Physically, literally. The women in that cult had their vocal chords cut with a special ceremony when they were twelve.
We lived in a remote community up in Northern BC. It was -no, is- a healthy thriving community, with orchards and mines, electricity and a small clinic, and even a tattoo parlour. The Teachers and Doctors had internet. It was beautiful, and very peaceful. Everybody was well looked after, with plenty of wonderful food and an outdoorsy lifestyle.
In fact, I later learned that outsiders often make applications to join the community. Women, even, with their children. Sometimes the applications were successful.
Not me though. I had been desperate to get out ever since the day I was ten, and my Dad told me about the Silencing. Dad was a Teacher.
I had wanted to become a Teacher, like my Dad. I had grown up watching him prepare lesson plans, grade assignments with his thick chunky red pens, discussing course content and pedagogy with his colleagues loudly and passionately. I was enthralled by it all and knew, as indeed my Dad often said, there was nothing more noble and worthwhile than teaching and shaping the mind of the young. No wonder only men in our community were entrusted to be Teachers. How ridiculous and backwards was the outside world with their female teachers -and unSilenced women- always mired in instability and chaos.
No wonder the outside was full of war, violence, debt and poverty. Their women always under the threat of assault. The Teachers played us videos with current dates, clips from the news made by outsiders themselves, showing how they treat their women. No wonder there was always a queue of women desperate to join us, a community free of mistreatment, abuse and assault, with plenty food for everyone, and a small safe home. Being Silenced must be a small price to pay.
I remembered my Mom laughing until the tears ran down her face when I had first told her about wanting to become like Teacher “Just like Daddy”. Then she had gathered me in her arms and sobbed as if her heart had broken.
Dad told about the Silencing a short while after that. He was a great Teacher, and I understood why it was necessary. Dad had explained it all carefully: the history, the benefits to community , the evolution from a symbolic tattoo along the throat, to an actual, painless clinical procedure which disabled the vocal chords permanently. I was so lucky I had a Teacher Dad who took the time to explain things so beautifully and clearly to me. Other girls would usually just get a notice from the clinic with the date and time of their Silencing appointment. However, as Dad said, it was very important that it was taught correctly, with proper context, otherwise it wouldn’t be understood properly. That’s why Teaching was such an important job.
Having a Teacher Dad had other benefits too. He had thrown me a Silencing party most girls could only dream of, with amazing food imported from outside, dancing and singing. I had a gorgeous floofy glittery lacy dress, also bought specially from outside for the occasion, and all my friends had been so jealous as I shimmered through the day. I still remember that dress.
But now it was over, and everyone had gone home. My Silencing appointment was tomorrow.
I lay in the dark, unable to ignore the knot of fear that had been tightening in me all day- well, all my life really, since the day Dad told me about the Silencing.
As I lay there, thinking about the procedure tomorrow which would permanently disable my vocal chords and silence me forever, the waves of fear breaking over me grew stronger. There was a light tap at my bedroom door. I raised my head, and called softly "Yes?" The door opened and my Mom glided quietly in. She was also dressed for bed, and despite the dark, the tattoo along her neck and throat was plainly visible. She had just chosen a plain line, as I would. Many Silenced women choose elaborate designs for the neck tattoo they received after their Silencing, but I wanted the same plain line across my neck as Mom had.
She reached out for my hand. I whispered "Mom I'm scared".
She started typing on her pad, which was always with her. "Please don't be scared Eliza. It's over so soon. And it doesn't hurt one bit- just the tattoo afterwards, a little bit".
I read the glowing words. Then I said, "Mom, I don't want to, I don't want to lose my voice."
She looked so sad as she typed furiously. "Eliza, your Dad has explained why it's like this here. You've studied examples of societies which don't have Silencing - you know how terrible and miserable they are. We are such a peaceful, orderly society since we started Silencing women. You know that!"
Dad yelled loudly "Louisa? Are you coming to bed?" Mom bent down for one last hurried kiss, and then left my room. I was alone with my fears again.
I couldn't help thinking about the outside. Where women jabbered, chattered, gossiped, wheedled, manipulated men and told stories and yammered and protested and wanted this and that and the other. Dad said it was a disgrace, and one day, maybe they would see the error of their ways and become like our community.
