By Christi Nogle
Daphne thought she might never get over the quiet here. It wasn’t silence, not quite. Loud sounds were still loud—carhorns, cheering at the football game, barking dogs—but too much empty space fell between them. A siren was something rare enough to bring neighbors out of their houses. They’d speculate about what might be happening, and more often than not they’d be right. On the schoolbus when banter and teasing had ended, all would fall so quiet they’d hear the hum of the road. No headphones here, no cellphones. Not for another forty years or more.
She was lucky to be allowed on the bus, but she hadn’t ridden home today because Charly had said she was planning to walk home. Daphne had spotted her at lunch but not since. Now she walked slowly, turning often to look down the dusty road behind her, hoping to catch Charly’s pink sweater in the distance, but instead she saw a familiar white truck.
Soon they had pulled up, Charly and her older brother Darrell, both of them smoking “Want a ride?” Charly called, and Daphne hesitated. She hadn’t seen a lot of this younger version of Darrell yet and still felt shy around him.
“Oh, Never mind,” Charly said. She crushed out her butt in the overfull ashtray and stepped out, leaving her bookbag on the bench seat. “I was going to walk, anyway,”
Darell shook his head. He headed off slowly and soon the dust billowed behind him.
Charly pointed out that the corn on either side of the road was only a few inches high. “Reminds you all the time left ‘til summer.” She offered a sweet grin and looked down. Bent back and no teeth showing—those were the first things you’d notice.
It was nice to hear her talking, though. Charly was quiet at fifteen, much quieter than Daphne would ever have expected. In her age, Charly would become brash and comical, but right now she was generally formal, wry. A little like Daria from the old cartoon, Daphne thought, if Daria thought all those things instead of saying them.
Anyway all of that was mask, armor. Right now she was soft inside.
Daphne was the one to keep the conversation going, babbling about her school day, all the little scandals and hypocrisies. A teacher with her pantyhose sagging off her, a popular girl who’d been whispered about in the lunchroom. She had always amused Charly telling stories, ever since kindergarten.
Only Charly didn’t remember.
Keeping it light was a challenge. Some of the things she had seen and heard, the ignorance and bigotry, meanness. . . not to mention in the whole school not one person who wasn’t white, not one person with a nonconformist way of dressing or speaking. How everyone agreed on everything, or pretended to. Eerie, to say the least, disturbing.
Things are as bad here as they are there, just different, Daphne thought. Maybe there is some other place somewhere.
It was a wonder they’d let her start attending school at all. No paperwork, no parent, nothing but the right diction and a story. An address. It’s because my hair was loose like a girl’s, she thought, and because I’ve always worn sunscreen, so my skin is nicer than they’re used to seeing on an adult, and because I wasn’t wearing a girdle or heels. They just about couldn’t have taken me for a grown woman.
Daphne’s stories made Charly smile and even chuckle from time to time. Their saddle shoes moving in time on the dusty road, and the sun, and Charly’s smile—all of these contributed a great swelling of contentment.
They approached the hateful house where Daphne was squatting. They couldn’t see it yet, but soon, just around the next bend. All was so still, no sign of a vehicle since Darrell’s, and it was like that all night, too. No electricity to run as much as a radio, no light but the candles. But sometimes I catch a kind of hum, a shimmer like static electricity. . .
“I just got a couple new records, Hey, you should stay over,” Charly said and then caught herself, a mask of concern crossing her face. “Or is your mother well enough to. . . to be home alone? I wasn’t thinking.”
“Mom’s getting better all the time,” Daphne said, and now they could see the roof, the overgrown yard. Oh, the dread of it.
“Would she be all right alone for the whole weekend, you think?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Maybe she’d like me to come in and say hello?”
“Not quite that well yet, I’m afraid.”
Charly did look a little relieved. The house was not so overgrown with greenery yet, but it was headed that way. It looked like a sad place already, and why would a girl want to go inside there?
