It Used My Sister's Voice And It Got The Wrong Word

We grew up on the last house before the road turns to gravel, and my sister and I had a whole language of shouted words, because our mother would not buy us phones.

On the night this happened I was seventeen and she was at her boyfriend's, twelve miles away, which I knew, because I had watched her leave and been furious about it.

At about half nine, from the treeline, I heard her voice call my name.

It was her voice. I have thought about this for a decade and I will not soften it: it was her voice, the exact one, including the way she goes up at the end when she is winding me up.

She said my name twice. Then she said, "Come out here."

And that is the sentence that saved me. Because my sister does not say "out here". Nobody in our family says "out here". We say "come out", or "get out here", and she would have said "get out here, you idiot", because that is who she is, and the thing at the treeline did not know that.

I stood at the door with my hand on the handle for what felt like a long time.

Then I shut the door and locked it, which we never did, and I sat with my back against it, and it called my name eleven more times over the next hour or so, and each time it got a bit better at it. That is what I cannot make anyone understand. It was practising.

Around eleven it stopped. At half eleven my sister came home, through the front, in a car, with her boyfriend, laughing about something.

I did not tell her. I have never told her. She is a nurse now and she does not have room in her head for this and I love her too much to put it there.

I have told my mother, once, at a funeral, when we were both drunk. She did not laugh. She said, "That's why your grandmother wouldn't let us answer to our names after dark."

And then she went and got another drink and we never spoke of it again.