But all these thoughts couldn't stop my fear for tomorrow and my Silencing.
Dark hours passed, as I started at the ceiling. I still remember those hours, heavy like glue, silent.
It must have been 2am when I heard a faint tap tap at my window. I sat up, putting aside my childish fears and opened the curtain. An adult woman was behind the glass, smiling at me. Her neck tattoo was clearly visible in the moonlight, a beautiful design of roses and thorns.
I didn't care about safety- my dread for tomorrow had desensitized me. I threw open the window. "Who are you?"
The woman opened her mouth and spoke, quietly, but still spoke, her voice coming from her lips. "Hello Eliza. Will you come away with me?"
I had never seen a woman of that age, with a neck tattoo, who could talk. My jaw dropped. "Wha...?"
She started speaking rapidly. "Eliza, I know how you feel. We can take you away, outside. I can't explain much now, but if you want to, you have to come away with me now. It will be a hard life- but you won't lose your voice, at least, not today you won't."
I was silent for a bit. I felt the dreadful fear of the last few years shifting a bit, giving way to a new emotion- hope? excitement? I looked at the aged face of this talking woman with the tattooed roses on her throat, and nodded dumbly.
She smiled at me. "Excellent. Follow me. No- you don't need anything, we have everything you will need- a car is waiting. Not even shoes. Just move fast."
My heart beating fast, I followed my new friend, and climbed out of the window.
She drove me for hours through the mountains , through winding back roads I never knew existed. She told me how my Mom had sent them a forbidden message to come get me. I knew I would never see my Mom and Dad again.
Sometimes little bits of news filter through connections. The community thrives. Life outside is hard. But I can speak.
I learned about the house on the drive back from the hospital. Considering that I was weak and half-delirious with fever, it seemed an odd time to tell me about my birth parents' final gift–but my grandparents were insistent. Maybe they figured that after such a close brush with death, there wasn't any time left to waste: I needed to know.
My paternal grandparents had raised me, and they were the first people I called when I began feeling sick. The fever lasted for days, followed by tremors and hellish, paralyzing night terrors. The doctors' tests were inconclusive, but after a while, my temperature finally began to drop on its own. It had been a close thing, and when I heard my grandparents’ news, it was hard to believe that I wasn’t still asleep and dreaming. According to them, I had inherited a house!
"We wanted to wait until the time was right," my grandparents explained, "and now, we think it would be the perfect place for you to rest and recover your strength." Tired as I felt, I agreed with them: I didn't want to wait another minute. Fortunately, the house I'd inherited was just an hour away from the town where I'd grown up. At the end of a long gravel driveway, my grandparents' station wagon ground to a halt in front of a wrought iron gate. My breath caught in my throat. This wasn't a house: it was a mansion!
A tanned, pudgy man in work attire ushered us through the gate with a wave of his hat. My grandparents rolled down their window, talking to him like an old friend. His name was Paolo, and he was the caretaker of the estate I’d inherited. With a short bow, he invited me inside. My grandparents said their goodbyes, assuring me that they would be back to pick me up as soon as I felt better. The plume of dust that their car raised as it disappeared down the gravel road felt as unreal as everything else around me, and I pinched myself as Paolo led the way across the perfectly-mowed green lawn.
Paolo warned me not to get my hopes up. The house itself had been in my mother's family for generations, but for tax reasons, it was owned by a private trust. The place badly needed updating, but the trust prohibited all but the most superficial of renovations. Paolo's complaints and chatter faded into background noise as I walked through the double doors and took the place in: ornate wood-paneled walls, mosaic floors, stained-glass flowers in the custom-built windows…
I didn’t understand. I’d always believed that my birth parents simply hadn’t had the resources to raise me, but this place was clearly worth a fortune. Noticing my confusion, Paolo explained that a 19th-century millionaire had built the place for my great-grandfather Alexander as a way of funding his research. Apparently, my great-grandfather on my mother’s side had been a sort of later-age renaissance man: he’d owned almost nothing and lived on the patronage of the wealthy. Paolo’s own great-grandfather, an illiterate Italian farmer, had been hired as a caretaker just two days after passing through Ellis Island, making the house as much a part of his family history as it was mine.
