My father raised me in a mountain cabin, claiming a supernatural plague had killed the rest of humanity in 2001. I called him a liar after sneaking out and finding civilisation. I was wrong, and I shouldn’t have gone outside.

Tell the story again, Little Me would always demand.

Papa would always cave after a brief ping-pong match: no, to please, to fine. I always bested him in a contest of wills. His hangdog face told a tale of guilt for trapping me in a mountainside prison; its grotty window panes dressed with nailed wooden planks in lieu of curtains.

My father’s tale of the apocalypse, told dozens of times throughout my childhood, went as such:

The plague came on a beautiful afternoon in mid-spring. Some argued against a ‘plague’ label, for it wasn’t a contagion. It wasn’t a new virus or flu the WHO or CDC had neglected to warn us about. It was as sudden as rain; an April shower that struck all places at once. Nobody would ever really agree on the how or why of it. In a matter of days, there wouldn’t be many left to argue about it at all.

Across the world, at precisely one minute past two Greenwich Meantime, one quarter of humanity started screaming at something unseen and unheard by the rest of us.

We were at the airport when it happened: you, your mama, and me. Folks used to travel places just for fun back then, Evie. Aluminium birds flew about on stiff wings, carrying us in their bellies. Sometimes, I mistakenly believe I hear one soaring miles above our little cabin. I suppose I like to pretend.

Anyhow, your mama squeezed you in her arms when the Phenomenon began. Dozens of people around us, in synchronicity, clutched their temples with eyes closed as they shrieked at a piercing register. One minute past two in the afternoon, the papers and the televisions would say, while there were still papers and televisions.

At the exact same moment in time, something had terrified one quarter of the planet.

When they stopped screaming, the soon-to-be-named ‘affected persons’ were driven to acts of lunacy and horror. Folks threw themselves over balconies. Armed airport officers, affected and unaffected, opened fire on one another. A businessman bludgeoned a woman with his briefcase. A toddler bit clumps out of his father.

The most unnerving part was they weren’t angry; they seemed horrified by their own actions. The assailants sobbed, wailed, and apologised. They said they were just trying to quieten the Voice. Something was talking to them, Evie. Something your mama and I, and plenty of other people, couldn’t hear.

Your mama and I ran for our lives, past scenes of horror I shan’t detail to you, little one. Cars were abandoned on streets. A plane plummeted from the sky. London burnt around us, as every other city, town, and village burnt across the globe.

Then, at one minute past three, came two billion cardiac arrests. The affected persons died of fright, after facing one final horror too great for their hearts to bear. One quarter of humanity was gone, if not closer to half, given the violent ends met by so many unaffected victims.

Many called it a supernatural event, given billions of corroborating stories about ‘the Voice’ torturing affected persons into acts of insanity, but scientists were determined to find a grounded explanation in medicine, technology, or our environment: a virus we didn’t yet understand, biological warfare, or even mass psychosis akin to the 1518 dancing plague of Alsace.

Even without a conclusive answer, I’m sure the world would have healed, in time. But at one minute past two the following afternoon, and each afternoon onwards, the nightmare repeated: one quarter of the world’s surviving population was plagued by ‘the Voice’ and subsequently died of cardiac arrest. All modern infrastructure collapsed by Day 3 or 4. Bands of unaffected savages, and zealots, ruled whatever remained.

As I said, this was no virus, no matter how diligently scientists tried to prove so. There was no quarantining or fleeing from it. It came for all people, no matter where they squirrelled away. But that didn’t stop you and… me from trying.

Papa always hesitated painfully at that part of the story. He never told me what happened to Mama, and I never asked. I knew she was gone. I knew it would hurt the two of us if I were to learn how.

We fled to the Lake District; to this very hunting cabin. We drove past fires, and fights, and wreckages, and things I won’t ever tell you about, Evie. The last town we passed, at the foot of this great mountain, was in ruins and entirely devoid of life. That was all the confirmation I needed: the world was over. So, I took us on the off-road dirt track up the mountain, expecting that any day, at one minute past two, you and I would be affected by the Voice too.

But something else happened as we drove up this mountain, Evie.

The sun was setting, so it’s hard to say what I saw appear in the dim orange of the day’s last light, looming over the track. It looked like a rip, as if two threads in reality’s tapestry had untethered to reveal the slimmest of openings. We were driving too quickly for me to swerve or stop in time. The car ploughed through it, and the wound stretched to let us through.

