It’s sudden, the kind of noise that makes me sit up straighter in bed, that makes me hold my breath to listen.
The only way to describe it is a ping. A ping, and then nothing. Ping, and then nothing. It’s a piercing noise when it comes, like some sort of mechanical bleep or chime, the second or two between each ping a welcome reprieve. I rub at my ears, certain at first that the noise originates there, in my own eardrums. That it’s merely tinnitus, a ringing in the ears, something only I can hear.
But then I realize it’s not coming from my ears.
It’s coming from somewhere on the other side of the room.
I stare though the blackness but see nothing. It’s too dark to see much of anything, aside from my own hand when it’s pressed all the way up to my face. And so I push the blanket from me and rise, following the noise. I move blindly, feet guiding me, my steps small because I don’t know what’s in front of me. Where the bedroom ends and the stairs begin. I have to be careful so that I don’t fall.
I skirt around the edge of the bed, where I find myself on the other side of the room, hunched at the shoulders because the squat ceiling doesn’t allow me to stand upright. From there, the noise rises up from the floor to greet me.
I drop to my knees, running my hands over a metal grate by accident. There I discover a floor register, one of those metal contraptions that attaches to the end of an air duct and leads somewhere under the floor, to some other room in the home. That’s where the ping is coming from, from some other room in the home. In my imagination, I see a mallet being tapped against the slats of another register in another room, because that’s what it sounds like to me. Like metal on metal, rhythmic and fixed.
I lie on the floor, pressing an ear to the grate so I can hear it more clearly. The ping. Which makes me think only of sonar emitting pulses underwater and then waiting for them to return, to see if there’s anything out there, anything like whales or submarines. Except the only thing here is me.
I’m overcome with the strangest thought then. An irrational thought but one that somehow makes sense.
Someone is trying to speak to me. To communicate with me.
I press my lips again to the cold metal grate and call out, “Hello?”
At first there’s no reply. The ping disappears, and as I sit there, waiting foolishly for someone to respond to me through the floor register, I realize this is ridiculous. Of course there’s no one at the other end of the floor register speaking to me.
Because if there was, that would mean they’re in the carriage home with me.
A chill rises up my spine, one vertebra at a time.
Is there someone in the carriage home with me?
I rise to my feet and scurry across the room—quicker this time, forgetting altogether about falling down stairs. I reach out to flip on the bedroom light. A yellow glare spreads over the room, obliterating the darkness. I stand at the top of the steps, staring down over the rest of the carriage home, listening for sounds, watching for movement. But there are none.
“Is anyone there?” I call over the stairwell, my voice timid and afraid. My heart beats hard; my hands begin to sweat. For three or four minutes, no one appears and in time, logic begins to watch over me. I shake my head, feeling stupid.
Of course no one is here.
It’s the newness of the home that’s to blame. That’s what has me on edge. Because for the first time in my entire life, I’m alone and somewhere new. I feel lost without Mom, not knowing who I am or where I belong. If I belong anywhere.
I turn off the bedroom light, and the room is once again plunged into darkness. It’s darker now than it was before because my eyes have adjusted to the light. I creep across the room and back toward the bed, reminding myself that this house is old. Old homes come with all sorts of strange but innocuous noises. Rats living in the insulation, the settling of the home, water moving through the pipes. That’s all that it is.
As I reach for the bed, I almost have myself convinced.
Until seconds later when the voices come. Female voices by the pitch of it, higher than that of a man. I suck in a gulp of air and hold it in, not believing my own ears.
Someone is there.
The voices are hard to hear, as if they’re a million miles away, the sound dampened by distance and the network of aluminum tubes that make up the ductwork. At first it’s only sounds, the cadence of women speaking, but no words that I can make out.
Until I do.
“It won’t be long now,” I hear, and at first I’m scared. My knees buckle. My throat constricts. My hands go to my throat without meaning to, pressing hard against my vocal cords. My tongue turns to sandpaper and though I’m cold, sweat breeds on my skin.
I see women in some sort of insulated room, by the sound of it. Patients in a psych ward, the walls covered with plastic and foam; a door, padded on the inside, but reinforced with steel. No knob on the door. No way to leave. That’s where I imagine the women are.
I stagger back to the floor register, setting myself down over it. I press my ear to the grate, willing the voices to return again, but at the same time hoping they won’t. Because I pray that no one is here.
I call into the floor register, my voice mousy at first, scared, “What? What won’t be long now?” Though my words are a whisper only, and if they were standing in the very same room as me, two feet away, they wouldn’t hear.
I cup my hands around my lips, pressing them flush to the floor register this time, so close I taste the bitter metal in my mouth. I call out, voice louder and more emphatic than it was before, “Can you hear me? Is anyone there?”
The only words I hear are low and plaintive. “She’s dead to the world.” But to my question there is no reply. Whoever is there can’t hear me.
The voices are hollow at first before they go silent. They disappear completely as I sit there, pressing my ear to the floor register in vain. But the only sound that I hear now is the tick, tock of the wall clock.
My pulse is going at a breakneck speed. It pounds hard through my temple, my wrist. Wind rattles the carriage home, hissing its way in through the window’s gap.
A noise returns from the floor just then and I think that they are back. The women, the voices. The ping. I press my ear to the metal grate and listen.
But this time the only thing that comes is a rush of lukewarm air blasting into me.
The heat. The heat has finally kicked on.
I think of the maze of tubes that work their way through the home and into this room from the furnace. The pipes and fittings and ducts. The ductwork, which, for a home this old, whimpers at every bend like the high pitch of female voices speaking, a whimper that my tired mind only doctored into words. There were never any women there.
It was the furnace’s burners igniting, starting to produce heat. The furnace spurting air into the home. It comes out with a whine this time, and I press my hands to the grate to thaw them out.
I’m aware suddenly of just how much my entire body aches.
The insomnia has taken my sleep from me, and now it’s taking my mind. Turning the gray matter to sludge. How long can I go on, I wonder, without sleep?
I return to bed and lie down on the mattress, staring out the open window at the sky. It’s turned black now, though before I can sleep, dawn will be here. Not in the blink of an eye because that’s not the way it is with insomnia.
Time is as slow as the three-toed sloth when you can’t sleep.