“The trees,” she muttered to herself as she rocked on her heels, back and forth, back and forth. Her palms were pressed flat over her ears as a low, keening whine made its way up her throat. “They’re laughing at me. Always laughing. Make them stop.”
My sigh was tired and perhaps too impatient. “Mother, no one is laughing at you. Please, get up from the floor. Don’t you want to go see the ocean with me?”
If anything, she hunched closer to the floor, back against the corner of the wall, knees pulled up underneath her chin as she rocked. So childish, this motion, and yet nothing could have looked less like a child. Thin, pale, and clearly worn beyond her years, it took everything in me not to put a name to my disgust, my intolerable pity.
“She’s been like this all morning,” the orderly standing at my shoulder informed me with a sigh. “We’ve tried everything we can think of to engage her or distract her, but short of forcefully removing her, there’s not much we can do. She won’t budge.”
“And why hasn’t she been given her medication?”
The orderly, Ethel, according to her nametag, raised her eyebrows. “That’s just it, dear. She has had her medication.”
Well that was a lovely bit of news. Her condition was worsening if she was acting like this while she was on her meds.
Bitterness, anger far beyond what the situation warranted settled in the pit of my stomach like a searing stone. I knelt down on one knee in front of my mother, trying to catch her eyes as I laid a hand on her shaking shoulder. “Mom?”
She shrank from my hand like a frightened animal and slumped against the wall. She still rocked with her hands sealed over her ears, staring at a fixed point just over my shoulder. She started shaking her head slowly, back and forth, back and forth, her dark, frightened eyes peeling at the scabby wound on my soul.
“The trees,” she whispered fearfully, “The trees are laughing at me. Always laughing. Don’t you hear them?”
“Mom,” I coaxed, in my best imitation of the orderlies and their never-ending compassionate tolerance, “C’mon mom, don’t you want to see the ocean with me? Remember the last time we went? We had a picnic and played Frisbee in the sand. You said you wanted to go back, remember?”
She paused then, bit her lip with yellowed teeth, and turned her head to stare at me, as if she were seeing me for the first time -- as if the memory of our last outing had stirred something within her, some part of her mind that was still rational. And for an instant that had the force of a lifetime of memory, I thought I saw a glimmer of my mother. The woman she used to be.
And in the next instant, eternity and memory shattered as my mother’s eyes, once so clear and intelligent, misted over into the dull sheen that had become familiar. The void I had grown accustomed to seeing every time I met her eyes devoured her. She turned her head away from me, her lank blonde hair curtaining her face, and laid it back against the wall. She started humming a tune under her breath as she rocked, back and forth, back and forth.
“Ring around the rosie…”
The mother I knew was gone, replaced by this void-woman who, half the time, couldn’t even recognize her own son. Why did I keep coming here?
“Pocket full of posies…”
She giggled then, a small, fragile sound, and thumped her head against the wall, once, twice…
“Ashes, ashes…”
Thump, thump.
“We all fall down.”
This woman was not my mother.
With no more than a frigid goodbye to Ethel, I stood and walked rapidly up the ward’s resident hall. After several security checks I was led to the entrance hall -- a large pink and white room, comfortably furnished and decorated but still reminiscent of a hospital. Once there, I went straight through the large, automatic glass doors which led to the outside; the world of sanity. The sight of the ocean met my eyes, stretched out before me in all its vast loneliness. I trudged my way down the drive, toward the parking lot, away from the Lincoln City Sanatorium that had become the cursed constant in my life. All the while I did my best to banish the memories of its inhabitants in all their demented innocence. But this was something I could never completely accomplish. They were ghosts, indistinct twinges that plagued my mind, always at the edge of my thoughts. Their voices haunted me at night. I would hear them in my mind, the patients in the ward; I would hear them screaming, muttering, laughing, singing…
We all fall down.
------------
My mother isn’t the only one who lost something, I thought that night as I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, toothbrush long forgotten, glaring sullenly at my own reflection, as if the weight of my stare would give it the power to reshape itself, become something more recognizable to me. That person glaring back at me from over the bathroom sink couldn’t be me. No, that was someone else, some sad, unfortunate man who’d seen far too much of the world. This stranger, this doppelganger in my mirror was a sallow looking man, with a narrow, angular face and two sharp lines running vertically between his eyebrows, wrinkles ploughed by sorrow. He was a man too thin for his age, with flabby skin that was a hanging memory of healthy fat that used to be there. He was a man with limpid brown eyes, dark as polluted soil, and dirty blonde hair that was beginning to recede. This was a man who looked like some frustrated accountant, or a corporate paper pusher, or a ragged hotel clerk working the graveyard shift, whose only goal was to reach his next meal. This was a man worn and weary of the world before he had even hit thirty, a man resigned to the fact of unhappiness, as if it were the law of gravity.