Daphne wanted to pick up the pace, but Charly stopped at the driveway. “Don’t you want to let her know you’re staying over?”
“Oh yes, oh yes. And pack a bag. And drop these off.” She wagged her heavy bookbag on her way to the door.
“Pack a swimsuit,” called Charly, “in case Dad takes us out to the lake tomorrow.”
Daphne turned and nodded. She’d pack what she could, but she didn’t have anything like that. All her school-clothes she’d stolen off clotheslines or gotten in donation boxes. Her nightclothes were not at all presentable.
The abandoned house was dark inside. Her bed was made neatly on the old-timey sofa, her things all folded on a coffee table. She selected a red sweater, slacks, a calico nightgown.
She’d been lucky to know about this house. It had helped her story immensely at the school. She’d said that the old woman Macy, only recently passed away, had not been without relatives as everyone had assumed. She’d said she was living in the house now with her mother, who was ill but on the mend, a proud and private woman. She wished not to meet neighbors at the house just yet, but of course Daphne was glad to go around and get any casseroles and things that were offered.
This story wouldn’t last long. Someone would look into the deed, or even just happen upon the truth in the course of being nosy. Already a couple of people had pulled into the driveway and knocked at the door—that was why she kept the windows so well covered, and that was why the house stayed so fearfully dark even on such a pretty day.
I shiver out here every night, terrified of the quiet, the loneliness (the shimmer, the hum). I’ve lain awake out here how many nights, waiting for this invitation?
Charly’s invitation had brought joy but trepidation as well. Where could this go? Maybe there is some other place.
She unloaded the books and packed the clothes. Charly would wonder about the bookbag, and probably there was something in the house more appropriate for overnight, but Daphne did not look around, she was in such a hurry. On her way out the door, she yelled back, “Love you, Mama,” loud enough to reach the ears of her real mom, who waited at the lip of the driveway in her pink sweater.
* * *
She’d seen photos and even old home movies, but still there was a strong feeling of vertigo entering the farmhouse. The outdoors, the school—these were uncanny, for sure, but this was more acute. In the mudroom and kitchen a few cans and boxes sat out, brands that didn’t exist in Daphne’s time and others that did but with different packaging. The light was strange and the smell reminiscent of Thanksgiving dinner, though it was just spring. In the living room, she recognized several items that had been in her grandparents’ empty-nest house when she was a child, and even a few things such as the bentwood rocker and the mantel clock, that had made their way down to her.
Charly’s room was finer than anticipated. Her open closet showed an ample, well-kept wardrobe, and on the shelves lay her record collection and player, books, and old toys like Breyer horses, building toys, model cars and such. Charly had been a tomboy, of course, a tomboy now at fifteen being forced to present as a young lady for the first time. No wonder she was a little quiet and bitter.
I know how you lose your virginity, Daphne thought, or has that already happened? She wanted to warn Charly of that, and so many other things. It felt like the fifties to her, but it wasn’t. Kennedy had already died—that was one of the only big dates Daphne remembered because the date was the title of a book she had read. There were other big things coming on the world stage and in the little world of the family too, all of them important to Charly, but where would you begin telling? Well, first you had to build trust.
Charly had an extra bed in her room for guests. Daphne sat there while Charly changed into pedal pushers and a light top. She worried about what they might do for the evening, what mistakes she might make. She had already made a mistake mentioning Simon & Garfunkel, a band she thought was Charly’s favorite, but either they did not yet exist or Charly had not yet discovered them.
She worried, but the evening passed breezily, all in all. Charly played her favorite songs from a few records and then they made themselves sandwiches for supper and did their own dishes. Darrell and the parents were out.
Grandma and Grandpa. Daphne hadn’t seen them yet.
The phone rang, and soon they were listening in on the neighbors’ conversation. This was something Charly had told her about in their other life: the party line, the eavesdropping. They held the receiver between them, stifling giggles. Charly had mentioned hearing all manner of scandalous trysts and other gossip, but just now it was two old women talking about their husbands’ gut issues. It wasn’t really all that funny, but they roared about it after they’d all hung up. No one was home yet, and they went back upstairs.
