What Follows You in the Dark?
Izzy
At 11:03, on a regular Thursday night, Izzy awoke to silence.
She knew she had been awake and alert on some level before her eyes opened. She joined her waiting, watching thoughts, late to the party. Her eyes moved around the darkened bedroom.
The cheap, plastic clock in the living room, a Wally World clearance, ticked loudly. Izzy felt the strain in her lower back. Her hands cramped into claws and wadded the sheets. She relaxed and slowly leaned back. She monitored. Her bedroom doorway glowed slightly, outlined against the white walls of the hallway. Her eyes burned and jittered, causing the illusion of movement, a dark form peeking, then retreating near the floor around the left door jam. She ignored it.
The form slowly reappeared at the top right of the door frame, lowering into sight like an emerging moon. It had lightened to a pale white. As it appeared, two large, black ovals showed, making an upside-down face. No mouth, so far. Izzy continued to watch, breath beginning to pant from her throat, chest swelled too large to allow air access. The form paused, and they stared at each other for an endless moment. It blinked. The hallway had no ceiling access. There was no way it could be physically clinging there. It was a hypnagogic episode, a balloon, a dream. A faint giggle echoed, followed by a faint, faraway scream that wailed on in sorrow. As the cry faded, so did the face, slowly retreating upwards, out of sight.
Several hours later, Izzy fell back into an exhausted sleep.
Electronic Voice Phenomenon, EVP, was all the rage in the ‘90s. The Art Bell Coast to Coast radio show had become an obsession for Izzy. As she moved apartments over several years, always one step ahead of a boyfriend who couldn’t be convinced they weren’t still dating, no matter how often his estranged wife pointed it out, Izzy had listened to the live show every evening, starting at 10 pm on the west coast, ending at 2 am.
It soothed her. Art’s voice quieted her mind, and even now, long after the radio show host was dead and gone, she replayed episodes on a podcast. Despite the wild guests he had every episode, there was something so regular in his manner. He was funny and endearing, the uncle she had never had, her family long dead and gone, and she loved the show. It also scared the ever-loving crap out of her.
Bell faced his demons alone, sitting in a darkened studio in his home from late night to early morning, seven nights a week in the Land of Nye, Nevada. He was someone who wanted to know exactly what the fuck was going on. Maybe he knows now, she mused. He had gone to the land no one just visits, assuming anything exists at the end. She remembered the times he talked about his biggest fear-death. It was a line waiting to go down a water slide without anyone seeing what twists and turns were ahead or what the tube dropped into. You were just pushed forward, one by one, by all those waiting behind you.
This fascination had pushed her to complete her first half-assed attempt at recording an EVP in her upstairs apartment. Too lazy and broke to purchase and set up any decent recording system, she had gone old-school, duct-taping the holes of a commercial cassette tape. It initially had a meditation program. She bought it when her doctor threatened to hospitalize her if her blood pressure didn’t lower. She had found the narrator’s voice annoying and abandoned the practice. She pulled her old boom box out of the closet, rewound the tape to the beginning, and dropped it in the open sandwich slot.
One quiet, sunny Sunday afternoon, she ensured the TV was unplugged to avoid ambient sound and hit "record," pushing the box beneath her bed. Closing the bedroom door firmly behind her, a sound marker suggested by Bell, she left the apartment for the afternoon.
The bedroom was entirely in a corner, with connecting walls to the apartment next door in the kitchen. In the apartment beneath, two lovely Native American brothers, elderly, quietly rode out their nights drinking Jim Beam and watching old MeTV westerns wearing matching headphones. During the day, they slept, no longer having jobs or family besides each other. Surprisingly, both were hard of hearing, making them such quiet downstairs neighbors Izzy often forgot they were there.
Izzy worked the graveyard shift in a Semi-Secured Crisis Residential Center for at-risk youth. She worked from 5 pm to 5 am, four days on three days off. She liked the job. Being a front-line youth counselor, underpaid and in charge, suited her. It gave her pause in believing the general public supported the idea that “our children are the future.” If true, why would Youtubers make six figures while the front-line response team for kids in crisis pulled minimum wage?
