But every time I’m there, I want to leave. The voice calling me home is different from the voices I hear when I’m here.

     I was young the first time I heard them. Maybe eight or nine by the pond. My sister told me stories about the pond. The faces she saw under the water. The giant fish that shouldn’t have fit inside. The footprints in the mud around the edge.

     I was afraid of the pond because of that. But kids like to be scared, until they don’t.

     That winter I resolved myself to swimming in the pond. And once that resolution had formed, it never left my mind. I watched the pond from my room through cracked and dusty glass. Cobwebs obscured the view but I looked past them. Loud cracks and bangs from inside the house tried to distract me, but I ignored them. The thumps in the walls and the wailing of old wood or something older still, none of it drew my attention. I watched the pond and its glasslike water and the reeds protruding from it. I watched it from my room until I visited in the Spring.

     That’s when I truly learned about the pond.

     The reeds housed voices. In those long days late in Spring when the sun was stubborn and only slowly gave way to stars shining in an indigo sky. Wind brushed through the reeds in the pond and whispers came with them. It was English sometimes. Or made to sound that way. And the words seemed to crackle in your ear like static. Bubbles against the eardrum, skittering like insects.

     And the words said such strange things when they said things at all.

     In the mornings, birds chirped and the sun came and burned away the weight of the night. Purple then red then orange then yellow. All colours painted across the sky. The house cast a long shadow in the dawn. Ancient trees cast longer ones.

     Light ricocheted off the deathly still of the pond. The reeds didn’t move, they only spoke. They cast no shadows.

     There were never shadows on the pond.

​

#

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     The summer before I left the farm was when I heard the most voices. Heavy fogs haunted the farm that year and figures shifted within. In the distance, somewhere in that grey miasma, sat the pond and the reeds and the voices.

     Once you heard them, they never stopped. My parents insisted the voices weren’t real, and my sister soon joined them in that.

     After my sister left the farm, she never returned. Letters came from her to me and to my parents. ‘Family,’ they said, ‘I dearly miss you all but I love the city. Things are so alive here.’

     She never said the farm was dead but she talked about death like it lived there. Maybe she had been afraid, and that’s why she had told me about the pond and about the things in the walls and about the things that hang from trees when the moonlight was missing.

     One summer evening I walked into the fogs. The whispering was relentless. A scraping and scratching hissing in my ears, like sand shifting against the skin. It was not English. Maybe it was no language. Aggressive airflow chopped into nebulous syllables. But there was intrigue and intensity and emotion in those syllables.

     They called to me, somehow.

     The first step into the fog was freezing. The whispering stopped, but just for a second before it started again, louder and more urgent. My skin ached and my eyes watered. In the distance, I saw the shapes shifting and wondered if they were coming towards me.

     I took a second step. I was trembling. The cold was too much.

     I turned around and the fog was behind me too. I screamed and sprinted forward. I was close to the house, I knew, even if I could not see it.

     A silent second. Then another. The voices had stopped and my scream had stopped and all the sounds in the world seemed to have stopped as I sprinted.

     I crashed into the bricks of the house. My teeth cracked and the sharp taste of copper filled my mouth as I bled. My forehead split open and I felt the air in the wound and I tumbled backward.

     I remember that part, before it went black.

     When I woke up, my parents said it had been a few hours. I was in my bed, head bandaged and with a mouth full of cotton drenched in saliva and blood.

     They said a few hours, but it had felt longer. Between the collision and waking up, I had spent hours walking through that fog. It had felt so real. The voices and the cold and the way I was shaking. And the eyes that pierced the fog to stare at me.

     I kept shaking. My parents brought me another blanket.

​

#

​

     During my schooling, that voice kept telling me to return home. A familiar voice. Not one of the pond voices or the scratching in the walls, but something familiar and forlorn. And I heard it in the city, far from the farm.

     I rarely listened.

     The city was nothing like the farm and my college was nothing like the church where I learned when I was young. The city glistened and sparkled and it was loud and obnoxious and you could lose a day or a night or a weekend in the city doing all the fun things it offered.

     It was nothing like the farm, which was quiet except the voices and dad’s yelling.

