Psychological horror · 3 min read ·
Rain Sounds Like My Name
For three weeks the rain against my window has been tapping out the syllables of my name, patiently, a letter at a time, and each night the taps come a little faster, as if whoever is outside has almost finished spelling out what they want me to remember.
- perspective: first
It started on a Tuesday in November, during the first heavy rain of the autumn. I was lying awake in the back bedroom of the terraced house, listening to the water run down the gutter, when I heard a pattern in it. Three soft taps against the glass, a pause, then two more, then a longer silence. It was not the wind. The wind does not stop and start like that.
I thought of Morse code, which I had learned at school, and I tried to count the dots and dashes. I could not make them into anything. I put it out of my mind and went to sleep.
The next night the rain tapped again. The same pattern, a little longer. I lay in the dark and counted, and this time I got a letter. It was an M. The third night it was an A, and then an R, and then a C. I felt my chest tighten. Marcus is my name. I have never told anyone that I was called Marcus until the day I was christened, because my mother always used my middle name, and I have spent my life answering to the second part of it.
I sat up in bed and looked at the window. The rain was coming down steadily, grey and fine, and the glass was streaming. For a moment I could see nothing outside but the reflection of my own lamp. Then a drop struck the pane directly in front of me, very precisely, and I saw that the water on the glass had gathered into a shape. A rough line of droplets that ran down and across in a loose curve, like a letter written in cursive.
I did not finish the spelling. I could not bear to. I got up and went down to the kitchen and made a cup of tea and sat at the table until dawn, listening to the rain.
When I went to the doctor, he asked whether I was having trouble sleeping, and I told him about the taps. He looked at me for a long time, the way I imagine doctors look at people they have started to worry about, and he asked whether I had lost anyone recently. I said my mother, in the summer. He said that grief and insomnia can make the mind invent patterns in ordinary sounds, that it is called apophenia, and that it was very common. He gave me a sleeping tablet.
I did not take it. On the fourth night, the rain came back with a new word. It spelled out my middle name, and then my mother's, and then a sentence I could read in the water on the glass, the droplets gathering into a message in her careful handwriting: *Come and tell me you're sorry.*
I have been sorry for a long time. I was angry with her when she was dying, and I did not visit the hospice in her last week, because I could not face the smell of the place or the look on her face when she saw me. I have never said the words.
Tonight the rain began early. I opened the window and leaned out into the cold. The drops fell on my face and ran down my neck, and they tapped against my cheeks in a soft, familiar rhythm. I said my name aloud, all of it, the first name and the second and the third, the one she used to shout across the garden when I was late for tea.
The rain stopped at once. The gutter went quiet. The window was clear, and the street below was empty and silver under the streetlamps. Then, very faintly, from somewhere beneath the water in the drain, a voice said *there you are*, and I shut the window, and sat down on the bed, and found that I had started to cry.