The 3 a.m. Whistle: A Short Story by Scott Spears

So I didn’t sleep last night and thought writing this short story would be a better use of my time. It’s not like my usual content, but really this is my ninth post so I don’t even have a ‘usual content’ yet. Sorry it’s still not that review I keep promising you. I will get that to you guys eventually. In the meantime, please enjoy.

The following is a true story. 

Except for pretty much everything after tenth sentence.

The Man sat down in his usual spot. Nestled in his corner of the couch, he began to peruse the web that so entertained him. Cruising through thechive.com's early morning posts: daily morning awesomeness and a low, dirty good time. It was late, or early depending on whether you were waiting to sleep or just now welcoming the day. For the Man, it was neither. See he had been working on a television pilot lately and the invigoration of writing at night had left his sleep schedule as tattered remains. As a result he could not – no – must not sleep this night, if he had any hope of ever returning to a sleep schedule in which he could wake up before 2 p.m.

Thus he began his unwitting journey. For every night since the massacre of his sleep schedule he had begun to notice a reoccurring event. At 3 a.m. every night a sound so horrifying, so piercing, so grating that it can hardly be described within the English language as anything other than a whistle. Every night upon this sound assaulting his ears, the Man’s blood would begin to curdle within his veins so that he might serve as some sort of vegetable side dish for the health conscious vampire.  On any and indeed every other night the Man would have ignored this screech. Yet on this night he chose to act upon the sound, for on this night, he suffered from an incurable boredom and was unable to shake the thought “eh, why not?”

The Man’s search began at the apartment acrossed from his, as he was sure he thought the sound may have come from over there. Though not a stranger to the complex, the Man was unfamiliar with this apartment, so he was justly surprised by the horror he found upon his arrival at its front step. Now dear readers, to aptly give you a mental image of the horrors of this dwelling, if it could be described as such, we will need to pause in our hero’s quest. But fret not, for we will return to the Man’s gruesome tale. This hovel, for it is more accurate to describe it thusly than as the apartment it once was, appeared in a state of complete disrepair. Upon the door hung an advertisement posted by The Irvine Company dated three days old. The windows were coated in a thin layer of dirt as if they hadn’t been washed in what may have been as long as a week. The blinds were in shambles; one window even missed a blind. The welcome mat sat askew on the front step, a corner hanging off the edge, and this author can’t help but connect the symbolism of the collapse of this mat to the gradual collapse of the apartment. To the Man it seemed that this apartment could no longer possibly serve as a home, unless the sole inhabitants were insects and rodents of various unusual sizes. And yet, a light burst forth from one of the windows even while our hero was pondering this! Someone was inside the apartment! “Perhaps they knew the source of the whistle, perhaps they were in danger from whatever ghastly villain haunted this place,” the man thought to himself. He reached out his hand to the door. Slowly gripping the knocker attached to the door, his hand, quivering, as if acting of its own volition, lifted the piece of metal which despite its small size seemed to weigh 5 pounds.

He knocked.

He knocked again.

It was at this very moment that the blogger writing this piece finished his waffles and had to rinse off his plate. The door creaked open on hinges that had never been oiled. A chain caught the door inside stopping the door from opening more than six inches. But even this gap was enough to expose the horrors inside. The light fixture had a bulb flickering, as if screaming in pain and revolting against what its light had to reveal to the world. Mail was strewn about the counter. Shoes littered the floor just inside the door. A spider had begun the insect’s take-over of the apartment, setting up camp in a web near the doorway. Dust had settled on the kitchen floor. After the second it took for him to regain his sanity after being exposed to such horrors, the Man took stock of what little he could see of the person who suffered daily from the poesque environment. He was a middle aged man with brown hair and eyes to match. The same brown hair peppered his face in unshaven stubble. He had the sullen appearance of a man who’d given up, or perhaps had just woken up at 3:30 in the morning.

“What?” the man groaned.

“I was wondering sir, if perhaps you knew the source of that atrocious whistle that invades our humble community every evening at 3 a.m. sharp?” our hero, the Man, enquired.

“Oh yeah, sorry. My dog ran off and I whistle for her every morning around that time cause she’s normally awake around then. Am I bothering you?”

Relieved and overjoyed that the whistle was not some apparition sent to deprive our hero of his sanity, he whooped and ran off without additional response. He returned to his apartment with a renewal in the hope of safety within his life, secure in his apartment, where he nestled back into his corner of the couch and continued his sleepless night.