The streetlights outside Aminata's window cast long, dancing figures across her bedroom wall. Dakar was rarely silent, a city breathing with the rhythm of car horns, distant music, and the constant murmur of voices from the street below.
Tonight, however, a different sound had begun to intrude, something that didn't belong to the familiar nocturnal symphony.
It wasn't loud. It wasn't even external, she suspected. It was a flicker at the edge of her hearing, like the ghost of a giggle. Hehe.
Aminata sat up in bed, the thin cotton sheet pooling around her waist. She tilted her head, straining to pinpoint the source. Was it Madame Diop next door, watching a late-night comedy? Or children playing somewhere down the alley?
No, this felt closer. Intimate. As if whispered directly into the canal of her ear, yet without breath or vibration. Hehe.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed, her bare feet pressing against the cool tile floor. The apartment was small but tidy, filled with the scent of leftover thieboudienne and the faint aroma of jasmine incense she burned earlier. Nothing seemed out of place. She checked the lock on the door – secure. The windows – latched.
Returning to her bed, she pulled the sheet up to her chin. Maybe she was just tired. Work had been demanding, the pressure mounting at the import-export office.
Stress did strange things. She closed her eyes, focusing on the whirring of the ceiling fan, trying to drown out the phantom sound. But it lingered, a tiny, persistent pinprick in the quiet. Hehe.
Sleep offered little escape. Her dreams were disjointed, filled with muffled laughter that seemed to emanate from just beyond her sight. She woke abruptly near dawn, heart pounding, the ghostly hehe seeming louder now, clearer. It felt… amused.
Over the next few days, the sound became a constant companion. It followed her to work, a mocking counterpoint to the clatter of keyboards and ringing phones. It sat with her during lunch breaks, turning the taste of her food to ash. It waited for her when she returned home, settling into the corners of her apartment like sentient dust. Hehe.
"Did you hear that?" she asked her colleague, Seynabou, one afternoon, keeping her voice carefully casual.
Seynabou looked up from her monitor, pushing her glasses up her nose. "Hear what, Ami?"
"Like… a little laugh?"
Seynabou listened for a moment, her head cocked. "No. Just Monsieur Ba complaining about the shipping manifests again." She gave Aminata a concerned look. "Are you feeling alright? You seem distracted lately."
"I'm fine," Aminata lied, forcing a smile. "Just tired." How could she explain? How could she describe a sound that only she seemed to perceive, a sound that felt like it was burrowing into her mind? Hehe.
The news began to carry scattered reports, initially dismissed as isolated incidents or morbid curiosities. A spike in suicides in Tokyo. Strange public breakdowns in London. People in Buenos Aires claiming to hear incessant laughter.
The stories were disjointed, lacking a clear pattern, easily lost in the usual churn of global events. But Aminata felt a cold dread crystallize within her. She wasn't alone.
She started spending hours online, scouring forums and obscure news sites. Threads emerged, filled with desperate, fragmented accounts. People described the same sound, the same feeling of being watched, mocked by an unseen presence.
Hehe. Hehe. Hehe. It was everywhere, yet nowhere. Some called it "The Giggles," others "The Whisper Plague." Scientists offered theories – mass hysteria, environmental toxins, a novel neurological disorder. None stuck.
Nothing explained the sheer synchronicity, the identical nature of the internal torment across continents and cultures.
Aminata stopped answering calls from her family in Saint-Louis. What could she tell them? That she was hearing things? That she felt like she was losing her mind? The hehe seemed to intensify whenever she thought of reaching out, as if discouraging connection, savoring her isolation.
She tried earplugs, but the sound wasn't physical. She played loud music, Wolof pop, mbalax rhythms pulsing through her apartment, but the hehe simply wove itself through the beats, an insidious harmony.
Sleeping pills brought only heavy, dreamless stupor, and upon waking, the sound was always there, waiting patiently. Hehe.
The city outside her window started to change. Dakar, usually so full of life, grew quieter. More shops were shuttered during the day.
Fewer people lingered on the streets after dark. Aminata saw the strain on the faces of those she passed – a haunted, inward-looking expression she recognized mirrored in her own reflection. The global phenomenon was no longer distant news; it was here.
One evening, the power went out. Her apartment plunged into sudden, suffocating darkness and silence. The usual city sounds vanished.
No cars, no music, no distant shouts. And in that absolute void, the hehe became deafening. It filled her head, echoed in her chest, vibrated behind her eyes. It wasn't just a sound anymore; it was a presence, vast and chillingly amused.