     Almost two years passed without a visit home. Memories faded a bit, holes chewed into recollections by the incessance of time. Imaginations filled the gaps left behind.

     I could imagine so many normal things. The reeds on the pond casting shadows. The walls silent and still. The basement door unlocked and welcoming.

     Dad and Mom smiling and my sister there with them and I could join. What wonderful fictions I could imagine as space and time grew between me and that place.

     I met friends and told stories. More fictions of a normal life and a happy sister and a kind family and a house that did not seem to scream or sway. No shapes in the fog or hanging from trees and no weeping from beneath the house or muffled by dirt.

     Friends told me their stories, too. Life in suburbs. Vacations to beaches. The people in the city lived such different lives and there were so many of them.

     In the chaos and the volume and all the conversations, I sometimes didn’t hear the voice at all. That nagging voice that said I should go home.

     I understood how my sister felt. She never once went home after leaving for college.

     Maybe I could have been like her. But then I got that call from Mom. Dad had fainted in the basement.

     I had to go home, the voice said. It was my Mom, I think.

​

#

​

     My sister never came home, and I never again left. Almost two years away but I found myself again at the farm.

     My mother never forgave me for leaving. My father never forgave anything or anyone. But my mother was old and pitiable and my dad was bedridden. Their bedroom had smelled of sick when I arrived and the sheets were stained yellow. Dust and spores sat thick in stale air.

     Months passed and I cared for the farm. My dad’s health never recovered and my mom never got any nicer. She did my dad’s work and I looked after my dad. They never let me in the basement and the fog got heavier and thicker so I had nowhere to go.

     At night I watched the fog and saw the shapes in it. I saw the gnarled trees that circled the farm. I saw the silver moonlight reflect off the pond. I saw the patches of grass that grew faster than others and I saw the grass disheveled around the cellar.

     Could I have told my city friends about any of this?

     One night, a few weeks after returning, the scratching in the walls got louder. Frantic, angry scraping. It was just above my head as I laid in bed. I froze because it had never been this loud before.

     More scratching and a faint wailing between heavy breaths. I heard it through the cracking drywall and peeling wallpaper. I trembled and tears formed and my breath stopped as the breathing in the wall got louder. The wall was being scraped away by whatever was inside.

     Drywall dust landed on my forehead, sticking to the sweat. More fell in my nose and my mouth. I sneezed and coughed and shot off my bed and curled in the opposite corner of my room like a terrified animal.

     The drywall burst and the wallpaper peeled away with it. A body stumbled out, human-shaped but no longer a person. It smelled of rot and iron. Grey skin with wounds, sticky patches of magenta and green. Maggots wriggled in the wounds and in the eye sockets and in the wispy black hair that clung to the peeling scalp skin.

     It flopped out of the wall onto my bed. My sheets stuck to it like clothes to wet skin. It crawled towards me, one labored movement after another. Crooked yellow fingernails tore up moldy floorboards as it shambled onwards, leaving sopping chunks of itself behind as it dragged.

     I screamed and jumped to my feet and leaped towards the door and ran down the hall. I pounded on the door to my parents’ room and threw it open and collapsed to the ground after closing the door behind me.

     I fell asleep and in the morning the monster was gone but a second hole in my wall had appeared. I slept on the floor beside my mom and my dad for a few more weeks. Long enough that I got used to the smell and mold and the skittering in the walls and the nighttime departures of my mother.

​

#

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     A few months after my return, when I would have started my third year of college, I started to miss being gone. I missed the city and the people and the conversations and the energy that rippled through the buildings and streets and lights.

     The farm had none of that. No conversations, just vile voices and whispers. No people, just figures. No city lights, just fog.

     Heavy fog that never left but swelled on darker days when the light was especially dim. Heaviest on those dreary early Winter mornings when the air was thick yet dry and clouds overhead painted the landscape dull grey.

     One of those mornings, I had to leave. I ignored the voices in the walls that whispered threats when they whispered anything at all. I ignored the voice in my head that said I should stay and that I owed my parents. I ignored the scratching and the skittering underneath the floorboards that seemed more animated by animosity.

     I flung the door open and ran. The panicked, breathless sprinting that happened in the grips of pure fear when your heart stops in your throat and your pulse thunders through your body.

