The Silence of Emptiness
I woke up from a nap and looked at the clock. It was 11:15 p.m. I hadn't intended to sleep that long. I wasn't even sure when I fell asleep. The television was still on, some late-night cable sitcom playing to a fake audience with a laugh track. They are the worst.
My phone was on the table beside me. No messages or calls. Outside the streetlights cast their familiar patterns of light and shadow across the sidewalk and onto my living room walls.
Everything seemed normal, except it wasn't. It was quiet. Too quiet. Westerly, Maryland is a small town, so there was nothing unusual about it being quiet late at night. This was different, though.
I stood at the front window looking out for a while, watching the houses across the street. Porch lights were on at several of them. Cars sat parked on the street. The light was on in the upstairs bedroom at Tom and Ellen's house two doors down. I didn't see anyone outside, but at 11:15 on a weeknight that wasn't particularly strange.
I walked to the kitchen for a glass of water. Standing at the sink, I began to realize what had bothered me since waking up. I couldn't hear anything outside. No cars on the street. No dogs barking in the neighborhood. No insects buzzing around the light on the front porch.
I got my water and took a sip. Looking out the kitchen window, I noticed the leaves on the Japanese maple were perfectly still. No breeze.
I put my glass down and walked to the back door. Opening it, I stood there and listened. Nothing.
It was late August. On a summer night in Westerly there should have been crickets, cicadas, air conditioners, something. Usually there was enough background noise that I didn't notice any of it. White noise. The white noise of Westerly. Tonight, there was nothing.
I walked back to the living room and picked up my phone. I called my friend Jake. The call wouldn't connect. I tried again with the same result. I called another friend, Kate. Same. The phone showed a perfectly good signal, four bars. I tried sending them both a text. The progress bars crept along and then hung. The texts never went through.
I checked the Internet. All seemed fine. I opened a couple of local news sites in Chrome and found nothing unusual being reported. There were some stories posted while I had been sleeping, including a couple from minutes ago. Whatever was going on in Westerly, the rest of the state apparently was unaware.
Facebook loaded normally. Friends and relatives had been posting. I could scroll through their photos and comments from the evening. A college friend had even tagged me in a post eleven minutes earlier. An uncle had commented on a post and photo from yesterday only three minutes ago. But when I tried to post something, it failed. I tried sending a message. That failed too.
My email was the same. New messages arrived while I was asleep, but I couldn't reply to any of them. I could receive information from the outside world. I simply couldn't send anything back.
A bit unnerved, I decided to check in with my neighbors. I didn't care that it was after 11:00 pm.
I walked next door to Mark and Susan's house and knocked. Their living room light was on, and Susan's Subaru was parked in front of the house. I waited a moment and knocked again, harder this time. Mark had a habit of falling asleep in front of the television, so I rang the doorbell too. If he was home, that usually got his attention. No answer.
I walked across the lawn to Tom and Ellen's. Their cars were both there. The upstairs light I had seen from my house was still on. I knocked, rang the bell, and waited. Nothing. I tried the Mitchells across the street. Same thing.
Standing in the middle of the street in loose shorts and a wrinkled, nap-creased T-shirt, I was beginning to feel ridiculous. There were perfectly reasonable explanations for nobody answering a door at this time of night. There were fewer reasonable explanations, though, for three houses in a row not answering when the lights were on and the cars were home.
I thought for a moment. Then, I called out in a loud but calm voice.
"Hello?"
My voice carried farther than I expected. Did it? Or, did it just seem like it did because of the silence blanketing the neighborhood? I slowly turned as I listened to my voice fade down the street, without echo, to emptiness. Nobody answered.
I took a final look around, then walked home scanning the street.
Back inside, I turned on the local news. WJZ in Baltimore. The anchors were talking about tomorrow's weather and the heat index, followed by a story about the recent I-83 lane closures. Nothing about Westerly. Nothing about people disappearing.
I switched to another local station, WMAR, and found more of the same. The radio wasn't any different. Classic rock was playing on 100.7 FM, The Bay, and between songs the DJ talked about the upcoming music festival at the Inner Harbor this weekend.
The rest of the world seemed perfectly fine. Apparently, it was just Westerly. Or me.
