Muse and Misfortune

II

Marshall stepped into his neighbor's house, which looked mostly empty save for the scarce furniture and boxes stacked against the wall.

"Oh," said his neighbor, closing the front door with a soft click. "Sorry about the place...I haven't really gotten around to unpacking too much. I don't really want to unpack and then..." She didn't finish. "Have a seat."

Marshall crossed the room, the shiny wooden floorboards smooth and slick, like ice. He sat tentatively on one end of a small gray couch. In front of it was a coffee table with scratch marks on its wooden surface. It looked as if it had been attacked. There were papers strewn out across the table, and a pen laid uncapped across one of the sheets. The papers were filled with lines upon lines of ink, the words so small they were illegible.

"Sorry," his neighbor apologized again, hurriedly straightening the papers into a neat pile. As she did so, she smeared the ink on a few of them. Marshall guessed this was what she had been working on before he interrupted her to ask for some silence.

"I've really got to get my life together," she said, shaking her head a little. She wiped her hands on her shirt, leaving behind faint black marks. "I should stop using all this paper, but what can I say? I'm old fashioned, I guess."

It still sounded as if they were in the middle of a large, crowded party, and her voice, which had been clear before, now dipped beneath the wave of noise. Marshall had to strain to hear her. Sometimes it was louder, and sometimes the noise was almost tolerable, but he didn't really want to have to continue to put up with all of it. He wondered when he was ever going to have a peaceful night of sleep again.

"So..." he said, watching as his neighbor used the pen to scribble something down in the margins of the sheet of paper at the top of the pile. His curiosity made him want to know what she was working on, but he knew it was none of his business. His voice sounded a little clearer to him as he said, "About the noise..."

"Right," she said, quickly finishing what she was writing. She capped the pen. "Sorry, let me just—" She grabbed the papers and hurried into another room. She came back empty-handed.

She took a deep breath as if preparing herself for something. "The voices," she said. "I hear them too."

Marshall didn't really know how one wouldn't be able to hear the voices. Honestly, everyone in his neighborhood should have flocked down to her house and demanded silence the first night she'd come, with how they usually treated everyone else.

She gave him an unreadable look. Somehow, he felt as if she knew what he was thinking.

"I don't know anyone else who can hear them," she said.

He stared at her.

"I just thought I was insane," she said, looking down at the pile of papers. "For the longest time, I did. But now I know it's not just me. I knew it. I knew there was something else going on." She paused and looked at him. "Not that I'm glad you hear them too, but I guess I'm just relieved I'm not alone anymore. I've moved countless times and I've always heard the voices. You're the only person who's ever come to me about it."

Was she insane? Was he insane? Maybe they both were.

What did it mean? How was it even possible, for them to be the only two people who could hear those voices? How could the voices be so loud, yet only be heard by two people?

"So...What now?" he said, looking at her with wide eyes.

She shrugged. She looked thoughtful, running a hand through her long hair. "If it's not just in my head, it must be something else. The voices..."