Please note: this story was provided by the author and published as is.
The first to leave was a woman named Rebecca out of Seattle, Washington.
Anyone who knew the young woman was baffled. Everything about her life seemed to be going right. She had a job she loved in publishing and a healthy relationship.There was no criminal history, no suspected substance issues. As with every missing person’s case, those old familiar sayings popped up:
“Everyone loves Becky. I can’t think of anyone that would want anything bad to happen to her.”
“What about her dog? Beck would never just leave Morty behind. Something must have happened to her.”
There wasn’t a lot to go on. There was no sign of foul play. Rebecca’s car was right where she left it, parked in the driveway of her newly purchased bungalow. The door had been left unlocked, her keys hung on a lanyard in the hall. Her purse, complete with wallet and identification, was on her kitchen counter. Searches of her home and work computers, as well as that of her boyfriend’s, turned up nothing of interest. In initial interviews, no one could think of anything odd or out of the ordinary. She never mentioned anyone threatening her or even feeling as though she had been followed.
But on second and third interviews, those around her began reporting similar experiences. Nothing that would have raised any eyebrows had she not disappeared, not anything particularly interesting. In fact, it took months for investigators to connect a common thread. In the weeks before Rebecca went missing, she complained often to her friends of hearing something strange. A humming, she had said, barely perceptible but reminding her of something she couldn’t explain.
Mental illness. The words both help and harm the investigation. On one hand, there’s a renewed hope to latch on to. Maybe Rebecca is out there, confused and wandering the streets but that means she is still able to be found. On the other hand, there was the critical misunderstanding of mental illness and the idea that a mental health crisis would for some reason be less of an emergency. Fears were soothed, Rebecca wasn’t taken, she wandered away. The public failed to consider that it was incredibly likely that, even if Rebecca had left of her own terms, she could have been taken advantage of after. The news cycle moved on, the wheel turned.
Then Rebecca’s mother disappeared. Other reports started rolling in.
While the investigation into the mother and daughter occupied the attention of the Pacific Northwest, around the country similar instances were emerging. A teenage girl in Florida, originally thought to be a runaway, disappears after school one day. In Maine, an elderly woman leaves her care home in the middle of the night. In Oklahoma, a professor fails to show up to teach her class.
And, without fail, the missing woman would have a family member, always a woman, follow her into the unknown.
The first to pick up on the pattern was a conspiracy nut with an anime girl profile picture on some forum. There, sandwiched between reports of JFK sightings by believers that his assassination was faked and the updates on investigations into Bigfoot, a thirty-something year old man later identified as Thomas Jacobs laid out his findings. He came to all the wrong conclusions, of course. In his mind, the Government-with-a-capital-G was responsible. The sounds that each of the women had reported, according to Thomas, was evidence of an experiment to control the minds of the public.
He ended his poorly executed post with a paragraph on the susceptibility of the female brain to subtle manipulation.
Asshole.
Despite its faults, the post received some attention by more credible sources. True crime bloggers, once the pattern had been pointed out to them, had a field day. Every middle aged woman with a podcast, every masked Youtuber who put out videos with altered voices and ominous music; all of them were talking about the sound they were referring to as The Calling. Major media outlets began to take notice. The topic was trending on every social media platform, photos of missing women and girls were compiled into massive collages. Official statements were being put out by police departments from counties in every state, as well as the FBI and representatives in government.
Panic was sweeping across the nation. There were absurd cries to lock up women all over the country for their own good. People spit out theories that were colored by other motives; some were blatantly racist, others claimed this was proof of some religious phenomena, all were marked by paranoia. The anxiety was crippling. Every woman insisted that she was hearing strange sounds, suddenly every sound was suspicious.
Which is probably why Erin thought nothing of it when she began hearing the noise. That’s how Erin was. Is.
Erin and I met at a fraught time in our lives. I had just been laid off, she was dealing with the fall out of coming out to her parents. We were able to rely on each other at a time when we both felt like we were losing everything. We were strangers, then friends, then, not something more exactly, neither of us were ready for that; but there existed between us that tension of potential, of what could be. I was infatuated by her, hypnotized by the way her dark curls fell across her face and the way her deep brown eyes lit up when she laughed. I could tell by the way I caught her looking at me sometimes that she felt the same.
The first time she brought up the noise, I didn’t take any special notice. We were having lunch at our favorite cafe, huddled in a booth by the window and she seemed distracted. Every so often she’d lift her head and look around at the other patrons, brow furrowed. When I asked about it, she said she thought someone was humming. I waved it away, unconcerned, and we finished our food with no further mention of it that day.