I sat there a few minutes trying to decide what to do next. Calling the police seemed like the obvious thing to do, except my phone wasn't making calls. I tried 911 anyway. Nothing. No connection, then a silent disconnect. I decided to walk to the police station. On my way, though, I wanted to see if the rest of Westerly was as empty as my street.
I looked at my camera on the coffee table. I grabbed it and made sure it had a memory card and a charged battery.
I'm not entirely sure why I felt I needed to take my camera. Maybe I wanted proof of whatever I was about to find. Maybe carrying a camera gave me comfort.
Maybe, ha. No, having my camera always gives me comfort. I am a photographer, not just some hipster with a smartphone. If something was really going on in Westerly, I was going to document it.
Camera in hand, I stepped outside and closed the door behind me.
The silence, and now stillness, seemed even more complete. There was no wind, not even a slight breeze. The leaves on the trees were motionless. Even the American flag hanging from the house across the street hung straight down from its pole. I couldn't hear any insects. No traffic noise from Main Street or the humming of air conditioners.
What got me the most was Mark and Susan's damn dog, Mr. Bean. That dog barks every time I open or close a door. He barks every time a person walks down the sidewalk. Every time he eyes Chunker's, the neighborhood alley cat, patrolling the back alley, nothing but a loud and frantic ruckus. Now, only silence and stillness.
I started toward downtown. My footsteps sounded strangely loud against the pavement, and after a few blocks I became aware of my own breathing. My sounds were the only sounds in Westerly now. My shoes against the sidewalk. My breath. My heart thumping inside my chest.
The town didn't look abandoned. That would have made more sense. The lawns were cut and tidy. Trash cans sat in front of a few houses waiting for morning pickup. Cars were parked along the street. Porch lights were on. I knocked on a few doors and rang some doorbells. Nothing.
Everything looked as if the people who lived here were home. They just weren't there. Emptiness and silence were the new residences.
I passed Henderson's Market on the way downtown. The closed sign was in the window, which was normal at that hour. An old pickup was parked along the side of the building. Shopping carts were lined up behind the glass, and a display of bottled water stood near the registers. Nothing looked disturbed.
What did I expect to find? Broken windows? Abandoned cars in the middle of the road? Some sign that everyone had suddenly run from Westerly? There was none of that.
By the time I reached downtown, I had stopped calling out to see if anyone would answer. Streetlights illuminated the sidewalks, and traffic signals continued changing from green to yellow to red for cars that never came. Storefronts were dark. A few lights had been left on inside restaurants and offices. Cars sat parked along Main Street as though their owners would be back in the morning.
I stopped beside Cooper's Garage. Two parking meters stood along the sidewalk in front of the building, still waiting for someone to park and feed them a few coins. The scene seemed so "street" and ordinary. I thought, this would make a good photo.
Photo? I had completely forgotten about my camera. With everything going on, I hadn't even snapped one photo. Some photographer. I laughed and relaxed a bit. I raised the camera and took the shot.
Wow! That shutter click was incredibly loud. I waited for a moment, almost expecting the noise to cause something to happen. I looked around. Nothing.
A few blocks farther on, I noticed a car sitting alone beneath a streetlight. I'd seen it parked around town before, although I had no idea who owned it. There was nothing unusual about the car. The doors were closed. The lights were off. It was simply parked where someone had left it. I raised the camera and took another shot. This time the shutter click did not catch me off guard.
Normally, walking around downtown this late with a camera eventually attracts someone's attention. Officer Sullivan might roll down the window of his police cruiser and ask what I was photographing. Someone leaving Maggie's Pub might suspiciously watch me for a moment. A person walking a dog might wonder why I was standing in the dark taking pictures of a parked car. I might even be asked to take a photo of a couple out on a date.
Tonight, there was no one. A Westerly full house of empty streets and silence.
I kept moving toward the police station, although I was no longer in much of a hurry to get there. This walk into town proved that all of Westerly was a ghost town.
I looked behind buildings and through windows. I crossed empty parking lots and wandered down a few back alley shortcuts I have taken hundreds of times without much thought. I checked the little park and Vietnam War Memorial beside the courthouse. I looked through the windows of the laundromat on Pennsylvania Avenue. The fluorescent lights were on inside. A load of clothes sat motionless in one of the dryers.