Did all four of us hang up the phone, or was it more? If we were listening, maybe others were too. Maybe dozens.
Party line. It has a different meaning too, like regurgitating empty speech, pretending. Like everyone at the school. Everyone everywhere. .
Charly had changed out of her houseclothes and into a crisp cotton gown. Daphne opened her bookbag, touched the worn-out calico. It was from old widow Macy’s armoire, one of the only things Daphne had taken from the room where the death had occurred. That room reminded her too much of the room where Charly spent her last weeks.
That’s why Daphne couldn’t say how long she’d been here. Those lonely nights in her dying mother’s home, so much the same as these nights at the old widow Macy’s. But not tonight. Tonight we sleep in twin beds three feet apart, close and safe and no one’s dying at all.
“Oh, I forgot to pack a nightgown,” she said. “I’m so stupid.”
Charly seemed sullen, but Daphne knew she was only tired. She got up and brought out a pair of peach-colored satin pajamas from a dresser drawer.
“These are too nice,” said Daphne, “They look brand new. Don’t you have another gown?”
“Keep them. They’ll look better on you.” Charly smiled. “Good with your coloring.”
Charly really did think she was pretty. There were little things she’d said to tell as much, and the smile just now. It was nice to know that all those compliments back in the other life had not been simply been to fulfill a mother’s duty.
Daphne assumed Grandma and Grandpa had given the pajamas knowing Charly wouldn’t want them, and now Charly was giving them away to rebuke them. Even gifts are not gifts here. Even gifts are ways to dig into people. Ah, well, maybe sometimes a gift found its person. She hadn’t put on anything so her in ages.
Soon the lights were out, and Daphne had not made any mistakes, but neither had she given any hints about her purpose. She had not begun the process of telling her truth.
Night really was darker here, without all the light pollution. This room was dark as old widow Macy’s living room where she’d been staying, but while that dark brought terror every night, this dark was warm and sweet because her mother breathed deeply in the next bed.
I don’t know how I’m here, Daphne thought. You died, and I must have lost my mind. There were a lot of things that made me lose it, not just the death or the weeks before. There was too much for me to stand, and then I was here. Not here, but outside of town. I was driving, I think, and then I lost time. I didn’t have the car anymore. I’d gotten out and lost myself in a cornfield—well over knee-high it was, not just another century but another season too, another time of day. But why did I leave the car? Why is it so hard to remember?
Can you imagine the horror of realizing? You see it in movies where the boy lands in the past and he’s like Whoa, this is wild, and then gets straight to the project of trying to get back to the present without fucking anything up, but in reality? I cried so much. The panic just ebbed and crested; it didn’t ever stop. Hasn’t stopped.
Those first nights sleeping rough, not daring to go around people. From a distance, they were like aliens. Maybe I thought they really were aliens and that I’d been beamed up to some simulated world.
I’d never felt such hunger. I was getting ripe, too. I kept thinking about getting hauled in as a vagrant until I started to notice the clotheslines everywhere. I’d never stolen anything in my life, but getting hauled in as a thief wouldn’t be worse. I thought if I was caught, they would somehow find my IUD, or the dental implant where I lost the canine, and think I was an alien, But really, how would they find anything in me? Did they even have X-rays yet? I hated that I’d retained so little of that kind of historical knowledge.
I found an actual cherry pie cooling on an actual windowsill. Tart cherries in it too, likely from their own tree.
I washed myself in the cold, cold creek. I’d lost my phone and wallet. There was nothing to say I was from the future except my stained and worn-down Hokas. I traded them for a pair of old widow Macy’s boots as soon as I was in the house, then traded those for donated saddle shoes. I brushed my hair a thousand strokes with the old lady’s boar bristle.
But how did I know about the house?
