The Voice of Grief
A Short Story for the Milk & Honey Horror Challenge
This story was slightly rushed, but I wanted to submit something to
’s writing challenge, so here it is. Interpret it how you will haha. The first prompt was: “There’s something in the walls that only I can hear…”. Go and submit to the challenge, if you haven’t already!Enjoy <3
The front door thudded shut, and Holly felt the tears dampening her cheeks even before she slipped off her shoes and collapsed onto the sagging couch.
You’re okay, she told herself. You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay.
But she wasn’t – of course she wasn’t. It was barely nine in the morning and she was already dripping with exhaustion, the sort that made her limbs feel like they were weighted paper and her lips like they were heavy with numbness. Talking to anyone was not an option right now.
She cradled her face in her palms. The tears trickled through her fingers.
Okay. Up you get.
And, though it took a couple of minutes, she did get up. She settled behind her desk, plastered on a bright, empty smile, and opened her laptop in preparation for the morning meetings her work loved so dearly, for reasons neither she nor any of her coworkers could sympathise with. Working from home helped some but, on days like this one, even sitting up pin-needle straight felt like it was draining her more each moment.
Not to mention that every second that clicked past brought Harlow and Jackson closer to home. Meaning that every second brought a strange tension of relief, longing, and dread.
And the never ending guilt.
Mommy?
Holly startled, her hands clattering against the keyboard. She glanced up. She thought she had heard Harlow’s voice, but… well, of course she couldn’t have. He was at school.
You worry too much over them, Holls.
That was Gabe’s voice. Holly closed her eyes. Sighed through her nose.
But she had hardly logged back into her laptop, her cursor hovering over the Join Meeting button on the screen, when she thought she heard something else. Voices. She glanced up and around. They were coming through the walls, which she knew meant the neighbors were yelling again. She wished they wouldn’t fight as much as they did. Her temples were already tender on the best of days; now, they were needling, her thoughts clouding, and she knew she had a migraine coming on. Just what she needed.
And yet…
JACKSON!
Holly froze.
Her gaze tripped to the wall beside her, where she could have sworn she had heard… well, someone calling her son’s name and…
No. Come on, Holls, you’ve been doing so well.
She heard footsteps, running. Muffled, but clear, as though just on the other side of the wall.
The neighbors didn’t have any kids, so far as she knew. Was the woman she knew only as ‘the girlfriend’ running from her abusive boyfriend?
Holly stood, slammed her laptop shut, and hurried back to the front hall. She was wondering if she had enough of a reason to intrude on the couple – except for the constant screaming matches, she had no real evidence the boyfriend had done anything wrong – when she slowed in her steps. Through the window that looked out into the street, she saw the very couple she had been about to call the police on standing outside in their driveway. Talking to some neighbors. Friendly smiles plastered to their faces.
Then what was I hearing?
THUD.
Holly shrieked.
Then, she began to laugh, thin and breathy.
I’m losing it. Oh my God.
It must have been some odd auditory illusion. Maybe she was hearing the neighbors on the other side of her, or maybe the kids playing in the park just behind her house. Sound traveled strangely. There was no reason to think…
But what had she been about to think, anyway? That she was hearing voices in the walls?
She exhaled a soft laugh.
But it was only that afternoon, when the bus brought Harlow and Jackson back home, that she was able to reassure herself that she had not heard her late husband’s voice calling her son’s name through the wall. Or, that if she had, it must have been some kind of momentary hallucination. That was all.
Mommy? I can’t sleep.
Holly’s eyes were open before the words were out. She turned reflexively.
“Jackson? Did you have another nightmare?”
Her words lingered in the thick darkness of the bedroom. Jackson was quiet. But, there was something else. After years of worrying over her children, Holly knew when one of them was standing beside her. When one of them would wake her up. But, where Jackson would have been, all she felt was empty space.
Her hand flickered to the lamp.
Soft golden light filled the room. She blinked to let her eyes adjust.
Jackson was not there.
Holly’s heart was muffled against her ribs. A dream, then. Never mind that his voice had sounded like it came from right beside her… but these things happened. Auditory hallucinations. Like the whispers she sometimes thought she heard before she fell asleep, or the footsteps through the wall the other day.
Still, something felt wrong.
When she heard the next voice, chills crept over her bare arms.
What is it, Jackson? Did you have a nightmare, honey?
Holly sat up fully, drawing the covers to her chest in a childish reflex. Her heart was thudding now. She stared at the wall beside her bed. The wall in which she had heard the voice.