I stood there staring at it for a moment. Someone had put those clothes in the machine. Where were they?
As I walked, I kept taking photographs. Empty streets. Empty parking lots. Light falling across brick walls and pavement. Places I knew well but somehow, now, no longer looked familiar. Each click of the shutter briefly broke the silence before Westerly swallowed the sound again.
After a while, I realized I wasn't only looking for people anymore. I would have settled for movement of any kind. A cat crossing the street. A moth circling a light. A piece of paper blowing across the pavement. Anything that suggested I wasn't the only living thing moving through town.
There was nothing.
I stopped near a wooden gate and looked into a brightly illuminated parking area beyond it. During the day, delivery trucks came and went through there. Employees from the surrounding businesses used it as a shortcut to Main Street. Tonight, the lights illuminated nothing but pavement and the surrounding buildings. I took another photograph.
For the first time, I wondered whether making that much noise was a good idea. The thought didn't make sense. I had spent more than an hour in the streets looking for another person. There was no reason to suddenly worry that someone might hear me. I moved on.
Without realizing it, I had begun staying close to the buildings instead of walking down the middle of the sidewalk or street. There was nothing in the open spaces to avoid and nothing in the shadows that I had seen. Yet, somewhere during the walk, curiosity had begun giving way to something else. I wasn't frightened exactly. At least that was what I kept telling myself.
The alley behind Maggie's was probably where I finally accepted that I wasn't dreaming. I'd walked through it dozens of times. During the day, it was nothing more than a shortcut between Main Street and the municipal parking lot.
Tonight, pipes and electrical conduit ran like dark lines across the old brick walls. Exterior lights illuminated doors, cracked pavement, and the narrow passage ahead. At the far end, part of a parked car caught the light.
I stood at the entrance for a while before walking in.
My footsteps sounded different inside the alley. Instead of disappearing into the silence, each step bounced between the brick walls, following me through the narrow passage. After walking through a town that seemed to swallow every sound, the echo of my passing was almost reassuring. Almost.
Halfway through, I felt uneasy and stopped. I looked behind me. Nothing.
I raised the camera and took another photo. The shutter clicked. The sound echoed against the walls and then faded back into silence.
I lowered the camera and looked at my watch. I had been walking for more than an hour. I had no idea it had been that long. It was now close to 2:00 a.m.
If I was dreaming, surely, it had been long enough for the dream to change? Or, long enough for it to end? I asked the questions out loud. Like the town, though, all I got back as an answer was silence. Nothing changed. No cars driving past. No door opening. No light in a window turning on or off. No person walking around the corner or down the street. No waking up on the sofa back home.
I had almost reached the police station, but I stopped walking. I wasn't sure what I expected to find there anymore. A locked building? Patrol cars sitting outside with no one to drive them? Finding the station empty would only confirm what I already knew.
Westerly was empty.
I had questions. How far did this extend? Was it only Westerly? What about the next town? The county? If I got in my car and drove toward Baltimore, at what point would I find other people? If the rest of the world really was continuing normally, why didn't anyone seem to know that Westerly was empty?
I decided to go home, get my car, and find out. I walked another block when my phone began to chime and vibrate in my pocket. I stopped. Froze, actually, with a touch of fright.
During the entire walk, almost every sound I heard had been made by me. My footsteps. My breathing. My voice. The shutter of my camera. Now my phone had broken the silence and stillness.
I pulled the phone from my pocket. There was a text message on the screen. It read, "Answer the phone."
The number wasn't in my contacts.
For several seconds I simply stared at the message. Earlier that evening, a text message would have meant nothing. Now, it meant that someone, somewhere, knew how to reach me. More importantly, it meant that I wasn't completely alone.
The phone rang. Same number. I answered and slowly raised the phone to my ear.
"We see you. We wondered when you would notice. Your photos are lovely."
___
Technical Notes:
All images for this fictional piece were captured on a hot summer evening in Westminster, Maryland, using a Canon mirrorless camera and Canon EF 28mm f/2.8 IS USM lens. The aperture was set to f/2.8 with an ISO of 3200. The photographs were processed and converted to black and white in Lightroom, enhancing their tonal richness and texture. Frame ratios are 4:3.