On the other side, the dirt track and the mountain continued upwards, but I knew everything was different. We had slung our bulky family sedan through a narrow needle eye, and when I looked in the rearview mirror, the rip in the air had disappeared. I wouldn’t have believed it had happened if not for the inexplicable and unearthly events which had already transpired that week.

I believe it was a doorway to God, little one. I believe he let us into his bubble of protection atop this mountain, far from the horrors of the world below. That’s why we’ve lasted these many years without becoming affected. That’s why we must respect His blessing. You mustn’t ever leave this cabin, Evie. It isn’t safe out there.

I believed his story for many years because Papa was the only human being I had ever known. His world-view was reality to me. But as the years went by, and I studied various books by various authors, I was exposed to different ideas and thoughts about reality, and I started to have my doubts.

But I doubted everything, which hindered as much as it helped me. I was too frightened to go outside and learn the truth for myself. You see, Papa and I were naturally predisposed to anxiety. We would fret about contamination, morality, and the slightest out-of-place sound from the surrounding trees. My father explained that he had obsessive-compulsive disorder, and he was fairly certain, given its genetic component, I’d inherited it from him.

Still, Papa tried to help me overcome my fears. He would tend to the vegetable patch behind the cabin and encourage me to sit on the back porch, watching and learning from him. See, you’re getting to experience the outdoors, he would say, and that did help with my anxiety; with my agoraphobia, among millions of other phobias.

In fact, the pendulum swung the other way, which hadn’t been my father’s plan. As I grew from a child to a teenager, I decided that sniffing a little fresh air under the rear awning wasn’t the same as properly going outsides. It wasn’t the same as freedom. Despite my crippling fears, part of me was curious. I yearned for more than the cabin.

And in the summer of 2018, while Papa was tending to the vegetables, I enacted my plan. Pretending to nip inside to use the bathroom, I instead tiptoed to the front door, unbolted the eleven latches, and broke free. The outdoors was different at the front of the property. I’d never felt it like that before, with shoes crinkling the grass, rather than creaking the wooden porch boards. I’d never stepped a foot over a threshold without my father’s watchful eyes over me.

This was the true outdoors.

I ran before Papa came looking for me. Down the mountainside I went, revelling at the sight of passing fields, flowers, trees, and rivers. I’d seen those things in books before, but Papa’s makeshift garden, walled with ramshackle fences, was the only real-life greenery I’d seen before that day. I was enraptured by the new sights, sounds, and smells; so enraptured that, after emerging from a cluster of trees, it took me a minute to process what I was seeing at the foot of the mountain, a few miles below me.

Something else from Papa’s books.

Civilisation.

A town.

But the creases deepened around both my squinting eyes and frowning lips as I more closely eyed the roads running into, out of, and through the distant place. Tiny coloured dots were racing about, like the bugs I’d often watch on the porch floorboards.

Like the life I’d often watch.

I continued down the slope at great pace, body lurching up and down so roughly that I thought I might hack up my hammering heart. When I stopped running a second time, I was close enough to properly discern the details of the town. I was close enough to accept what I hadn’t wanted to accept before.

The dots were cars.

The cars were moving.

I had seen plenty of motor vehicles in picture-books. I had even seen Papa’s rusted one, intentionally concealed with leaves and shrubbery beside the garden fence, so as to deter strangers (there were none in our isolated haven, surrounded by woodland). But these moving cars weren’t like his forgotten, seventeen-year-old sedan. These vehicles were shiny, and new, and colourful, and moving. I kept reminding myself of that last part.

I ran a little farther, through more woodland, and came to a stop near the edge of the treeline, just before the main road. There, I caught my first glimpse of real-life people other than my father. Real-life people in their real-life cars going into this real-life town, bustling with life. Nobody was affected by a demonic voice. Nobody was killing anyone else.

The world hadn’t ended.

Despite my curiosity about the town, and my fury at my father, terror drove me back up the mountain. Terror of real-life people, with whom I had never interacted. Terror of the modern world, which I was sure I wouldn’t understand, for it was likely quite different from the outdated books Papa had shown me. I wasn’t equipped for a world beyond the cabin, so I had to retreat with my tail between my legs. I was entirely reliant on Papa.

When the trees started to thin and home came back into view, I saw Papa pacing anxiously; when he saw me, he came running. He didn’t yell, as I expected. That would have been better than the unsettling question.

“Evie, this is very important: are you alone?”

