Recesses of the Mind — The Tell-Tale Heart, retold by a vampire

True — anxious — very, very horribly anxious I had been and still am; but why will you say that I'm losing it? Being grounded sharpened my hearing — it didn't break it, didn't dull it. Above everything, my hearing got sharp. I could hear every floorboard in the house. I could hear the fridge breathing downstairs. I could hear things three rooms away. So how, then, am I crazy? Just listen. Watch how calmly — how normally — I can tell you the whole thing.

It's impossible to say how the idea got in. But once it was there, it lived there. Day and night. There wasn't a reason. There wasn't even a fight. I love my parents. They'd never done anything to me. They just said — no phone until your grades come up — and the phone was already mine, paid for, sitting warm in my hand, and I could not, would not, give it up.

So by degrees — very gradually — I made up my mind to tell them I had lost it. Keep it forever. Be free of their rules. The night before, I scuffed it once on the driveway so it would look dropped. Cleared my search history. Deleted the Find My app. And in the morning I came downstairs with my face arranged into the perfect amount of panic — not too much — and I said it was gone, said I'd looked everywhere, said maybe it fell out of my pocket at the bus stop. My voice didn't shake. My mom hugged me. Would a crazy person have gotten the hug?

For a week it was perfect. I kept the phone on silent, hidden inside the slit I'd cut in my mattress, and at night I'd slide my hand in and feel it there in the dark — my secret, my own. So you see, they would've had to be very, very paranoid to suspect that every night, after they were asleep, I lay there with the screen glowing under the blanket — that one pale rectangle of light staring up at me like an eye.

On the eighth night I was more careful than ever. And that was the night it rang. Not out loud. Understand me — the phone was on silent. I had checked. I had triple-checked. But I heard it ring — a low, clear, electronic ring, rising up out of the mattress, into the room, into my skull — and I lay still and told myself it was the wind, it was the pipes, it was a cricket, it was nothing. But it rang again. And I knew, the way you know in the bottom of your stomach, that it was ringing for me, and that no one else in the house could hear it at all.

So I gave it to them. The next morning, hands shaking. And I watched my dad lock it in the drawer of his desk two whole floors away from my bed. There, I thought. Now it's gone. Now it's quiet. It was not quiet. That night it rang from the drawer. Through the carpet and the joists and the walls — I heard it, clear as if it were on my pillow. I pulled the blanket over my head. I jammed my fingers in my ears. The ringing came through my fingers, low and dull and quick, the way a phone sounds when it's buzzing against wood — on and on and on — and my parents slept, slept like the dead, while I lay there sweating and the ring climbed higher and louder, do you understand me — louder every single second.

And then, in the morning, it was back. Back in the slit in my mattress. I swear to you I had not gone downstairs. I had not touched the drawer. But there it was — warm, waiting — and when I picked it up the screen lit by itself and showed me my own reflection in the black glass, and I understood that it would always find its way back to me. The notifications came one after another, soft little chimes — you lied, you lied, you lied — and the read receipts under my own guilt turned blue, blue, Read, like it had seen everything I'd done.

I gave it back four more times. The drawer. The kitchen trash. The neighbour's recycling bin. The bottom of the lake at the park, where I threw it as far as I could and watched the ripples close over it like a mouth. Every single morning it came home. Every single night it rang — louder, louder — until I could not eat, could not sleep, could not sit at the dinner table without my hands twitching toward my ears.

My parents started watching me. What's wrong, they kept asking, soft and worried — and I would smile and say nothing, I'm fine, I'm great — but the ringing rose up under the table, under the very floor, that low dull quick sound like a watch wrapped in cotton — and it got louder, and they didn't react, they just kept eating, kept asking, kept smiling those calm hypocritical smiles — and I thought: they hear it. They have to hear it. They're pretending. They know what I did and they're toying with me.

I couldn't take it. The ringing filled the whole house, the whole world, it was inside my teeth — and I shoved back from the table so hard my chair fell, and I screamed: — STOP IT — stop pretending — I lied, okay? I lied. I never lost it. It's in my mattress. It's been in my mattress this whole time. Can't you hear it? IT'S RINGING — it's right there — it won't STOP RINGING —