My Father's Voice

The sun wore a ten-foot smile that could have been drawn with a licorice Mr. Sketch Scented Marker. It rose majestically over an aerial shot of endless pines, the original “Penn’s Woods,” needles glossed amber by the nascent light of morning. Lettering proclaimed, THE BEATING HEART OF AMERICA. Sandra glanced from the billboard to the wilderness surrounding her and asked aloud, “Who puts a billboard full of trees in the middle of a forest?”

She’d begun asking questions of the universe about two hours earlier, when it had occurred to her that the only living things she had seen since her gas-station lunch had been cows grazing in the few places where the earth glimpsed the sky.

“There should be one of those signs like you see in the desert,” she told the speedometer wryly. “Last gas for two hundred miles.”

A minute passed.

She said, “You did say that you wanted to get away from the kids for awhile.”

Sandra rolled her eyes and ceded this round to herself. She had said those very words. She needed an escape from the kids, but moreso from the judgmental parents and the administration that sided with them. Just, nobody wanted to hear that. A teacher who needed to get away from the kids was something everyone thought they understood, because they wanted time away from their kids, too. So, Sandra had taken the path of least resistance, unaware that a letter would arrive within an hour to announce the death of the father she never knew and summon her to Middle of Nowhere, Pennsylvania.

Even the GPS lady had given up fifty miles ago. After a few minutes of intermittent recalculation, she had just quit the trip without so much as a good-bye.

“And good riddance to you,” Sandra said. Her voice fell flat. She couldn’t even manage an echo for company. Worse, she had finished eleven of the twelve cans of Mountain Dew that she had brought along for the trip. Gas stations only sold bottles, which made the soda taste like plastic. It had been a long trip here, but the trip home promised to be both long and dry.

Her questions all played out to no resolution. Who was he? How did he die? Why had he included her in his will after letting her grow up without knowing him? And, yes, What did the letter mean about claiming an inheritance?

The most important of those questions would go unanswered forever. Mom proved a dead end not worth pursuing. She had never spoken his name and forbade Sandra from even mentioning him. And on the rare occasions in the past when teenaged Sandy had thrown caution to the wind and forced the subject, Mom crushed the subject with a manic light in her eyes that Sandra recognized as fear. Fear of a man who had disappeared before his daughter was born and never returned.

The GPS woke up to declare, “Turn right, and your destination is on your right,” words Sandra nearly missed due to her yelp of terror, born partly of surprise but also of the memory of that light in her mother’s eyes.

“On your right,” turned out to be a subjective statement. Perhaps the property had belonged to Sandra’s father, but the unpaved road she now traveled showed no sign of habitation. In fact, the trees hugged the road so tightly that she lost the sun beneath twining branches. She carried on this way for the better part of a mile, countless divots and rocks battering her worn shocks as the GPS lady slipped back into a well-deserved coma, before abruptly reaching a clearing that would have been right at home in a documentary on the English aristocracy.

“More like ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” Sandra said. Her foot came off the gas. She let the car idle ahead, all the old questions replaying in her mind. Who the hell did Mom marry?

On the third floor several windows were broken. No curtains hung there, only darkness. Once as a college sophomore, Sandra had imagined herself a writer rather than a teacher. She had submitted her finest haunted house story as her final project in The American Short Story. She’d passed, but the professor bled comments onto every page. She could still visualize the handwritten note that followed the first paragraph – “Never refer to windows as eyes…TRITE.”

“Fuck you, Dr. Fultz,” Sandra said now. “This bitch is staring right at me.”

The car came to a halt and she got out, gripping her last Mountain Dew like a child with a blanket. No one awaited her arrival. She saw no indication that anyone had been here in some time. The grass stood almost to her knees, and the upstairs windows weren’t the only thing in need of maintenance.

“Leave behind what is familiar and comfortable,” Sandra said, quoting the letter from her father’s attorney. She stared back at the house. “I am so far beyond familiar and comfortable right now.”

She hesitated. She knew all the reasons to turn back. The shadows deepened among the trees at the edges of the clearing. The dilapidated mansion loomed. She was keenly aware of the fact that even the nearest stranger lived fifty miles away. No one knew she had come. Most of all, she couldn’t banish the memory of the panic in Mom’s eyes whenever she mentioned her father.

In the end, her litany of questions overruled the roster of concerns. The questions repeated in her mind with no resolution to be found, and she knew they would never be silenced if she gave up this opportunity to answer even one of them. Sandra climbed the steps.

The door was locked, but a moment after she tried the knob, a panel fell open at about waist-height in the wall next to where she stood. It opened with a metallic clang and revealed a slot wide enough to slip most of her hand through. Etched into wood above the opening were five letters: PHONE.