The second time, we were out walking together and gossiping, enjoying the spring weather as it brought the world out of hibernation. She startled, hard enough to make me jump, and I reached out for her arm. She told me she had heard the humming again as soon as we started on the path. Then, out of nowhere, the noise that could so easily be dismissed had been joined by singing. By this point we had seen what was happening all across the news and my mind went to those missing women. What should we do about this? Who should we turn to?
My fear must have shown on my face because Erin immediately relaxed. It was a trait that I found both endearing and frustrating about her, her ability to set her own concerns and needs aside for the comfort of others. Usually I teased her for self-sacrificing streak, but this time I selfishly let myself be comforted.
The power of suggestion, or at least, something like it. That’s what she had said. The news coverage was having the same effect on her that it was having on plenty of women, and men even, all over the country. Her brain had registered there was something happening and had latched on to her anxiety to manifest the symptoms. Simple, believable. It was the kind of suggestion that you accept because it’s what you need to hear. An explanation that acted as a cool lotion on a sunburn. Soothing. After all, weren’t a majority of those cases unfounded?
I think that after that she started hiding what she was hearing from me. I can’t say where it was to keep me from worrying or if, in her mind, not acknowledging the sounds would make them go away. As it stands, in the intervening months between that day and the next incident, I heard nothing about any sounds.
As it grew warmer, we got closer. Lingering glances lingered a little longer. The energy between us was charged with the sense of something almost realized. We spent more time together, coming up with excuses to enter into each other’s space. As other aspects of our lives settled, it became easier to imagine that we were in a place with room to fit those feelings. When I wasn’t spending the night at her apartment, she was spending the night at mine. Our weekends were spent beating the heat with naps in the shade or in the cool water of the creek.
I still don’t know how she managed to hide what she was going through. I’ve gone over this time with a fine tooth comb imagining what signs I could have missed. Perhaps the times she complained of a heat induced headache were actually a symptom of being barraged by noise. A glance over her shoulder I dismissed as something casual could have been something more fearful. I will never forgive myself for being more consumed with thoughts of impressing her sister, or whether she would like my family. I did my best to make her smile at every opportunity, but in light of what happened since, it almost feels selfish. Did I want to make her happy, or did I want to be the focus of her attention and absorb her sunlight?
This is what grief does to a person, I suppose. You lose someone and you’re left wondering about your place in their life.
I became aware that something was wrong in the middle of that summer. We were spending an evening watching some stupid true crime, half paying attention and half giggling over gossip. She fell asleep first but I must have drifted off not long after.
I woke to a title screen near blinding me in the dark room, only recently having been stopped. Erin was nowhere to be found. I looked for her all over the house and was just about to text her when I noticed someone on the porch. I jumped, startled, before I recognized her silhouette and stepped out to check on her. The sound of the door didn’t seem to catch her attention. Normally I would have seized an opportunity, we’d been locked in a battle of jumping out at each other over the last few weeks and I’d been meaning to seize my revenge.
But something felt wrong.
I can’t explain why I was afraid at that moment but I was hesitant to get closer. She still hadn’t looked up at me. She was swaying slightly, her movements barely perceptible as she stared up at the sky. A full moon illuminated her face and I was taken aback; she looked beautiful, she always did, but there was an emptiness there that scared me. Perhaps this was some sort of sleepwalking episode? I wracked my brain, trying to remember if that warning about never waking a sleepwalker was a myth or not. Surely the best course of action would have been to leave her be, it would have been best to just watch her and make sure she didn’t do anything to put herself in danger.
But that blank looking on her face. It makes my stomach turn even now, remembering it. It wasn’t the distant look of a daydreamer. It was like she was somewhere far away, far beyond my reach. I stretched my hand out just to touch her arm, some part of me fearing that she would fade into dust.
She gasped, suddenly, taking in air as though she had been underwater for too long and I drew my hand back. My heart was pounding rapidly in my chest as she turned to me. She smiled, sadly, and said that she thought she might need to see a doctor.
Erin and I went together. I held her hand in the waiting room like a proper almost-girlfriend would. I fidgeted with nervous energy and, in typical Erin fashion, she comforted me. Still, when confronted with the reality of explaining to a doctor what she had been experiencing, Erin looked to me for strength. I think she was afraid that he would dismiss her concerns as being all in her head and, to be fair, that’s what doctors all too often did in the face of the unknown. But, maybe because of what was being seen in the news, we were met with genuine concern.
Erin went through a series of tests meant to root out the cause. Scans, sleep studies, auditory tests, mental health evaluations. All of it turned up nothing out of the ordinary, but still the sleepwalking episodes grew more frequent and the singing was nearly constant. She moved in with me full time, and we relied on our friends for emotional support.
