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. Porch lights were on at several houses. Cars sat parked on the street. Nothing looked unusual, but 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 walked to the kitchen for a glass of water. Looking out the window, I noticed the leaves on the Japanese maple were perfectly still. No breeze.
I 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.
I checked the Internet. All seemed fine. Local news sites had stories posted while I had been sleeping, including a couple from minutes ago. Facebook loaded normally. A college friend had 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 p.m.
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. An upstairs light was on. I knocked, rang the bell, and waited. Nothing.
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 this late. There were fewer reasonable explanations for two houses in a row not answering when the lights were on and the cars were home.
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.
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.
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.
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 stillness seemed even more complete. The leaves on the trees were motionless. Even the American flag hanging from the house across the street hung straight down from its pole.
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 shoes against the sidewalk. My breath. My heart thumping inside my chest.
The town didn't look abandoned. 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. Everything looked as if the people who lived here were home. They just weren't there.
I passed Henderson's Market on the way downtown. The closed sign was in the window, and an old pickup was parked along the side of the building. Nothing looked disturbed.
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.
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. 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. Tonight, there was no one.
I kept moving toward the police station. 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.
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. 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. 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? Nothing had changed.
I had almost reached the police station, but I stopped walking. I wasn't sure what I expected to find there anymore. Finding the station empty would only confirm what I already knew.
Westerly was empty.
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.
