. She had no reason to know that name. I closed the door again.
After another moment’s pause, my tired mind still trying to piece together an explanation, I took off my towel and began to wipe the name away.
And in the mirror’s reflection, like something out of a clichéd horror movie, I saw someone standing behind me. Someone smaller and more slender than me, someone with jet black hair, pale skin, and black circles around eyes the color of ice, lips upturned in a malevolent, jeering grin.
I let out a low bellow and spun around on my bare heels. My foot slipped on the wet floor and I fell straight down, my back raking harshly against the edge of the sink as I made my rapid descent. My tailbone hit the tile with a thud and I winced, hissing in breath.
When I looked up from my pathetic position, naked on the wet bathroom floor, my body throbbing in about four different places, each one vying for attention, I saw that no one was there.
Soft footsteps rapidly approached the bathroom and Jenna burst in, looking first with panic across the room before lowering her eyes and finding me.
“Are you okay?” she asked, crouching down and placing one warm, concerned hand on my shoulder.
I sat forward, grabbing my towel to cover myself. “Yeah,” I responded, groaning out a lie. “The floor was wet and I slipped.”
There was no dream on the fourth night. I woke on my own and stretched under the covers, my feet searching for cool spots under the sheets. As I stretched, I felt aching in my back and tailbone, reminders of the episode in the bathroom the morning before. I turned my head and looked at the clock on my nightstand. 7:45.
I had overslept.
I sat up quickly, grabbing my cellphone from the nightstand, turning it upright, silently cursing the blasted thing for not waking me. And there, perfectly centered in the dead black screen, was a hole, a hole that punched all the way through the device, surrounded by splintering fingers, a web of cracks extending to every edge of the screen.
Jenna rolled over to face me, and then, seeing the shattered cellphone in my hand, sat up, swiping her hair from her eyes.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered, fruitlessly pressing the power button on the phone, already knowing it wouldn’t turn on.
“Did you step on it or something?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I repeated, a note of irritation in my voice. I realized I would rather be irritated at this moment than terrified, so I pivoted my emotions in that direction.
“You don’t know?” she asked, skeptical.
I tossed the dead cell onto the covers and slipped out of bed. Jenna picked it up and began mashing the power button. I walked into the bathroom and shut the door.
“Ryan?” she called after me, concerned.
“I’m late for work,” I yelled through the door.
I got to my office more than an hour late and only twenty minutes before a scheduled presentation with senior staff. Tori, my assistant, appeared at my office door no sooner than I had dropped my briefcase on my desk with a frustrated sigh.
“Is everything all right?” she asked, a mask of worry on a face framed by unnaturally red and curly hair. I couldn’t tell if she was more worried about why I was late – and I was never, ever late – or the fact that I was due to deliver a very important presentation within the hour with no time for our routine pre-game run-through. I didn’t mind giving presentations as long as I was both prepared and rehearsed, and at the moment I was barely one of those things.
“Cellphone’s dead,” I said. “So I overslept. Did you make copies?”
“I made them yesterday,” she said in a tone that also communicated the fact that I already knew this. “Folders are on the table in the conference room.”
“Projector is on? File loaded?”
“Projector is on. File loaded. Coffee?”
“Please,” I said, turning on my computer. Tori disappeared. I loaded my presentation and skimmed through it, reminding myself of the key points, my lips moving as I quickly read each one under my breath.
My heart was pounding. But it wasn’t because I had just run up the stairs.
Twenty-five people crammed into the conference room. Senior staff took the ten seats at the table. Everyone else was standing at the perimeter. When the door was closed I stood at one end of the table, temporarily blinded as my head intercepted the projector’s light. I gave a smile that I hoped looked more self-deprecating than nervous and smoothed out my tie as I stepped aside.
“Good morning, everyone,” I said through a mouth full of cotton balls. “I apologize if I appear a little frazzled this morning. Technology failed me.”
In spite of the morning’s events and my frayed nerves, about three minutes into the pitch I had found my groove. It turned out I had rehearsed enough in the previous days that I was able to kick into autopilot without even realizing it had happened. And as I felt myself calming, I could also feel the room calming along with me. Most of those present, if not everyone, nodded at the salient points and chuckled at the humorous ones. Despite the morning’s unfortunate beginning, I was winning the day.
But it all fell apart quickly and with a strange sense of inevitability.