She knew it was impossible, as impossible as hearing Gabe’s voice come through the walls. But she could have sworn, for a moment, that she had heard her own voice, soft and comforting. A response to the question that Jackson could not have – had not – asked.
Maybe it was the press of the night she knew lingered outside her window, or maybe it was only a paranoia born of motherhood, but–
Holly pushed the covers off and stood.
She crept over to the wall, her inner voice screaming at her to ignore the voices she had thought she’d heard – it can’t be insanity if you don’t acknowledge it, can it, Holls? – and go back to bed, but then she was pressing her ear to the wall and listening to the thick, muffled sound of nothing behind it.
Nothing. A hollow.
Of course that’s all it was.
Then, she heard it.
The sound of crying. Jackson crying. She would know it anywhere.
She should have rushed to his room immediately – he must have truly had a nightmare – but something kept her pressed to the wall. And that was why she heard her own voice once more, comforting him. The whisper scraped against her ear, impossibly real.
Come on, Jackson, let’s get you back to bed.
The rustle of covers shifting, followed by bare feet padding against the floor. Getting closer. Closer.
Thud.
A footstep, right on the other side of the wall. Holly heard it and scrambled back, a shrieking part of her certain that someone was about to come into her room.
She hurried outside. There was no one. She checked both Harlow and Jackson’s rooms. Both of them were sleeping peacefully. There was no one in their bedrooms. There was no one that could be in their bedrooms.
I’m losing my shit, Gabe. I wish you were here.
And, like a sick answer to her prayer, she heard Gabe’s voice from the other side of the wall call, gently, “Holls?”
Holly’s coffee was black and bitter that morning but, although she had not slept a wink after hearing Gabriel’s voice, she hardly needed it to wake her up. She was wide awake, painfully so. Her eyes burned, with exhaustion and with unshed tears.
She barely managed to keep herself upright as she saw Harlow and Jackson to their bus stop and hugged them both, tight as she could, before the bus whisked them off to school.
She wished she could have kept them both home, just for a day. Just so she wouldn’t have to feel so alone.
Like she had felt last night.
Hearing Gabe’s voice call her name had bordered on dangerously dreamlike. Dangerously mad. Had she told the therapist she had seen for the months following Gabe’s accident that she had heard his voice in the walls of their once-shared home, she knew the response she would have gotten. It’s the grief that’s getting to you, Holly, dear. Don’t let it in. If she had persisted, the woman would have likely pushed her into taking some medication or another. Holly could picture the look of tight sympathy on the therapist’s face. You’ll heal, dear, it just takes time. Don’t indulge in these delusions. It will only slow down the process of your grief. Like a wound kept open to fester.
But it had been over a year now, since Gabe’s death, since those conversations with her therapist. And she had never had this sort of delusion – that’s what it must be, after all – before the last couple of days.
She had crept back towards the wall after hearing Gabe’s voice. How could she not?
“Gabe?” she had whispered, and then she had heard the voice that could not have been hers and yet was answer him instead. I’m okay, Gabe, Jackson just had a nightmare. Go back to sleep, honey.
Impossible.
But, even sitting in the bright, solid daylight, she could not shake the feeling that it had happened.
The next three days convinced Holly that she was either in dire need of a psychiatrist, or that the voices were real.
Footsteps; shuffling, playful, sombre. She recognized the fall of each of them, in the same way that she had once known if it was Gabe or one of the boys – and which of them – coming down the stairs. Familiar to the point that it was uncanny. Voices; whispers, shouts, laughter. They came from inside the walls somehow. She knew how that would have sounded to anyone else – oh, the poor dear, motherhood is already so difficult… but widowhood at her young age, no wonder she’s struggling; but she had already heard those whispers, from neighbors, from her therapist, from the older women she met who assured her that widowhood never became easier, but that she would find ways to cope.
One night, after much deliberation, she asked Harlow if he had heard anything strange in his room at night. She didn’t want to frighten him, but she needed to know.
“Just Jackson knocking on the walls,” Harlow answered. “I wish he wouldn’t do that. He’s always keeping me up.”
Holly felt her cheeks pale, even as she kissed him good night, and went into her younger son’s room.
“Jackson?”
Her son was already in bed, his dark curls strewn across his forehead. “Yes, mommy?”
Holly tried to smile. “Have you been bothering your brother again? Why don’t you let him sleep, hmm?”
Jackson’s forehead scrunched. “I haven’t, mommy. He’s lying.”
“If you say so,” Holly said, kissing his forehead to smooth the pout. “But don’t let me hear it from him again, okay?”
