[SS] Voices

Name: Azhann Rosmin
Class: LGB3A
Semester: 3
Title: Voices
Word Count: 556 Words
Category: Story
Brief Summary: N/A


I hear voices. They come from the other side of my bedroom door. I’ve been hearing them for a while now. The voices are always bickering at each other – like some sort of dispute erupted and they haven’t ended it for a long time. I keep hearing them at nights, especially like tonight. I was sound asleep and was awaken by them – the voices. I never braved myself before to go out and find the source but once, I had.

It wasn’t fruitful at all. I was partly mad at the voices for waking me up and a sort of blind fury took over. I jumped out of bed – not bothering to slip on my slippers – and went straight to the door. But then, I stopped dead. I held my face close to the wood of the door and I could hear them quite clearly, though I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

I lowered my ear to the door and tried hard to distinguish any word or slang or dialect I could. But to no avail. They seemed to bicker nonetheless.

But what shocked me the most that night was that I found out they were more than many of the voices that were present. It was like they were hundreds. We live in a regular apartment where everything is regular. The rooms aren’t too spacious, they are comfortable enough. And most of the rooms connect with the living room which held a few pieces of furniture and an old TV set. It couldn’t fit ten people not to mention a hundred.


That night, I braved myself to find out whom or what was making those voices. I had enough of waking up in the dead of mornings just to hear some untraceable quarrels and slump back into bed, wide awake. I had enough of needless insomnia and sleeping through the day.

I opened the door.

Without anything more than the weight of silence was present outside my room, I was engulfed in total darkness right afterwards. Curiously, the darkness was delayed of actually being there. It was as though something else was there in its place. When that something vanished, the darkness resumed its place. But that night, I felt the darkness’s totality upon me delayed.

I cut across the living room and flicked on the lights. There was nothing peculiar. I started towards the kitchen and the front door. The lights were on – we've always kept them on for some reason.

Defeated, I walked back to my room after switching off the lights to the living room. The second I managed to close my door shut, the voices came back – louder and more obnoxious than ever.

It has been a full month – a whole month of waking up to those wretched voices and unnecessary trips through the semi-darkened apartment. There were nights I cursed at them foully from my side of the room – bearing my fists and vengeful swears and others, I sobbed pathetically under the covers – trying as hard as I could to muffle out the voices. The voices now have gone through the walls. They are in them – between them, are them. Nights are a living nightmare for me. Being an erratic insomniac, I grow weary and more paranoid than ever imagined I could be.

The voices – they are here.


EDITED BY:  Rabiatul Adawiyah binti Mahmood