The Last Sound They Make

by Ron Davidson

The subway train shuddered towards downtown like a steer being prodded into an abattoir. Elliot stood in the fifth car, his face tense and drawn, indifferent to the scattering of empty seats around him. The interior of the car had a hollowed-out, musty feeling. It was, thought Elliot, as if the comings and goings of thousands of people tended to scrape away the outer layers of places, leaving only bones as refuse. The skeletal discards of the train shrieked as it rounded a curve, sparks spraying from its wheels.

The other passengers seemed unbothered by their surroundings. Most stared impassively at smartphones, their fingers entwined by thin, snake-like power cords. An old man with bushy eyebrows dozed, his head bobbing with the train. Two teenage girls sitting by the door giggled hysterically as they traded a notebook back and forth.

Suddenly, the passengers’ heads jerked in unison towards the nose of the train as it began a sharp deceleration. “Newport Station,” the conductor’s voice crackled over a speaker. “This is an eastbound train for Airsdale. Newport Station: exit on the right.”

Elliot could see the station lights flaring in the window an instant before the car emerged from the tunnel. It was precisely then that he heard it, cutting though the squeal of the brakes and the laughter of the two girls like a broadcast on an emergency frequency. The message contained no words, just a grunt of startled pain.

Elliot’s scalp prickled. No, please, he thought. The train was slowing rapidly, but the doors wouldn’t open for thirty seconds. A shudder of panic ran through Elliot. Then, right in his ear — or rather, in his head — blared a spluttery soprano cry: “Fix it!”

My God, Elliot thought. It’s right here. He spun around, his eyes darting about, observing everyone and everything in the car with adrenaline-fueled clarity. As far as he could tell, nothing unusual was going on inside the car.

Where then?

A teenage couple began walking towards the door. Elliot stood blocking their path, immobile, his head cocked, straining to hear. Another sound was coming through — a weak, watery sigh, a bit fainter than the last broadcast. West of me, he decided, and bolted towards the door. He would get onto the platform and sprint east, away from the train. He could make 50 yards in a few seconds once the doors opened. That might be enough to help.

But even as he made this calculation, Elliot sensed his mistake. He should have run through the connecting door into the car ahead, and then to the next. It would put him that much farther from the source. But he’d positioned himself in front of the door of his own car, and a crowd had formed behind his back, blocking him. He had no time left anyway. It had to be now, this instant.

But after its race to arrive, the train took its time stopping. When it finally came to a halt, Elliot’s mind was blank with terror. He tensed to leap, to bore through anyone who got in his way. But the train started again, inching forward slightly, to improve its alignment with the platform. With a choked scream, Elliot jammed his fingers between the two doors and tried to pry them open.

He was too late.

The Silence descended. The moment after the final, ghastly moment. The moment when he followed, as helpless as the dead, pulled in their wake across an unthinkable border. Elliot shuddered as cold, eternal darkness filled him. The agony he felt would last only seconds, he knew, but it would seem to him to go on and on.

Elliot fell to his knees as the doors now mockingly opened. He writhed onto the platform, unable to cry out, sinking into fathomless night. And then he sensed something. A presence. He felt it distinctly, radiating danger, like a seam of burning coal through the walls of a mine. He sensed it glaring at him hungrily. He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out.

Then it was over.

Elliot came immediately to his senses. He was lying on his back on the platform, gasping. The bushy-browed man was kneeling over him. “Take it easy, son,” he said. “We’ll call a doctor.”

Elliot shook his head and clambered shakily to his feet. “No.” He backed away from the man. “No.” He could say nothing more. He turned and staggered into the crowd.

Elliot spent several minutes wandering around the platform, breathing deeply, his face twitching. For six years, since Lisa’s accident, he’d been hearing the noises. And the Silence.

Lisa.

Even now he couldn’t bear to think about it. She had been... then an instant later, she hadn’t. That was all. Her shriek exploding in his head in that instant — as he sat at the café two blocks from the intersection where the SUV struck her, his back rigid, staring out the window, impatient for the sight of her face — was best not thought about. Nor was the Silence that followed.

Everything broke after that. Lisa was gone, his life was mangled. But his mind had also been damaged. Not warped into insanity, he knew. But the contents had shifted. Its capacities augmented. His mind had been like an old radio that an impatient user strikes with a fist, and it suddenly starts receiving signals from Mongolia. He started receiving the broadcasts. That’s what he called them, but he had no real vocabulary for what they were. He knew only that they were things no human mind was meant to receive.