I was winded by the time we arrived at the master suite; my sickness had taken more out of me than I’d thought. Seeing stars, I sat down on a real feather bed and looked out the window over the rolling hills, golden in the late afternoon sun. Smiling at my disbelief, Paolo reminded me that he would be in the caretaker’s cabin if I needed anything. The house was well-provisioned, but if I had any requests for food and drink, he could pick it up when he went into town. Almost as an afterthought, he added that I should ignore any odd sounds that I might notice after dark. These old houses tended to creak and groan as they settled into their foundations, Paolo explained, and rats sometimes invaded the attic. In any case, it was best just to stay in bed if I heard anything.
After Paolo left, I kicked off my shoes, stretched out, and stared up at the canopy of the four-poster bed. My mind buzzed with unanswered questions, but my body was utterly spent. Even though there were still hours left before nightfall, I sank into a deep and dreamless sleep.
When I woke, the room was dark. I reached for a lightswitch–nothing. Apparently “electricity” was one of the updates that the house so badly needed. The daylight coming through the windows had been so bright before that I hadn’t noticed it, but now…
I felt my way through the gloom to the bathroom: the house did have indoor plumbing, even though the toilet still flushed with an old-fashioned pull-chain. I was just about to head back to bed when I heard footsteps in the hallway. My blood ran cold: this was no scurrying raccoon or creaking foundation! I pressed my ear to the door. The sound was soft, as though whoever was out there was barefoot–and trying to keep quiet.
The closest thing to a weapon at hand was a plunger. I grabbed it and flung open the door: the hallway was empty. I stood in the dark for a long while, listening, but heard no sound apart from the rustling leaves of the trees outside. On my way back to bed, I noticed another strange feature of the house: none of the doors had locks, or any other way to secure them shut. Despite their elaborate design, they were no different from the free-swinging doors of a hospital. I climbed nervously back into bed, unsure what my new discovery might mean.
When I saw the room by the light of dawn a few hours later, I felt like a fool: it was true that there was no electricity in the house, but Paolo had left a battery-powered lantern right on my nightstand. Then, when I stumbled out into the hallway, I noticed the gentle tick of the grandfather clock downstairs: it seemed perfectly reasonable that my fever-addled brain had mistaken its echo for footsteps the night before. Laughing to myself, I prepared myself some coffee and apple oatmeal in the well-stocked kitchen and set out to explore the house.
My great-grandfather’s patron had been generous: there was a library, a conservatory, and a vast, empty room that might have once been some kind of laboratory. The books lining the shelves were a testament to his varied interests: they ranged from Slavic folklore to advanced surgical techniques, and everything in between. It was, however, difficult to discover exactly what Alexander had been doing for his fabulously wealthy patron. Paolo’s answer of “all sorts of things” wasn’t exactly helpful, and the more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed that I’d never heard of my great-grandfather or his research. Still, I hadn’t come to my family home to exhaust myself with doubts: I was there to recover from my illness–and despite its mysteries, the estate seemed the perfect place to do so.
Disconnecting from the digital world did me good, as did the fresh air and solitude. My grandparents had dropped off two suitcases of my clothes and personal belongings, while Paolo made sure that the kitchen was well-stocked with anything I happened to crave. Even so, I found myself eating and drinking less, instead spending more time walking, reading in the library, and investigating the strange old house that was my heritage. During the day, I felt like I was making progress; the nights, however, were a different story.
Although it was probably nothing, I couldn’t stop thinking about the “footsteps” that I’d heard during my first night at the estate. The lack of lighting in the ornate, high-ceiling rooms bothered me, as did the fact that there was no way to lock any of the interior doors. The weirdly-stretched shadows cast by my battery-powered lantern reminded me too much of the night terrors that had accompanied my fever. In the worst of them, an emaciated woman in a white nightgown with hollow eyes and a distended jaw that hung down to her chest had pursued me through darkened corridors–corridors that didn’t seem very different from those of the estate. Maybe it was superstition, maybe it was just a gut feeling, but I dragged a heavy armchair in front of my door before I went to bed.
