by A. C. Wise
At the end of that first dinner with Maddy, Henry had sat on the deck with her, finishing the last of the wine while Paul washed dishes.
“Does he know?” Maddy had asked.
Her gaze went to the kitchen window, a square of yellow light framing Paul at the sink. There was no jealousy in her voice, only sympathetic understanding.
“I don’t know.”
“I won’t tell if you don’t.” Maddy reached over and squeezed Henry’s hand, and from that moment, their relationship had been set, loving the same man, lamenting his choice of career.
Henry wants to tell Paul to wrap himself around Maddy, take comfort in the shape of her, and forget about the woman, but he knows Paul too well.
“I’ll call you if I hear anything,” Henry says.
“Henry?” Paul says as Henry moves to hang up.
“Yeah?”
“Are you still working on the—”
“The movie? Yeah. Still.”
His movie. Their movie. The one they started together at NYU, back when they had dreams, back before Paul’s father died. The one Henry is now making, failing to make, alone.
“Good. That’s good,” Paul says. “You’ll have to show it to me someday.”
“Yeah. Sure.” Henry rubs his forehead. “Get some sleep, okay?”
Henry hangs up. In the space behind his eyes, a woman breathes and breathes and breathes until she doesn’t breathe anymore.
*
Sweat soaks thirteen-year-old Henry’s sheets, sticking the T-shirt and boxer shorts he sleeps in against his skin. His mother left the windows open, but there’s no breeze, only the oppressive heat they drove through to get to the rental cabin. His brother snores in the bunk above him, one hand dangling over the side.
The noise comes out of nowhere, starting as a hum, building to a scream, slamming into Henry full force. Henry claps his hands to his ears. Animal instinct sends him rabbiting from the bed. His legs tangle in the sheets, and he crashes to the floor. The sound is still there, tied to the heat, the weight and thickness of the air birthed in horrible sound.
“Henry?” Lionel’s voice is sleep muffled above him.
Henry barely hears it over the other sound, rising in pitch, inserting itself between his bones and his skin. There’s another sound tucked inside it, too, worse still. A broken sound full of distress and pain.
Footsteps. His mother’s and father’s voices join his brother’s. Hands pry his hands from his ears.
“Can’t you hear it?” Henry’s voice comes in a panicked whine, his breath in hitching gulps.
“Henry.” His mother shakes him, and his eyes snap into focus.
“It’s just cicadas. See?” His father points to the window.
A single insect body clings to the screen. Lionel trots over and flicks the insect away before pulling the window closed.
“What’s wrong with him?” Lionel asks.
Even with the window shut, the noise remains, filling every corner of the room.
“Can’t you hear?” Henry’s hands creep toward his ears again.
His mother gets him a glass of water. His father and brother watch him with wary eyes. They don’t hear it. They hear the cicadas’ song, but not the broken, stuttering sound that digs and scrapes at Henry’s bones. No one hears it except for him.
Later, Henry learns that the sound is the cicadas’ distress call, the noise they make when they’re threatened or in pain. And over the course of the two weeks at the lake, Henry learns his hearing is different from the rest of his family’s, possibly from almost everyone else he knows. There are tones, nuances, threads of sound that are lost to others. It’s as though he’s developed an extra sense, and he hates it.
Lionel, however, turns it into a game, dragging Henry around to various parts of the lake, asking him what he hears, getting Henry to challenge him to see if he can hear it, too. Henry’s big brother grins, amazed at every sound Henry describes—birds murmuring in distant trees, small animals in the burrows, dropped fishing lines, an aluminum rowboat tapping against a dock all the way across the lake.
Henry almost allows himself to relax, to have fun, until on one of their excursions he hears the crying girl.
Henry and Lionel are deep enough in the woods surrounding the lake that the dense, midsummer foliage screens them from the road, the water, and the other cottages. Henry scans the tree trunks, looking for shed cicada shells. The sound comes, like it did the first night, out of nowhere—a ticking, struggling sound like hitching breath. Except this time it’s not hidden in cicada song but stark and alone, somewhere between mechanical and organic, full of pain.