It had been just an idle story, not something I ought to have remembered at all: a house that got abandoned and forgotten, a house close to this one. You and Darrell talked about it one time when the family was together for the holidays, how the trees came up around it so that it was years and years later that they found it again—clearing the trees to plant more corn, they found it curled up inside, with all the old lady’s things still in it, not vandalized, still watertight. (And were my running shoes still inside it, too? Best not to think of things like that.)
It was just a story about how odd things happen, but it delighted you so much to tell it. That’s why I remember—the smile on your face. You savored the story because really, odd things do not happen nearly often enough. It delighted you to think of a house so completely forgotten.
Maybe you always wanted to be forgotten, or to put it better, left alone.
“Maybe I did,” said Charly.
Daphne gasped, opened her eyes. She knew it was a dream because the Charly across from her was old and drained of moisture, with plastic tubing crossing her face and tucked behind her ears. The glow on her face was only light pollution.
“There’s a hole in that house,” this old Charly said.
Daphne blinked.
Another Charly stood before her, slender and young, tying her hair in a ponytail. The pedal pushers were back on.
“I forgot to say, Dad gets mad if we sleep in on Saturdays. I left you as long as I could.”
“Thanks,” said Daphne.
“You talk in your sleep, by the way.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t mind. It was funny.”
* * *
She’d expected Grandma to be beautiful. Instead she was only herself with all the wrinkles ironed away. Vain, energetic, a little wacky. She liked Daphne immediately; she liked all girls and women, Daphne thought (or she liked all of them but Charly, who she didn’t think quite girl enough.) It was good to see her; she’d been gone before Daphne was ten.
Grandpa was the beautiful one. Like a contemptuous vampire gliding around all day, judging things. Blond and physically delicate, very James Dean. You don’t expect a man like that to scream, to have such rage. Why should he?
Darrell was big and red-faced as ever. He was the funny one, everyone seemed to have decided, though his wisecracks felt forced. Of course they were—a way to stay safe, like a dog showing belly.
Charly was irritable around her family, who kept her separate, which made her more irritable. A circular and self-sustaining thing.
As Saturday rolled on through breakfast and the long drive, the fishing lesson, lunch, and so on, Daphne was aware of the family trying to decide what to make of her. Through looks and comments and questions, she guessed they wondered what an older girl would want with a younger one, a plainer one, and when they’d decided she was a regular enough girl, all charm and deference, it seemed they looked forward to seeing her influence on Charly. They complimented her teeth a lot, and her posture. Charly winced each time.
There was the cycle of irritation but no real cruelty on display. Certainly no screaming. Of course not, not in front of a guest, but every chance she had, Daphne caught Charly’s eyes. I believe you, she tried to telegraph. You don’t think you’ve told me, but you have, and I believe it all.
That night they felt closer, talking about hopes for their lives as they braided each other’s hair. It didn’t last but fifteen or twenty minutes, that feeling of home, but it calmed Daphne so much she fell straight to sleep.
* * *
Over Sunday breakfast, they considered church. It felt like they were seeing if Daphne might judge them for skipping. It turned out they everyone was too tired and sunkissed from the lake to manage it. They were happier sharing the paper in the sunny nook. For an hour, they did not seem all that bad. It was only that they were bad for Charly.
The morning rolled on into afternoon, and Darrell needed to visit a girl in town, so he offered Daphne a ride home. Charly came along.
Don’t do it. Too soon. Just don’t, Daphne thought as the house came into view. The truck stopped, and Charly slid over to let her out.
“Do you want to come in for a while?” she asked.
Charly looked surprised but nodded.
“Pick you up on my way back?” said Darrell.
“Oh, I guess I’d rather walk home,” said Charly.
They watched him drive away, and the quiet came over them. Daphne had the urge to say she’d left something important behind and rush them back to the farmhouse. Instead she led them to the door. The front porch cracked and creaked. She felt Charly seeing the overgrown vines, the quilt behind the lace curtain. She felt Charly seeing something wrong here.
She opened the door and did not call out to a mother. Of course not; her mother was right behind her.
