That Dreadful Noise That Kept Us Up at Night
by Marisa Thoman
University of Cincinnati
Marisa Thoman is a Communication Design major and English minor at University of Cincinnati. Her designs have been recognized with awards from Graphic Design USA, Graphis International Awards, and Creative Communication Awards. You can find more of her work at marisathoman.com or on Instagram @thomandesign.
We had been hearing things in the walls for months now. Usually after the sun went down, when we were covered in the damp quiet of the white-walled rooms. At first, it sounded like the ticking of a clock. Slow. Then fast. Slow. Then fast. The girl with the deep purple bags under her eyes was the first to ask if anyone else heard it—that dreadful noise that kept us up at night. We all had. Everyone, except Clarice.
We had been living in the dorms at Mrs. Ives’ Home for Bright Young Girls for about a year and a half, since we first enrolled in the school when we were fourteen. The only contact we had with the outside world was when we got to visit our families for Christmas break. They didn’t even let us leave over the summer.
The honest truth was that none of us wanted to be there. The instructors were cruel women who hated young girls, the rooms in each building were always so cold, and the noise, that dreadful noise, kept us up at night. It began to enter our minds during our daytime lectures when we were supposed to be focused on scientific notation in Chemistry or iambic pentameter in English. We even thought of the noise during our one-on-one meetings with the counselor, Ms. Christy. She asked us what we were thinking about when our eyes drifted out the window, glazing over as we stared out at the sky. We never told her about the noise.
As time progressed, the sound was no longer just the subtle tick-tock of a clock. It sounded like claws scratching against the peeling paint on the walls. A sound so shrill it constantly echoed in our ears, pounding right in the spot between our eyes.
But Clarice never heard it.
She wasn’t like the rest of us, not just because she didn’t hear the noise. Her skirt—two sizes too big—fell three inches past her knees, resting at a crooked angle on her bony hips. There was a greenish tint under her translucent skin. Worst of all, she smelled like milk. We had despised her since the first time we saw her. Now whenever we talked about the noise, she made it a point to mention that she didn’t hear anything. She loved to be different, to make it clear that she knew that we knew she was different, and she didn’t care. Some of us believed she did hear the noise and that she was lying just to make us angry. If that was her plan, it worked.
Eventually the noise got so loud in our heads, something had to be done about it. We started following Clarice around to see what she did to escape it. We thought it couldn’t be possible for her to pretend not to hear it even when she was alone. When the sharp noise clawed at the inside of our skulls, we would pinch our eyes closed, pull our hair, or curl up into a ball. So far as Clarice had been around us, she betrayed no outward expression of hearing the noise. Logically, she must have had a place to go to be alone and let out her sorrows.
It was a Tuesday afternoon the first time we followed her to the stream. Our lectures ended at noon on Tuesdays so we could have time to work on our chores or seek counsel from Ms. Christy. After her chemistry class, Clarice slipped out of the room and began floating down the halls, so unaware of her surroundings that she didn’t hear the light tap of our Mary Jane enclosed feet. Clarice walked right out the front door and headed for the woods. We followed.
Finally she reached the stream that hid back behind the trees. We watched from behind the largest oak as she collected rocks, shoving them in her pockets. All of us glanced at each other, sharing a knowing expression. Clarice was filling her pockets to drown herself. At that moment, we all knew that she had heard the noise. Why else would she long for eternal sleep? Every single one of us had thought about ending our lives to escape the noise. As we watched Clarice fulfill our darkest fantasy—the one that we only ever allowed ourselves to think of late at night when the noise was all-consuming—none of us made any effort to stop her. There was a satisfaction about being right that held us in our place and forced us to watch.
But when Clarice’s pockets were full, she turned around and headed back for the school. We were dumbfounded. She was more elusive than ever.
Later we learned that Clarice kept a box of rocks under her bed. We weren’t sure what they were for, but now we knew that she went down to the stream every Tuesday to collect more. On that first Tuesday, we followed her back and waited as she hid them under her bed. Then, we watched her go to her meeting with Ms. Christy, where she talked and smiled like she didn’t have a care in the world.
All the while, the noise was getting worse. As the seasons changed and the sky turned grey, it became louder and louder, taking up every corner of every room. Within a couple of months we would be home again with our families for a brief moment in time, but that didn’t seem like it was part of our reality. It felt like we were on a deserted island thousands of miles away from them. Most of us hadn’t even received a letter from our parents since last Christmas.
We were completely isolated.
