Short Story: South by ApocD - a podcast by ApocD

Redman stood and with a wave sent his children back to their chairs. The kitchen was cold; floorboards creaked under his heavy boots. He stepped over bits of broken plate, knelt, and gripped his wife's shoulder.

She kept her eyes down as she spoke. "I hear it."

She looked up; he saw that she was crying. He would not have his wife crying at suppertime. He would not have her scaring the children. He would not have her leave.

He took her by the arm and lifted her to her feet. "It's not real. Now, clean up the mess you've made." He turned to the children. "Help your mother. If I hear any talk about..." He let the sentence trail off into silence. His wife's arm was cold in his grip; he released it and retired to his study.

A book of ancient history rested on his desk. He sat and opened it. His mind wandered as he tried to read the text. He closed the book, connected to his terminal, and called Turner.

Turner's face appeared on the screen.

"I hope I didn't interrupt your supper."

Turner smiled and shook his head. "No, we haven't even sat down, yet. You all right?"

"She hears it."

"Your wife?"

"Yes."

Turner shook his head. "I'm sorry. When did it start?"

"Just now."

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know. I was hoping you could give me an idea."

Turner took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "Not sure what to tell you, Redman. It seems that once they hear it, there's no stopping it. The first one, the barber's wife, she heard it, what, for about a week before she left?"

"Yeah, about that."

"Some take longer and some shorter, but they all leave. They all go south."

"That's just the thing, Turner. If they all go south, then where are they going? Why can't we find them after they leave?"

"I don't know. Maybe we're just looking in the wrong places."

"Maybe. Look, I was hoping you could tell me what happened at that meeting with the
overseers and the barber's wife. There's been so many rumors, I don't know how to tell what's true, and I need as much information as I can get to figure out what to do."

"You know I'm not supposed to talk about the meetings. There are official reports."

"You and I both know those reports rarely tell what really happened in those meetings. We go back a long way, Turner. I don't want to lose my wife. Please."

Turner nodded. "All right, but not a word of this to anyone else."

"Of course."

"Well, the barber's wife claimed that she heard a constant whispering, like a thousand voices in her head speaking at once. At first, she could only hear it when she was in complete silence. She said that after a few weeks there were fewer voices, like they were competing for her attention and some of them had given up. She still couldn't understand what they were saying, but she could understand individual words on occasion. She said that later on she could only hear one voice, and that it was telling her to go south. Let's see, what else, oh, she said that the voice was female, but not someone she knew. It spoke clearly in our local dialect, and it repeated itself a lot. When the overseers pressed her for more information, she admitted that when she walked south, the voice subsided. When she came back north, it returned."

"Anything else?"

"No, not that I can remember. She disappeared the day after that meeting."

Redman nodded. There was a knock at the study door.

"I have to go. Thanks for your help, Turner."

"No problem. Let me know if there's anything I can do for you." The terminal went black.

Redman opened the door. His only son, who had turned seven the month before, stood in the hallway, looking up at him.

"I think mother's dying."

Redman put a hand on the child's shoulder. "She'll be fine. Where are your sisters?"

"With mother in the parlor."


Redman stepped into the parlor, his son behind him, and found the two girls and their mother sitting on the sofa. He sat in the plush chair, the one reserved just for him, and put his son up on his knees.

"You still hear them?"

His wife looked to him, and he could see in her eyes a hesitation, as if she were afraid to tell the truth. "Yes."

"Are there a lot of them?"

"Yes."

"Can you understand any of it?"

"No. I can only hear it when it's really quiet, and even then they're so soft I can't make anything out."

"So, you'll be leaving then?"

The girls looked at him with shocked expressions; his wife held a steady gaze.

"I don't want to, of course."

Redman doubted that of course. He knew he wasn't the worst husband; he was good with the kids and treated his wife with respect. He was out of the house a lot, though, and he did have a temper. He had wondered, for years now, if she had ever thought of leaving. There were rumors around town that only the people who wanted to leave heard the whispering.

"But, if you have to, you will."

"If there's no other choice, I will. If there's no way to stop myself."

"I can secure the house. We've got time. The others took days, didn't they? When the time gets close, we can send the children to my mother's place. Time out in the country will do them good, and time together alone will do us good."


As the days passed, his wife reported that the whispering was growing louder and that the voices were growing fewer. When it seemed, as compared with the others, that she had just a few days left, Redman sent the children away. They would miss school, but it was best for them to be away. They had too much town in them, anyway.

His wife's condition worsened to the point that he was making their meals and keeping the house. He took leave from work and stayed with her all hours of the day. The doors and windows were secured by locks with keys that only Redman had. He had stocked up on food, put in bars over the windows, and installed an extra grate in the chimney to keep her from climbing out. The place was secure, and short of killing Redman, she would never get the keys.

The day came that the urge to leave became too great for her.

"I have to go outside." She was sitting on the sofa in the parlor.

Redman walked from the kitchen, where he was cooking breakfast, into the parlor. "You know you can't go out."

"It's not what you think. I just need to get some air."

Redman thought about it. He could go out with her and stop her from running away, but he knew he couldn't risk it. He shook his head and returned to the kitchen.

She refused to eat breakfast. That was a problem he hadn't considered. What if she refused to eat until he let her out? It would be difficult to force feed her, but he would if there was no other choice. He doubted it would come to that, though: she would eat when she got hungry enough.

She refused lunch and dinner.

The next morning, he found her dinner from the night before on the table. She was in the same position on the sofa, mumbling to herself. When she saw him, she sat up.

"Please, you have to let me out."

"You know I can't."

"I'm dying. If you don't let me out, it'll be your fault if I die."

"What do you want for breakfast?"

She turned over on the sofa without answering.

The night was cold; drafts came through the cracks in the walls. Redman put extra logs on the fire and sat beside the fireplace in the parlor as his wife lay motionless on the sofa. The look in her eyes, the look of mad desperation, made him put out the fire before he went to bed. He knew they would nearly freeze without the fire, but he couldn't risk her burning the house down as he slept. He took the matches and hid them before he went to bed.

It was cold when he awoke. The other side of the bed was empty, as he had expected. He got dressed and went to look for his wife.

Her body was lying near the front door. There were bloody scratch marks on the floor, and when Redman approached he could see that she had beaten her head against the doorknob. He checked for a pulse; she was dead.

As Redman moved his wife's body and wrapped it in a sheet that he had found in the hallway closet, he thought that it was better that she had died at home, rather than disappearing somewhere south.

He placed her body on the parlor sofa and as he sat in his chair, in the perfect silence of the empty house, he heard a faint whispering.

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