On the third night, a heavy THUMP jarred me out of sleep. I rushed to investigate–then cursed when my big toe collided with the chair I’d placed in front of the door. The chair was undisturbed, so whatever had caused the sound must have come from somewhere else in the house. The adjacent rooms were empty, and below me was only the library…
Lantern in hand, I hurried down the stairs and into the cavernous room. Nothing seemed amiss, but as I ran my hand along the endless rows of musty books, a thought occurred to me: wasn’t it possible that the eccentric millionaire who’d built this place for my great-grandfather had included some equally-eccentric features in its design? A secret passage, for example? It sounded absurd, but when I inspected the shelves more closely, I realized that one stood slightly higher above the floor than the others. The mechanism was simple; built into the side of the bookcase, it was hardly “secret” at all. A gentle tug released the latch and the bookcase swung outward. When I lifted my electric lantern into the darkness on the other side, I realized that it wasn’t a passage at all: it was a room. Roughly the size of a closet, it contained a wingback chair, an oil lamp, and a series of journals ordered by date. Mesmerized, I took one down and began to leaf through it.
It appeared to contain my great-grandfather's notes on some sort of project. Test subject identification numbers. Age. Height. Calories ingested. I noticed that the numbers in the "height" column steadily increased, while those in the "calories ingested" column decreased, in some cases to zero. The subjects who didn't reach "0" were crossed off with an “X.” I wondered if they’d dropped out of the tests early or something.
Hours later, I had gone through four of those weird journals and was still no closer to understanding what my great-grandfather had been trying to do. Some of the pages featured sketches of bizarre machines; others showed dosage charts or occult symbols. I was just about to give up and head back to bed when I noticed the darker-than-dark shadow watching me from the doorway of the hidden room. Whatever it was, it was tall, and just beyond the reach of my tiny lantern’s glow. I could vaguely discern the outline of long stringy hair and an old-fashioned nightgown.
If I held up my light, what else would I see? Sunken eyes? Hungry, distended jaws?
For a long time, neither of us moved–
And then the door slammed shut.
That’s how I learned that at least one room in the house did lock: from the outside.
Hyperventilating, I looked around the tiny space. There was no way out, and I began to suspect that whatever this place’s original purpose had been, it hadn't been used for a study. It had seemed so cozy that I hadn’t noticed the smooth soundproof walls or the drain in the concrete floor. It felt like a place where people had been kept against their will, and now here I was–trapped just as they had been. I pounded on the bookshelf-door, screaming until my throat was hoarse. Soon I was leaning dizzily against the door, wondering why my feet looked blurry. I was going to pass out…
The sight of a pedal on the floor jolted me out of my panic. Of course! Whoever had remodeled the room would have changed the locking mechanism as well! When I leaned my weight against the pedal, the door swung open easily. I tumbled, panting, into the library. I was surprised to see that the sun had come up and that Paolo was leaning against the bannister, shouting my name.
The caretaker claimed to have no knowledge of the hidden room, but he didn't seem very surprised to see me come staggering out of the wall, either. Old houses have a lot of secrets, Paolo shrugged, before asking me if there was anything I wanted from town. I had considered asking him about the tall, tangle-haired figure in the nightdress, but the last thing that I wanted was for him to fear for my sanity. I reminded myself that I'd experienced strangely similar hallucinations during my sickness, and I was still a long way from a complete recovery. Besides, if the gaunt woman had been real, then where had she gone?
I had no appetite for breakfast. Instead, I made several loops around the exterior of the house: trying to create a mental map of its windows, chimneys, and cellars. Just as I’d suspected, many of the rooms were much smaller inside than they should have been: it was like there was a whole separate house in the dead space between the walls!
The strange, sound-proofed room that I'd discovered had been easy enough to access, but there was no clear way into the other spaces between the walls. For a crazy moment I even considered smashing a hole in the plaster, but then I remembered the mysterious trust that managed the estate: if I damaged the property, I was sure to be sued, banned from ever returning…or worse. My head ached; the bright sunlight was starting to get to me. I investigated the cellar, where I didn’t find much more than old gardening equipment…and dozens more of the small, thick-walled rooms, just as empty and mysterious as the one upstairs.