His scalp prickled as he thought of the presence. He had never felt it before. Was this because he’d never been so close to the source of a broadcast before? If he were any closer, would the presence also be closer? If he were too close, could it reach out and...?

He shook his head as if to hurl the notion away.

Then he considered the broadcast’s distance. Whoever he’d heard had been close by. But how close? Distances were tricky to measure. He’d had powerful broadcasts from half a mile away, and he’d had a relatively faint one from no more than two hundred yards. Wind, buildings, rain, nothing like that had any effect on the signals, as far as he could tell. The variables affecting their strength were unknown to him. As a general rule, though, louder and clearer meant closer. The maximum range seemed to be approximately one mile. All of this he’d calculated over six years of grim, unwilling observation.

Today’s broadcast had originated nearby, but apparently not inside the train or on the platform. Somewhere else in the station, then? He did not see a crowd of onlookers around a lifeless body, or police or paramedics. On the street above the subway tunnel? In the basement of a nearby building?

Fortunately, it had been brief. No lingering sobs. No outpourings of regret, no prayers. No screams. But there had been a sinister feeling to it, making Elliot wonder if foul play had been involved. He had carefully planned his route to avoid hospices and hospitals. The street outside Newport Station was lined with theaters, bars and restaurants — places of vibrancy and life. But that didn’t make the trip risk-free. Accidents and, as he suspected just now, murders happened everywhere. No place teeming with people could be entirely safe.

In fact, about the only place he truly felt safe was the cemetery. His first visit to Memorial Park, to attend his mother’s funeral, had been nerve-racking. It wasn’t the prospect of hearing broadcasts that had frightened him — there was little possibility of that — but of hearing nothing. Of Silence. For all he knew, the cemetery, with its dense accumulation underground, would be a roaring black hole of Silence.

He had parked twelve blocks away and approached the marble archway on foot, his senses on high alert, prepared to back off at any moment. But he had felt nothing. In fact, he had found the place calming. After the service he had lingered, ostensibly to talk to his relatives, but really because the place soothed him. Several times since, when matters had compelled him to visit town, he’d returned to it.

He left the station and crossed Ninth Avenue. Lowering gray skies promised rain. It only took a few minutes to reach his destination. The bank, with its rectangular granite columns stretching eight stories to the brow of the roof, conveyed aloofness to the world. It was indomitable, permanent. The tiny figures moving up and down its steps seemed pitifully weak and perishable.

Elliot became one of them, then entered the building. He had come, after a lengthy period of hesitation, to collect the contents of his safety deposit box and bring them to his local bank in Islington. It would be one less tie to the city. Soon he might never have to return to it at all. That was his plan. To never have to leave his little town, where the population was so small and the nearest hospital so far away that he might never hear another broadcast. Where he might forget he’d ever heard them, and begin to live normally again.

Christmas decorations twinkled in the bank lobby. The holiday was only a week away. Next to Elliot, a three-foot-tall Rudolph raised its mechanical head, showing off a blinking red nose. A teller with a candy-cane brooch called him over. She picked up a Santa Claus hat and plopped it on her head as he approached, and Elliot managed a weak grin.

When interviewed later, the teller could offer no theory as to why the customer suddenly fell to his knees and clamped his hands to his ears. She herself had heard nothing. The man started screaming and, she said, sort of sobbing as well. At first the detectives pursued the theory that he was creating a diversion, for the incident happened at the precise moment when the trio of robbers in back of the bank had leapt out of their car and shot the driver of the armored truck and the two guards. One of these guards was then fatally stabbed with a knife. The theory was soon discarded, however, as no ties between Elliot and the gang could be found. It was adjudged a bizarre coincidence.

Upon his subsequent admission to the psychiatric ward at St. Joseph’s, the city’s largest hospital, Elliot had shrieked hysterically and begged to be taken somewhere else. He was sedated and placed in the care of Dr. Johnathan Jeffries. No one could get a clear idea from the patient’s gibberish as to what so thoroughly frightened him about the place.

That same day, three workers caught in an industrial fire and a heart attack victim died within a few hours of each other in the emergency room on the first floor. Their deaths caused a slight spike in the hospital daily death statistics. Dr. Jeffries, unconcerned with such matters, opened a report on his patient, noting that he appeared to be suffering from an acute psychic rupture. He would almost certainly have to remain in the hospital for a very long time.