Chapter 2: The Whisper in the Dark

I don't know what woke me up. It wasn't a loud noise or a bad dream. One second I was asleep, and the next my eyes were open, and I was staring at the ceiling in a room that felt wrong.

The house was completely quiet. Ethan's computer was still on, giving off that faint blue glow, and it was just enough to turn the furniture into dark shapes. I lay very still and listened. Nothing. No cars, no crickets, no wind. When you live in a house full of noises, you don't notice them until they stop, and this house had gone silent in a way that made my ears ring.

I turned my head, and my stomach dropped.

The closet door was open.

It wasn't cracked open, either. It was wide open, and the space inside was pure black, blacker than the rest of the room, like somebody had cut a hole in the wall. I was sure it had been shut when I fell asleep. I remembered the brass handle glinting. Now the door stood there like a mouth.

"Ethan?" I whispered.

He mumbled something and rolled over. I couldn't understand a word.

"Ethan, are you awake?"

Nothing but slow breathing from his bed. So maybe he had gotten up in the night, I thought. Maybe he had needed a sweatshirt, or a pair of socks, or something else that a normal kid might need from a closet at two in the morning. There had to be a normal reason. I said it over and over in my head, and I almost believed it.

I sat on the edge of the bed for a few minutes. I wasn't exactly scared; I just felt off, like the air in the room had changed. But I couldn't fall back asleep with that door hanging open. Every time I closed my eyes, I could feel the dark space beside me, breathing on my shoulder. So I finally stood up. The wooden floor was ice cold under my bare feet.

I took one step, and then another. The closer I got, the quieter the room seemed to become, until I could hear my own heartbeat. I reached out for the edge of the door, and my fingers had just touched the wood when I heard it.

"Hey."

It was a whisper, soft and thin, and it came from inside the closet.

I have never moved so fast in my life. I slammed that door so hard the whole wall shook, and I dove back into bed and pulled the blanket over my head like a little kid. My heart was pounding so hard I thought it might crack a rib. I lay there listening, waiting for the handle to turn or for something to scratch at the wood.

Nothing happened. Minute after minute, nothing happened.

Slowly, I started to build excuses. "I had been half asleep," I told myself. The house was old, and old houses make sounds. Maybe the wind slipped through a crack and whistled a little, and my brain turned it into a word. That was the only thing that made sense, because it made no sense for anyone to be inside a closet. It took me the rest of the night to talk myself into believing it. I didn't sleep again until the sky outside the window turned grey.

In the morning, Ethan shook my shoulder. "Get up. Mom made pancakes." The room was full of yellow sunlight, and everything looked normal. The closet was shut, and the brass handle was just a brass handle.

"You look awful," Ethan said, laughing.

"I didn't sleep."

"I slept great."

I almost told him about the whisper. The words were right there on my tongue. But I was twelve, and I could already hear him laughing at me, so I swallowed them and followed him downstairs.

The pancakes helped. So did the shower and the sunshine, and by lunchtime I had mostly convinced myself that the whole thing had been a nightmare. Ethan and I spent the afternoon exploring. We climbed through the empty rooms upstairs, found a rusty bike in the barn behind the house, and raced across the field until we were both dizzy and covered in grass seeds. Nothing strange happened all day. I remember feeling relieved and a little embarrassed that I had ever been afraid.

Then evening came, and so did the visitors.

Aunt Linda had invited some friends from her new neighbourhood, and they brought their kids along. By the time the sun went down, there were seven of us kids in the house, all around the same age, along with a living room full of grown-ups laughing and eating chips. Somebody said the magic words, "Let's play hide-and-seek," and everybody cheered.

We played a version where the seeker had to tag people, and each person who got tagged became a seeker too. The last person left hiding won. There were only two rules: nobody could hide in the living room, where the parents were sitting, and nobody could go into Aunt Linda's bedroom. Ethan shut that door and taped a piece of paper on it so nobody would get confused.

A tall boy named Tyler got picked as the first seeker, and he started counting to fifty with his face against the wall. Everyone scattered. I ran up the nearest staircase, my socks sliding on the wooden floor, and I could hear doors opening and closing all around me.

Neither of us knew it, but the game had already begun. It just wasn't the game we thought we were playing.