The Follower by Kate Doughty (ebook reader with built in dictionary TXT) 📕

first to speak. “Alex Grable? Absolutely no way.”

“Are you sure?” Bella asks.

“I mean, well, no,” Rudy admits. “That’s why I brought it up here, I wanted to get your takes on it. It’s, uh, hard to explain.”

“Well, what’s on the tape?” Amber asks.

“It’s better if you just listen,” Rudy says.

“Well, you can’t just say that and not play it,” Bella says. “Come on.”

Of the four girls, Rudy can see that Jada looks the most uncomfortable, with Cecily a close second. Amber looks a little apprehensive, and Bella looks positively excited.

Amber takes a seat on the floor next to Rudy and motions for Jada to sit next to her. The other two girls join them in a circle.

Rudy places the tape recorder in the middle of the floor, along with a bottle of vodka he’d swiped from his parents’ stash. “I’m warning you, though, it’s super weird. Kind of disturbing. So, I also brought drinks.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t . . . ,” Jada whispers.

“Well, I definitely want to,” Bella says.

Rudy looks to his sisters. Amber gives him a nod, but Cecily . . . she’s clearly freaked out already. “I think you need to hear this,” he tells her.

Cecily takes a deep breath. “All right,” she says with a nod.

Jada scoots a little closer to Amber. Amber grabs her hand. Rudy cringes. He hates that he’s about to ruin his sister’s date, but this . . . can’t wait.

“Yeah,” Bella says, leaning forward. “Let’s hear it.”

Rudy turns the recorder on and puts the tape in. The room goes quiet. In the recorder, the tape makes an empty clicking noise. He feels himself tense, waiting for what he knows is about to come.

“It’s broken,” Cecily says, and it sounds like she’s trying not to sigh with relief. “Maybe we should—”

“That’s the first part,” Rudy says, shaking his head. “Some of it was really damaged from being tangled; I couldn’t get much of it to work. Only a few words, here and there. The end is clearer, though. Listen.”

Segments of syllables start to emerge. He watches Cecily and Amber freeze up as they listen.

Click. Click. “Gra—” Click. Click. “Com—” Click. Click. “Following—” Click. Click.

“It gets better from here on out,” Rudy says, as the tape descends back into wordless clicking.

Then, as Rudy knew it would, the clicking stops. But what follows is not the kind of silence that’s devoid of any noise. It’s the silence that comes with a room—birds chirping, AC humming. When he was listening to the tape in his room, Rudy hadn’t thought much about where the silence was from, but now that he’s up here, Rudy realizes that it is the silence that comes from this room. The turret.

And then the noise starts. The sound of something . . . moving. Something grinding.

Rudy braces himself for the words.

When they come, Bella yelps. He understands; he hadn’t expected to hear the voice that came out of the tape, either. It’s a small voice, the voice of a young girl, and it’s singing, ever so softly, as if someone had recorded themselves singing under their breath. The song is a nonsense rhyme, probably a nursey rhyme—but unlike any rhyme he has ever heard before.

Once there was a shooting star,

That shot across the sky

But I don’t want to see it there;

So that star had to die.

When Rudy had first heard this in the darkness of his room, he had immediately froze. The voice seemed so . . . young. Too innocent to be the voice of a murderer. But it had to be Alex Grable, didn’t it?

The song breaks off into dissonant humming, keeping the soft, lilting melody. There are soft noises in the background, as if someone is singing while doing housework, or preparing something.

The singer starts to mumble more words, but he can’t catch them, only snippets:

One floor, two floor, three floor, four—

[ . . . ] listening at the door—

And Rudy realizes something that he missed before. The singer isn’t being obstructed by background noise; she’s trying to make up another verse, recording her ideas. She stumbles around the rhyme scheme for a few more moments of muffled clutter before continuing on in a clearer voice, as if she’s finally settled on the right verse:

Once there was a shooting star

But she won’t be here for long—

Too bad, so sad, no mom, not mad,

Flying and falling and gone.

There are a few more seconds of dissonant humming, and then a click as the blank tape turns over and flips to silence.

“There’s more,” Rudy says.

Silence.

Click.

Clatter.

The tape hums with the sound of the turret once more. Then, the sound of footsteps, rushed, frantic. Silence. And, over the silence, a panicked keening. Someone is breathing, hard and erratic.

Then, a word: “Mom?”

Rudy closes his eyes and braces himself. This is the worst part, the one that he knows will keep him awake late into the night. The tape begins to play scattered noises of someone stepping, slowly at first, then quickly. Something slams into something else, and then there’s a louder scuffle, the sound of something or someone heavy losing their balance—and then silence. At first, he’d thought that this was where Alex jumped, where Alex fell, but that can’t be true, because the girl’s voice starts again. It’s not a rhyme this time, just one phrase repeated:

Flying and falling and gone. Flying and falling

and gone. Falling and gone, falling and gone,

falling and gone, falling and—

Then, an uneven noise, like feet scuffling across the floor, like the sound of someone falling.

Then silence.

Rudy turns the recording off. “That’s it,” he says. None of the girls answer. They’re still staring at the tape, shell-shocked. Rudy can’t blame them; that’s exactly how he’d reacted when he heard it. He coughs. “Uh, at least, that’s what I’ve been able to salvage so far, between detangling the tape and the deterioration and the mold and stuff.”

Still, no one answers. He reaches for the fifth of vodka. Mr. Cole won’t miss it; as part of his gambling reformation he’s also majorly cut back on drinking. “I thought we might need