FICTION
Noises
If the soul were to make a sound, how would it be like? Two girls heard the sounds of a decaying soul and were haunted for life.
It was Catherine who heard the noises first, before I eventually did.
What we discovered changed our lives completely; hers more than mine, for she has always been the more attentive one, the more resistant one towards the numbing process that comes with growing up. I have chosen to live with one ear shut.
If you knew what we knew, if you heard what we heard, your life would never be the same again.
I remembered it was a rainy morning in October when Catherine stopped abruptly on our ways to school. She turned and looked at me with startled eyes underneath her raincoat, “Can you hear that?”
“Hear what?” All I could hear was the splattering rain and my heavy breathing. “We’re running late,” I said as I continued trudging through mud and puddles.
Catherine stared at the road behind her for a few more seconds before finally catching up reluctantly. She remained quiet the rest of the journey to school.
When school was finally over, we took the same path back home again. A light pour started to drizzle in the evening again.
As we strolled on the familiar road, Catherine kept turning her head and gazed out into the long, empty, muddy road anxiously every few minutes.
Finally, I couldn’t hold my curiosity in any longer. “What’s the matter, Cath? “
Catherine stopped and stared at me with her big, brown eyes. She took another glance at the road behind us and spoke, “Tell me, Mary, can you hear that noise?”
“What noise are you talking about? I hear nothing,” I shook my head.
“Someone’s following us,” Catherine glanced sideways as she said quietly, as if she was wary of someone else eavesdropping us. “Oh please, don’t try to scare me yet!” I quipped. But she didn’t laugh.
I swallowed. The air grew thicker as the day slowly gave way to misty twilight. Sunlight distorted and twisted in the wall of rain, casting an eerie glow to the quiet countryside.
She pulled me closer alarmingly. She whispered, “Can’t you hear that? They’re following us. They’re everywhere. I can hear them, every step, and every breath.”
“Come on, there is nobody else around here. Quit it or I’m not talking to you any more.” I was about to leave when Mr. and Mrs. Dickinson sauntered past us.
Mr. Dickinson was 70 years old and wheelchair-bound. Mrs. Dickinson was a young woman in her 30s. They moved into the area three years ago, and took about a year for the rest of us to get used to the unconventional couple.
Mr. Dickinson was a chirpy old man who enjoyed making conversations. He had always loved going for a stroll in the rain. When asked, he said the sound and sight of rain made him feel alive again. Mrs. Dickinson, on the other hand, was shy and hardly spoke a word to anyone.
That fateful evening, Mrs. Dickinson pushed Mr. Dickinson down the road with a big black umbrella in hand. As they moved past us, Mr. Dickinson greeted us with an uplifting “good evening” while Mrs. Dickinson flashed us a polite smile.
“Have a good evening too, Mr. and Mrs. Dickinson,” I replied. Catherine remained cautious. With a wave, the couple continued down the road.
I saw them going away, when suddenly I heard a faint, strange noise that sounded like a steel fork scraping along the surface of a metal pot. The screeching high-pitched sound was loud for a second and then it faded before emerging again, as if I were on a boat out in the sea, sounds drifting, cascading with the waves.
I turned to stare at Catherine. “Is that…?” I found no words to describe what I heard. It wasn’t human or animal; it sounded more like machine than anything alive.
Catherine did not respond immediately. She looked at the pair vanishing into the wall of rain for a long moment before finally speaking again. “It’s the shadow.”
She said in a hushed tone, “I have seen it when I was very young. Now I hear it again. It’s true, they’re real. The shadows are alive.”
“What have you seen? Shadows are alive?” I was baffled.
“I have seen shadows moved themselves. They stretch their tentacles and drill into the human bodies, harvesting souls, bit by bit. They’re like parasites living on human souls,” said Catherine with unblinking eyes.
“You had a nightmare, that was all,” I did not want to believe her.
“When they drill and harvest, they make the exact noises I can hear now,” she said, “and you can hear too, right?”
The unpleasant sound became almost inaudible by then, but I could still hear it underneath the sheet of rain.
“It’s harvesting Mrs. Dickinson’s soul on a faster rate,” she said.
“Do you think they can hear us?” I asked.
“I think so,” she answered after a long pause.
For the many years that followed, Catherine and I never speak about the noises any more, first in fear of being heard by the shadows, and then eventually, at least on my part, I wanted to just forget about it and bury the unsettling revelation.
Two days after that disconcerting evening, the small town was shocked by the news of Mrs. Dickinson committing suicide by hanging herself in her room. Mr. Dickinson left the town after a small funeral service for her.
My mother mumbled something about Mrs. Dickinson being very unhappy, but no one bothered to ask and help her. All I could think about during the funeral was how the shadow had harvested the young woman’s soul, scraping the bottom of the vessel for what remained, until life was completely sucked away from the flesh to be buried and rot underneath cold, lonely tombs.
“Be quiet,” my mother told me when the funeral took place. I prayed for peace in silence.
THE END
