September 11, 2024

The Talking Thing
By Brittany Hague

Listen to this story here on the Kaidankai podcast.



They'd lived their whole lives with a ghost. They called her “mother.” Always more presence than person, the skeletal woman in the background would chat to herself liltingly, like a sick bird, while sipping champagne from a crystal candy bowl. She was a champagne drunk: one of the rarest kinds. 

If the old photos the two sisters found searching in her dresser were to be believed, she had once been an actual person, even a vibrant one. In blurred glimpses into a foreign past, there she sat, neatly posed in an endless series of portraits. To their enduring fascination she was pictured in a procession of clean, untattered outfits. In one photograph she appeared to be just a few years older than the girls in a dainty dress with ribbons in her hair, shyly holding someone’s hand. In another, her hair was cropped in shiny waves, her head thrown back mid-laugh, and her gown was such a deep black they could almost feel the velvet. The girls had no memory of their mother in anything but the ragged nude slip and stained kimono that had become her uniform (even on her erratic neighborhood strolls!) The girls had to squint and use their imaginations to believe that these images were of the same wan and slight woman that wandered their house, particularly the pictures in which she seemed to be amusing friends who were (unfortunately, and always) cropped out of the frame.

That their mother, who mumbled to herself day in and day out, would even have friends seemed ludicrous. The only other constant person in their orbit was Anne: Thick, weird Anne who doted on their mother under the title “Personal Assistant” and took no more notice of the girls than their mother did. Under Anne's watch the bills were paid, a revolving staff kept the house clean, and the massive lawn was cared for. The girls were probably still alive only because of Anne–though their welfare was not her main objective, by any means.

Their dad was gone. Not divorced or dead, just gone. He had “business.” Every few months he returned with terrible but expensive gifts. Once it was a huge wooden rocking chair so uncomfortable and with edges so sharp the girls repurposed it as a Barbie guillotine. Another time it was a box filled with the promise of hundreds of Beanie Babies, though when the sisters finally ripped through the cardboard and packing tape, they found it contained hundreds of the same neurotic looking green frog. It called to mind something grown-ups had said once about plagues. The rare times he did return home, he made them dress nicely for dinners with some visiting business partner from India or Hong Kong.

He did not even return when mother was found at the bottom of the stairs. She had presumably taken a tumble and it seemed like a good time for her to go to the special place she went sometimes to “relax.” When Anne gently walked her to the waiting car, mother held her head and asked, “Oh, where did he go?!” Anne scoffed.
 
“You know very well he is in Hong Kong. And what do you need him for, anyway? I’m here.”

So, when the voice started coming from the guestroom closet there was no one to tell, except Anne. But they would never tell that woman anything. There would be no comforting arms to hold them and scare the monster away like they'd read happened in books. Just two sisters and a voice in the closet.

The first afternoon it was kind of exciting; an exhilarating secret. They asked it questions and it tried to toy with them. It asked them to set it free, then, in a child's voice, to show it how a candle worked. Then, in their mother’s songbird nonsense, it begged them to open the door and save it. They found this last request hilarious, which annoyed it.

By early evening they had grown tired of the Talking Thing. It had screamed, cursed, told them they were in trouble, mimicked a little boy pleading to stop his father from killing it, and spoke all sorts of strange languages, but it made for lousy conversation.

"Who do you think the best dancer in the world is?" They asked, trying to settle a bet between the two of them.

"Your mother's ill. Let me help her."

"Yeah, we know," rolling their eyes, "But who's the best daaancerrrr?!"

After a few hours of their relentless questions, it gave up and stopped talking. They'd gotten sillier and sillier and by the end they were giggling, "How many butts do you have?" Just the dumbest stuff they could think of. It responded by telling them it was a Reptoid and suicide was the only way forward. Lying on their backs with their legs up against the wall, they turned to each other and squealed, "Reptoid!" throwing themselves into another giggling frenzy. Eventually they sighed, panted, rolled over and left the Talking Thing, still going on and on about its mission on Earth in angry tones.

Back in their beds, under the quiet and darkness of night, the Talking Thing seemed more real, the danger more imminent, so they decided on some rules. First: they would put the key to the closet where no one would find it. The last thing they needed was a cleaning lady letting it loose. Second: they'd never talk to it alone. In fact, they wouldn't even go into the guest room without the other. Silly things had a way of revealing themselves to be horrible if the other wasn't there to crack the first laugh. They had learned this very early in their lives.