Henry freezes, cold despite the sweat-slick summer air. Lionel is almost out of sight between the trees before he notices Henry is no longer with him.
“What’s wrong?” Lionel trots back, touching Henry’s arm.
Henry flinches. He’s sharply aware of his own breath. His chest is too tight. Underneath the insect sound there is something else—distinctly human, horribly afraid. He tries to speak, and the only sound that emerges is an extended exhalation, a “hhhhhhhh” that goes on and on.
Lionel’s repeated questions fade. Henry stumbles away from his brother, half-blinded by stinging eyes, catching tree trunks for support. He follows the sound, its insistence a knife-sharp tug at his core. He needs to find the source of the sound. He needs….
Henry crashes to his knees, nearly falling into a hole opened up in the ground. The edges are ragged and soft, the forest floor swallowing itself in greedy mouthfuls. There’s a caught breath of alarm from below him, wet with tears, weak with exhaustion, fading.
“There’s someone down there,” Henry pants, the words coming out between clenched teeth, his whole body shuddering. He’s doubled over now, arms wrapped around his middle, where the sound burrows inside him.
“What—” Lionel starts, but then he looks, seeing what Henry sees.
The girl is barely visible. The tree canopy blocks direct sunlight, and the hole is deep enough that the child is a mere smudge at the bottom.
“Get…” Henry’s voice breaks. Tears stream on his cheeks. “Mom. Dad. Get help.”
Lionel sprints away, and despite the pain, Henry stretches out flat on his stomach. Leaves crackle, branches poke at him. Things crawl through the earth underneath him, worms and beetles and blind moles further undermining its integrity, impossible things he shouldn’t be able to hear. He stretches his arm as far as he can, pressing his cheek against the ground. He doesn’t expect the girl to be able to reach him, but he hopes his presence might comfort her.
“It’s okay.” His shoulder feels like it will pop out of its socket. “I’m not going to leave you.”
From the dark of the earth, the girl sniffles. Henry stretches further still, imagining small fingers reaching back for him.
“It’s okay,” he says again, terrified the girl will die before rescue comes. Terrified it will be his fault, his failure, if she does. “Just hold on, okay? Hold on.”
*
The second time, Henry listens to the tape with his eyes closed. It scarcely matters. He still sees the woman, slumped and taking her last shallow breaths, but inside the theater of his mind she is so much worse. She’s carved up by shadow, her skin blotched as though already rotting from within. At any moment she will raise her head and glare at Henry, his powerlessness, his voyeurism.
He stretches after any glimmer of identifying sound, wondering if his unwanted superpower has finally chosen this moment to abandon him. Then, all at once, the sound is there, sharp as a physical blow.
A faint burr, rising from nothing to a scream. The cicada song he can’t help but hear as a herald of doom. It knocks the breath from his lungs, bringing in its place the heat of summer days, air heavy and close and pressed against the window screens. He shoves his chair back from the desk so hard he almost topples, and stares, wide-eyed. The image on the screen doesn’t change. After a moment, he forces himself to hit rewind. Play
.
Ragged breath, stuttering and catching. There’s no hint of insect song. Even though Henry knows exactly when the rise and fall of the woman’s chest will cease, he holds his own breath. Every time her breath falters, he finds himself wishing the painful sound would just stop. It’s a horrible thought, but he can’t help it, his own lungs screaming as he waits, waits, waits to hear whether she will breathe again.
Then, a sound so faint yet so distinct Henry both can’t believe he missed it and isn’t certain it’s really there. He reverses the tape again, afraid the sound will vanish. Sweat prickles, sour and hot in his armpits. He barely hears the woman breathing this time, his strange powers of hearing focused on the almost-imperceptible sound of a train.
