The Copper Wires

I was the fourth of nine children, the youngest boy, and in our house, the boys were packed into a single attic room like sardines. The ceiling sloped so low that my older brother, Elias, had to duck when he stood up, and the window was a single, warped pane that let in a view of dead elms and the gravel drive. The room was barely big enough for three cots, a dresser, and a desk with a cracked laminate top that my father had rescued from a demolition site. We lived in a town that was nothing more than a crossroads, a place where the highway forgot to continue, and the only entertainment was the sound of wind through the abandoned grain elevator.

Elias was the first to notice it. He started coming home late, after the bars closed and the streetlights buzzed, and he’d sit on his cot, staring at the dark window, his eyes wide. He said he heard things on the drive home, a sound like something dragging itself along the asphalt, but when he stopped the car, there was nothing. He started taking the long way home, through the back roads where the trees pressed in, and he swore he could feel something breathing behind him, even when the seat was empty. We thought he was just stressed, working double shifts at the cannery and dealing with a breakup.

Then our grandmother, who we all called Nana, because she was the only one who knew about such things, came to visit. She was a tiny woman with a face like a dried apple, and she wore a shawl that smelled of tobacco and mothballs. She took one look at Elias and said, ‘You’ve brought something home with you, boy. It’s riding on your back, and it’s hungry.’ She did a ritual with sage and a jar of honey, and she said it was a thing that had attached itself to his car, something that had been waiting on the side of the road, looking for a ride. She chased it out of him, but she warned that it might not have left entirely.

A week later, I started hearing it. It wasn’t a sound that came from the house, but from inside my own skin. It was a high-pitched hum, like a mosquito that never landed, and it would get louder at night, when the lights were out. I’d lie in my cot, watching the ceiling, and the hum would become a voice, a thin, reedy whisper that said my name over and over, but in a way that made it sound wrong, like it was learning the word and didn’t like the taste. My twin brother, Micah, heard it too, but he said it was more like a scratching, a noise of nails on wood. We started taking turns keeping watch, but the thing was patient.

Then the nights got worse. Elias would wake up screaming, clawing at his chest, saying something was pressing down on him, suffocating him. Micah would wake up with red marks on his ankles, like fingers had grabbed him. I was the one who felt it the most, though. I began to see it in the corner of my eye, always just out of sight, a shape that was too large to be human, but too thin to be any animal. It would stand at the foot of my bed, a black silhouette that absorbed the light, and I’d feel a chill that went straight to my bones. The worst part was that it didn’t move; it just watched.

One night, about three months in, I woke up to a sound that was different. It was a metallic clang, low and heavy, and it came from the support beam under my bed. The beam was a thick iron pipe that ran the length of the bed, and something was hitting it, hard, so that the whole cot shook. I froze, my heart thumping, and I could hear the sound echoing in the silence. Then it stopped. I held my breath, listening, and I heard it again, but this time it was coming from the desk by the window. It was a scratching, a sound of something sharp on the laminate surface, and it was moving closer, down the wall, toward my head.

I wanted to scream, but my voice was trapped in my throat. I squeezed my eyes shut, and I felt a wet breath on my face, smelling like copper and rot, and I heard a voice, not in my ears, but inside my skull. It said, ‘You have something of mine.’ And I knew, with a certainty that had no reason, that it was talking about a piece of copper wire I had found days earlier, a piece of copper wire that had been lying on the side of the road, shiny and new, and I had picked it up and put it in my pocket. I had forgotten about it until now. I reached into my pocket, and there it was, cold against my fingers. I threw it across the room, and I heard it skitter across the floor.

There was a moment of silence, and then I felt a pressure lift, like someone had taken a weight off my chest. I opened my eyes, and the room was empty. The scratching was gone, the humming was gone, and the air was still. I didn’t see the copper wire again, but I knew where it went. In the morning, when I told Nana, she nodded, her old eyes knowing. ‘It was a piece of it,’ she said. ‘It leaves pieces of itself behind, to anchor itself to this world. You gave it back, and it went away, but it will find another ride.’

That was the end of it for us, but I never forgot the sound of that clang, and the feel of that breath. I still have a piece of copper wire in my pocket, a new one that I found at the hardware store, and I keep it there to remind me that some things are best left where they lie. But sometimes, on quiet nights, I think I can hear a faint tapping, coming from the support beam of my bed, and I know that it’s not over. It’s just waiting for me to drop my guard.