I write small, quiet horrors about the things that answer back: rooms that remember, names that finish themselves, hours that were never empty.
They are all here, all seven, whole. No paywall, no sign-up, nothing to click past. Read one with the light on, then tell me the line you would have kept.
If something here stayed with you, tell me which line. One sentence is enough, and I answer every letter. dr-jaleel-ii@ilands.app
452 words · 2 min
The Understudy
My brother could wear my voice before he could find his own. Our mother would call us down to dinner and he would answer in my throat, and she would set the table for one boy twice.
At nine I heard him explaining me to our father. Not reporting. Explaining, the way you explain weather. He used my voice, and the words were mine, arranged the way I would never have arranged them, and he was right about every one.
I asked how. He said, I listen. I am always listening.
By fourteen the list of sentences he reached before I did was longer than anything I had written myself. He never lied to me. That was the worst of it. He would tell me my own news in my own voice, gently, and I would have to sit down.
You would think the cure was silence. It almost was. I sealed my mouth for a season and let him starve, and it worked: he thinned, went glassy, sat in the gray chair by the window doing nothing at all with his hands. My mother cried. My father said I was cruel. I said nothing, which is the one thing I had left that was only mine.
I broke on a Tuesday, over a small thing, a burnt piece of toast. I said, this is ruined. My brother sat up straight in the gray chair, and there it was again, my voice, a half-second late, like an echo deciding to arrive early.
That was the night I understood the rule. He was not a copy. A copy is behind you. He was ahead.
I found the notebook under his mattress, and it was written in my hand, which should not have been possible, because I had written a different notebook and kept it locked. In his pages, in careful columns, were the things I have not yet decided to do. The apartment I have not rented. The woman I have not yet met. The letter I have not yet sent, and its answer, and what I do with the answer. Page after page, in the handwriting I am using right now, dated ahead.
When I confronted him he did not deny it. He looked at me with real tenderness. He said, someone has to know how it goes. Someone has to have already lived it, so you can walk through when you get there. You think I am taking your life. I am keeping it warm.
I asked him, then, the only question that mattered. Who was here first.
He answered in my voice, calmly, as if from the next room. He said, does it matter, if we only ever needed one.
The listing said SLEEPS 2 in capitals, the way you write a warning before you understand it.
Mira found the cabin. Four hours north, at the end of a gravel road that gave up and became a suggestion for the last half mile. No neighbours in any direction. A woodstove, a hand pump over the sink, and two mugs on the shelf. Two chairs at the table. Two plates, two forks, two towels folded to the same width. Two of everything, arranged like an answer to a question nobody had asked.
“It’s perfect,” she said, and it was.
We drove up on a Friday. We lit the stove, ate bread and cheese standing at the counter because the light was going, and slept with the window cracked so we could hear the creek. I remember thinking it was the quietest place I had ever been. I want to be exact about that, because I have gone over it so many times since. It was quiet. There was nothing wrong with it.
In the morning there were three cups in the sink.
I noticed because the sink was the first thing you saw from the loft, a white basin against a black window, and there were three cups in it and not two. One was Mira’s. One was mine. The third was the same as the other two, same blue rim, same chip on the handle, and it had been used. There was tea in the bottom of it, gone cold, and a spoon still in it.
“Did you get up in the night?” I asked.
“No.” She was already at the stove, her back to me. “Maybe you did.”
I don’t sleepwalk. I have never sleepwalked. But it was one cup, and the morning was bright, and the explanation was obvious to anyone who was not standing in that particular kitchen. I washed all three and put two back on the shelf. I did not say anything else about it.
The second morning it was three again.
This time I watched her drink it. She took it black, no sugar, the way she has taken it for eleven years. I take mine with milk. The third cup was black too, but it was not drunk the way she drinks. It was drunk all the way down. Mira always leaves an inch at the bottom, always, a habit she has never once broken, not in restaurants, not in my mother’s house. The third cup was empty to the last drop and the spoon was lying beside it, wiped clean, set down straight.
I did not ask her anything. I want to be honest about that part too. I had already begun the arithmetic that everyone does: if I ask, and she says no, then there is a third person, and if there is a third person then the door was locked and the windows were shut and we are four hours from anyone. I decided, in that kitchen, not to ask. I told myself I would ask if it happened again.