A primal response of exaltation—Henry wants to shout and punch the air in triumph. And at the same time, the woman on the screen is still dying, has been dead for days, weeks, months, even, and there’s nothing he can do. Henry forces himself to listen one last time, just to be sure. The train is more distinct this time, the lonely howl of approaching a crossing. Goose bumps break out across Henry’s skin. His body wants to tremble, and he clenches his teeth as though he’s freezing cold.
He must have imagined the cicadas, even though the noise felt so real, a visceral sensation crawling beneath his skin. The train, though, the train is real. He can isolate the sound, play it for Paul. It’s an actual clue.
He thinks of the summer at the lake when he was thirteen years old, Lionel snoring in the bunk above him. That first terrible night where it seemed as though all the cicadas in the trees around the lake had found their way into the room. Then, later, how their song had led him to the almost-buried girl.
Henry reaches for the phone.
“I’m going to send a sound file your way,” he says when Paul answers. “It’s something. I don’t know if it’s enough.”
“What is it?” Water runs in the background, accompanied by the clatter of Paul doing dishes. Henry imagines the phone balanced precariously between Paul’s ear and shoulder, the lines of concern bracketing his mouth and crowded between his eyes.
“A train. It sounds like it’s coming up to a crossing.”
“That’s brilliant.” For a moment there’s genuine elation in Paul’s voice, the same sense of victory Henry felt moments ago. And just as quickly, the weight settles back in. “It might give us a radius to search, based on where the car was found, and assuming the killer was somewhat local to that area.”
There’s a grimness to Paul’s voice, a hint of distraction as though he’s already half forgotten Henry is on the other end of the phone, his thoughts churning.
“Thank you,” Paul says after a moment, coming back to himself.
The water stops, but Henry pictures Paul still standing at the sink, hands dripping, looking lost.
“I should—” Paul starts, and Henry says, “Wait.”
He takes a breath. He knows what he’s about to ask is unreasonable, but he needs to see. Without the safety and filter of a camera and a video screen in the way.
“When you go looking, I want to go with you.”
“Henry, I—”
“I know,” Henry interrupts. His left hand clenches and unclenches until he consciously forces himself to relax. “I know, but you probably weren’t supposed to send me the tape, either.”
Henry waits. He doesn’t say please. Paul takes a breath, wants to say no. But Henry is already in this, Paul invited him in, and he’s determined to see it through.
“Fine. I’ll call you, okay?”
They hang up, and Henry returns to his computer to isolate the clip and send it to Paul. Once that’s done, Henry opens up another file, the one containing the jumble of clips he shot with Paul at NYU. Back when they had big dreams. Back before Paul’s father died. Back before fifty-eight minutes of a woman breathing out her last in an unknown room.
Henry chooses a clip at random and lets it play. A young man sits in the back seat of a car, leaning his head against the window. He’s traveling across the country, from a small town to a big city. The same journey Henry himself had taken, though he’d only crossed a state. There are other clips following a boy who grew up in the city, in his father’s too-big shadow, but both boys’ heads are full of dreams. Two halves of the same story, trying to find a way to fit together into a whole. Except now, the film will always be unfinished, missing its other half.
Even though he knows he will never finish the movie without Paul, Henry still thinks about the sounds that should accompany the clip. It’s an exercise he engages in from time to time, torturing himself, unwilling to let the movie go. Here, he would put the hum of tires, but heard through the bones of the young man’s skull, an echo chamber created where his forehead meets the glass.
The perfect soundscape would also evoke fields cropped to stubble, the smell of dust and baking tar and asphalt. It would convey nerves as the boy leaves behind everything he’s ever known for bright lights and subway systems. Most importantly, it would also put the audience in the boy’s shoes as he dreams of kissing another boy without worrying about being seen by someone he knows, without his parents’ disappointment and the judgment of neighbors’ faces around him in church every Sunday.