This couldn’t be me. I couldn’t look this old, I was all of twenty-six. I had a steady job that I enjoyed, a nice apartment, two or three good friends who would go with me to the dingiest downtown bar and then straight to the city’s art museum in the same night. I had my life together, I was successful, I was comfortable.
But then my mother had gotten sick. Began having dreams, complaining of odd head pains, hearing voices, hurting herself. Over several years she bounced between home care with me and state-funded care at different psychiatric hospitals in the state. Then it was hospital to hospital, psychiatrist to psychiatrist, before she was sent on a more or less permanent basis to Lincoln City’s psychiatric sanatorium. Through it all, no one really knew what was wrong with her. Her symptoms ranged from those of dementia, to bipolar disorder, even to mild schizophrenia. She had been put on several different medications, had undergone several types of therapy, and finally the doctors at the sanatorium had found a combination of the two that seemed to work well for her.
Of course, “well” is subjective and misleading. However the meds may have aided her functioning, her mind was permanently damaged. She would never be the same. The woman I knew as my mother was dead. She had died, and the void-woman had risen from her ashes.
We had both lost. My mother lost her sanity and her life. I lost my mother and any security I had in knowing who I was.
The doppelganger in the mirror continued to stare at me, eyes outlining features like an unfamiliar road map. With a haggard sigh, I shut off the light, plunged the mirror and its secrets into darkness and went to bed.
------------
I worked in the Lincoln City Library -- eight hours a day, six days a week. I enjoyed my work. I think it was the atmosphere of the place. Being surrounded by the books and the quiet and the stillness put my mind at rest. Every time I plucked a book off a dusty shelf, smelled the odor of its pages and felt the solidity of it in my hand, I felt grounded and calm. This was something my curse could not touch. This was something real.
The library was particularly empty that day, so my shift ended an hour early. I had planned on visiting my mother after work, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave the library. Why abandon a world of reason and stability for a world of ghosts and nightmares? That was my mother’s world, a place of ghouls and voices and dreams too solid to ignore but too fragile to touch.
I will visit her, I thought, in a little while.
I wandered among the shelves for a time, pulling out books at random, glancing at the titles and the binding, occasionally flipping through the pages, before returning them to their proper places. I had just decided on leaving, so I could beat the traffic, when a vague, insistent inclination to keep browsing urged my feet forward. I perused the first and second floor briefly, scanning aisles and shelves for anything interesting. It wasn’t until I came to the stairwell that I realized I had meant to go to the third floor all along.
The third floor was perhaps the oddest feature of the otherwise pristine library. A large portion of it held academic volumes; it was the part generally frequented by college and graduate students. But there was another, smaller portion of the third floor which occupied its own corner of the building. Only employees could access that room, and it was only open to the public two days of the year, at the library’s annual book sale. It contained the unused books; books that were rarely checked out, books that were out of print, sometimes books that were simply unpopular. Books that eventually became nothing more than a waste of shelf space. Those books were considered a waste of the library’s budget, and the books that were sold in the library’s annual book sale usually came from that section of the library. I had visited it a few times to deposit unused books, but I had never taken the time to explore it thoroughly.
It’s no wonder I never did, I thought as I stepped into the room and turned on the light. The smell of dust and old books immediately bombarded my nose. I sneezed a few times before I could get a good look at my surroundings. The room had become even more cluttered and disorganized than the last time I had been there. The books on the shelves lay in disarray, un-alphabetized and piled vertically instead of lined in rows. The binding on most of the books was tattered at best and bleached from sun exposure. I walked up to the shelf closest to me, peering at book covers. The titles were hard to make out on some. The ones that were legible discouraged me from giving them more than a precursory glance.
Most of the books were simply out-of-date novels that had never been popular. Some were biographies of people I had never even heard of; others were self-help books and mechanical manuals. I found a few editions of a history book written in the 1940's. The only thing of any interest was hidden beneath stacks of magazines at the back of the room. It was a rather large volume, about the size of a dictionary, just as tattered and dirty as everything else. The title on the cover was faded beyond recognition. I opened the book to the front flap. “Dream Interpretation.” Intrigued despite myself, I began flipping through the pages, reading a paragraph here and there.