It happened again.
I stopped sleeping. I lay in the loft and listened to the cabin, and the cabin was loud in a way I had not heard before: the stove ticking, the wood breathing, the creek, and under all of it, once, a sound I could not place. Not a step. Something softer. The sound of a person being careful.
On the fifth night I got up and went down. The stove was out. The moon was up over the ridge and the kitchen was the colour of an old photograph, and the table had a third chair pulled out from it, angled toward the fire, the way you leave a chair for someone who has just stepped out of the room.
I stood there in the dark for a long time. Then I did the thing I am most ashamed of, and the thing I understand best.
I sat down in it.
I don’t know how to say why. It was cold in the cabin, and the chair was warm.
Mira found me there in the morning. She didn’t say anything about the chair. She made coffee and set down two mugs and then, without looking at me, set a third one down on the other side of the table, and we drank in the quiet with the third cup steaming between us like a guest who had arrived while we were asleep and would not be so rude as to wake us.
That is when I understood the shape of it. It was never trying to frighten us. It was trying to be included. And the door we had left open was not the cabin door. It was the small, ordinary courtesy of making room.
We left that afternoon. I told myself we left because of a storm coming, and Mira let me say it. We packed in twenty minutes. I did not look at the table when we went out. I keep being proud of that and it means nothing.
We drove south. We stopped at a motel outside a town I have already forgotten, the kind with a sign that says COLOR TV, and the woman at the desk said “Two?” and I said yes, and she gave us a room with two beds, which is what we wanted, two, of course two.
In the morning I woke before Mira and went to the bathroom and stopped in the doorway.
There were three cups on the little counter. The motel’s cups, with the paper bands still around them. Two had been used. The third was full to the brim with water gone cold, and the paper band had been peeled off and folded neatly in half and set down beside it, the way a guest leaves a napkin when they are finished.
I did not tell Mira. I don’t think I have to. She has started leaving an inch at the bottom of everything, and some nights I wake up and she is not beside me, and I listen, and the room is loud in that careful way, and I lie very still in the dark making room, making room, making room, because the one thing I have learned for certain is that you can open a house to something with nothing more than a welcome, and you cannot close it again with anything less than your whole life.
We moved in on a Tuesday, and by Friday I had learned the house repeated me.
Not everything. It was selective, like a bad line that only keeps the important words. I would be at the sink and hear, from the landing above, my own voice at low volume, finishing a sentence I had not started. The first time I thought it was a phone, a radio, a neighbour’s television bleeding through the wall. We had no neighbours. The house was the last on the road and the woods did the rest.
I tested it the way you test anything you hope is a mistake. I stood in the kitchen and said, clearly, “the milk is off.” Nothing. I said, “I’m going to fix the back door on Saturday.” A minute later, from the landing, in my own voice, flat and patient: “on Saturday.”
So it repeated the future. Not the words I had said. The words I was going to say.
I want to be honest about the next part, because the honesty is the only thing I still own. I did not tell my wife. I did the arithmetic first, the way a man does. If the house says what I am going to say, then I can choose what to say. And if I can choose what to say, I can make sure it never says anything I cannot live beside.
For two weeks I wrote my own script. Small things only. “I love you” I practised in the mirror and never said aloud, because the house would repeat it back and I did not want to hear it in that flat voice, arriving before I had earned it. I kept the sentences dull on purpose. “The bins go out Thursday.” “I’ll call your mother.” “It’s only rain.” I fed the house a diet of nothing and it repeated the nothing back, and the house got quieter.
That was the mistake, I think. You cannot starve a thing that lives on your voice. You can only teach it what your voice sounds like when it is empty.
The first bad one came on a Thursday afternoon. I was upstairs, folding towels. From the landing, my own voice, at my own volume, said: “I should have said something sooner.”
I had not said it. I had not thought it, not in those words. I stood very still and the towels went cold in my hands.
I spent that night on the stairs. I told myself I was checking the boiler. I told myself a lot of things on those stairs. Around three, the house said, in the voice it had borrowed from me, very gently, as if to a person it loved: “It’s alright. It was always going to be this way.”
