Voices in the Dark: Part Five

Part Five

The following morning, Addy’s parents insisted they believed her account of the night’s

events, despite the fact that the Ring camera hadn’t recorded any of it. When her father replayed

the single alert from the night before, Addy felt her stomach drop. The Howler wasn’t there at

all. Instead, the grainy black-and-white footage showed a raccoon tipping over their trash can

and rummaging through the spilled garbage.

“But I saw him,” Addy said. “He was talking to the ground. And then he looked right at

me.”

Her father’s eyes managed to say two things at once: “we believe you” and “you

probably had a bad dream.” The contradiction made her feel small and invisible.

Frustrated and unsettled, Addy tried to move on. Her mother suggested she do some

writing, but when Addy sat at her desk, she found herself staring at the spot outside her window

where the Howler had stood only hours earlier… or had he? The uncertainty gnawed at her.

Finally, she made a decision. She would investigate!

Outside, the morning air was cool and crisp. Her dad was in the driveway, finishing the

cleanup from the night before, rolling the big black trash can back down the driveway.

Across the street, the old man was out front raising his flag, his uniform perfectly clean and

sharply pressed.

Jazzercise Woman came prancing down the sidewalk, all neon and pep. As she passed the

old fellow, she waved.

“Good morning, Captain Simon!” she called, skipping and spinning past him.

Addy froze.

Captain Simon?

What was going on here?

She realized, suddenly, that she had never spoken to the man across the street… not even

a simple hello.

Why had the Howler shouted his name?

Captain of what?

Addy stepped toward the sidewalk, intending to greet her neighbor for the first time.

Before she could speak, she felt something… odd vibration beneath her feet.

She stopped. She was standing exactly where the Howler had stood the night before,

screaming and cursing at the ground. Addy looked down, her skin prickling with awareness.

Something was there. Not the Howler… but something else. Just be beneath the thin crack that

ran through the pavement between her feet. An outsider, or rather, an observer.

She leaned closer to the pavement. A low humming rose up through the concrete.

Without thinking, Addy dropped to her hands and knees and pressed her ear to the sidewalk.

She heard not one sound, but many, as if someone were scanning radio stations, searching for a

signal. Static snapped into a horse’s whinny, then the gargle of mouthwash, chirping crickets,

chattering teeth, a rooster crowing. Beneath it all ran a constant undertone… steady and

immense.

It wasn’t static. It almost sounded like water… like a powerful river, raging just below

the surface. The sound swelled, rushing from a roar into a shriek, until Addy realized the sound

was no longer underground at all. It was everywhere. Shrieking and echoing up and down the

street.

“Goddamn it!” Her father shouted over the noise. “What the hell do they think they’re

doing?”

Addy followed his gaze to the nearby intersection of Chestnut and Central. A yellow

muscle car was spinning wildly, doing donuts in the middle of the road, filling the air with

burning rubber and leaving thick black circles on the asphalt. Two teenage boys were inside,

laughing hysterically, showing off or seeking an early morning thrill. Addy vaguely registered

that she’d seen them somewhere before.

“Those idiots are going to get themselves killed if…” her father began.

A sharp cracking sound cut him off, like an old tree branch snapping. One of the wheels

twisted at an impossible angle. The car lurched as the young driver lost control.

“Look out, Addy!” her father yelled, grabbing her and pulling her back from the street.

The crash was violent and sudden.

The sound brought Addy’s mother running to the front door. She screamed in a way that

shocked Addy’s senses… a noise like nothing she’d ever heard coming out of her mother.

At first, the angle made it hard to understand what she was seeing. The car was upside down.

The dead boys inside looked unreal, almost like mannequins. The disorientation made their faces

somehow less horrifying. She could not say the same for the remains of Captain Simon.

His body was folded unnaturally beneath the wreckage, crushed in half. His polished

black shoes were somehow behind his head, his neck bent at an angle no living body could

survive. There were no obvious wounds, but the dark liquid pooling beneath him was not motor

oil, as Addy first assumed.

The boys, she later learned, had moved into the cul-de-sac behind Addy’s house earlier

that year. The younger one would have been in her grade when school resumed in the fall.

Captain James Simon, according to the obituary Addy later found online, had indeed been a

sailor… a Navy captain during World War II. The morning he raised the flag for the last time, he

was 107 years old.

What haunted Addy most wasn’t the violence itself, but how quickly everything returned

to normal. Emergency vehicles came and went. A tow truck hauled away the wreckage.

Neighbors drifted back inside. Pandemic life resumed its routine. It felt wrong… obscene…

shameful.

The night before, the Howler had stood outside her window shouting Captain Simon’s

name. He had said goodbye, as if he knew the old sailor would be leaving Chestnut Avenue

forever.

How could he know that?

And what else did he know?

Addy’s thoughts returned again and again to all the things the Howler had screamed into

the night. She remembered the night of the family campout… the way he had stalked the streets,

shouting the name “Cornelius” with such venom. Was there someone named Cornelius in the

neighborhood? Had he been crushed by a yellow muscle car as well? And, was The Howler

threatening people or warning them?

These were the thoughts that kept Addy awake, lying in bed, waiting for the Ring

camera’s electronic voice to announce his return.

But the Howler didn’t return… and over the following weeks even Addy began to settle

back into the comfort of familiar patterns.

She finished writing her story about Captain Simon. In it, the brave sailor, having learned

of his impending death, had recorded his final confession on a cassette tape, revealing the secrets

of a hidden underworld and the creatures that ruled the dark places beneath the seven seas.

It was a good ending.