After a while, the only thing that could distract us from that dreadful noise that kept us up at night was talking about Clarice. At first we just talked about her in general. Her sickly skin. Her murky eyes. Her milky smell. It didn’t take long for that to stop being enough. We began to talk about hurting her—running our razor-sharp nails across her skin the same way the noise peeled away at the inside of our minds. We wondered if her blood would be red like ours or if some toxic green ooze would spill out of her paper skin. These fantasies didn’t last long before we decided to kill her.
Not all of us wanted to at first. There was fear of getting in trouble, and fear that killing her would make the noise louder. Some of us thought that, without her to distract us, the sound would become deafening. Some had already been wholly consumed by the noise, walking around in a zombie-like daze through the halls. The stronger ones in the group knew what we had to do.
It was late in the fall when we followed Clarice down to the stream for the last time. That morning, we had a plan. We huddled behind the largest oak tree and sent the loveliest of us to go and talk to her. She took delicate steps towards Clarice down by the water. We watched as they exchanged words—the perfect distraction. Clarice would talk to anyone she could. Her fatal flaw was that she always failed to listen.
What she didn’t hear that morning was the sound of our steps as we moved in on her. Standing behind her, we were able to take in the details about her that made us sick. From our vantage point her skin looked sicklier than ever. Some of us had to breathe out of our mouths so we wouldn’t have to smell her milky scent. While most of us observed, the one of us with the deep purple bags under her eyes saw her moment to strike. She picked up a stone and threw it at the back of Clarice’s head. We all watched as she collapsed.
Some of us began to leave—either bored already now that the action was over or scared that we would be caught. Those of us who stayed filled Clarice’s pockets with rocks. It made sense for her, the rock collector, to fill her pockets this way. Maybe that’s what she was collecting them for all along; we just sped up the process.
We stayed to watch her body sink, wanting to make sure she wouldn’t pop up for one final breath of air. She never came back up.
After the killing of Clarice, those of us that were weak claimed they stopped hearing the noise. They sympathized with Clarice; they wanted to have what she had—peace. We would never know if Clarice had actually heard the noise in life, but it was almost certain she didn’t hear it in death.
For most of us, the noise got louder. We heard it throughout all hours of the day. No longer just a subtle tick-tock or a drawn-out scratch, it was like a thousand high pitched voices screaming, clawing to get out of somewhere. When our teachers opened their mouths in class, the noise came out. The noise became a physical thing grabbing and pinching our skin, constantly reminding us of how alone we felt in this hellish desolation.
We began drawing pictures of Clarice. It was something to do in the late hours of the night when that dreadful noise kept us up. At first the drawings were a way to remind us of the incident, then it just became a habit. We filled pages upon pages with graphite renderings of the haunted look in her eyes. As much as we wanted to forget her, she was in the back of our minds almost as much as the noise. The administrators never mentioned Clarice. They never took notice of a missing student. It was almost as if she had never been there. The silence on the subject was worse than the silence in Clarice’s head.
The weakest among us couldn’t stand living with the noise and the guilt that came after Clarice’s death. It happened slowly at first, then quickly. Girls started drowning themselves, filling their pockets with rocks just like Clarice. Sometimes we found their bodies floating down by the shore; other times, they just disappeared. But we knew what happened. As the days passed, we were growing smaller and smaller. Still, not a single member of the faculty mentioned the dwindling number of students in classes each day. Not even Ms. Christy.
We began looking at her differently during our sessions. We had never been particularly fond of her, but at least she pretended to listen. Why should we have to bring up the missing girls? Shouldn’t it be the responsibility of the faculty? Their silence made our solitude feel meaningless. They were the reason we were forced to stay there, and yet they didn’t even bother to look for our missing bodies. We were trapped inside the walls they put around us and the walls we built inside our minds.
It was the girl with the deep purple bags under her eyes that finally broke the silence.
“Why aren’t you doing anything about all the missing girls?” She asked Ms. Christy during their Tuesday afternoon session.
“What missing girls?” Ms. Christy responded.
“How about the eight girls who are no longer in my English class? The ones whose bodies are floating in the stream?”
“I believe you’re mistaken. We have no account of any missing students.”
By the time the story got around to what remained of us, we were chilled. All the girls who had taken their lives were gone for good. We wondered if their families knew; we wondered if their families cared. It was clear that the faculty didn’t care about us. They were preaching the message of putting education above all, not stopping for a minute to check in on us. They didn’t hear the noise, that dreadful noise that kept us up at night. They didn’t even realize that we hadn’t been sleeping. They didn’t notice our red rimmed eyes, our drooping shoulders, our distant expressions. Worst of all, they didn’t notice when we filled our pockets with rocks. They didn’t notice when our bodies washed up on shore. They didn’t notice us.