I don’t know how long I sat there, cross-legged on the floor, snatching snippets and sentences. It couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes. Yet I started to become aware, in stages, of a strange sound in the background, something so low and quiet that it took me a moment or two to register the noise. When I did, I paused and lifted my eyes from the stained pages of my book. At first I dismissed it as the low drone of the air-vents, but as I listened the noise seemed to grow more insistent. Not louder, exactly, but clearer, less muffled. Nothing but white noise at first, hovering just at the edge of coherency. Now it grew, not louder, but sharper. It sounded at first like rustling -- the quiet swishing noise of leaves scraping the sidewalk or of pages flipping in a book. I looked down at the book in my lap, but the pages hadn’t budged. The noise grew clearer still.
“Hello?” I called hesitantly, not entirely sure what I was expecting to hear in return. Perhaps someone had come into the room and I hadn’t noticed. That noise was just the sound of their footsteps on the carpet, or their book pages turning over. I stood up, carefully placing the book on the pile of magazines, and peered through the shelves. No one else was there.
The sound continued, so soft it was almost a caress. What could it be? There was no wind outside, that much I could see from the stillness of the trees beyond the window.
I stood for a moment, staring out the window, when suddenly it came to me. That noise. It was…
Whispering.
Unlike any whispering I had ever heard before, the sound was not distinctive in the same way a human voice is. But it was whispering, of that I had no doubt. My immediate thought was that there must have been a group of students in the other room, working on a project of some kind. That was not an uncommon occurrence, especially on this floor, and kids were rarely as quiet as they ought to be. Shaking my head in annoyance at the boisterous students, I went to remind them of library manners and common courtesy. But when I left the room and closed the door behind me, I didn’t see any kids. I didn’t see anyone at all. There was no one at any of the study tables littered throughout the room -- no one searching the aisles for a book -- no one passing by on their way to the stairs -- I was the only soul on that floor.
A nervous fluttering lingered in my stomach and became slightly more poignant the longer I stood there, isolated in the sound – until, abruptly, it ceased altogether. I turned around, glanced at the room I had just left. Strange, I thought. What could that have been?
I couldn’t be sure which was worse; the strange noise or the suddenly intense quiet.
Shaking my head, I snorted at myself and glanced at my watch. I winced when I saw the time. Mother would be expecting me soon.
When I left the library that day, I was determined to mention the noisy air-vents to a superior.
----------
My mother was smiling when I saw her. She was sitting in the big armchair in her room, rocking herself with her foot. She had a hand-knitted blanket wrapped around her shoulders and her fingers toyed with the fringe as she stared out the window. Her room had a wonderful view of the Oregon coast. Some nights she kept the window open, and you could smell the ocean on the breeze. It used to help her sleep, back when she had first come here. Before she started to get worse. Now she rarely slept, and when she did it was usually drug-induced.
But she was smiling. My mother, who oftentimes had to be physically restrained to be kept from harming herself. She was smiling. My throat constricted at the sight.
“She’s been in a wonderful mood today,” Ethel told me with a smile. She stood in the doorway behind me, holding a tray of food -- my mother’s dinner. I nodded at her, my lips barely twitching in response. I took the tray from Ethel and closed the door when she turned to leave. Tray in hand, I sat down on the wooden chair next to my mother and picked up a spoon full of mashed potatoes.
“Mom?” I asked gently, trying to smile for her when she turned her head to look at me, “You ready to eat?”
She made no motion to take the spoon I held out for her. Her smile grew the longer she watched me. There was a certain brightness to her gaze, a strange perception I hadn’t seen there in a long time. It wasn’t cognizant, exactly. It was too unbalanced for that. But she seemed to be at a certain level of awareness that was unusual for her. It was almost as if she remembered –-
But before the hope could take root in my mind, she said, “I heard you.”
I should have known better than to rise to her bait. But her statement baffled me so much I couldn’t help but ask, “What?”
“They heard you too,” she went on. “We tried to be quiet, so the trees wouldn’t hear, but they’re so loud, you couldn’t understand, so the books muffled them, kept them from cackling and crowing and getting into your mind, naughty trees, naughty, naughty to laugh so loud, but they know the color of your blood now, you can’t hide the white flags anymore, the stains don’t confuse them--can’t stop them, only muffle, muffle with their pages, but they kept laughing, laughing because they can’t stop, they don’t get tired, they laugh and laugh, naughty trees, naughty to laugh so loud…”
Her eyes seemed to grow wider with every word, and suddenly the smile that had given me hope twisted into something grotesque. She giggled once, and then she sang, “Ring around the rosie, pocket full of posies…”
It was a curious thing, the bitterness that welled in my chest. The ugliness that lay somewhere deep inside me, always there and always growing. It was an ugliness I couldn’t seem to banish and couldn’t control. A trait of the doppelganger, the stranger walking around with my skin. It was a strange thing, to find myself hating my own mother.
