We leave our names outside with our coats.
Hask insists on it. He meets us at the porch of a house the border village has kept shut for sixty years. My partner Orin carries the camera. I carry the sound recorder. Hask carries a small bell and no recording gear at all.
“Don’t tell the house your name,” he says. “Don’t answer a voice from upstairs.”
“Or what?” Orin asks.
“If you answer an upstairs voice with your own name, it can keep you here until sunrise. The door won’t open for you. It will open for someone who hasn’t answered.”
“What if we break a window?” I ask.
Hask points at the bars across the windows. Old flood wreckage is packed against them from inside. He has not brought us to a place with an easy second door.
“People tried,” he says. “Before the village closed it.”
We have been paid to record the voices and establish what happened to the family that lived here. The border council wants facts before deciding whether to open the grounds. Orin wants the fee. I want a recording that nobody can dismiss as a bad wire or someone whispering behind a wall.
I say we can use equipment numbers instead of names.
Hask opens the door. The latch works cleanly.
Inside, water marks reach nearly to my shoulder. Six names have been carved into the wall beside the stairs. The smallest is set below the others, where a child could reach.
Orin turns on the camera.
“Camera one,” he says.
“Sound two,” I answer.
From upstairs, my voice replies, “Sound two.”
I keep my hand on the recorder.
“Again,” Orin whispers.
“Don’t ask it,” Hask says.
There are small fae living in the walls. The village calls them copies. They can repeat anything they hear inside the house, and throw the sound into another room. They did not kill the household, Hask tells us. They moved in afterward. The other voices were here already.
“How do we tell which is which?” Orin asks.
“You may not.”
The old stairs are split halfway up. Mud has dried between the boards. A door below them is jammed with stones and the remains of a cupboard. The water marks, the blocked door, the six names: the family had been trapped here when the river flooded the village.
Orin films the marks. I read the names silently.
Upstairs, a woman calls, “Bring the little ones down.”
Hask has heard that before. He lowers his head but doesn’t answer.
We move into the lower room. A cold draft comes through the porch door. I note its direction so I can find the exit in the dark. The windows here are barred too. The floor is clear enough to stand on, though a great pile of old wood blocks the wall behind us.
“Camera one,” my voice says from above.
Orin turns toward the stairs.
“I’m beside you,” I tell him.
“I know.”
But he takes a step. His camera tips upward. For a moment I want him to. We need evidence, and the voices are upstairs.
Then his own voice says, “Again.”
He stops.
Hask asks whether we have enough.
It is still afternoon. We could leave, review the recordings, and decide what more we need. Orin looks at me. I should say yes.
Instead I kneel beside the carved names. I read the smallest aloud. “Emmet.”
A child answers from upstairs.
“Are you coming?”
Orin lowers the camera. Hask catches my shoulder.
“No,” he says.
I tell the child the flood is over. I say nobody has to run down those stairs now.
“Who are you?” the voice asks.
It sounds frightened. It sounds unlike the flat little copies of our equipment check. I want it to hear a person rather than a number. I want that so badly I answer before I think.
“Pella.”
The porch latch clicks.
My name comes back from upstairs. In my own voice first. Then Orin’s. Then a voice neither of us has used.
Hask tries the door. It opens. He holds it wide and tells me to come.
I step forward. The opening goes dark in front of me, like a wall. I touch it. My fingers meet something cold and solid.
Hask is on the other side, still holding the door. I can see him through the lower window. Orin puts his shoulder against the darkness beside me. He passes through and nearly falls onto the porch.
It is closed only to me.
Orin comes back in. He tries to pull me with him. My feet stop at the same place. We try once more, then stop before he hurts my arm.
“Sunrise,” Hask says from outside. “The binding ends then.”
Orin says he’ll stay with me.
I look at the stairs. My voice is calling from there now, promising it has found the way out.
“You might answer in your sleep,” I tell him. “Or by mistake. Like I did.”
“I won’t.”
“I thought that too.”
He stands in the lower room, angry with me, angry with the house. Then he puts the camera on a stool facing the doorway and goes outside. He will wait on the porch with Hask.
The fee will not cover this night. The camera may not have enough battery for it. Neither of us mentions that again.
Hask rings his bell. The sound comes through the door from below. I sit where the cold draft reaches my knees.
By dark, a second bell rings upstairs.
The copies have heard the first one. They can ring it too.
I close my eyes and keep my back against the lower wall. I know where I am without following a sound.
The child asks me to come. A woman calls the six names. Something in my own voice tells me Orin has left.
I ask through the window whether he is there. Orin answers from the porch, where I can see his coat move. We talk about nothing important for a while. His sister’s dog. The dent in our van. Food we should have brought.
Then the house starts using those words upstairs, and we stop.
The night lasts a long time. I don’t answer the upper rooms again. That doesn’t undo my first answer. I sit and wait until the window changes from black to gray.
Hask opens the door when the sun reaches the porch. This time the opening stays light. I walk through, holding the recorder so tightly it has marked my palm.
We give the council the names, the flood marks, and the recorded calls. We refuse a second visit. The council has enough to keep the grounds shut while it decides how to honor the dead.
At home, I play the long recording of the night. There is Hask’s bell, then the bell upstairs. There is Orin talking about the van.
In the quiet after we stop talking, very softly, the child speaks.
It says my name.
I turn the player off before it can ask me to answer.
Loading comments…