I was confused, but assured Papa I had come home alone. He hurried me back into the cabin, glancing fearfully at the trees around us. After he shut the front door behind us, I wasted no time letting my fury kick off the proceedings.

“You lied to me,” I said.

My father faced me with eyes still so frightened, not furious. “None of this is what you think, Evie.”

“The world didn’t end.”

“It did. I promise. But I… I know what you saw. About four summers ago, I broke my own rule. I walked down the mountain one night, while you were asleep, hoping to scavenge for some more supplies. I didn’t expect to find what I found. Lights. Sound. People. A living town.

“It didn’t make any sense. I saw the world end. I saw that very same town in ruins only thirteen years earlier. There had been corpses in the street. Some were in bodybags, but most weren’t, because there had been nobody left to bag them. There had been nobody left, Evie. Don’t you understand? I saw everything end when you were a baby.”

I took a minute to collect my thoughts and tried to be reasonable. “You’ve known the truth for four years, Papa. Why didn’t you take me back to civilisation then?”

“Because… something happened when I was down there, Evie. I wanted to make sense of what I was seeing, so I went into the local pub. There was a television in the corner, so I sat with a glass of water and watched news stories. Learnt about the state of the world in 2014, and it didn’t take long for oddities to start adding up.

“There was a story about Big Ben. Remember Big Ben?”

“The London landmark in the picture-books you used to show me?” I asked. “The one that—”

“Was destroyed in 1954, before I was born. In 1956, they erected a replacement clock tower: New Ben. It was physically near-identical, but the colour of the brickwork was different, and nobody called it Big Ben anymore. Nobody.

“There were other things. Some big, and others small. It was when the Queen appeared on the screen that I really lost my mind. The Queen died in 1997. My memory isn’t perfect, but I remember cultural moments of such significant impact as that. Here, in 2014, she was alive and well. I saw her on the television screen, speaking to diplomats at some international conference.”

I frowned. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying this isn’t our reality, Evie. I’m saying it’s a reality that didn’t end in 2001.”

“You can stop now, Papa. You made up a story because you were terrified of the outside world, and you wanted me to be terrified of it too.”

My father shook his head. “We’re terrified of things because we’re sick, Evie. Sometimes, I think that may be why we stayed alive. There was a theory that the only people unaffected by the Voice were those already mentally broken. Maybe our predisposition to terror granted us immunity, of sorts.”

“This is the part where you say God saved us, right?” I asked.

“No, I… I think that opening above the dirt track was a door, Evie. How else do you explain a reality with impossible differences from our own? I’m sure I’d only just begun to see the differences when I got up to leave, but…” Papa paused and grew solemn. “On my way out of the pub, a man at a nearby table turned to face me with a smile on his face.

“There you are, he told me. I thought he was drunk, in spite of my gut churning, so I opened the door and got out there, and then: there you are. I heard those three words again, from a woman pushing her pram.

“My skin grew cold and clammy, in a way it hadn’t since the days of the Phenomenon, so I hurried my pace. As I walked up the streets out of town, I heard those three words again and again from strangers with perturbing smiles on their faces. Unrelated and unconnected strangers. And when I tried to question a young man who said it, he frowned at me and asked what I was talking about.

“Something found me, Evie. Something that came through that hole between realities.

“I think that something might have been the Voice.”

I was sick of Papa and his story of the supernatural at this point, and I told him that I had come across no such people uttering those three ‘perturbing’ words during my visit to town. I stormed upstairs and locked myself in my room.

However, when I woke in the early hours of the morning, something was off; not just the world-shattering revelations of the day. No, I had an instinctive urge to go to my bedroom window. There, I peeped through the gap between two of the wooden planks, which had always given me a thin letterbox view of the world outside the cabin. Usually, there was nothing more to see than trees, but this pitch-black morning—

A moonlit man.

There was a man standing at the edge of the treeline.

No sooner had I looked out at him than he lifted his forefinger, somehow seeing me through the tiny slat, and yelled, “There! She’s there!”

A nail flew out from the wooden plank, striking me across the neck, and I yelped in pain, massaging my bloody wound.

From the thick of the trees came more people: men, women, and even children. About a dozen people, convulsing as if in the throes of a group seizure. Some of them wore clothes stained in blood. And as they gathered at the foot of our cabin, they all started screaming together.

“He’s going to hurt everyone, baby, unless we do it,” a twitching woman told a child who was bawling.