The first time that Erin wandered during the day, I was at work. I’d found a job at a call center that provided me with decent benefits and it was close to home. Halfway through my shift, I got a phone call and answered it to hear Erin sobbing on the other end. She had been making herself something to eat one moment, and in the next, she was three blocks away and barefoot on burning hot pavement. I went home during my lunch break and we made an appointment for the doctor.
From then on, Erin wasn’t to be left alone. My job could easily be done from home and our little family, made up of kind hearted souls from our community, rallied around us. Friends took Erin out on errands to give her some sense of normalcy. They brought food and offered to do our laundry. It was awkward, but we were grateful, accepting these gestures as they had been intended; a message that, no matter how isolated we may have been feeling, we were not in it alone.
But, even with all the support, I couldn’t have my eyes on Erin every moment. Falling asleep became an exercise in risk. I’d stay up until my head ached with the need for rest, every move feeling as though I was moving through quicksand.
This just wasn’t sustainable.
Erin sat me down one evening to explain her plan. She had begun having dreams in those spaces where she lost time. The images varied. Occasionally they would be something tangible, a location that she could pinpoint on a map. Neighboring towns, road signs, a diner. Other dreams would feature hands, reaching out to her through the darkness, or a chorus of voices calling her name. Erin, they sang, sister.
She wanted to follow these images. If they lead nowhere, she reasoned, maybe that would be enough to snap her out of whatever this was. I was hesitant, unsure if giving into this compulsion was healthy.
To be honest though, I would have followed her anywhere. When I agreed and scheduled some time off, Erin’s midnight walks came to an abrupt stop. We were baffled but Erin took it as a positive sign and a cool day in October, we packed up the car and followed her dreams.
Literally.
It required some research. Sometimes, the locations in Erin’s dream were marked only by something simple, like a statue in a town square. We wrote down her dreams as soon as she had them, researched them, then marked out the location on a physical map just to have a record of where we’d been. We spent the night in whatever hotel or dingy motel we could find with an available room, sometimes sleeping in the car at rest stops. We lived on fast food and gas station coffee but we tried to make the most of it. We sang along to the radio and listened to binged upbeat podcasts. Not once did I mention the way my stomach was tying itself into knots. I didn’t want to let on just how much I hated that we were doing this; if this is what she needed to do, we would do it, but I knew she would turn back for my sake in a heartbeat.
We stalled out in southern Louisiana. For a week we slept in a motel with no air conditioning, a burden in a place where autumn had seemingly failed to reach. No more dreams came. We languished in that room, reading garbage paperbacks from a rack we found in the supermarket and eating poptarts too many meals in a row. I began to have real hope that we had reached the end of the line. Erin’s plan had worked, coming this far and finding nothing had snapped her out of whatever trance the news had put her in.
I was ready to pack it up and go home. I had almost reached the end of my vacation time, but Erin wanted to stay a little longer. There was something in the air, she had said, something wanted her there.
I agreed to wait out the rest of the weekend, but we didn’t need that long. That same night I was pulled from my sleep by the sound of the door shutting, I nearly drifted off again before my brain registered what it had heard. Dread flooded every fiber of my being. I leapt from bed and shoved my feet into shoes and the room key into my pocket. I was out of the door just as Erin rounded the corner down the street. I jogged to catch up to her, calling out her name with no response. She wasn’t moving particularly fast and yet, she was always out of reach. I couldn’t seem to catch up. The town we were in was small, dead after nine p.m., and yet I feared that someone would come along and grab her before I could get there.
As I followed, she led me further and further until the houses around us became more spaced out. Tall trees and dense brush became more frequent. Here, at the edge of town, nature wrestled with humanity for domination. Still, Erin didn’t slow down. Paved roads gave way to wide dirt paths and street lights no longer lit our way. I fumbled for my phone to use as a flashlight, terrified at the idea of stepping on something that could potentially bite back and called for Erin again.
Frustrated tears blurred my vision but I couldn’t just leave her.
I couldn’t say how long we had been walking, but we were no longer passing houses. The wilderness was untamed by man here. Up ahead Erin stopped, cocking her head as if listening for something before she turned and moved down the embankment. Even above the cacophony of bugs and birds and toads, I could make out the sound of muck sucking at her shoes. She had disappeared beyond the beam of cellphone’s flashlight, leaving me with little choice but to follow.
Water pooled into my sneakers and every step was a struggle. Each brush of tall grass against my calves was enough to make me jump. I cursed every nature documentary I had ever seen, every news report of some poor soul lost to a swamp. If Erin feared what might be crawling around out here, it was impossible to stay. While I stumbled, she moved ever onward, confident.
