Author: Bradley Ward

“What did you tell her after you were done?”

“I told her that her basement looked fine to me. I know she’s your friend, Mom, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t crazy.”

Julie Donovan was a case if Tim had ever met one. His mother’s best friend for over thirty years, Julie had plenty of stories that he was all too familiar with that proved his statement true.

His mother disagreed. “She’s not crazy, Tim! She lives alone, and it’s only natural that she gets frightened sometimes!”

“Frightened, sure. Making up elaborate stories about people living in her basement? That’s different, Mom!”

“You try sleeping by yourself for twenty years and then tell me that you aren’t scared on occasion!”

She was serious. She didn’t believe Julie’s stories, of course, but she did think Julie had reason to believe them herself.

“Mom, the things she was saying were happening down there aren’t just stories from a single lady that can’t sleep at night.”

“I know, Tim. But you checking it out for her should put an end to her worries. Right?”

“I hope so. I really do. But I’m not dealing with this anymore if it doesn’t. She only paid me ten bucks.”

---

 

Julie Donovan stood at the top of the wooden staircase that descended into the basement. Tim Northford had spent much longer than he had planned to down there because of her prodding. He hadn’t found a thing. Not a single trace of the visitors she had heard discussing her demise for the past few nights.

It was ironic, really. She laughed internally. She was known about town as the gossip queen. Straightfaced and quick-eared, she knew every secret that people cared to share and then some. But here she was, being talked about just out of earshot every night by the strange voices in her very own basement.
Some would say the way she talked behind others’ backs had ruined lives in the past. She was terrified that the hurried whispers she had heard in the musty space below might end hers.

Perhaps he had scared them off? Maybe tonight would be different? Perhaps she might actually get some sleep for the first time in four days. As the grandfather clock announced the arrival of 6 pm, she realized that she’d know the answers to those questions in a short while.

---

 

Tim Northford jumped as his mother threw open the door to his room.

“Get dressed! Quick!”

“Mom… what’s going on?!”

“I heard them, Tim!”

He could hear the basic terror in her voice. He’d only ever heard her this frightened and frantic once before, and he didn’t want to dive into those memories.

“Heard who?”

“The voices in her basement, Tim!”

He was dreaming. He had to be. He had spent more than ten dollars’ worth of time in Julie Donovan’s basement the afternoon before. He hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary – no trace of how anyone could enter Julie’s basement without her knowing.

“She’s crazy, mom! Did she call you?”

“Yes, about 15 minutes ago.” She sounded winded, as if she hadn’t taken a decent breath in hours.

“She could tell I didn’t believe her – because I do trust you. So she carried the phone to the top of the stairs to the basement and left it there. I told her to get dressed as quickly as she could and wait out on the sidewalk for the police to get there. I called them on my cell phone.”

“Ok, so everything’s fine, then, right?”

“NO! I heard them, Timmy!”

“What did you hear?”
“Whispers that sounded — sounded awful. Not like they were coming from people. It sounded like a hundred people whispering the same words at once!”

“Ok, but what were they saying?”

“I don’t know – I can’t focus! Here, the phone’s still on…”

He hadn’t realized she had set the cordless phone down on his bed. She picked it up uneasily and handed it to him. He put his ear up to the receiver.

At first he heard nothing – just the low hum of the dehumidifier that he had seen in the basement the day before. Then, he picked up on a hissing noise that separated itself from the mechanical sound. Was it a man’s voice, or a woman’s? It sounded like both, with the voices of children mixed in. But, as his mother had said, all of the voices (or was it one?) spoke in unison:

“We know something the rest of them don’t, do we not? Yes. Yes we do.”

He felt the chill that he saw in his mother’s eyes crawl through him, grasping at his core.

“She knows everything about everyone. But she doesn’t know herself. Not like we do.”

He heard a sound that could only be identified as a laugh.

“Her own medicine! Such a bitter taste!”

A scream pierced his left ear through the garbly speaker of the cordless phone and the line went dead.