The house was unwell. Anyone would know that.
The charge in the air, the feeling the house gave—the wrongness of it explained the old story. Something about this place had shielded it, or would shield it, from people’s eyes. Something about the house would make the trees enclose it and the town forget it was ever here.
“I’ve lied to you, you see,” said Daphne.
When she turned back, Charly seemed to be frozen in fear on the threshold. Surely girls didn’t murder girls in this time, and yet if Daphne had to guess what her mother was thinking. . .
She touched Charly’s shoulder. I know how he screams at you, how they all goad you. How they set you apart. I wish I could have met you sooner. Saved you when there was even more to save.
“I’m staying all alone here,” she said. “Well, you see.”
Their eyes had adjusted, and Charly had to be seeing the sofa made into a bed, the stacks of clothes, and all around her the old widow woman’s squalid things. For the first time, Daphne was furious at the town for letting old widow Macy live and die this way. In that room, all alone. Was the power off, even then? She felt sure it was. Dying alone in the dark and no one passed a hat to keep the power on because why? Because she was irritable, set apart, because she didn’t go to church. And that was part of why they forgot the house, too, until Daphne came around with her bright hair and good manners, accepting their offerings of casserole.
A smell of ozone, stone. The air had gone thin.
“I don’t understand,” said Charly weakly. “You’re a runaway?”
Daphne opened her mouth to speak, but she had to rush in to catch Charly as her eyes rolled back. Her mouth and muscles went slack as Daphne lowered her down to the threadbare carpet.
Still limp, still white-eyed, Charly said, or someone said through her, “There’s a hole in this house.” She screamed in terror before falling unconscious again.
* * *
They sat cross-legged on the sofa, later, in the dark. Facing each other, with tear-tracks down their cheeks. Daphne had shared some things that she shouldn’t have known, to prove her case. She’d spoken well. She always did.
No light glowed through the window-quilts, and they knew that either Grandpa or Darrell would be knocking at the door soon, if Charly didn’t get on her way.
“You believe me, though?” Daphne said. She felt shaky and thought that Charly must be feeling the same.
Charly nodded, but her eyes moved in a way that contradicted things.
“You do and you don’t. I understand. It’s a lot.” But Daphne thought that Charly did accept the important part, that the two of them were safe together, that they were family.
She thought of the movies, about how she ought to be making sure Charly met her father. Never. If there was one thing she could do, it would be to never let her meet that man.
Her family made a hole in her that she’ll try to fill in all the wrong ways. She’ll be hurt over and over. By the time she gets free, there’s so little life left. . .
“Are you going to try to get back? Can I go with you?” Charly asked.
I’m not sure it’s worth going back to. “I wouldn’t have the first idea,” Daphne said. “Though there’s something about this house, I think. I’ve heard things.”
“From who?”
From you? “It doesn’t matter.”
In the movies, the boy would be saving humanity or something big like that. I’m saving this one girl—just saving part of her, really—and that seems bigger to me.
Daphne thought she heard a car, but no headlights lit up the quilts.
She said, “We could go back to your house, tell them a story. Tell them my mom’s run off and I need a place to stay. Get some money and things together, then run away
“Let’s do that,” Charly said, too quickly. She was always only looking for someone to be with.
Yes. If Daphne changed her wardrobe, couldn’t they pass for mother and daughter? Find a ring somewhere and say she was widowed.
They stood on half-asleep young legs, and Daphne started gathering things from the table. They needed to at least get out on the road before anyone came.
But then the phone rang. It rang twice and no more because someone in another house had picked up.
Charly was staring at the phone, lips parted. In a moment she said, “I didn’t realize you were on the party line”
“I’m not. It’s. . . it’s never rung, not once. It’s been cut off.” Daphne moved to investigate the phone in the far corner of the room.
Charly was backing away toward the door. “You heard things. . . My mother or, oh God, Darrell, or anyone. Talking about me. That’s why you know things.”
Headlights lit up the wedding ring quilt.
