Hear Me: A psychological thriller

By Luis Filipe Alves

PUNISHMENT HAS A VOICE.

Joana and Gonçalo are married. But their marriage is far from perfect.
The tragedy of their daughter’s death has pushed them apart, to the point that they can barely communicate.
Yet Joana and Gonçalo are still married.
Then the Voice appears, a voice that only Gonçalo seems to hear. Convinced their dead daughter is reaching out to him from beyond, Gonçalo becomes obsessed with decoding the Voice's message.
An obsession that forces both of them to confront the real forces that keep them together, and what they truly felt about each other and their daughter.
And the truth behind the Voice will push them towards a fate they never wanted, and could never have guessed.
Joana and Gonçalo are married.
For now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Luis Filipe Alves
• Release date: Feb 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9789892051895

Luis Filipe Alves

Luís Filipe Alves has been a writer all his life, it just took him until 2005 to notice. And he still forgets sometimes. He was one of the first podcasters in Portugal, with the weekly-ish music show Armário das Calças (which translates as The Pants Closet; don’t ask), a name he kept using with his blog long before the podcast closed doors. The blog itself was closed in early 2012, replaced by the portuguese version of LuisFilipeAlves.com. Luís also co-founded the flash fiction blog Palavras Contadas (Counted Words), and was part of the team of Outro Lado dos Comics (The Other Side Of Comics), a comics news and analysis blog. He still hasn’t formally quit, but trust us, he doesn’t work there anymore. His daily (portuguese language) newsletter Obviamente (Obviously) hasn’t missed a single weekday since it started in June 2012. Luís is justifiably proud of that, but less so of its actual content on most days. He’s since published the first year of it as a book. It looks good on his shelf. He’s self-published six ebooks in portuguese, and intends to release at least as many in 2014, while also translating them all into english. And whatever else he’s doing right now, he should stop it, and just write some more.

Book preview

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Hear Me

Luis Filipe Alves

Cover Design by Melody Simmons.

Hear Me © Luis Filipe Alves. All Rights Reserved, except where otherwise noted

This book was produced using PressBooks.com.

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Few people came to Filipa’s funeral. Which wasn’t surprising. The little girl didn’t live long enough to make many friends, and her parents became relatively insular after they married. So the attendants were just a few relatives, half a dozen co-workers, and two or three people that Joana had no idea who they were.

She considered asking Gonçalo, but couldn’t find the courage to do so. It was the wrong time for that sort of thing, and even if it wasn’t, she doubted her husband would listen. He was like a statue ever since their daughter died. Yes, he could still move, obviously. But he didn’t react to things, and his face looked sculpted in stone, stuck in a neutral expression. Joana assumed it was normal. Must have been the shock people always talked about. She couldn’t know, she’d never seen anyone in shock, and she certainly had never felt it. But that must’ve been it.

She looked around. The graveyard was huge, almost full of headstones and graves. The few people there had a hard time finding spots that didn’t require them to step on a grave. The coffin is so small, she thought, and there’s barely room for it.

She realized how cold that thought was. Her daughter had died, after all, and those were the thoughts that filled her mind.

But she couldn’t bear to thing about that. Deep down, she missed the child, but otherwise… Nothing. She was tired but otherwise normal, or maybe just a bit distant. Which was probably why she found herself analyzing everything around her. It was like everything was happening in the third person, like she was watching a 3D movie in real time, but that’s all it was. Joana thought she should feel bad from that too. But she didn’t.

All around her, people she had no connection with cried like the greatest of tragedies had happened to them. At her side, Gonçalo was still and inexpressive.

The small coffin was lowered to the ground at her feet. The priest spouted some rubbish that Joana couldn’t even bother paying attention to.

And inside her, deep where she missed her daughter, something changed. Something died.

She heard herself scream, felt her face awash in tears, her legs losing their strength, her hands and knees falling to the ground, other people’s hands trying to lift her up.

Gonçalo didn’t even look.

Someone finally managed to help her up, but Joana had no idea who. She had no idea about anything at all. Where she was, who with, why. All she knew was that inside the wooden box that someone was now covering with dirt was the most precious part of herself. A part of herself she would never get back.

Without thinking, Joana got close to Gonçalo. For the first time since they got married, she grabbed her husband’s arm. She grabbed his hand, with every ounce of her strength, which wasn’t much. Gonçalo didn’t hold her back. Instead, he took his hand away, and took two steps to the side, letting Joana stand on her own.

Gonçalo’s and Joana’s home rarely had unnecessary lights on. The concept of unnecessary, however, had evolved overtime. At first it meant all lights outside the room they were in. Now, they often didn’t even have the main light in the room on. If they were watching TV in the living room, they wouldn’t turn on the ceiling light. If they were reading in the bedroom, the bedside table lamp was enough. If they were in the kitchen, then they would turn on the main light so they could cook, but the tiny table lamp was enough to eat by.

So it was easy to see what was right in front of them, but they couldn’t see as much of