The terrain was unsteady and the light couldn’t be trusted, what passed for stable ground was little more than a layer of sludge that could send you deeper into cold water. More than once I slipped on slick rocks, just barely managing to keep my phone from being submerged with me.
I felt exposed, vulnerable. We were attracting too much attention. Or, more accurately, I was drawing too much attention. I turned to search for the glow of eyes in the water. The task of getting back to the motel felt insurmountable, even if I could have found it in me to leave Erin here, in the dark of a Louisiana swamp. Every tree looked the same to me, their gnarled forms rising from the black, forming a maze that would have been difficult to navigate in the day.
I was falling further behind. Too distracted. Too slow. Too weak willed. The tears flowed steadily now.
Then I heard it.
Singing.
It was distant but it left me frozen. Was this what Erin had been hearing? She was out of sight now, but I knew I only needed to follow the sound.
I sloshed through water now waist deep in some spots. The closer I got, the louder the singing. Now I could make out a voice that stood out, a humming that put me in mind of a lullabye. The buzz of insects around me had picked up and I got the distinct impression that they were singing along.
A quick splash to my right startled me out of my thoughts. I turned, pointing the flashlight in that direction only to catch sight of the disturbed water. I braced myself, waiting for the next move. I screamed at the sensation of a warm breath across the back of my neck. I flung myself forward wildly, splashing through the water with mindless fear.
Follow the sound, find Erin.
I stopped again, trying to pinpoint what direction I needed to go. I was wasting too much time. I closed my eyes and listened hard but all sound had stopped. A singular voice, right beside my ear, broke the silence with a giggle. I dropped the phone as my heart plummeted in my chest, it fell into the water with a plop as the water around the light was briefly lit up green and then went dark.
I was blind.
A sob tore itself from my throat and I held still. Ridiculously some part of me felt as if I could just remain there, a statue in the swamp. Maybe I could save myself that way. Just as that ridiculous thought crossed my mind, a woman stepped out from behind a tree. She was gorgeous, thick red hair drenched like she had just been swimming, emerald eyes glinting in the light from the lantern she held aloft. Her dress clung to her form like a second skin.
I pleaded with her for help in stuttering, broken sentences that only half made sense but her face remained expressionless, even as a spider crawled down from her hair and down to her neck. Slowly, she moved the lantern, gesturing to her left. I followed it with my gaze.
More lights. Drifting forward out of the dark, forming a path.
Helplessly, I followed. Each lantern I passed was held by a woman with the same blank stare. They observed me with cold detachment, falling in line behind me when I moved on. Some were naked, others wore clothes that clung wetly against their frames. They wore spiders, insects and snakes like accessories. Gators swam by their sides like loyal dogs. Not one being, human or animal, made a move to harm me.
Shaking, I was herded through the swamp to an island nearly disguised by thick vegetation. It was larger than it looked from the outside and I tripped and fumbled my way to the center. The women behind me spread out, circling a clearing that had been trampled down into the weeds. The singing began again. I found myself lulled by it, swaying, eyes drooping. My body was heavy though my heart still fluttered with anxious awareness.
Erin stepped out from the trees on the other side of the clearing. Her russet brown skin looked almost gold in the firelight, shadows served to make the angles of her body seem sharper. I reached out, desperate to feel her against me, real and solid and alive. I crumpled, unable to support my own weight. Behind Erin, another woman stepped from the shadows. Her appearance shifted with every blink; one moment she was a gray old hag, sagging skin and pinched features, the next she was a little girl, then a matronly woman with a braid to her waist.
Erin turned to look at her, asking permission and, having received it, crossed the clearing to where I kneeled. Her hand felt cool against my cheek, a welcome relief. I had dozens of questions on the tip of my tongue but I could not speak one of them into existence. All I could say was her name.
She smiled and what she said next was lost to me but I understood this:
She loved me, but she would not be returning. This was her family now. These were her sisters.
The singing grew louder. I heard the steady beat of a drum and knew it to be my heart. Erin pressed a kiss to my forehead and back away. I let her go.
When I next opened my eyes, I was in bed at the motel. My sweatpants were crusted with dried mud and I smelled foul. The shoes were a lost cause. I dragged myself into the bathroom and into the shower. When I had cleaned myself up and dressed in fresh clothing, I called the police. I answered their questions the best way I could, but much of that is hazy. I was numb. They investigated me, but ultimately, like the other women who had gone missing, Erin was a mystery. No trace of the women was found in the swamp.
I went home and went to bed. When I emerged again, I had dozens of calls from Erin’s parents. Her sister had gone missing while we were gone. I knew she wasn’t coming back. None of them would be coming back.