As the summer days wore on, the novelty of the Talking Thing faded. It was turning to fall, and worms could be found under the squishy wet leaves, dad had sent new foreign Barbie dolls who required asymmetrical haircuts and custom tattoos, and a couple of teenage girls had moved in next door, begging to be spied upon. Listening to an angry voice became less appealing. Especially when it got creepy, like when it told one of the girls she was carrying the germs of a demon in her wound. How had it known she had scraped her knee? They took note that it could either see them outside of the room or see through clothes. Both were bad. They especially hated its latest trick: making them hear footsteps any time they were alone.

One bright autumn morning, mother returned, looking vacant. Late that evening, Anne killed herself. A leap from the highest balcony. It went unnoticed all morning until mother floated in from the yard at lunch time, blood on the hem of her kimono singing “Oh no, oh no, oh no.” The girls ran to the scene and stopped short when they saw Anne’s feet, crooked and shoeless. They walked silently, hand in hand to tell the new neighbors to call someone (they didn’t know who) for help.
They stayed inside that day, away from the strangers and flashing lights, under blankets in the same bed. The Talking Thing whispered and laughed. Down the hall, two rooms away, they could hear it. “That was me. You aren’t the only ones I speak to. Anne was a very sad woman.” They decided they wanted to be rid of it. When the house quieted the next day, they stood before the closet door to announce that they wanted it to go.

 “Ohhh,” it moaned, “I want to go, too. I shouldn’t be here.” The voice, for once, sounded genuine and forlorn. But, they agreed later, that was probably how it wanted them to think it sounded. “I can only go if you feed me. A single person will do.” Well, they weren't going to kill someone for it; they huffed and stormed out before it could even begin its protests.

They changed their minds a few days later when an obnoxious boy came to visit. They had dealt with boys before (their cousin was a boy, but a gentle one that liked wooden soldiers) this kid, Harrison, was a real boy. He smelled bad and alternated between spazzing out and staring comatose at an alarming rate. He spoke in voices from unknown cartoons and pointed imaginary guns at everything while running hard into the furniture. They were over him within ten minutes, but their dad had invited him to play all afternoon while the men talked business. Dad was back until a new Anne could be found.

"Will he do?" one sister asked the closet, pretending to talk to the other. The voice instructed them to open the door and push the boy in.

"Nuh un! We’re not stupid, we'll never open the door," they insisted.
"Then how’s this going to work?" 

And on and on. The afternoon had lapsed before they could even agree on ground rules. Harrison, who had been slouching in the corner looking at a little screen, had to go home. Upset, one sister walked up to the closet and kicked the door. 

"Happy?!" she screamed. Then quieter, so her dad couldn’t hear, "You are an asshole!" The girls left. Together they felt high on their assertiveness and adult language, but they were no closer to being rid of the Talking Thing.

They started making plans. Obviously, it had to be a boy, and obviously they were going to have to find some way to bind the Talking Thing to the closet while they fed the boy to it. Research consumed their autumn. The library had books on magic and demons, but they were long and boring… And once you actually started to look, there were so many boys out in the world. How could they decide which one deserved to die more than the others?

And then, suddenly the Talking Thing was gone. It was so anticlimactic that even mentioning it felt heartbreaking, so they didn’t. They had heard on the radio that played dimly in the kitchen that a local boy had gone missing, and they wondered, even felt responsible, but mainly they were weirdly upset that they hadn’t been more directly involved in the tragedy. Intrigue had moved on to someone else's household, it seemed.

A new assistant was found, a stern older woman who never smiled. She didn't understand their mother's rituals which caused their mother to throw grander fits and spend more days crying in her canopy bed. Dad was leaving again. The morning he left, their mother stumbled onto the porch where the girls were squashing ants. Even though it was brisk she was still wrapped in her kimono, the unwashed hem of which had darkened to a rusty brown. She smelled sickly sweet and looked flimsy. Her emaciated hand clasped one of the girl’s jackets. They turned to find her eyes clear, as if she finally saw them.
​
“It’s back where it belongs,” she sang while tapping her forehead. Her eyes glazed over once more. As she teetered back inside, they noticed she was palming something small and brass, a key, rubbing it like a worry stone.


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Brittany Hague (she/her) has worked as a graphic artist, an independent interactive fiction maker, and short story writer. She lives in Seattle with her husband, two children, and familiars. Her short stories have appeared in the Night of the Geminids and Monster (Hidden Fortress Press) anthologies, Last Girls Club, and Black Sheep Magazine. [email protected]

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