Chapter 2: The Babysitter and the Notebook That Whispers
The house was too quiet. Ethan Maxwell traced a finger along the spine of a well-worn Dr. Seuss book on the shelf, the silence pressing in on his ears. It was the kind of deep, suburban quiet that amplified every creak of the floorboards, every hum of the refrigerator. He’d taken the babysitting gig for the cash, obviously, but also because it was easier than another Friday night trying to force himself into a crowded dorm party where he’d just end up in a corner, nursing a warm beer and feeling like a ghost.
From down the hall, the soft, rhythmic snore of four-year-old Lucas was the only sign of life. Ethan had won the bedtime war with a record-breaking two stories and a promise of no monsters under the bed. Victory felt hollow in this overly-perfumed living room, with its beige sofa and too-bright, overhead light.
He wandered into the nursery, the only room that felt somewhat lived-in. A single nightlight cast a flickering, blue-ish glow over a landscape of stuffed animals and a toy chest painted with peeling circus elephants. The air smelled of baby powder and something faintly sour—leftover milk, maybe. He was straightening a crooked frame holding a generic "It's a Boy!" announcement when his foot connected with something solid under the crib.
It wasn't a toy. It was a notebook, thick and bound in a dark, pebbled leather that felt vaguely sticky to the touch. He pulled it out, sitting cross-legged on the plush carpet. The cover was blank. He opened it.
The first page wasn't text. It was a drawing, a sketch in dark, precise pencil. A man’s face, middle-aged, with a weak chin and anxious eyes. Scrawled beneath it, in handwriting that was all sharp angles and impatient slashes, were the words: Make him see me. Make him hear me. Make him want me.
Ethan frowned, flipping the page. Another sketch, this time a woman laughing, her head thrown back. The writing here was different, neater, but just as charged: Confidence. Laughter that draws eyes. A voice no one interrupts.
Page after page. Faces, desires. Make the promotion mine. Erase the debt. Silence the doubt. The entries were like whispers in the dark, secrets shouted onto paper. Some sketches were crude, others disturbingly good. It was a catalog of yearning. He felt a prickle on the back of his neck, a sense he was holding something that was never meant to be found.
His thumb brushed a page near the middle. This sketch was of Janette, the mom who’d hired him. He recognized her tired smile, the soft lines around her eyes. The writing here was faded, as if written long ago: Energy. Patience that doesn’t fray. A full night’s sleep.
Beneath that, in fresher, jagged ink, was a new line: A spark. Something just for me.
The front door clicked open. Ethan snapped the notebook shut, his heart thumping a guilty rhythm against his ribs. Footsteps, heavy and weary, moved through the living room.
“Ethan?” Janette’s voice was drained. “Lucas down okay?”
“Yeah,” he called back, hastily shoving the notebook under a pile of pastel receiving blankets on the glider. “No problems.”
She appeared in the nursery doorway, a silhouette swallowed by a bulky cardigan. She flicked on the overhead light, and Ethan blinked against the sudden brightness. Janette looked… wrecked. Her blonde hair was escaping a haphazard bun, dark smudges pooled under her eyes, and her shoulders slumped as if carrying an invisible weight.
“You’re a lifesaver,” she mumbled, fumbling in her bag for her wallet. “The PTA meeting ran late, then Karen just had to dissect the new fundraising calendar over decaf…” Her words bled into a yawn. She pulled out two twenties, her movements slow, automatic.
As she handed him the cash, her eyes, glassy with exhaustion, drifted past him to the glider. They settled on the corner of the dark leather notebook, now clearly visible where he’d hurriedly hidden it.
She froze.
The tired haze in her eyes evaporated, replaced by a sharp, almost painful clarity. Her gaze snapped from the notebook to Ethan’s face, then back again. The forty dollars hung forgotten between her fingers.
“Where,” she said, her voice suddenly low and stripped of all its previous weariness, “did you find that?”