By mid-afternoon, Paolo still hadn’t returned. When he wasn’t back by sundown, I began to feel genuinely concerned–and not only for the kindly old caretaker’s health. Without Paolo’s car and phone, I had no way off of the estate. Still weak from my sickness, just a few loops around the house were enough to wear me out: there was no way I could walk the length of the two-mile driveway that led to the main road. Even worse, Paolo’s absence meant that, for the first time, I’d be truly alone in the house after dark–and who knew what might come creeping out of its walls?
With a deep breath, I sat down on my bed, wondering what I should do. Twilight had descended on the estate, and at first, I didn’t even see the large leather-bound album on the mattress beside me. I hadn’t put it there; in fact, I’d never seen it before in my life. Paolo couldn’t have placed it there, either…
I glanced up, half-expecting to find some horrible, less-than-human thing standing close enough to touch–
But the room was empty.
Running my fingers over the old leather, I wondered what the album was meant to tell me. There was a small black-and-white photo of a family of five in the center of its cover: I clearly recognized my own green eyes, sharp cheeks, and frizzy brown hair in their features. Fascinated, I opened to the first page.
“Although our patron has been most generous in providing test subjects, the gift of immortality is not one to be bestowed casually. Within these pages, I will document my family’s journey into the next phase of human evolution.” – Alexander T.
If the journals had sounded insane, the album’s dedication was even more so–especially considering the first few pages featured nothing more than the same five people going about their daily lives: sharing a meal, reading in the library, and even lined up by height in the main hallway. After the ninth page, however, things began to change. The “meals,” I realized, were being documented because the people in the photo were being fed some kind of chemical: the dosages were listed across from each photo. The library photos were taken with increasingly less illumination–probably to show that, for the people in the photo, light was increasingly unnecessary. Likewise, the “height” images were used to show that the family’s bodies were changing–far more rapidly than should have been normal.
The changes were most obvious in the adults. Their arms and legs became stretched and gaunt, their eyes hollow. Their heads grew larger, and their jaws dropped ever lower toward their chests. In the “meal” photos, I noticed that the quantities of food and drink were becoming less and less. By the fifteenth page, the family wasn’t eating at all. The library photos became nothing more than black, lightless squares–and the hallway height photos were almost too gruesome to look at. The children continued to look normal, which, in a way, was worse. For them, living with these emaciated, inhuman things was normal. I hoped they were costumes. I hoped it was a prank, a joke, anything–
There were no more photos until the children reached young adulthood. Then came another series of charts: height, weight, food consumption, and fever.
In the next photos, a few barely-perceptible changes had already taken place, and more importantly, there were new additions to the family: each of the original children now had a spouse and child of their own. Those three relationships seemed too close to be a coincidence; and a chilling thought occurred to me: had the children been ordered to find partners, to breed the next generation before they themselves began to…change?
The background of the following images was slightly more modern. Bushy facial hair and corsets were out, tuxedos and flapper-dresses were in. Behind those superficial differences, however, was a sinister repeat of the first set of photos. The adults grew ever more monstrous, the children were mostly unchanged, until…
Another set of charts. A third generation had reached adolescence, and by now, the photos were in color. Beneath them, however, were the same measurements: height, weight, food consumption, and fever. This generation, too, had found partners and had children of their own. One of those children was my mother.
I almost didn’t want to turn the page; I already knew what was next. The older generation would warp and change, finally retreating into the “other” side of the house; the younger generation would find partners, reproduce, and then gradually begin to change themselves. My father, it seemed, had hid me from my mother’s family by taking me to my grandparents. He had broken the cycle…hadn’t he?
I thought about the fever, the lack of appetite, the headaches caused by sunlight…
And I started to wonder.
What if my grandparents hadn’t brought me out here to “recover?” What if they’d brought me here because it was already too late? What if I’d been allowed to discover the secret rooms, the photo album, and my great-grandfather’s work–all in order to introduce me to the changes I’d soon be experiencing myself? The footsteps I’d heard and the figures I’d seen were my own family within the walls, coming to check up on me. To see how I was progressing.
I looked down at my fingers. Weren’t they a bit longer and thinner than they'd been that morning?
My heart raced at a sudden creaking sound from the bedroom wall. It was swinging outward! The blackness beyond beckoned. My heritage, my future. An eternity of lightless passages.
“Come to us,” my mother whispered from the darkness. “We’re waiting…”