In response, the child simply wailed, “Make it stop… Make the voice stop.”

As I whimpered fearfully, my father burst into my bedroom. “We have to go. Now.”

I leapt to my feet and followed him across the landing. “What’s going on? Who are those people?”

There was hammering against the front door, and I whimpered in fright as I donned my shoes and coat, before following my father to the back of the cabin. With nothing but the clothes on our backs, we crept into the night and the garden. My father quietly opened the gate at the back of the garden, which he had likely not used since building the enclosure seventeen years earlier.

A voice yelled from the front of the property. “We have to do it, or he’ll eat the world. Please. He just needs you two. The last two. You weren’t supposed to leave. He needs you to… complete himself. Don’t make him start all over again!”

My heart somersaulted. “What are they saying?”

“They’re affected, Evie,” my father interrupted in a whisper as he led me into the trees. “Seventeen years later, and I haven’t forgotten. The convulsing. The deranged words. It’s here, like I told you.”

I was still in denial as we stole through the forest, across fields, and away from the mad mob at our door. I didn’t have a good explanation for those people and their erratic behaviour. Maybe Papa did something to upset the townsfolk four years ago, I thought as we dashed down the mountain. Maybe they followed me back up the mountain, finally tracking him down. But there’s nothing supernatural going on here. There’s—

The town was on fire.

My father had commented on the smoke rising above the treeline, but I’d barely registered him; my heart had been filling my ears. It was only as we emerged from the forest and saw the town clearly that I processed it: the flames, the flashing red-and-blue lights, and the distant screams. And, most of all, the military vehicles cordoning off the roads into the little town.

“They’re quarantining it…” murmured my father, a thought crossing his mind. “Come on.”

And then they came. Townsfolk at the foot of the hilly slope, maybe half a mile from my father and me, were screaming up at us. There you are! There you are! Through the thick of night, without a torch between them, they impossibly saw us. There was no denying it anymore; or, at least, my paralysed body was no longer denying it.

Papa’s story was true. All of it was true.

“COME ON!” my father screamed at me, grabbing my head and yanking me away from the approaching affected persons.

He led me east, skirting us around the town, and the mountain, and our possessed pursuers. We heard not-so-distant gunfire at one point, and we lay low in a ditch until the (we presume) soldiers had passed by. They must’ve mowed the affected persons down, because we certainly weren’t followed after that.

My father and I walked for an hour until reaching the next village over, just as the sun was rising. A couple of soldiers were in the town square, being questioned by residents about the billowing smoke over the next town over. Just a tragic accident at the bakery, Papa and I heard one soldier lie to them. Everything is okay.

There was a small news story about the fire later that day. An ‘incident at a local restaurant’, which did not align with the soldier’s lie, that had ‘sadly claimed two dozen lives’. That was it. Nothing else. Surviving townsfolk, interviewed by a television reporter, appeared stiff in their responses. Everything they said seemed rehearsed, as if the military had told them to keep hushed about what had really happened; about the unexplained screaming, violence, and (most likely, according to Papa) eventual cardiac arrests. The affected persons had died of fright, just like the billions of people back in our world; or perhaps they had wound up in government labs for autopsies.

My father took us far away: to another country on another continent. He would dismiss my questions and fears about what happened in that town, and whether those people on the mountain were right that the Voice would ‘eat the world’ as punishment for letting Papa and me slip away.

He wanted us to focus on our new lives. He taught me what he knew of the world, but some things had to be unlearnt, for this reality was so different from the one he had known. The two of us learnt and adjusted, and I started to forget. It was a trauma response, I think. I decided Papa was right. We should let ourselves believe we belonged in this new world, and that we weren’t being hunted by a malignant force, hell-bent on the completion of its apocalyptic mission.

I want to believe it’s all over. I want to believe the Voice has no power here; otherwise, in these eight intervening years, he surely would have already laid your reality to waste. But I’m not so sure. I’m often overcome by terror as a glacial breeze tickles at the entrances to my ears, as if hoping to find some way of weaselling into my brain; sometimes, it even tickles that faded scar on my neck, as if hoping to climb into my body an alternative way.

I know Papa feels it too. The Voice wants us. It is waiting to strike again. And if it doesn’t find a way of taking us, it’ll take this world instead. Next time, the Phenomenon won’t just strike a single town. It won’t be some small event contained by government officials.

Next time, at one minute past two on an ordinary afternoon, the world will start screaming.