“If you will look at this chart from last year,” I was saying, using a laser pointer to shine a spot of red on a colorful pie chart projected on the screen, “you will see that…”
“Naaaaaaaancy…”
The voice came from the other side of the room. It was high and light as a feather, and also eerily dry, as if it didn’t belong in the room itself. There was no hint of any reverberation, as if instead of bouncing off the walls or furniture, the sound was simply passing right through them.
I stopped talking and turned around. Two dozen faces stared back at me, some of them sporting brows furrowed with confusion or concern, most of them blank, a couple etched with boredom. I cleared my throat. The hand with the pointer hovered pointlessly in the air, the red dot now shining randomly on a poster on the wall. “Teamwork makes it all work.”
After an uncomfortable pause, I turned back to the screen and re-aimed the pointer at the pie chart, which took some effort as my hand had begun to tremble awkwardly. I cleared my throat again, though the dryness would not budge. “As I was saying,” I croaked, “you will see that…”
“Naaaaaaaancy…”
The voice was sing-songy and carried the hint of a barely-concealed laugh.
I turned around again quickly to scan the room, inadvertently taking a step once again into the projector’s light. I blinked and immediately sidestepped, a grin of uncomfortable embarrassment on my face as dots of light poked at my vision.
Faces stared back at me in silence. Confused faces. Blank faces. Bored faces. Irritated faces. Tori’s face, concerned. And one face, all the way in the corner, smiling. A pale white face with icy blue eyes surrounded by rings of black. Its grinning mouth opened.
“Naaaaaaaancy…”
Heart in my throat, I looked around at everyone else. Do you not hear this? Do you not see this person? But no one was looking around. No one acknowledged the sound. All eyes were locked on me.
My tie felt suddenly very tight and my tongue like a dry rug. With a nervous chuckle, I picked up a cup of water from the table. I sipped it, my hand shaking, and forced down a swallow. “My apologies, everyone,” I said. “Not having a great morning. Bear with me.”
I took a bigger swig of water, throwing my head back, and when I looked across the room again, the figure in the corner was gone. I took a deep, steadying breath.
“Okay,” I said, putting all my effort into a smile. The corners of my mouth weighed a ton. “How about everyone open up your folders and turn to page three.” I set the cup down.
The sound of folders sliding and pages rattling filled the room. I took another unsteady breath, heart pounding, and attempted to calm down. I locked eyes with Tori and raised my eyebrows – a look of camaraderie and desperation. She raised hers in return, her face a question mark.
I continued. “On page three you will see…”
“Who is Nancy?” someone asked.
My heart stopped. “I’m sorry?”
“Who is Nancy?” the voice repeated, and several people began to chuckle quietly.
“I’m sorry, I don’t…” I began.
Bob Forrester, CEO, my boss’s boss’s boss, slapped his folder shut and slid it toward me with force. He was clearly not amused. I stopped the folder before it went over the cliff and threw him a look that I hoped was both grateful and apologetic.
I flipped the folder open. As the chuckling continued, I silently read, “NANCY. Prepared and presented by Nancy Nancy. Nancy 23, 2022. Nancy nancy nancy nancy. Nancy nancy. Nancy, nancy, nancy and nancy…”
I was back at my desk, my head in my hands.
“I promise those pages weren’t like that when I put the folders together yesterday,” Tori was pleading. She stood before my desk, her hands in a knot in front of her chest, her red hair and stick-thin body making her look like a nervous matchstick.
“For the fourth time, Tori, I believe you,” I said, lifting my head to make eye contact with her. “Someone is messing with me.”
“Who is?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Mr. Forrester is livid. So is Walt.”
“No doubt,” I responded, returning my head to my hands.
“Can I get you anything?”
“A pistol? Some cyanide?”
“That’s not funny,” Tori scolded.
“Nothing is,” I said, and she walked away with a sigh.
I sat in silence.
“Nancy!” a voice shouted, and I jumped.
Jared stood in the doorway, a huge, conspiratorial smile on his face. He knocked “shave-and-a-haircut” on the door frame even though I was already quite aware of his presence.
“I heard you dropped a massive boner in front of Forrester this morning,” he said, walking in. He dropped gracelessly into a chair in front of my desk.
“What do you want, Jared?” I asked, massaging my temples.
He chuckled and shook his head. “I just wish I had been there to see it.”