“Under the crib,” Ethan said, the words tight in his throat. Her reaction was all wrong. It wasn’t curiosity. It was fear. And something hotter, sharper—a kind of frantic recognition.
“You didn’t open it.” It wasn’t a question. It was a plea.
Ethan’s silence was answer enough. He saw her jaw tighten, a tiny muscle flickering in her cheek. The room, once just quiet, now felt charged, the air thick and difficult to breathe.
“It’s private,” she said finally, snatching the notebook from the blankets. She held it to her chest, her arms crossed over it like a shield. Her eyes, now wide and awake, scanned his face, looking for something. Judgment? Understanding? “Some things… you just need to put somewhere. To get them out of your head.”
“Yeah,” Ethan managed to say, standing up, desperate to break the tension. “No, I get it. Creative writing major. I jot down weird stuff all the time.”
The word weird hung in the air. Janette flinched, just slightly.
“It’s not writing,” she said softly, more to herself than to him. She looked down at the cover, her thumb stroking the leather. Then she seemed to remember he was there. She forced a smile, but it was thin and brittle. “Thank you, Ethan. I’ll walk you out.”
The exchange at the door was hurried, awkward. “See you next Friday?” she asked, but her mind was clearly elsewhere, her body already angled back toward the depths of the house, toward the nursery, toward the notebook now tucked tightly under her arm.
“Sure,” Ethan said.
He stepped out into the cool night air, the door clicking shut firmly behind him. He stood on the porch for a moment, the image of Janette’s transformed face burning in his mind. The profound exhaustion, erased in an instant by a single glimpse of dark leather.
He replayed the pages in his head. The sketches. The desperate commands. Make him see me. Erase the debt. A spark.
A ridiculous, thrilling thought uncoiled in his stomach. What if it wasn’t just journaling? The drawings were so specific. The words were so absolute. They weren’t prayers. They were instructions.
He started the walk back to campus, the normal sounds of the night—crickets, distant traffic—sounding muffled and far away. He thought of his own invisibility, the easy way people looked through him in conversations, the way his ideas in workshops seemed to evaporate as soon as he uttered them. He thought of the weak-chinned man in the first drawing, and the fierce demand: Make him want me.
His hands, shoved deep in his pockets, felt cold. A part of him, the sensible part, wanted to laugh it off. It was a weird sketchbook from a tired, overwhelmed mom.
But another part, a part that had spent a lifetime feeling unheard, was already whispering. It was already wondering what you were supposed to write. And what, exactly, happened next.
And what, exactly, happened next. The question pulsed in time with his footsteps, a maddening drumbeat all the way back to his dorm. He stood under the flickering stairwell light, key in hand, but his body was already turning back toward the dark street, pulled by a compulsion he couldn’t name.
He walked back, snuck in through the window and stole the book without being discovered. The cold night air bit his skin as he slipped the strange, heavy notebook into his backpack, his heart a frantic animal in his chest. Back in his dorm, the chaotic silence of his own space felt alien, charged with the weight of the thing now hidden under his rumpled sheets.
The leather felt fever-warm against his knees in the dark. His pen hovered, then in a rush of guilty ink, he wrote: She comes to the window, yawning and caressing her nipple.
The sash window above him slid up with a sharp gasp, and Janette stood there, her eyes glazed with sleep, her fingers tracing lazy circles over her thin nightshirt.
The sash window above him slid up with a sharp gasp, and Janette stood there, her eyes glazed with sleep, her fingers tracing lazy circles over her thin nightshirt. She grabs her breast and pinches her nipple, trying to coax out milk, a flat, mechanical motion utterly divorced from the woman’s waking self. A cold wave of understanding crashed over Ethan—this wasn’t a wish. It was a command. His hand shook as he ripped the page from the notebook, the paper tearing with a sound like a scream.
His hand shook as he ripped the page from the notebook, the paper tearing with a sound like a scream.