But this was not my mother.
“… ashes, ashes, we all fall down. Ring around the rosie…”
It was when she reached out to touch my hand, still singing her children’s tune, that I did something I had never done before.
I lost control.
I jerked away from her so violently that I knocked my chair over. It fell to the floor with the hollow clack of wood on linoleum. The movement startled her enough that she stopped singing, but not so much that she stopped smiling. That smile was infuriating. I wanted to tear it off her face.
I picked up the food tray that had fallen to the floor and hurled it across the room, propelled by the force of words left unsaid, a hoarse yell rising out of my throat. The tray hit the wall with a sound of thunder. The sound multiplied as it died, reverberating off the walls and ringing in my ears.
As the echoes faded and the room grew quiet again, my body suddenly felt very heavy. My mother was still sitting in her chair, smiling vacantly at me as her fingers toyed with the fringe of her blanket. Now I was just exhausted. This battle with the ugliness was tiring and it was a fight I could never win.
When I left, she was still smiling.
----------
At the library the next day, I heard the whispers again. But they weren’t just coming from the little room on the third floor. I would hear them in the holds section; I would hear them on the second floor in the reference section; on the first floor near children’s books; then near the group study room as I ate my lunch. They were all over the library. The sound wasn’t continuous, as it had been before, but every now and again, as I went about my work, I would catch a murmur, so soft I couldn’t be sure I had even heard it at all. But then the next murmur would come after that, and the next.
Kids, I would think to myself with a shrug, and then go back to work.
----------
At first it was slow. Slow and steady, like the flow of water. It sounded like the low hum of voices, volume and pitch rising, then falling, fading away before ascending again. It was rhythmic and it wasn’t. It was steady but it had no discernible pattern. And every day, it would become more successive and more pronounced. Not louder, but clearer. Every day I began to think that perhaps what I was hearing wasn’t the sound of people in the library. Even when the library was completely empty, I would still hear the murmuring.
Then one day, no more than a week after I first heard it, the whispering grew. Where a moment before there had been silence, the whispering picked up so suddenly I at first thought a coworker had turned on the radio. It had grown more insistent, more demanding. It pulsated in the air around me, it reverberated in my body, a mad thrumming, as of a cord vibrating after it’s plucked.
I sat at the front desk, trying to ignore the pulse of it, the maddening presence. Trying to ignore the fear that clawed at my abdomen, ripping through my stomach lining like acid.
What is it?
None of the people around me showed any signs of hearing it. My coworkers went about their business, sorting through the drop-off bin -- the group of people studying at a table not eight feet away went on reading and scribbling without even lifting their heads.
What is it? Am I the only one who can hear it?
No, no, that couldn’t be right. It was so obvious. It was everywhere, all around me, omnipresent as oxygen.
What is it?
And then suddenly the noise seemed to surge. It changed from a vague buzz all around me to a concentrated point.
A point right behind me.
I swung around in my revolving stool, desperate to catch a glimpse of it, whatever it was. I spun so fast my bangs whipped into my eyes. They stung and watered, but I willed them to stay open long enough for me to finally see.
There was an echo -- nothing but a memory of sound -- a sigh, a flutter, and then nothing.
No, wait. There it was again, but this time it was to my right, in the corner by the holds. I turned, slowly this time, thinking that perhaps if I attempted stealth it wouldn’t notice. But no, it was nothing but another echo.
Then I heard it again, to my left. But before I could even think to turn, I heard it behind me. Then it was in front of me, then above me, as if it hovered in the very air over my head.
What is it?
I turned my head this way and that, trying to at least locate it if I couldn’t see it. I craned my neck as far as I could in any given direction, but it was no use. I couldn’t see it, nor pinpoint where the sound was coming from.
The noise continued to circle me, an eddy of confusion sucking me into its current. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shut it out. The sound passed through my skull like a wraith, unaffected by the sealant of my palms over my ears.
That’s when I first really realized it. This thing; it wasn’t physical.
But it was there. I could feel it as well as hear it, the pulse of it throbbing underneath the palms sealed over my ears. A warming of the skin, a crawling of flesh.
I tried to stand and stumbled until my back hit the wall. I used it as a crutch to support my weight as I held my throbbing head. The sound made it ache in a pain I had never experienced.
