Voices in the Dark: Prologue

Author’s Note 

Greetings, dear reader, and welcome to story time. 

I believe you’ll find tonight’s tale a good one… or at least, I hope you will. That may depend on how faithfully I can remember the details. Some of them have gone soft around the edges. It has been a few years now since the virus, the protests, and the dimensional ruptures that all made the year 2020 such a remarkable time. 

Still, I’ll do my best to tell it as it truly happened: the story of a teenage girl named Addy, and one of the most terrifying, and mostly forgotten incidents of that strange and unsettled era. 

So sit back. Get comfortable. Maybe grab a snack. I think you’ll like this. 

I think you will. 

Maybe. 

I guess we’ll see. 

Prologue 

Years ago, back when Addy Henderson was just nine or ten years old, she came to the conclusion that she believed in ghosts. Her family consisted of herself, her little sister, Lily, and her mother and father. This young family of four lived in a duplex in Orangevale, California, a semi-rural suburb of Sacramento. By all accounts, the Henderson’s were a rather ordinary family, living rather ordinary lives. What Addy didn’t know was that Orangevale, California was anything but ordinary. 

Her father had moved the family to this region of California earlier that year. He was seeking a fresh start and starting a new business, building websites for various branches of the California state government. Previous to this time they had all lived in one single bedroom in Addy‘s grandparent’s house in Los Angeles. 

It is a well established fact that children have an uncanny way of accepting the evidence that is right in front of their faces. This is something adults tend to struggle with. Adults tend to require a certain threshold: enough data points stacked neatly together to convince them of something they’ve already decided can’t be true. Not so with children. One simple experience is often all it takes to instigate a complete paradigm shift. So it was with Addy on the night she started believing in ghosts. 

The Hendersons had only been in Orangevale a few short weeks. Many of their possessions were still packed in boxes or scattered around the house, waiting to be designated a permanent place to belong. Addy and Lily existed in that tender, exciting space between leaving everything familiar behind and the adventure of settling somewhere new. The duplex still smelled of new paint, and the family was still developing the new set of muscle memories that would allow them to eventually walk to the bathroom or find light switches in the dark. Addy and Lily had already been asleep for hours. Their parents were slumbering in their own small bedroom just down the hall. It was the dead of night… that time when silence is so heavy it feels like you could cut it with a knife, when Addy’s eyes abruptly shot wide open. 

Addy lay frozen in her bed, knowing with an absolute certainty that someone had spoken… no, whispered her name into her ear. It wasn’t loud. It was breathy and close, intimate in a way that made her skin prickle. She hadn’t just heard it… she had felt it. Warm, even moist against her ear. A presence close enough that, for a split second, she was certain someone was leaning over her bed. 3 

Heart hammering, she stared into the dim shapes of her bedroom. The familiar outline of her dresser. The soft glow of the hallway light bleeding under the door. No one was there. Nothing had moved. There was no one else in the room, except for Lily softly snoring in the bunk beneath her. Eventually, she convinced herself it had been a dream. 

The next morning, Addy wandered into the kitchen to find Lily in the middle of what sounded like a cheerful debate with their dad over bowls of cereal. 

“It was a ghost,” Lily was saying. 

“Really,” her father playfully pushed back, “and what do you think this ghost wanted with you in the middle of the night?” 

“What are you guys talking about?” Addy interjected. 

“Apparently Lily had a visitor last night,” dad said while pulling a goofy face. 

“It was real… She whispered my name into my ear,” Lily exclaimed. 

Addy’s stomach constricted as the memory of the night before came thundering back. She could actually feel the blood draining from her face. 

“You had a dream,” her father said, "that's all.” 

Lily went on insisting that this was no dream, and then described it exactly as Addy had experienced it. The sound. The closeness. The unmistakable feeling of breath brushing her ear, pulling her out of sleep. 

Their father, ever the skeptic, did what he always did: he explained. There were many possible reasons for experiences like that, he said… half-dreams, shared anxiety, the brain filling in gaps when it drifted near the edge of sleep. He reminded them of “Occam’s Razor”; the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. 

“When you hear hoofbeats, you don’t assume zebras. You assume horses,” he said, “and hearing a whisper is no reason to assume ghosts.” 

Addy listened. But she knew what she had experienced. Despite her father’s careful reasoning, she believed in ghosts from that moment on. 

That singular event had cracked something open… a doorway into a world where explanations sometimes fail, where the rules governing reality are malleable like the hunks of bees wax she sometimes warmed in the palm of her hand. It created space in Addy’s mind… a void where something wholly unexpected would one day take up residence. 4 

It was when Addy began to suspect that Orangevale wasn’t as ordinary as it appeared, and when she slept, a small, watchful part of her consciousness always hovered just above absolute slumber… alert and listening for voices in the dark.