Sandra stared.

“You can’t be serious.”

Her words returned faintly from the edge of the clearing. The echo she had craved not long ago now served to reinforced how alone she was. She frowned.

The voice telling her to go home repeated the roster of concerns. It used Mom’s voice.

The other voice repeated the litany of questions. It sounded like Sandra. They were her questions, and all her reasons to leave belonged to a woman who lived in fear two hundred miles north of here.

“I’m trusting you, Dad.”

Sandra slipped her phone into the slot. It landed on something just beyond her view, then slowly disappeared into the house as if conveyed by unseen hands. A mechanical hum commenced, and the metal cover rose steadily to cover the opening. Then, two more sounds, one ominous, the other frightening. The crunch of plastic, glass, and steel from somewhere just out of sight. An audible click as the door lock disengaged.

Sandra jerked door open and leapt inside, ignoring the interior as she scanned the floor for her phone. It lay in a heap, screen shattered, compressed to half its normal thickness, twisted circuit board exposed.

“Son of a bitch,” she gasped, and the difference in the sound of her voice drew her attention upward and inside the house. Lit by ebbing sunlight, the foyer opened into a long corridor. Steps curved to a landing. On the right, a parlor. Left, the dining room. Archways led farther in each direction. The door swung shut behind her, its lock clicking shut.

Her fight was short-lived. She couldn’t break the front door, but the downstairs possessed many ornate windows she would be sad—but not unwilling—to break. A locked door was ominous, but she was no more trapped now than she had been when the door hung open. Steeling her nerves, she began an investigation, moving fast because her only flashlight was now so much shatterproof glass and mangled electronics on the floor.

There was no note, or anything addressed to her. Sandra found just two things of interest. A broken window along the west side of the house would save her the trouble of breaking glass. Also, one door beneath the steps had no handle but she suspected would open if she stepped even farther away from what felt familiar and comfortable.

“Screw it,” Sandra said. “My dad was Jigsaw. That’s all I need to know.”

She walked to the broken window and swung a leg into open air. She froze, straddling the sill, when a man’s voice broke the silence. “Sandy.”

Her name.

His voice.

“Dearest Sandy. You are free to leave. But, if you do, this will be the last time you hear my voice.”

She stared into the house as he spoke, looking for the speakers, but it was late enough that his voice could have projected from a soundbar directly over her head and she wouldn’t have been able to see it. Everything more than a few feet from a window lay draped in shadow. Worse, as Sandra considered the yard—rather, the grounds—her father’s words took on an alternate, darker meaning.

“Last time I hear your voice,” Sandra said softly. Sitting there, half in and half out of the broken window, she did not feel like she was on the edge of escape so much as she felt exposed. The pools of darkness between the distant trees did not feel empty as they had when she first arrived. Sandra found that she could not dispel the sense that there were eyes on her, waiting for her to make a choice. Maybe her final one.

Shaking her head, Sandra swung her leg inside. She dropped to the floor and hurried before the last of the light could dip below the horizon. Eyes narrowed, she studied the contraption mounted next to the door with no knob, a wooden tube roughly the size and shape of a can koozie. Considerable work had gone into burning the image of the Mountain Dew logo into the surface of the wood.

“I get it” Sandra muttered, “you stalked me.” She lifted the can and attempted to slide it into the koozie. The bottom of the can came down across the top. The can and the tube weren’t just similarly sized. They were exactly the same size.

“You can’t be serious.”

She bit her lip, keeping the best of her curses—a tirade that would have impressed her most jaded students—inside for now. She popped the can open, listening to the divine release of carbonation, inhaling the slightly fruity aroma, and then she poured it into the replica container on the wall. As the last drop fell, a subtle click triggered within the wall. The door swung open, not slowly but all at once, and Sandra found herself swaying above a steep flight of steps. The bottom few were lit by a pale blue light.

“Oh, hell no.”

And yet, once again, the litany of questions. Who was he? How did he die? Had he died?

Who was among the trees?

Sandra ran a hand along the wall as she descended the steps. She studied the blue light every step of the way, ready to race to the top and out the open window if she caught any glimpse of movement. At the same time, she dreaded the sound of the door slamming shut behind her so much that she had to fight against closing her eyes in anticipation. Throughout her descent, the glow remained steady. Nothing moved. The door never closed.

Her foot came down on the basement floor. Ahead stretched a room with damp stone walls. A bare bulb, hung at the end of a sturdy chain. Beneath the light, on a stone dais, rested a lacquered coffin. Atop it sat a framed photograph. Sandra hurried toward it without hesitation, eager to see the faces before her. A door she had not noticed swung shut behind her.

