The Terminal Gong

The first time I heard it, I was four, tucked into a narrow bed in a rented cottage that smelled of salt and old wood. My brother, Elias, slept across the room, his breath a soft whistle. The sound came through the wall—a low, rhythmic thumping, like a giant’s heartbeat. I pressed my ear to the cold plaster and felt it vibrate. It wasn’t loud, but it was there, steady as a metronome. I called it the ‘banging,’ and it only came at night, when the house settled into darkness. I never told Mom or Dad. They would have said it was the pipes or the sea, but I knew better. This sound followed me.

We moved from that cottage to our own house in the suburbs, a split-level with a rec room we never used. The first night there, I lay awake, waiting. And at 2:47 AM, the banging began again, muffled, as if from inside the walls. It was worse now. It seemed to be coming from the ceiling above my closet. Elias slept through it, too. I would crawl into his bed, my heart thudding, and he would grunt and turn over, never waking. The banging went on, night after night, and I learned to time it, to count the beats: seventeen, then a pause, then seventeen again. It was a pattern, almost like a code.

When I was six, we took a trip to a relative’s cabin by a lake. I was hopeful, thinking that maybe, just maybe, it would stop. But the first night in that log-walled room, the banging started again, this time from the floorboards, as if something was underneath the house. I lay frozen, staring at the dark shapes of my cousins’ sleeping bags. I felt the urge to run to my parents, but I was old enough now to know that the sound was attached to me, not to any place. It was a leech. And that night, I did the unthinkable. I got up and followed it.

I padded down the hallway, the wood cool under my bare feet. The banging grew louder as I neared the front door, which was slightly ajar, swinging in the breeze. I pushed it open and stepped onto the porch. The lake was a silver sheet under the moon, and the banging was coming from the boathouse at the end of a rickety dock. I walked, my legs trembling, my nightgown billowing. The boathouse door was open. Inside, in the dim light, I saw a figure: a tall, thin man with no face, just a smooth, skin-colored void where his face should be. He held a mallet, and he was striking a massive, iron gong that hung from the rafters. Each strike sent a wave of air that made my hair stand on end. He stopped when he saw me. He tilted his head, and I saw that the gong was not metal, but a shimmering, translucent substance, like a frozen scream.

He spoke, and his voice came from everywhere, not his mouth, because he had no mouth. He said, ‘You hear it now, but you will forget. You will forget until you are ready.’ He raised the mallet again, and I felt the sound not just in my ears, but in my bones, in my teeth. And then everything went black.

I woke up in my bed in the cabin, the morning light streaming in. My mother leaned over me, concerned. ‘You had a nightmare,’ she said. But I knew it wasn’t a nightmare. I looked at my hands. They were clean, but I could still feel the vibration of the gong. I never heard the banging again after that. But I never forgot the face, or the voice. I grew up, went to college, became a psychologist. I told myself it was a childhood illusion, a product of a vivid imagination. But every night, just before sleep, I would listen. And there was silence.

Last month, I turned thirty. I was going through old boxes in my childhood home, which I had inherited. I found a diary I had kept when I was nine. In it, I had written about the banging, and I had drawn a picture: a faceless man with a mallet, and a gong. I wrote a single sentence: ‘He said I would forget until I was ready.’

That night, I lay in my old bed, in that same room. At 2:47 AM, the banging started again. It was louder now, more insistent. I got up, walked to the closet, and opened the door. The back wall of the closet was gone, replaced by a dark corridor. The banging echoed from its depths. I knew what I had to do. I walked in, and the corridor closed behind me. I found myself in a vast, echoing chamber, and there he was, the faceless man, standing beside the gong. The gong was now covered in strange symbols, and it was pulsing with a dark rhythm. He turned to me, and his voice resonated through my skull. ‘You are ready. Listen.’

He struck the gong, and the sound was not a sound but a torrent of images: every fear I had ever suppressed, every moment of terror I had ever experienced, every secret I had never spoken. The gong was not a thing; it was a repository of fear, and I was its new keeper. The faceless man faded, and I was left alone, the mallet heavy in my hand. The gong hummed, waiting. I knew that I would never leave this place, that I would become the one who strikes the gong for other children who hear the banging in their walls. And I understood, at last, that the sound had not been following me. It had been calling me home.