Chapter 5 Her Own Voice

Margo's POV

My own voice was still hanging in my headphones, frozen mid-sentence, and I sat there so long without moving that the computer screen dimmed itself to save power.

That woke me up more than anything else could have. I tapped the mouse fast, like I needed to prove to myself the file was still real and hadn't just been some trick my brain played on me out of nerves and no sleep.

It was still there. Still paused. Still waiting.

I told myself there was an easy answer. People sound alike all the time; I'd been told my whole life I have a voice that carries, teachers always picking me out of a group project by sound alone before they even turned around. Maybe this was just some other girl who happened to sound close enough to me that my tired brain filled in the rest.

I needed to hear it clean to know for sure. Not through the static, not through whatever bad mic had picked it up from far away. I needed it clear.

My hands went to the keyboard the way they do when I actually know what I'm doing, which is the one place in my whole life I feel completely sure of myself. I pulled the file into the cleanup program Mr. Halloway taught me last year, the one we use for stripping crowd noise out of assembly recordings, and set it running. A little bar crawled across the screen. Ninety percent. Ninety-five.

Done.

I hit play again, and this time there was no static at all. No crackle. No far-away mumble I could talk myself out of. Just a voice, clean and close, like whoever recorded it had been standing right next to the person talking.

"...he's been in my room again. I know it sounds crazy, but things keep moving, and nobody believes me, and I don't know who else to tell. I keep the door locked, and it doesn't matter; it doesn't stop him. I don't know how he keeps getting in"

The recording cut there again, hard, same spot as before, as a hand had clapped over a mouth mid-word.

It was me.

Not almost me. Not close enough that I could talk myself into someone-who-sounds-like-me. Every little catch in the voice, every place it wobbled, every breath in between the words- I know how I sound when I'm trying not to cry. I've heard myself do it in the school bathroom more times than I want to admit. This was that exact sound, word for word, coming out of a file that had been hidden on purpose in a folder I wasn't supposed to look at.

My hands had gone cold enough that I actually rubbed them together, the way you do outside in winter, except the AV room wasn't cold at all.

I clicked the file properties, hunting for anything that made sense, a real date, a real time, something that would let me say Oh, that's the day I recorded a video project for English and laugh this whole thing off before it swallowed me whole.

The timestamp was scrambled, same nonsense string as the file name. But buried under it, in the tiny metadata box nobody usually bothers to check, was a device tag. A recording device ID, the same kind Mr. Halloway uses to track which mic picked up which file.

I knew that ID. I'd cataloged it myself, twice, for the supply list.

It wasn't a school mic at all.

It was a small recorder, the kind you'd clip somewhere out of sight, tucked into a vent or behind a shelf, the exact model Mr. Halloway keeps in the locked cabinet behind his desk for "special project use," the same cabinet I don't have a key to, the same cabinet nobody but him is supposed to touch.

Which meant whoever planted a recorder in a room and caught my own voice saying things I have zero memory of ever saying, either had access to that locked cabinet, or was Mr. Halloway himself.

I sat back so fast my chair scraped loud against the floor, the sound way too big in a room that was supposed to be empty, and for one wild second I actually turned around, heart slamming, checking that the door was still closed, that I really was alone, that nobody was standing behind me the way something had stood behind me in the dark on Friday night.

The room was empty. Just me, the humming server, and a screen still glowing with a voice I couldn't explain.

Because here's the part that wouldn't sit still in my head no matter how many times I tried to make it make sense: I have never said those words. Not once. Not to Dot, not to my dad, not to a mirror at two in the morning. I have never told anyone that somebody's been in my room, because nobody has ever been in my room. I would know. I'd feel it. You feel it when something in your own space has been touched by someone who isn't supposed to be there.

Except now I wasn't sure I would feel it at all. Now I wasn't sure of anything.

My phone buzzed against the desk, so sudden and so loud in that quiet room that I actually gasped out loud, my whole body flinching like I'd been shocked.

Same number as Friday night. No name. No contact saved. I'd deleted it, because I told myself deleting it would make it stop.

You weren't supposed to clean the audio.

My throat went bone dry. I stared at the words until they blurred, my thumb hovering, not typing anything back because I didn't trust my hands enough to move.

A second message landed right under the first, and this one made every hair on my arms stand straight up, because there was only one way whoever was texting me could know what I'd just done in a locked room with the door shut and nobody else inside it.

Now it's clear enough that you can hear what's coming next. Look behind you.