“No…” I nearly whimpered, “Stop, why won’t you stop?”
Why wouldn’t it go away?
I was nearly hunched over, partly from pain and partly in an attempt to shield myself. Then something heavy and solid came down upon my shoulder.
“Hey, are you alright?”
I opened my eyes and lifted my head. It was one of my coworkers. He had a hand on my shoulder and concern in his expression. He didn’t seem to be hearing it. He wasn’t almost sick with the pain of it.
He said something else, something I didn’t catch. I tried to concentrate on the sound of his voice, on evening out my breathing, on forcing some strength back into my legs so I could support my own weight -- anything other than the whispers.
“I’m fine,” I said a little brusquely, shaking off his hand. “Just a headache. Only need to take some Ibuprofen.”
His eyebrows lowered in a frown. He evidently didn’t believe me. “Are you sure? Maybe you should take off for the day. It’s slow enough, we’d be fine without you.”
I opened my mouth to disagree on reflex, but something stopped me.
“Al… alright. That sounds like a good idea.”
My coworker, Tim I think his name was, looked relieved and clapped my back in an awkward way.
As soon as I stepped out the door, the voices stopped.
----------
It was another week before I realized that the only place I ever heard the voices was in the library. As soon as I stepped out the double glass doors that separated city street from air-conditioned columns, the murmurs ceased altogether.
This was good. This made sense. If I didn’t hear the whispering in any other place, then it was likely work related stress. That was all. Stress. I just needed some rest, relief from the strain. Then it would all go away.
------------
Days went by, a week. I kept hearing it. The sound of it would come and go, but it was a constant presence, a shadow following me from floor to floor, room to room, isle to isle.
I stood in the general stacks, pushing a metal cart full of books that needed to be re-shelved, trying to ignore it, to focus on something solid, on something real. Handle, metal, coldness, fingertips, shifting muscles, legs, air, skin. Focus on feeling. Focus.
A whisper fluttered by me, a lover’s touch and a mocking pinch all at once.
“Shut up,” I hissed vehemently to the air. A girl browsing the isle across from mine shot me a startled glance. I hurried toward the staircase, leaving my cart full of un-shelved books behind.
------------
A few nights later, as I was leaving the library after my shift, there was a notable change in the air, a muggy heaviness that was unusual for that time of the year. I thought I felt a certain resonance trailing after me as I made my way down the sidewalk, sound seeped into the very air particles until the sky pulsed with the life of it.
No, no. That couldn’t be right. It always stayed in the library.
Sound behind me, like leaves scraping against the sidewalk.
As I picked up my pace, my pulse beating a wild tattoo in my neck, I imagined what it must look like, this shadow. I imagined a darkness leaking out of the cracks around the library’s main doors, like fumes of miasma, spilling onto the sidewalk and creeping towards me in the night, reaching out to embrace me from behind…
We all fall down.
----------
It was slow that day in the library. There hadn’t been much activity since lunch hour. I was left sitting at the information desk, staring at the book lying in front of me. I had been staring at the same page for nearly half an hour. I must have read the same sentence ten times over before I gave it up as an exercise in futility. I closed the book with a sigh and rested my elbow on the desk, chin slumped on hand, eyes glued to the wall.
The only thing left to do was to try to figure out what the whispers were saying. They had gotten clear enough now that I could decipher a word here and there through the endless droning. But that, also, was an exercise in futility. It had gotten boring after hours of straining to catch a word, a phrase, a sentence, anything. Now I was resigned to leave the dull hum to its own devices.
It had been weeks since I first heard the voices on the third floor of the library. It had been so long, I was almost accustomed to hearing them. They were no longer an abnormality, in the same way that someone who lives next to train tracks ceases to notice the noise of passing trains. It was now strange to imagine the voices not being there. I still wasn’t sure what they were, exactly. On occasion I would try to make out what they were saying. But usually I was fine with letting them remain nothing but white noise.
----------
When the voices did become tangible, I was not at all prepared for it. I was re-shelving books in the general stacks when I suddenly noticed that the whispering I had been, as always, unconsciously listening to was no longer incoherent. The voices had not only become clearer, but louder. Loud enough that I could finally hear. They were speaking words that I understood. My shock was so great that I dropped the book I was holding, mouth falling open of its own accord.
And then I listened.
“… ashes, we all fall down.”
What?
“Ring around the rosie…”
No.
“… pocket full of posies…”
No.
“… ashes, ashes, we all fall down.”
---------
A/N -- Yeah. Definitely not done. Feeling pretty good about where it is now, though.