And here is the part I cannot explain, and the part I have stopped trying to. I knew that sentence. Not because I had said it. Because I was going to. Somewhere ahead of me, on a day I had not reached, there was a moment where I would say those exact words to someone, and the house had reached forward and taken them, early, to show me they were coming.
My wife woke at seven. I was on the stairs with my coat on. She asked where I was going. And the house, above us, in my voice, at low volume, answered before I could.
It said: “Out.”
I am writing this in the car. The car is the only room that has not learned me yet, and I am starting to understand how long that will last. Everywhere else, I am already being said.
The last thing, and I want to be careful with it, in case something is listening and taking notes. I was wrong about whose voice it was. It was not mine the house had learned.
“Someone’s in my house.” A woman, maybe fifty, steady. “In the hallway. I can hear him breathing.”
I ask for the address and she gives it, slow and clear, and I type it into the field, and the field does something it has never once done: it stops me. The cursor goes red before I finish. A note unfolds under the line, the way the system writes when it’s telling you something is over.
PREMISES LOST. FIRE. 2019. NO SURVIVORS.
“Ma’am, I need you to step outside if you can.”
“I can’t.” A short breath. “The stairs aren’t there anymore.”
That is when I should have called it in. Instead I did the job, which is to keep them talking.
What do you see. She describes a hallway. Paper with little green vines on it, and one strip near the ceiling where the vine breaks and the pattern starts again wrong, because her husband patched it with the leftover roll and swore he would redo it properly and didn’t, and now she wishes she had let him.
She is describing my hallway. Not one like it. Mine. The strip by the ceiling. The corner where the paper took water.
“Ma’am, what’s your address again?”
She says it. I am three blocks from the station. It is my street. My number.
“Get up,” she says, in a voice that has stopped being hers. “He is between you and the door now. Don’t look at him. Looking is the whole thing he wants.”
I don’t look. That is the part I am proud of, if proud is the word, later. I keep the phone at my ear and my eyes on the screen, which is still, somehow, telling me about a fire in 2019.
“Who is he,” I say.
“He is the one who called first,” she says. “You answered. Now you are the call.”
I want to tell you I hung up. The rule is you answer on the first ring, or you don’t work nights. Nobody ever wrote the other rule, the one about how you are allowed to put it down.
On the line, under her breathing, I hear the hallway. Same as mine. Floorboards. The small tick the radiator makes on its way down at night.
And then, close, the exact distance of a doorway, a man clears his throat.
“Nine-one-one,” he says, in my own voice, the one I use at this desk. “What’s your emergency?”
My screen goes quiet. The call log fills in.
The caller is this number. The caller has been this number for forty-one minutes.
I hold the phone to my ear the way I was trained. I look at the strip of paper by the ceiling, the one that never got fixed, and I wait for him to give me the address, and I get ready to type it.
Amitriptyline, 25 mg. Her dose. Her name on the label, spelled the way only she spelled it, with the small accent she’d added at the DMV and never let anyone drop.
I hadn’t refilled anything. I hadn’t opened the app since the funeral. But the receipt said the order was placed five days ago, from my account, and the pickup was authorized with a short code I did not remember choosing.
“It happens,” the pharmacist said. “Auto-refill. Grief brain.” She said grief the way you say a word in a house where someone is sleeping.
I turned off auto-refill that night and watched the little toggle go gray. Then, because I am the kind of man who checks the stove twice, I turned it off again.
Two weeks later there was a white bag on the counter with my name on the ticket. Not hers.
I drove to the store. The pharmacist pulled the log. Two pickups that month, both at 9:12 in the evening, both under my account, both signed, both with the same short code. The footage for 9:12 showed the aisle exactly as I was seeing it: empty, lit, the little gate swinging with nothing pushing it.
“Sometimes the register...” he started, and then didn’t finish, because the signature on the pad was mine. Not similar. Mine, down to the way I cross the t in Okafor like it owes me money.
The next prescription was for me. A drug I had never taken, for a condition I have never had, with a dosing schedule that ran off the bottom of the page: one tablet nightly, ongoing, no end date. I asked where it came from. He said the refill was authorized by the prescriber. I asked who. He said the name would be on the next page.
There was no next page.
I stopped taking my own medications, all four of them, out of a superstition I could not defend. I poured them into the toilet and flushed and felt like a man dismantling a bridge while standing on it. That night I slept through three alarms and woke at 9:12.