Henry watches the reflections slide by on-screen—telephone poles and clouds seen at a strange angle. His own drive was full of wind-and-road hum broken by his parents’ attempts at conversation, trying to patch things already torn between them. Henry had gotten good at filtering by then, shutting out things he didn’t want to hear. Maybe he should have given his parents a chance, but love offered on the condition of pretending to be someone else didn’t interest him then, and it doesn’t interest him now.
Between one frame and the next, the image on the screen jumps, and Henry jumps with it. Trees, jagged things like cracks in the sky, replace the cloud and telephone pole reflections. The car window itself is gone, and the camera looks up at the whip-thin branches from a low angle.
Then the image snaps back into place just as Henry slaps the pause button. He knows what he and Paul shot. He has watched the clips countless times, and everything about the trees cracking their way across the sky is wrong, wrong, wrong.
When the phone rings, Henry almost jumps out of his skin. He knocks the phone off the desk reaching for it, leaving him sounding weirdly out of breath when he finally brings it to his ear.
“I’ll pick you up tomorrow around ten,” Paul says. “I have an idea.”
“Okay.” Henry lets out a shaky breath.
His pulse judders, refusing to calm. He needs a drink and a shower. Then maybe a whole pot of coffee, because the last thing he wants to do is sleep. When he blinks, he sees thin black branches crisscrossing the sky, and he hears the rising whine of cicada song.
*
There is a legend that says cicadas were humans once. They sang so beautifully that the Muses enchanted them to sing long past the point when they would normally grow tired, so they could provide entertainment throughout the night while the gods feasted.
But the enchantment worked too well. The singers stopped eating. They stopped sleeping. They forgot how to do anything except sing.
They starved to death, and even then the enchantment held. They kept singing, unaware they’d died. Their bodies rotted, and their song went on, until one of the Muses took pity on them and fashioned them new bodies with chitinous shells and wings. Bodies with the illusion of immortality that could live for years underground, buried as if dead but wake again.
Cicadas are intimately acquainted with pain, because they know what it is to die a slow death as a spectacle for someone else’s pleasure. But they do not die when they are buried. They merely dream, and listen to other buried things, things that perhaps should not have been buried at all. They remember what they hear. When they wake, they are ready to tell the secrets they know. When they wake, they sing.
*
Paul drives, Henry in the passenger seat beside him, a bag of powdered
donuts between them, and two steaming cups of coffee in the cup holders.
“Isn’t that playing a bit to stereotype?” Henry points. Paul grins, brushing powdered sugar from his jeans.
“So sue me. They’re delicious.” He helps himself to another. Henry’s stomach is too tight for food, but he keeps sipping his coffee, even though his nerves are already singing.
Paul mapped out a widening radius from where the car with the MiniDV in the glove box was found, circling the nearby railroad crossings. It isn’t much, but it’s something. They’re out here hoping that whoever killed the woman crashed his car on the way back to his home, which might be the place he killed the woman. Maybe they’ll find her body there, or maybe he was on the way back from burying her somewhere else. Maybe they’ll find him. Henry is both prepared and unprepared for this scenario.
Right now, he’s not letting himself think that far ahead. He’s focusing on the plan, tenuous as it is, driving around to likely locations where he will listen. Henry feels like a television psychic, which is to say a total fraud. He wants to enjoy the relative silence of the car, the tick of the turn signal, the engine revving up and down. He wants to enjoy spending time with Paul, catching up, just old friends. He doesn’t want to be thinking of snuff films and ghosts, and on top of that there’s a nervous ache in his chest that keeps him conscious of every time he glances at Paul, wondering if his gaze lingers too long.
Trees border the road. It’s early fall, and most are denuded of their leaves. Henry peers between the trunks, looking for deer. The sound, when it comes, is every bit as unexpected and violent as the last time. A reverberating hum, rising to a scream—cicada song, but with another noise tucked inside it this time, one he remembers from when he was a child.