I think I shed a tear then.
“Please,” I said.
“No,” said the voice. And then it stopped talking and I closed my eyes and the redness of my eyelid capillaries was bursts of blood and horror in all directions and then at some point I fell asleep.
NOTE:
For the purposes of this account, you can go ahead and assume, even if I don’t write it down, that the last exchange between me and the voice before I fell asleep that night—me saying “please,” the voice saying “no”—happened again and again over the days and weeks that followed.
In fact, you can mentally insert the following between almost every paragraph of the rest of this:
ME: “Please.”
THE VOICE: “No.”
You.
It’s funny, even just typing “you” gives me tingles.
But you don’t appear, not quite yet. Nearly, though. You’re waiting in the wings, ready to come onto the stage, ready to walk into the apartment above our garage, and my life.
It feels weird, thinking about you, before I knew you existed. I wonder what you were doing.
I think I like picturing you standing in the wings.
A hero, listening for his line, his cue to enter.
But a tragic hero. A hero betrayed by me.
The voice let me go to school the next day. In fact it was silent all through my walk there, and all through my classes. I apologized to Mr. Fortey. He said, “That’s okay, Cassie. To be honest it was good to hear your voice in class, for once.”
Huh.
As usual, no one else spoke to me, and neither did the voice. I ate my lunch in the cafeteria alone, at a small table.
Everything almost seemed normal.
The voice didn’t come back till I was walking to the library after school. I think I already had half an idea that I was going to do some reading about the Houdini Killer.
I took the ocean-view route, but avoided the part of the boardwalk where Dad’s restaurant was. The day was warm but there was a very light rain, so light that it seemed not to be falling vertically. It was more a mist that hung everywhere, thick with the smell of the ocean. I was hungry—I’d skipped breakfast to avoid Dad, and the food in the cafeteria sucked. I ducked into a bodega on the corner near the house and grabbed some Skittles. I don’t even really like Skittles, but they’re not produced in a factory that handles nuts. Most chocolate bars, even if they don’t have peanuts in them, could kill me.
There was a guy in the store, an insurance salesman or something, I don’t know. Cheap suit, Pulsar watch. A backpack with the suit, which made me think he was staying in a motel while doing whatever business he was doing. Thin; pasty skin, acne scars.
Anyway, when I left the store, he followed not that far behind, having bought a pack of menthol Newports. He lit up as soon as he was on the street. I turned right onto Ocean and he turned right too; I could hear his leather shoes slapping the sidewalk.
That was when the voice came back.
“That man is following you,” it said.
Behind me, the footsteps sped up. I could almost hear traveling-salesman guy’s breath, could almost feel his fingers around my neck.
“He wants to hurt you.”
I picked up the pace, nerves dancing now despite myself. Looking for anything to distract me: the license plates of cars, their models, whether they were out-of-towners or not. That’s a game I used to play with my dad—guess without looking at the state tags whether a car belonged to tourists or not. It’s not hard, though my dad made me figure it out rather than just telling me: the townspeople’s cars are nearly always rusting, from the bottom, because of the ocean air.
“He’s just a guy,” I said to the voice, under my breath, as I passed a Toyota Corolla that by the red stains around its wheel arches belonged to a townie.
“He wants to **** you and then dump your body at sea, for the crabs and fishes to eat.”
“Please stop,” I whispered.
Then I felt a touch on my arm and I swear my heart nearly stopped. I spun around, arms up.
“Whoa, hey,” said the guy. He sounded like a surfer dude, his vowels long and lazy. “Easy there.”
“Say a word to him and I’ll make you pay.”
That was the voice, of course—so I just stood there, looking around me to see if there was anyone passing, anyone who could help me if he did want to hurt me. But there was no one; the street was empty.
The guy peered at me, puzzled. He had washed-out eyes; there was something sad about his whole appearance. He didn’t look like a killer. “I just need directions,” he said. He took a crumpled piece of paper from his jacket. “West Construction, on Fourteenth. The guy in the store didn’t know.”
I did know where that was, and opened my mouth—