Holly left Jackson’s room with her heart buried deep in her throat. She could hardly breathe as she rushed into her room, shut the door, and pressed her ear to the wall. Listening.
Soon, she heard the sounds again.
Gabe’s voice, deep but bright. “Good night, boys, don’t let the monsters scare ya, huh? Remember what I taught you?” There was a pause, in which Holly could imagine him executing a badly imagined martial arts move that barely managed not to knock anything over. Her smile was tinged with tears. “Just let them try and get you.”
The boys giggled.
Holly’s tears were hot against her cheeks.
Then, her own voice filtered out to her. A smile embedded in it, even as she scolded Gabe for teaching the boys to be violent. It was hard, hearing that voice. Hearing what she had sounded like when she had been happy.
The tears wet her lips. Her heart clenched with longing.
The idea came to her, slippery and treacherous. Like when she had first heard Gabe’s voice through the walls. Dreamlike and dangerous and all too real.
She stepped away from the wall, searching the bedroom with her gaze. Her eyes landed on a heavy stool. She picked it up, her eyes and hands fastened to it tight. But, although every part of the situation should have seemed insane, her decision did not.
She threw the stool against the wall and listened to the brittle crack of the paint and wood.
Soon, Harlow and Jackson were in the room with her, their initial fright giving way to wonder as their mother hacked through the wall with the stool, her eyes and arms bright, determined. When she had made a ragged hole, roughly her own size, she lowered the stool, her body trembling with exertion and adrenaline. With incredulity. But, when she looked through the hole she had created in the wall, she saw only her own bedroom, as though she were stepping into a mirror’s reflection. Familiar as a worn path in a carpet.
“Come on,” she told her boys. “We’re going home.”
She didn’t hear their protests, their cries of: “Mommy, don’t go in there!”. She took one of their hands in each of hers and stepped into the other bedroom. She breathed in the scent of the house as it had been, when Gabe was still alive, when every corner smelled of his aftershave or the wooden splinters from his most recent woodworking project, or the wool of his sweater.
The warm scents grew stronger as her gaze found the back of the slumping armchair that Gabe had always sat in, sipping his mug of black coffee. Her heart stuttered, then slowed. She smiled. She pulled her children forward, even as they tried to slip free of her grasp. Jackson was crying. He must have been as happy as she was to see him.
Gabe’s outline was as familiar and elusive as the scent of rain.
“Gabe,” Holly said. She must have let go of her boys’ hands, because she found herself placing a gentle hand on his shoulder. He was warm, real. Alive.
Gabriel turned and the world shattered.
“Holls?”
Holly threw herself into his arms, her unsaid words melting into tears. She wept until his sweater was damp and the wool filled her nose. She wept until Gabriel’s arms tightened around her, the reassuring warmth that she had missed with her whole heart.
When she pulled back, smearing her tears with the backs of her hands, it was to look him in the eyes and know that he was alive.
Her breath stammered in her chest.
The sound of her boys flooded back in her ears. They were crying; Jackson was shrieking, uncontrollably. Holly stepped back and she felt nothing but the smooth surface of a wall at her back. A wall that her boys were cowering against as they watched the thing that she had taken for Gabriel grin. Its arm was hanging loose in its socket. Its ribs poked through its sweater like broken branches. Its forehead was wet with blood. Like the injuries Gabriel had sustained in his car accident.
Its eyes, she thought, numbly. If only she had seen those first, she would never have mistaken it for her husband. Gabriel’s eyes were a kind, clearwater blue, the sort that made anyone want to trust him. The thing standing before her…
Its eyes were the pale gray of faded grief.
Autumn had witnessed her fair share of tragedies as a detective, yet even she the press of tragedy standing in that house.
Rosen. She recognized the family name. She had seen Gabriel Rosen’s body when it had been pulled from the corpse of his car. The truck that hit it had obliterated the metal frame of the car. Shards of glass had been wedged into the man’s skin; she had never seen so many broken bones in a single body. He had been young, a new father turned tragedy.
Now, his wife and children were missing.
Maybe it was prejudice talking, but the house felt almost soggy with grief, the air heavy, the walls dripping with it.
She studied the hole in the broken wall; ragged, arbitrary. Large enough that Autumn could fit inside it, the glow of her flashlight illuminating dust and cobwebs and fractured wooden beams.
Though she had searched the wall thoroughly, there was no sign of mother or children.
It was as though they had simply disappeared. As though their grief had simply swallowed them.
Eerie and compelling until the very end. Well done!
Wow..... heartfelt writing!