A roar she felt as much as heard. Some beast had been let loose, but it was one with no mouth. Water flowed in torrents through a dozen corrugated pipes set mid-way on the walls. The mildew smell of a stagnant lake filled the air. The blue light, knocked askew by tremors shaking the foundation, swung overhead, creating mad shadows. Sandra saw dark shapes flop out of the pipes; some were certainly frogs, but others were longer, sinuous.

“Jesus!” Sandra cried, partly from horror but also no small amount of disbelief.

“Dearest Sandy,” her father’s voice—she never doubted it was him—said again, barely audible above the cacophony. The water had already reached her ankles. It was cold.

“Dad?”

“What inheritance did you expect to find?”

His voice emanated from everywhere and nowhere. She raced into the room, not bothering with the door, looking for any exit that might have been invisible at a distance. There were no windows, she had entered through the only door. As the water reached her knees she leaned against the wall farthest from one of the spewing pipes and swiped at her tears with shaking hands.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t come here for things.”

The voice was spent. Again, she realized that his words possessed a double-meaning. She had mistaken a statement for a question, but the sadistic bastard had been gloating. Well? I left before you were even a baby. Your mother made it pretty damn clear that I wasn’t a good person. What did you expect?

Sandra screamed. The water had risen to her waist. She splashed her fists angrily in the water, spraying the few parts of herself that she had managed to keep dry.

“I just wanted to know who you were!” she cried. Her legs threatened to buckle. She wanted to curl into a ball and sob, but any chance for that was long gone. She missed her kids. Something brushed against her leg for the first time. It bent around her, a lover’s caress, then was gone.

The voice returned, almost inaudible now that the water’s fury roiled at the level of her ears. “Then come join me.”

Sandra stared at the coffin and the picture still atop it. From here she could see a young man next to a woman who looked like—that was Mom! And in the man’s arms was cradled a little girl in a yellow dress.

“I remember that dress,” Sandra said, no longer caring that she could not hear her own words.

On shaky legs she dragged herself to the dais. She stared at the smiling couple and their child. Mom looked like any proud mother posing for a family picture. Baby Sandra had a smile fit to brighten the whole world. She did not know the man holding her, but she recognized the house looming behind them. Voiceless, she mouthed her confusion as she stared at her mother’s smiling face.

“We were here.”

Sandra cried out, swiping the framed picture from the coffin’s lacquered surface and gripping the lid before her nerve could fail. She threw the lid open and stared down on the man within. It was the man in the picture, grown old. Whatever had taken his life had withered him in the process. His eyes were closed.

“Is this unfamiliar and uncomfortable enough for you, Daddy?” she shrieked.

The water poured in. If anything, the flow had increased as time went on.

Sandra stared into the coffin and the frail remains unable to fill the narrow space. She knew what he intended for her to do. She waited till the water froze the bottoms of her breasts before clambering inside. Her hands came down on his chest and she jerked away as if burned. Inside his fine suit he was nothing more than bones and parchment flesh. His head turned to face her in a crackling of vertebrae, and for a moment she was sure his eyes would open—and then she would surrender to this madness, just check out and float away. They remained closed.

The water rose. Soon it would spill over the coffin walls. Sandra glanced up at the coffin lid, the grim realization of how this would need to end, sealed inside with the man who hadn’t disappeared quite so long ago as she had been led to believe. Except now she saw another message. Four letters scrawled across the bottom of the light—as if by a Mr. Sketch Scented Marker—PULL.

Desperately, Sandra reached up from the coffin and took hold of the chain above the light. She pulled. The chain descended easily, the bulb coming to rest on her father’s chest. At once, the water stopped flowing. The door at the base of the steps rose, lifted into the ceiling among sounds of pulleys and chains.

“Dearest Sandy,” her father said. “Your mother sought to keep you from me, but I was never far. She has many justified regrets, but one thing that we have always agreed upon was you. You were our marvel. Our perfect addition to this world.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Sandra whispered, easing herself out of the coffin. She found that the words were not entirely insincere. The noise of the drains rose to a drone that rivaled the thunder that had just ended. She spoke to him anyway. “But you never answered my question. Who the hell were you?”

“I was not a good man,” her father said, and for the first time Sandra felt certain that there were no speakers in the house, not even hidden ones.

She stared into the swaying shadows. The unseen serpent writhed once more around her leg, but it had nothing to do with the way she could feel each individual hair on her body standing in unison.

“Come upstairs, dear Sandy. I may not be a part of this world any longer, but we have your inheritance to discuss.”