Voices – Page 6
Part 2 — Whispers in the Dark
Four in the morning and he couldn’t sleep. John sat, sitting on his fire escape, smoking Camels and listening to random voices and the things they spoke of.
Above him somewhere a woman was receiving exquisite pleasure through the ministrations of a lover. Her voice came to John as a series of sighs and moans.
Below him somewhere, a man was tormented by dreams of the death of his child. His voice came to John as a litany of wailed curses.
Near him somewhere, a young boy slept, images of his birthday celebration running through his dreams. Cake and ice cream, friends, presents.
All around him, voices everywhere, so familiar now that John suspected he would feel naked without them. Some spoke nonsense in tongues he didn’t understand, others spoke no words at all. None of them gave him the answers he was looking for. None of them told him what he had missed, or how he had missed it. None of them could explain why the look in her eyes had so affected him.
Blue eyes like old jeans, like the sky after a storm, like mist rising off a lake in the pale time before dawn. Haunted eyes, frightened eyes, eyes which seemed to plead for help. John wanted to help. For the first time in years, he found himself caring about someone, worrying about someone, thinking about someone. Knowing he was crazy, he’d stopped bothering to connect with people.
Now there was a connection again, forged by those blue eyes and by the shared knowledge between the two of them that, yes, they were crazy, or on the way there. John liked that connection, and he believed that there was some way he could have kept it alive.
And somehow he had missed it.
John pitched his cigarette butt over the edge and watched it fall, sparking off the building across the alley. “Okay,” he said. “Fuck it. Sleep.”
He was halfway back into his room when the screams started. John knew instinctively, as he knew with all his voices, that these were not sounds that anyone else could hear. This was no different from any of the many screams he heard each day, in that respect. What was different was the voice itself; it was raw and immediate and visceral, not the type of thing he normally heard, which was more like the reflected sound of an echo. Perhaps it was their connection, perhaps it was a fluke, but John understood that he was hearing the sound in real time.
Somewhere in Manhattan, Jennifer Wilkens was screaming.