Above him, Janette blinked. The glassy sheen vanished from her eyes, replaced by a wave of disorientation and then dawning, stomach-churning horror. She looked down at her own hand on her breast, at the window open to the cold night, at the strange boy standing on her lawn in the dark. A choked sound escaped her throat before she stumbled back, vanishing from the window frame. The sash slammed down.
Ethan stood frozen, the torn page crumpled in his fist. The silence of the suburban street was deafening. A dog barked somewhere. A car turned a distant corner. Normal things. The world had just cracked open, and it kept spinning like nothing happened.
He ran. His breath sawed in his lungs, a raw burning, but he didn’t stop until he was back in his dorm room, the door locked, his back pressed against the cheap wood. He stared at the notebook on his bed. It looked inert. Harmless.
It wasn’t.
The torn page was still in his hand. He smoothed it out on his desk, under the harsh glare of his study lamp. The words he’d written looked back at him, stupid and crude and monstrously powerful. She comes to the window, yawning and caressing her nipple. His handwriting. His thought. Made real.
A sick, electric thrill cut through the terror. It was real. The proof was in the cold night air still clinging to his jacket, in the raw panic on Janette’s face.
He should burn the page. He should burn the whole book. He paced the tiny room, four steps one way, four steps back. But his mind was racing ahead, past the horror, into a dizzying landscape of what if. What if you could fix things? What if you could be heard? What if you never had to feel like a ghost again?
He sat. He opened the notebook again. His heart was a hammer against his ribs. This was a test. A controlled experiment. To understand the rules.
Janette’s page was there. The original entries. Energy. Patience. A full night’s sleep. A spark. He picked up his pen. His mouth was dry. He didn’t want to hurt her. He just needed to see. To know.
He wrote below the old entries, his letters careful and deliberate: She is not alone. Her husband joins her. He sees her need.
He waited. Nothing. No distant scream, no sudden shift in the air. Maybe it only worked in proximity. Maybe he’d broken it.
Frustration bubbled up, hot and impatient. The earlier fear was melting, replaced by a gnawing, arrogant curiosity. He needed a stronger phrase. A clearer command. The notebook seemed to demand conviction.
He tore out another blank page from the back. He wouldn’t write in the book itself, not yet. This was a draft. On the fresh sheet, he wrote, each word a dark pledge:
Her husband joins her at the window. He undresses her. He presses her chest against the cold glass. He fucks her from behind. He fills her. He impregnates her womb.
The sentence sat there, black and vile. A part of him recoiled. This was a line, crossed and then erased entirely. He thought of Janette’s tired eyes, her cardigan, her relieved smile when Lucas was asleep. He crumpled the page.
But the image, now that he’d conjured it, wouldn’t leave. It pulsed behind his own eyes. The power wasn’t just in the book; it was in the specificity, the willingness to picture it, to direct it. The notebook was just a conduit. The will was his.
He uncrumpled the page. Smoothed it. He copied the words, verbatim, onto a fresh line in the notebook itself, beneath his previous command. The ink sank into the paper, hungry.
This time, he felt it. A subtle drain, a slight vertigo, as if he’d stood up too fast. The air in his dorm room grew heavy, charged with static. On the desk, the torn first page—the one about the window—seemed to vibrate, then dissolved into a fine, gray ash.
The new writing was now the active command.
He didn’t have to see it to know it was happening. He could feel it, a wrongness radiating from across town, a psychic echo. He saw it in his mind, clear and terrible: the husband, moving in a dream, leading her back. The press of her bare skin against the windowpane, a gasp fogging the glass. A brutal, rhythmic shadow under the moon. A union without love, without desire, only the execution of a sentence he had written.
He vomited into his small trash can, sour bile burning his throat. He had done that. He had authored that.
When he could breathe again, he wiped his mouth and looked at the notebook. It was still open. The words glistened. And beneath them, in the margin, in a handwriting that was not his own—a tight, feminine script he recognized from the earlier entries—a new phrase had appeared, as if etched by an invisible hand.
It worked.
Then, a second phrase, still forming, the letters bleeding into the paper like a slow tear:
Thank you.