Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Voice on the Stairs
Martin answers the phone in his father's voice without meaning to, and each call he takes that way sounds a little more like the man who used to ring the house on Sunday evenings.
- perspective: close-third
The first time it happened, Martin was on the landing of the house in Ellesmere Road with the cordless phone against his ear, talking to a plumber about a boiler, and he heard himself say, *Right you are, son, we'll sort it out between us,* in a dry, slightly amused voice that was not his. The plumber laughed. Martin laughed too, a half-second late. Then he put the phone down and stood very still in the hall with his hand on the banister, listening to the echo of a man he had not heard speak since the hospital in March.
His father had called him son on every phone call for forty years. It was a habit, a way of ending a conversation with a joke that nobody needed to understand. Martin had hated it as a teenager and missed it terribly afterward, and now it had come out of his mouth as if it had been waiting in the back of his throat all along.
He told his wife, Carol, that night. She listened with her knitting in her lap and said that grief did strange things with the voice, that she had read about it, and that it would probably pass.
It did not pass. It came back on the Monday, when the dentist's receptionist called to confirm an appointment, and Martin heard himself say, *Tell her Stan says the chair's been fine,* which was what his father used to say whenever anyone asked after the surgery. The receptionist thanked him. Martin wrote the appointment in his diary and did not know who had written it.
By the end of the month the voice was everywhere. It answered the bank, the insurance company, the man who came to read the meter. It was not an impression. Martin could hear the difference, the slight drag on the vowels, the weight on the second syllable of words like *arrangement* and *sincerely*. He had always thought his father sounded like a man reading the shipping forecast in a warm room, and now he did too.
He did not want to be that man. He worked hard to sound like himself. He rehearsed sentences in the car. He practised saying his own name. But each time the phone rang, something settled into his throat and took over, the way a hand settles on a banister, and the words came out in the old rhythm.
Carol started to flinch when he spoke to her. She said nothing at first, and then one evening, when he called her from the kitchen to say the dinner was ready, she came to the door with a face that was trying hard to be patient. "Martin," she said. "I know it's him. I know he's in there somewhere. But you have to let him go."
He tried. He sat at the kitchen table with a glass of water and told himself, quite clearly, that his father was dead, that the funeral had been on the twelfth, that the headstone was not yet cut. Then he said, in his own voice, that he was sorry for the trouble, and the voice that came out was his, but it was the voice of a son apologising to a father who had gone to bed early, and the difference was so small that he almost could not hear it.
That night he dreamed of the house in Ellesmere Road, with the stairs going up into the dark and a light on at the top. At the bottom stood a man in a grey cardigan, his hand on the newel post, looking up. He did not call out. He only said, very quietly, in a voice Martin knew as well as his own, *Well, son. You'll want to get that phone.*
Martin woke with his heart pounding. Downstairs, very faintly, the cordless phone was ringing. He lay still and counted the rings, and on the seventh he got up, and went down the stairs in the dark, and picked up.
He did not know what he was going to say. He opened his mouth and waited, and into the silence on the line came the familiar dry chuckle of the man he had lost, and a voice, quite pleasant, that said, *It's me, son. Shall I ring you back?*