THE LISTENER — Part 2: I Talked to My Sister for Five Minutes. The Phone Was Never Off the Hook.

I didn't answer it again after that first night.

Not for a while.

I want you to give me that much, at least, because it's true.

I heard my own name come out of the dark in my own voice, and something in me finally understood that whatever this was, it was not a friend.

And I stopped talking to it.

I went quiet.

And I thought, in my foolishness, that going quiet was the same as being safe.

It isn't.

I'll explain the difference before we're done.

For now, just know that I stopped answering and it did not stop coming.

And that gap between the two is where the real horror lives.

The days helped.

That's the cruel rhythm of it.

The way the daylight lets you argue yourself back down.

In the morning, with the sun on the frost and the ordinary sounds of an ordinary world, the whole thing seemed impossible, and I'd decide I'd imagined it, a woman alone too long, hearing things the way lonely people do.

I'd almost have myself convinced, and then the light would start to go, earlier every day, because this was the deep of winter now, the nights eating further into the afternoons, and I'd feel the dread come up in me like water in a tub as the dark came down, because some part of me that was wiser than the rest knew the daylight was the lie and the dark was the truth.

Then it started to talk.

really talk it came up slowly the way everything about it came up slowly first just my name again but from different places now the yard the roof the hall then two words then a little phrase halting like a mouth learning to work and here is the thing that turned my blood to water every night it was better The first phrases were wrong.

The rhythm off.

The stresses in the wrong places.

A voice reading letters it didn't understand.

But it listened to itself, I think.

The way it listened to everything.

And it corrected.

Night after night, the wrongness got smaller.