Jonah didn’t know how he could tell the sound was coming from the closet because he wasn’t hearing it in his ears. It was the low rumbling of indistinct chatter, garbled nonsense that lived in the back of his mind and came from no direction. If he listened closely, it became louder, but the echoing murmurs never took a final shape or formed words. It was languageless speaking.
The red numbers on the face of his alarm clock cast a dim, shadowless light that filled the room just enough for Jonah to see the tips of his fingers caress the doorknob. 12:30 already, and he had to be up for school at six. This infernal noise had kept him up three nights now; when would it just go away? He wrapped his hand around the knob and turned it a quarter of an inch before stopping.
As the boy stood in the dark with the door just inches from his face, the sounds in his mind grew to a hollow whisper. Still voiceless, still formless, the undertone picked up a meaning. The door was asking to be opened, so he opened it.
The creaking door was quiet, but in comparison to the voiceless noise, it may as well have screamed. Jonah’s vision was filled with a dark void, shadows at the furthest end of the gradient of darkness in his room. He waited, and his eyes adjusted to pick out a subtle contrast of greys, suggesting where his clothes hung and where other objects rested. Just as they all came into focus, the largest shape began to stir.
Jonah’s stomach twisted, giving him that same horrid feeling he got the day his grandma died. When his mother picked up the phone from the hospital, before she even said hello, he felt this knot in his gut because he knew she was gone. Now he felt it again, watching as the dark shape moved first slowly, then quickly.
A cold burst of air left the void of darkness and froze the sweat on his face. The creature emerged as if from a membrane at the threshold of the door. It contorted its long, mantis forearms and forced its gnarled shoulders into Jonah’s room. The mouthless face of the creature stared at him as if smiling.
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Only breathless air would leave his mouth, the rest of his cry for help had gotten caught in his throat. The monster pressed him to step backward. The small boy craned his neck as he looked up toward the ceiling, watching the outline of the monster appearing and disappearing as it shifted and stilled in the darkness.
This was the origin of the sound in his mind. The voiceless monster shouted at him so loudly that Jonah covered his ears. He stepped backward again, this time tripping on the pantleg of his urine-soaked pajamas. Jonah landed with a thud that shook the room. The monster sped forward and leaned over him, pressing its sharp mandible against his sternum. A mouth hole ripped open on its face as it sucked in a big gulp of air. The creature's breath chilled Jonah's bare beck as he struggled to get up.
A moment later, a rapping preceded the tired voice of his mother through his bedroom door. “Jonah, are you okay, sweety?”
He tried desperately to speak, but his words were nothing more than empty murmurs without sound.
The monster spun its head around and spoke in a sweet falsetto. “I’m alright, ma. I just fell out of bed.” It had Jonah’s voice. The boy tried desperately to thrash against the floor, to make any noise at all, to bring his mother to his aid. The harder he fought, the tighter the monster pinned him.
“As long as you’re okay, baby.”
“I am. Goodnight.”
“I love you,” his mom said.
The monster looked back at Jonah and said, “I love you too, mom.”
Jonah’s heartbeat so loud in his head that he prayed his mother would hear it from all the way outside the room, and maybe she did. She lingered for a moment before he heard her footsteps fade away down the hall.
Jonah never stopped issuing his silent scream as he stared hatred at the monster. It leaned in close again. Before it bit a chunk out of Jonah’s neck, it used Jonah’s own voice to whisper in the boy’s ear, “You won’t miss your voice for long. No need to talk about what happens next. It’ll be between you, me, and God.”