“I’m sure the version being circulated by everyone in the office is far more colorful and interesting than the real thing.”
He sat forward suddenly and slapped my desk with both palms, startling me for the second time. I was pretty sure his blood was laced with caffeine. “Do you know what you need, old man?”
“I’m thirty-eight,” I said. “You’re thirty-one. I’m not—”
“Do you know what every old man needs?” he said, his grin broadening widely. Although he was presently annoying me, he was also the closest friend I had in the office, and, amazingly, I found myself smiling in return.
“What?” I asked. “What does every old man need?”
Jared stood up, practically bouncing on his heels, and pantomimed a swinging gesture.
“No,” I said, dropping my smile.
Jared, still bouncing, nodded, his eyes wide, his grin wider, and made a back-handed swinging gesture.
“I said no.”
“Racquetball!” he said, only he intentionally mispronounced it, Rah-qwet-ball.
I turned away from him and faced my computer screen. “Nope,” I said. “I’m working late. They’re giving me a second chance at the presentation tomorrow.”
Jared backed slowly toward the door, continuing to swing his invisible rah-qwet. “Working late is fine,” he said. “I couldn’t get a court at Lou’s until 8:00 anyway. It’ll do you some good. Work off some of those nerves. See you there. Old man.”
He left. I considered.
I worked until 7:30. Stopped at the mall for a new cell phone. Swapped the SIM card. Texted Jenna, who already knew I was working late, to tell her I was meeting Jared at Lou’s for racquetball.
“Don’t let him wear you out,” she texted back. “You’re not as young as you used to be.”
“Thanks for that,” I said out loud but did not text in return.
Lou’s was the last independently owned gym in the city. It was ancient, and much of the equipment was outdated, but it had an old school atmosphere and charm that no chain could ever match and a congeniality among the clientele that could never be replicated. And the glue was Lou, a retired Navy seal who was probably in his mid-70s. Tough as nails and armored with old muscle, he was a man who liked to bark insults with thinly-veiled good nature at the sweaty masses. Rumor had it that he had made more than one muscle head cry with just a few sharp but hilarious verbal missiles. He never smiled, even when he laughed.
When Jared and I walked in at 8:00, having first met up in the parking lot, the gym crowd was already thinning out. There were just a couple of people on treadmills and one guy at the weights.
Lou barely looked up at us from his newspaper as we walked in.
“We have the racquetball court at 8:00,” I said as we walked by.
“Like I care,” Lou grunted.
“Always a pleasure, Lou,” Jared said with a smile.
“You have an hour,” Lou shouted at us as we entered the locker room, tipping his head back toward a large clock on the wall. “Close at nine. Sharp.”
“We’ll be done no later than 9:15,” Jared shouted back.
“Be a miracle if the old man lasts the hour,” Lou called back.
Jared laughed. I shook my head.
Lou was wrong. I actually barely lasted 45 minutes.
Jared mopped the floor with me, figuratively speaking, and when we were finished I collapsed on the floor, gasping for breath, every inch of my clothes soaked through with sweat. I feel like a used rag, I thought, and probably look like one too. Jared bent over, hands on his knees, barely winded and barely sweating. He had a gleeful smile on his face and looked as if he was preparing a verbal barb, but then thought better of it and said, “Good game.”
“Was it?” I asked. “I can’t remember.”
He helped me to my feet and we shambled toward the locker room. We didn’t exchange words; I was mostly incapable of speech. The rest of the gym was empty, as was the front desk. Lou must have been in his office. Some of the lights were already turned off.
As we both spun the dials on our combination locks, I had a flashback to my dream from four nights prior. But of course I remembered the numbers, and the door swung open with a loud and annoying creak.
Jared began stuffing his work clothes into his gym bag, then looked over to me. I was still catching my breath, my wet clothes hanging from me like sagging skin.
“I gotta shower first,” I said, shaking my head with exhaustion. “I can’t drive home in this and I’m too sweaty to change.”
“Got it,” he said, slamming his locker door. “Good game. See you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” I nodded, slumping down on a bench as he left the room. I heard him shout a farewell to Lou, which was answered by a grunt.
There were a stack of white towels on a deep shelf near the end of the row of lockers. I stripped and threw my wet clothes on the floor of my locker, which I closed and locked, grabbed a towel, and sauntered over to the showers, my bare feet sticking to the concrete as I walked.