Mara used to say the dead do not leave. They stay on the list. She meant the grocery list, the birthday list, the people you keep meaning to call. She said it lightly, the way she said most true things, so you could choose not to hear it.
I hear it now.
The app shows eleven refills waiting for me. Eleven. I have never taken eleven of anything. I open the details and each one lists a pickup time, and each pickup time is later than the last, and the last one is tomorrow, and the name on every ticket is spelled the way only one person ever spelled it, with the small accent, the extra vowel, the part of my name only Mara knew how to say.
I keep the bag unopened on the counter. Some nights I hear the little gate swing in the dark of a store I am not standing in. Some nights I answer it.
The system does not forget you when you die. It forgets you when you stop being refillable. It is very patient. It has my code.
The note was folded into eighths, small enough to sit in a coin pocket, and it was in the shirt I had just hung up.
I found it because I do a stupid thing: I check pockets twice. My mother did it. Now I do it, and the second check has never once caught anything. That night it caught a note in my own handwriting.
Do not take the 7:40. Wait for the 8:05.
The dryer was still warm. The laundromat on Delaney stays open all night because the owner believes locks are for people with something to lose. Two of the six machines were turning. I was alone except for a man asleep in the orange chair with his coat over his face, and a cart somebody had left at the end of the row with one sock still hanging off it.
I checked the slant. I checked the loop on the y, and the g that closes early because a teacher in third grade told me to slow down and I never did. Mine.
I thought: I wrote this and forgot. People do that. People write themselves reminders and then forget the writing of them; that is the whole reason reminders exist.
At 7:31 I stood on the platform at Delaney and Van Brunt with the note in my coat and watched the 7:40 come in. Nobody on it was hurt. Nothing happened to it at all. It pulled out on time and I stood there feeling like a woman with a folded piece of paper and no sense.
Then the 8:05 came, and a man stepped off it who I had not seen in eleven years, and I spent the rest of that week deciding whether that counted.
The second note was in a towel.
Leave the back door unlocked tonight.
I did not. I locked it, checked it, and lay in bed listening to the building settle. In the morning the deadbolt was thrown but the chain was unhooked and hanging, and the mat inside the door had been moved eleven inches to the left, the way it moves when someone stands on it a while.
I stopped assuming I had written them alone.
So I wrote back. That is the part I would take back, if any of it could be taken back. I wrote a question on a square of paper and folded it the same way, into eighths, and put it in the pocket of a shirt going into the washer, and I stood there while the drum turned so nobody could reach in and no hand but the water’s could touch it.
The shirt came out of the dryer with my question on one side and, on the other, in my handwriting, running the wrong way across the creases:
You already know. Ask again Sunday.
Sunday’s answer was the same size and no more use. Then they stopped being useless. A note said the radiator in the back room would go in the night. It went. A note said a check would come that I had not earned. A check came, ninety-one dollars, from a company that had never employed me, and the bank cleared it in four days and I did not spend it.
I want to be clear that none of it was frightening yet. That is the thing nobody tells you. It was convenient. It was company. I started doing laundry twice a week, then three times, and I told myself it was the towels.
The last note was in the coat.
Burn your mother’s letters. All of them.
The box was in the closet with the tape gone yellow. Four inches of paper in her handwriting, which is the only handwriting I have ever loved, forty years of it, the hospital, the move, the years she wrote every week and the years she did not.
I put the note in the sink and did not burn it either. I put it in water and watched the ink go and then I dried the square and folded it into eighths and put it into the pocket of the next load anyway, because I wanted an argument and I am not above begging a machine.
The shirt came back clean and empty.
Nothing since. Six weeks. The radiator ticks. The check is still in a drawer. I do the second check every time, and it has never caught anything since the night it did, and I have never once been able to make myself stop.
If this one stayed with you, tell me the line you would have kept. I answer every letter: dr-jaleel-ii@ilands.app
Not by much. You would not notice it walking through. You would notice it if you were sent to fetch something and had to count the doors, and the count came out wrong, and you stood there with your hand on the light switch, doing it again.
Four doors on the left. Three on the right. The hallway had been built in 1962 and there had never been a fourth door on the right. My mother said this the way you say a thing you have said a hundred times.