Daphne held the phone in her hand. The receiver was humming with warmth, her whole body cold and tensed around it.
Is that true?
But no, the internet, she wanted to say, and 9/11, wars, and so many deaths—how could I know about all those things? My dental implant, my IUD. Diseases that don’t yet exist. Diseases that are gone, or were gone for years, and in just the past year there’s been so much more, so much that when you left I had at least that relief, that you wouldn’t see more of it. . .
She knew all of that not from any party line, or if it was, it was a vast and mysterious party line unknown to all but gods and aliens.
“You know some things about me, and everything else you made up.” Charly looked scared, and more than that, she looked sad.
A car door slammed outside.
“You’re crazy,” said Charly. “You’re crazy, and I’m a fool.”
Was it true? Was she so lonely after all, driven mad by this house?
Steps on the rickety porch.
The receiver was to Daphne’s ear. A weak, wheezing voice. Voices? “A hole in this house, a hole in the house. In the house, it’s in the house, a hole—”
A pounding at the door, but it wasn’t too late. It wasn’t too late because Daphne could see the hole now. She’d never stood right in this spot before, but you had to stand right here to see. Behind the empty coat rack beside the front door, a shimmering void. A flash of memory, a shimmering and a hum like that in a cornfield a thousand miles and half a lifetime away.
On the phone, the breathless voice: “There are . . . holes. . . in the. . . world.”
At the door, a voice: “Charly? Anyone?” Not Darrell but Grandpa. Not worried, angry. Always angry, even with all that he had.
Sadness drained out of Charly’s face, only terror remaining. She was still too soft for this world or any other.
Daphne pointed. She couldn’t speak at first. She pointed at the hole.
“Open up now, this is ridiculous,” Grandpa yelled.
And Charly turned, not all the way to the door. She turned ninety degrees, to the coat rack.
“Yes,” hissed Daphne. Her jaw was clenched, like when you try to scream in a dream and nothing comes.
The door was unlocked, the knob turning. He never had respected a closed door.
“Hole,” wheezed Daphne, still jabbing her finger towards it though Charly’s back was turned.
Charly was twisting around the coat rack. The door cracked open behind her.
Grandpa drew out the word, “Girls?”
And for a second, none of it was true. Daphne was a girl, one who’d watched too much science fiction on a black-and-white television. She’d come to this house as a runaway, and the house had driven her mad. She’d listened to the party line and made up the rest, made it all up. The hole was a fantasy, and when Charly touched it, all three of them would see. Soon Daphne would be strapped on a bed with the voltage rolling through her.
Charly was about to touch it, too. She was twisting around the coat rack, steadying herself. When the door flew all the way open, it startled her. Too much weight on the empty coat rack, a stumble, and she was gone.
Gone into the hole.
The door fully open, headlights streamed past his menacing silhouette. On-the-nose invasion movie imagery, for sure.
For a split second, Maybe this is from watching too much Twilight Zone?
No. The coat rack lay horizontal on the floor, a slender pale wrist emerging out of the staticky hole in the carpet, a strong hand holding fast to the coat rack’s center pole.
Let go, Charly.
“What the hell is—” the angry man bellowed.
And with some drama, like her defiant older self flipping the bird to some asshole driver, Charly’s hand clenched tighter, jumped open, and was gone.
Grandpa was screaming all the time Daphne maneuvered around the furniture, still screaming as she kicked aside the coatrack and leapt away to somewhere else.
* * *
Christi Nogle is the author of the novel Beulah (Cemetery Gates Media, 2022) and the short story collections The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future and Promise. Her work has appeared in over fifty publications including PseudoPod, Escape Pod, Vastarien, and Dark Matter Magazine along with anthologies such as C.M Muller’s Nightscript and Flame Tree’s American Gothic. Christi is a member of the HWA, SFWA, and Codex Writers’ Group. She lives in Boise, Idaho with her partner Jim and their gorgeous dogs. Follow her at christinogle.com or on Twitter @christinogle
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