My grandfather told me a story that his dad told him. As a boy he lived in a town by the sea. He didn’t say where or what manner of town it was, but I pictured it as a typical country village with quaint houses and cobbled streets.
The locals had a rule that they would impose on themselves, visitors (though this was no tourist village mind you; they didn’t get many that stayed past sundown) and newcomers. You weren’t allowed to talk outdoors after sunset. To be more specific, no vocalisation. At all. Not even humming. Most people didn’t even venture outside after dark.
And every night people would triple-check that every door and every window house was closed. If you had a broken window you boarded it up like a darn airlock; if there was any hole in the wall, any opening between your domain and the outside world it had to clogged up big time.
My great grandfather didn’t question it as a small boy. Heh. I guess if you’ve lived with something since birth you wouldn’t - but every kid gets to that age where they start noticing things. I wonder, though – would he have ever learned the truth if that incident with the visitors hadn’t happened? Well. One time, when my great grandfather was around ten years old, some travellers were loitering around longer than usual.
If people didn’t leave before it started getting late, they’d be chased out. Sometimes ushered faux-politely, sometimes outright scared off. But these guys, five of them, were young and boisterous, and they didn’t like being nagged at.
Sunset came and the local children started throwing rocks at them; blindly defensive of their town’s practice. The sheriff eventually told the men that they had to go.
My great-grandfather remembered the hollering. Maybe they’d had something to drink, a lot of something, but they wanted to know why exactly they weren’t welcome, do you have a problem with us, who do you bumpkins think you are, on and on. Eventually the small ‘police force’ had to physically drag them to the edge of town.
Past my great-grandfather's house at the very end of the cobbled street, where he and his little sister watched from their window.
He heard them yelling something, and in a moment of pure stupidity on his part, his words not mine, he tried to open the window a crack to hear them better. He’d never heard such tones, what with how the town rationed words.
Luckily his mother stopped him and dragged them both away from the window.
That night, my great-grandfather kept getting up to peer through the curtains. His sister, mother, father and his uncle were all asleep by that time. He told my grandfather that a strange excitement, laced with dread, came over him that night. I suppose it’s like checking your phone, but with a lot more fear involved. Then, sometime in the early morning but long before the sun was due, he spotted the five men wandering around the streets.
They were yelling back and forth at each other, perhaps still half-drunk or just acting like the hooligans they were. My great-grandfather waited with trepidation, waited for some kind of bogeyman to descend upon them and snatch them away.
Little did he know that what every villager dreaded had already happened. They were long gone.
Eventually, with a stab of disappointment, my great-grandfather finally slept through the rest of the night. Until a loud pounding woke him in the early morn.
His uncle got to the door before he did. There on the doorstep was one of the young men from last night, the whites of his eyes bulging and red, his face etched with horror and sweat. His uncle opened the door fully and the rest of the young men were visible, trembling some ways down the street.
My great-grandfather didn’t realise until later that one of them might've been dead. He remembered the man's head lolling to one side as he lay on the ground. An empty expression was plastered on his face. No blood. No scars. Pale. One could have assumed he was drunk still. He recalled the way the man's arms were tucked in against his chest like he'd been cold; even though it had been a mild night.
That was the day his family inexplicably packed up and left - while the sheriff was dealing with the limp figure on the street surrounded by his friends. They barely took anything; the five family members simply departed in the early hours and went as far as they could. It happened so quickly my great-grandfather couldn’t muster up any protest. But he did keep asking ‘why’.
It wasn’t until they had settled in the next town over, quite a ways away, that the adults finally came clean.
We couldn’t leave without someone taking our place, they said. And he could tell by the looks on his parent’s faces that they were sickened with guilt. But they couldn't have passed up the chance for escape.
Only his uncle remained stony-faced to tell the tale. He didn’t coddle him and his sister, and the parents couldn’t stop him this time. He said, again, that nobody could leave the town without someone else taking their place. There always has to be the same amount of people.
He cut off my great-great aunt’s ‘why’ and went on to explain that the five yobs would have to stay there now. And that it was their own fault for not heeding any warnings. Finally, my great-grandfather reached his limit, and he asked loudly, why nobody was allowed to talk after sundown.
With a look that was flat and cold his Uncle said,
“There are things that awake in the night, that can steal people’s voices. They do it without you noticing, they do it without being seen. You don’t even know its happened until later. It can take an hour. Or a day, or a week. They wait to use it.”
What happens?
“They use your voice to trick your loved ones. They can pretend to be them. They can use it to get into your house. There’s one for every person in that town, and if someone leaves without finding a replacement, they’ll follow them to other places. They spread like spores. They could be anyone. What we did was against the rules. But we risked it.”
Did they kill that man?
“They did worse than kill him.”
My great-grandfather didn’t tell anyone where that town was. Sometimes his son doubts that it exists. But something worried him.
There were five family members; brother, sister, parents, uncle.
There were five men who came to the village.
But one of the men might've died.