I hung the towel on a hook outside the showers and stepped in. There was a long row of showerheads along the wall with no partitions for privacy. Navy-style. Lou would have it no other way. The water never got above lukewarm. At first it cooled my hot skin, but after a few minutes I began to shiver. The water was also so hard that I could barely make a lather with the soap from the wall dispenser.
As I was rinsing the last remnants of the thin layer of soap from my face, I heard a noise: a distant creaking, metallic like the sound of a locker door opening.
I turned off the showerhead and wiped water from my eyes with my fingertips. “Hello?” I called out. “Lou?”
A locker door then slammed shut loudly, and my heart slipped a beat.
I stepped toward the door of the shower room. One foot slipped on soap scum and I jerked, awakening the soreness in my back. I groaned softly and placed a hand on my low back, massaging it as I stepped more carefully. Reaching around the corner for my towel, I found nothing there. I looked. The hook was empty.
“Lou?” I called out again. My voice bounced back from the concrete walls and the metal lockers, and was then swallowed instantly in silence. My body broke out in gooseflesh, my wet skin chilled by the air.
I had a realization. “Jared?” I called out. “This isn’t funny, man.”
Silence.
I moved toward the lockers, dripping, wet feet clapping on the floor as I walked. The light seemed dimmer and I wondered if Lou had shut some of them off, a way of giving me the hint that he wanted to close up for the day but I was making him wait.
I looked toward the locker I had chosen, expecting my combination lock to be gone or opened, but it was still there, hanging dutifully in its place. I spun the dial, unlocked the lock, and opened the door with a loud creak.
The locker was empty. No, not quite empty. On the high shelf just above eye level were my keys, wallet, and cellphone. But everything else – my clothes, shoes, and gym bag – were gone.
I furrowed my brow in confusion, a nervous feeling creeping its way into my chest. “Lou? Jared?” I called out. The room responded with their names only, and then it was quiet.
I grabbed my things from the shelf and then padded over to the end of the row of lockers where the shelf of towels was located.
It was empty.
I rolled my eyes. “Come on, guys!” I yelled. “Not fun—”
In response, all the lights turned off.
The only light was a dim glow coming in around the edges of the locker room door, light that was escaping from the main workout room on the other side.
I walked carefully toward that dim light, occasionally losing it as my eyes had not yet adjusted to the darkness. I stepped carefully, afraid of hitting my toes on a bench or the corner of a locker. The distance seemed endless. My breathing was loud in my ears and shaky, and not only because I was cold.
When I was about halfway to escape, I heard a whisper.
“Nancy,” it said.
I felt the breath of it on my wet neck, impossibly cold, sending rapid shivers down my arms and both legs.
I took off in the darkness toward that dimly-lit rectangle, my feet slapping loudly as I went, the sound echoing throughout the dark locker room, and over that sound I could faintly hear quiet laughter.
I slammed through the door and into the gym, panting. The locker door closed silently behind me and I stood there, panting, expecting it to open again, expecting someone to come out behind me.
I heard laughter.
There was Lou, behind the desk, sizing me up as I stood there, wet and completely naked, vainly attempting to cover myself with hands that still clutched my phone, keys, and wallet.
I drove home wearing a dark blue sweatshirt with cut off sleeves, tattered gray shorts, and a pair of worn-out tennis shoes that were two sizes too small, the best outfit that Lou could throw together from the gym’s lost-and-found. I smelled like someone else’s old sweat and cigarettes and had to roll the window down.
“Did Jared come back while I was in the locker room?” I had asked him.
“Nope,” he said.
“Did anyone else come in?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“Did…” I hesitated. “Did you take my clothes while I was showering?” Lou looked at me sternly, and I immediately wished I could retract the question, like a fisherman pulling in a fresh catch, and I dropped my gaze. He didn’t bother to respond.
“Sorry,” I said. “Just trying to figure out what happened.”
He had relented with a rattling sigh. “Someone might have come in while I was in the office. I didn’t hear the front door chime. But since they left your valuables and only took your clothes, seems to me someone just wanted to play a joke on you. No harm, no foul.”
“No harm, no foul,” I said, although I didn’t actually agree. “But how did they know my locker combination?”
Lou fixed me with a steely look. “Gym closed fifteen minutes ago,” he said.