     I was barely through the door when I hit the fog. A grey wall expanding endlessly above and outward. As ubiquitous as air. Humidity hugged my skin, making my clothes cling to me like terrified toddlers to their mother. Mud squelched underfoot and each stride was slowed by soil stuck to my shoes.

     I reached the pond and rushed past it. The surface was still though something lurked underneath, through the fog and the water. But I ignored it and kept going. The tall trees came next into view, hidden from sight by the fog until they were just a few feet from my face. One surprised me and I leaped to the left as I ran.

     My ankle landed sideways. I think I screamed or maybe the adrenaline stopped it or maybe I stifled it. I feared any sound could reveal my location to whatever lived out here.

     Tears rolled down my cheek, mixing with the moisture from the miasmic fog that enveloped me and the trees and whatever else moved in the forest. The figures are in the forest and sometimes they hang and sometimes they sway.

     I tried to stand but the pain toppled me once again. I screamed. No stifling this time. My knees sank into soil softened by the fog.

     The pain was excruciating but something distracted me as I laid on my side. A figure through the fog. Only a few feet away. It was humanoid but not. Too tall and thin and moving more like a serpent one second and a jackal the next.

     And it moved towards me.

     I scrambled backwards, wrists and hands crashing clumsily on gnarled roots and filthy forest floor. The figure moved so I moved again, pushing with my feet and wincing from the pain in my ankle. My left hand collided against a rock and I felt the skin scrape away.

     It shifted forward and I saw it through the fog, leaning over me. If the light had been natural and overhead, I would have sank in its shadow. But there was no natural light, there was only fog and trees and the figure. Two black pits in a grey band of skin were all the face it had. The flesh was thinner where a mouth would be, and several rows of teeth were visible behind the skin. Beneath the head, the torso was grey as well but adorned with narrow strips of scar tissue, white stripes across grey like a tiger.

     At the ends of its arms were mangled, malformed growths, not quite fingers but sickening in their resemblance to them. They reached for me, their ends split open by festering sores.

     I screamed and scrambled back again and then climbed to my feet. I sprinted, pain shooting through my ankle and pulse pounding in my wrists and neck and throat. I left the forest, each step screaming agony. I glanced at my ankle, barely visible through the fog, and saw flesh turned black and throbbing with heat.

     When I reached the pond I saw more of the figures, curled masses resting on the bottom of the pond in the clay. There were no fish and the figures seemed to twitch and swell but the water stayed motionless.

     A few more feet. I dared not look behind but felt the burning of eyes on my back and the scorching pain of my ankle. I dove through the door, still ajar from when I had left, and lay on the ground. A panting, whimpering, sobbing mess.

     My mom rushed to close the door and said nothing to me.

     I told her I was sorry and that I wouldn’t leave again. She did not punish me. Maybe that’s what she wanted all along or maybe she had seen the same thing and knew the outside was not safe.

​

#

​

     My parents are gone now. Physically, anyway. They can’t leave the farm just like I couldn’t leave the farm. But their bodies were taken away by something in the forest or maybe to the basement.

     My sister called when they died. She hasn’t called since. She left the farm. Maybe that voice that brought me back here was mute in her. Maybe she was strong enough to ignore it.

     Is it my fault I’m here? I didn’t choose this place or the people who made me.

     I still hear them. Their voices echo through the halls, because my parents cannot leave the farm just like I cannot leave the farm.

     I live in the master bedroom now and the view is better and some days when the fog is lighter I can almost see the whole farm. The grey fields and the barn with the peeling red paint turned maroon by time. I wonder what figures stalk within it and if they’re like the things in the fog or the things in the walls.

     I wonder, too, if I’ll end up like them. Did my parents end up like them?

     I hear their voices and the other voices. The skittering whispers. The scratchy, rasping sounds that almost form words from the walls. Mom and Dad are there now, saying things that are nothing but sound close to something.

     And underneath them all, I hear the voice that keeps me here. We all hear that voice. The one that tells us where we belong and what we must do and how we must live. Mine tells me to stay here.

     My ears ache from the pressure. From pressing my hands against them to stifle the voice.

     Still, I hear it.