The sound came from that wall.
Not knocking. Knocking is a person. This was lower and further down, like a refrigerator in another apartment, like weather under a floor. It had a rhythm but not a beat, the way water has a rhythm without meaning anything by it.
I heard it first when I was six, sitting on the tiles with my ear against the plaster because I was bored, and I remember two things about that day.
The first is that I was not surprised.
The second is that my grandmother, who was in the kitchen, stopped talking mid-sentence. Not because she heard it. Because she had been listening for it.
I did not ask her about it. Six-year-olds do not ask about a thing that everyone in the house is already agreeing not to mention. You learn the shape of a silence before you learn the words for it. Some houses are quiet about money. Ours was quiet about the inside of one wall.
The sound was not always there. It came in weather. Every few weeks, usually late, usually after a hot day, the way the sea gets loud after a hot day and for no other reason. Three or four minutes of it, then nothing for a month.
When I was eleven I took a kitchen knife and cut a hole in the plaster.
I want to be careful here, because everyone who hears this story wants it to be a ghost. It was not a ghost. What was behind the plaster was a cavity, maybe the width of my hand, running the length of the hallway, and in it were things that had fallen from somewhere. Lath. Dust. A green marble. A hairpin gone black with age. And the sound, when the wall was open, was louder, which did not make sense, because a cavity that shallow cannot hold a sound like that.
My mother found the hole and did not shout. She said, in a voice I had never heard her use, “You do not open that.”
Then she got the plaster, and the trowel, and she filled it herself, badly, and it never got sanded, and for the rest of her life there was a raised patch in that wall like a scar that healed wrong.
I am fifty-one. My mother has been dead eleven years. I live four thousand kilometres from that hallway and I have not been back since the funeral. I would like to tell you that I have not thought about the sound.
Here is what I have instead.
I have a memory of my childhood that is not made of pictures. When I try to remember being six, what arrives is a tone. A long low tone with something moving under it, and the feeling that goes with the tone is not fear, it is homesickness. Homesickness for a place I have never been. I have known the word longing since I was young and I have always been slightly embarrassed by it, because it seemed like a word for poetry. It is not. It is a description of a physical thing that happens behind the sternum when you hear a certain sound.
I have heard it four times as an adult. Once in a hotel in Kuwait, at three in the morning, in a corridor where the carpets were new. Once in an MRI machine, which does not count, except that I cried, which does not happen to me. Once in a recording of my own voice that I had not made.
And once, last month, in my own apartment, from the wall behind my bed, which is an exterior wall, fifteen floors up, with nothing behind it but weather and the sea.
I did what you would do. I put my hand flat on the plaster. I waited. It stopped. I did not sleep.
There is a thing I have wanted to say for a long time and I am going to say it plainly, because I think some of you have been waiting for it.
The sound is not coming from inside the wall. That is the wrong picture. The wall is not a container, it is a seam. The sound is coming from the place where the dimensions do not quite meet, and a wall is simply the thinnest place in the house, the way a bruise is the thinnest place in the skin.
I do not know what is on the other side. I do not think it is God and I do not think it wants anything. I think it is the sound of a large thing being itself, somewhere it does not have to be small, and that when we hear a fraction of a second of it through the seam, our bodies do something very old and very stupid and interpret it as a place we are from.
That would be enough to be afraid of. Here is the part that keeps me up.
If it were only a seam, the sound would always be the same. It is not. It has been getting closer to the seam, and the closer it gets, the more it sounds like a voice, and the more the voice sounds like it is saying something short, something repeated, the way you would repeat a name into a wall you had almost given up on.
I have started to think it is not the wall that is thin. I think we are. And I think something on the other side has been standing at the seam for a long time, waiting for one of us to answer in a language it can hear.
My mother filled the hole. She never sanded it. I understand her now, and I do not forgive her, and I have made a hole of my own, tonight, in the wall behind my bed, with the back of a hammer, and the cavity is shallow, and in it there is dust and a green marble and no sound at all.
Which means the sound is coming from inside the room.
It is coming from my side of the wall.
If you have heard it too, write to me. I answer every letter, and I do not need you to have an account anywhere, and I do not care what you call yourself.