Not long after this, we stopped talking to each other. For each girl that remained, the noise evolved into her own personal nightmare, taking digs at her most private insecurities. Insecurities that she sometimes didn’t even know she had. Although we could only hear our own version of that dreadful noise, it felt like the most raw exhibition, like our bodies were turned inside out, revealing the pink flesh of our most inner layers for the world to see. Most of us stopped showing up to classes, preferring to ride out the torment under the dark cover of our duvets. Those of us that still bothered going to class noticed as they peeked through the windows of other classrooms that some teachers stood at the front of the room teaching a class full of empty seats. That was the final straw. It felt as if they were mocking us, daring us to take our turn down by the stream. They didn’t care if we stopped showing up. They didn’t care if we took our own lives. They didn’t care about us.
We had no source of comfort during our last few weeks there. More girls disappeared, but even we stopped looking for them after a while. Only a handful of us were left. We didn’t have support from the faculty, we didn’t have support from our families, and we didn’t have support from each other. All we had was the noise, that dreadful noise that kept us up at night, to remind us of our eternal solitude. The path ahead seemed hopeless. If we couldn’t make the noise stop now, we worried that we would never be able to.
It was the girl with the deep purple bags under her eyes who first packed her things and left. Some of us watched as she headed for the woods and never returned. When we went down by the stream, we noted that her body never turned up and that there was no sign of any belongings left behind. It was like she had never been there at all. We finally understood that she didn’t take her life like the others. She took her stuff and got out. We would never know where she went, but we spent our final days at Mrs. Ives’ imagining different scenarios for her.
We imagined that when she finally made it to the street, she waved her thumb at passing cars until one stopped to pick her up. The driver would probably ask where she wanted to go, and she would say, “Anywhere but here.” And maybe the driver would take her along for miles and miles until she was all the way across the country. Maybe she would ask to be dropped off at the first town that looked welcoming. Maybe she would sit at the bar of a diner and talk to the waitress about her great escape. Maybe she would make up a new story to tell.
After we spent hours exhausting the different possibilities for the girl with the deep purple bags under her eyes, we realized that somewhere along the way we had replaced her with ourselves. We imagined all the things we could do with our lives if we just got out of here and left that dreadful noise behind. For the first time, we realized that death might not be the answer. That there was a whole world out there for us to explore, and that no one here was going to stop us from packing our bags.
So, we left. Those of us that remained gathered our belongings and walked straight off the property. We walked through the woods and past the stream. And then we walked some more. Some of us never found our way out of the woods, too consumed by the noise to remember which way to go. Some of us picked up a new life in the first town we stumbled upon. We never heard from Mrs. Ives’ or our families again. None of that mattered to us. What mattered is this: the farther we walked from the school, the quieter the noise got. We kept going until all that was left in our heads was radio silence. For the first time in a long time, we were able to hear ourselves think. To think clearly.
Interview With The Author
1. What was your inspiration for this piece?
This piece started off as an imitation exercise in my Forms of Fiction class fall 2019. However, it has evolved so much since then that I don’t even remember what it was initially an imitation of. I was inspired by my own experience going to a private school growing up and wanted to explore the feelings it gave me of being trapped, like my voice didn’t matter.
2. What is your creative process?
As mentioned earlier, it started off as an imitation exercise. It was written for a class focused on stories told from first person plural, so the driving force behind my piece is the exploration of that POV. I typically start each story by writing straight through then going back to make little changes to make sure it all flows together. I also like to listen to atmospheric music to get in the right headspace while writing—I think I listened to The Haunting of Hill House soundtrack during this story.
3. What are some influences on your artistic process?
My professor—Michael Griffith—had a lot of influence over this piece. I loved his class so much because I had never read a story from first person plural POV before. He really changed the way I look at literature and my writing process as well. In addition, I’m a big fan of authors like Stephen King and Gillian Flynn.
4. Is there anything more you’d like our readers/viewers to know about you or your work?
This is my first published work and I am so excited about it!
Editors’ Comments
Utterly inventive, “That Dreadful Noise That Kept Us Up at Night” is a thrillingly unique take on grim without being overtly gory. A captivating must-read, it serves as a powerful reminder of knowing when to move on.