As an off-the-chart ADHD adult, Izzy was used to walking into her kitchen to be met with a half-made meal spread over a counter. Her monkey mind gleefully narrated: That’s right, I was making my lunch when I remembered I was almost out of shampoo and went to the bathroom to see when a trip to Walmart was necessary. I remembered I needed toilet paper, so I went to the hall closet to check that supply, which led me back into the kitchen to see how small the paper towel roll had gotten.
Her attention skipped like a flat stone on a pond before losing energy and plopping into deep water, forgotten. Half-finished tasks would direct her in complete circles around the apartment, picking up items, leaving them in unlikely places, then retrieving them on a third go-round. She had, like many ADHD people, developed personal strategies to remember things, businesses, and people, with post-it notes stuck on doorways, "Remember backpack!" "Turn down the heat," stuck in her purse, slapped on the counters. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. Endless lists.
But the attempt to capture a spirit voice on tape, something she had been excited about, made an effort to complete? That was entirely forgotten before she even came home that same day. Gone from her waking mind as completely as if it had never happened. This would be described as the “Trickster” in paranormal circles. The supernatural just loved fucking with humans in general, and anyone addressing the phenomenon would experience glitching equipment, drained batteries, and exciting recordings inexplicably erased moment or days after recording. The most common was “paranormal apathy,” the experience of something paranormal occuring at night, in bed, often something terrifying, and the experiencer would react by hiding under the covers or turning over and instantly falling asleep.
So, it was a full two months later when she needed to record her meditation tape. The doctor continued to show alarm at her blood pressure. She worked in a residential crisis center for kids; high stress was a part of the job. He asked if she was using the commercial tape. She reluctantly admitted that she had abandoned it; the voice was unbearable. He suggested she record a tape with her voice; some studies showed it was more effective. Willing to try anything other than an expensive hospital stay, she ended up, late one evening, pulling items from the back of her closet off the top shelf, muttering, "Where the fuck did I put that boom box?” Looking under the bed, a last effort rewarded her with the blue, dusty Panasonic. She plopped on the bed, rewound the tape, ran it forward for good luck, then muted the TV and began reading from the prepared script. At this point, the EVP attempt remained buried in her mind. Twenty minutes later, completing the script reading, she rewound the tape and hit "play." For a moment, there was nothing, just background hissing.
Suddenly, a voice, sounding like a well-trained parrot, chirped, "Hey, whaddya doing?" Multi-tasking, Izzy was idly watching a Gilligan’s Island rerun on the TV with the sound off. It took a moment for her to realize what she had heard. Enough time for the tape to begin playing the mediation script Izzy had just recorded. As she recorded, she had held the box on her propped-up knees. Without external mics, she carefully spoke a few inches from the built-in microphone. The result was damn near unintelligible. It sounded like she had recorded it from a different room than the box.
Unlike the parrot’s voice, which was crystal clear.
She hit stop, stared at the box for a long moment, then began an endless rewind and play routine that would repeat in various devices for over a decade, when she lost control of the cassette, never seeing it again.
There wasn’t much Izzy was afraid of; she did a short stint of paranormal investigations, after the recording, got bored, and quit. There were a few experiences that couldn’t be explained, but nothing matched the clear voice she had captured. She attended four or five expeditions, low-key, disappointing and time-consuming. She wore a hoody that stated, “hoc paganus non currunt.” She ordered it specially made from a t-shirt shop online after watching a particularly disappointing but top-rated ghost-hunting show on tv where one “investigator” ran like hell after getting spooked, screaming, “Run, boys, run!” in a high squeal.
The people she met on online and in person wanted so badly to experience anything that made them feel special, apart from all the boring humans in the world. Many labeled themselves “empaths.” While a true empath could exist, Izzy thought it was rare. What these people called empathic was more likely hypervigilance and hypersensitivity often brought about by past trauma. If you took the paranormal seriously, and she did, everything had to be distinguished from something actually present, opposed to the product of an investigator’s “I want to believe” mind.
It wasn’t that Izzy hadn’t found her people, her “tribe”. Izzy hadn’t yet faced the fact that she was only truly happy when on her own.