Panic seized her. She scrambled for her phone, its screen illuminating her trembling hands. No signal. The silence pressed in, amplifying the internal laughter. Hehe. Hehe. Hehe. It scraped against her sanity like fingernails on slate.
She stumbled towards the window, throwing open the shutters. The street below was dark, save for a few flickering candles in distant windows.
A figure stood motionless on the opposite rooftop, silhouetted against the faint pre-dawn light. Aminata froze, her breath catching. Was it real? Or just another trick of her fragmenting mind?
As she watched, the figure slowly raised an arm, pointing directly at her window. And though she couldn't possibly hear it across the distance, she felt it resonate within her skull: Hehe.
Aminata slammed the shutters closed, her back pressed hard against the wood. Tears streamed down her face, hot and silent.
The laughter inside her head swelled, twisting, becoming almost painful. It wasn't just mocking anymore; it felt hungry.
Days bled into weeks. The power remained intermittent. Food supplies dwindled. The structure of society seemed to be fraying at the edges. Official broadcasts urged calm, offering useless platitudes and contradictory advice.
Stay indoors. Seek fresh air. Avoid loud noises. Embrace silence. Nothing worked. The suicides continued, becoming horrifyingly commonplace. People walked into the ocean, stepped in front of buses, or simply ceased to move, found days later with rictus grins frozen on their faces.
Aminata rarely left her apartment now. She rationed her small stockpile of rice and dried fish. The hehe was relentless, a constant internal hum that warped her thoughts.
Sometimes it felt like her own inner voice had been replaced, twisted into this perverse, giggling echo. She'd catch herself thinking hehe instead of words, the sound bubbling up involuntarily from her own consciousness.
She started talking back to it, whispering curses in the dark. "Leave me alone! What do you want?"
The only answer was the incessant, maddening hehe.
One afternoon, staring at her haggard reflection in the dusty bathroom mirror, a new thought surfaced, cold and sharp amidst the internal laughter.
The sound was inside her head. It used her own mind, her own ears, her own consciousness as its playground. If she couldn't block it out, maybe she could… remove the apparatus it used?
The thought was terrifying, yet possessed a desperate logic. The hehe lived in her perception of sound. If she couldn't perceive sound…
Her gaze drifted to the small pair of scissors she used for sewing, lying beside the sink. They glinted dully in the low light filtering through the grimy window. Hehe, whispered the voice, almost encouragingly. Hehe.
She picked up the scissors, the cool metal heavy in her sweating palm. Her reflection stared back, wide-eyed, hollow-cheeked. Was this madness? Or the only escape left? The laughter surged, a triumphant crescendo within her skull. It felt like it was cheering her on, eager for the final act.
"No," she whispered, her voice raspy. "No more."
She raised the scissors. Her hand trembled violently. The sharp points hovered near her left ear. The internal hehe seemed to pause, holding its breath in anticipation.
Could she do it? Could she inflict such violence upon herself? The alternative was a slow descent into utter insanity, becoming another vacant-eyed victim found days later, the silent laughter the only victor.
Her neighbor, Madame Diop, screamed then. A raw, ragged sound from the apartment next door, followed by a sickening thud. Silence returned, deeper, heavier. Another one gone.
Aminata's resolve hardened, fueled by terror and a bleak, final clarity. This thing, this laughing void, wouldn't take her the same way. She wouldn't just surrender. She would fight back, even if the only weapon she had was her own flesh.
She took a deep, shuddering breath. The hehe returned, softer now, almost coaxing. Hehe.
Closing her eyes tightly, shutting out the sight of her own terrified face, she jammed the sharp point of the scissors into her ear canal.
Agony, white-hot and absolute, exploded through her head. She screamed, a choked, gurgling sound, dropping the scissors as blood erupted, warm and thick, pouring down her neck.
The world tilted, sound distorting into a roaring wave of static and pain. But through the agony, through the blood filling her ear, she could still perceive it, fainter now, distorted, but undeniably there. Hehehehe.
It wasn't enough. It wasn't gone.
Sobbing, half-blinded by pain and tears, she fumbled for the scissors on the tiled floor. Her fingers closed around the handle, sticky with her own blood. The laughter inside felt different now – panicked, perhaps? Or was that just her own desperation echoing back?
She lurched towards the mirror again. The sight was grotesque. Blood streamed from her ruined ear, matting her hair, staining her neck and shoulder. Her face was a mask of shock and unimaginable pain.
She had to stop it. She had to.
With a guttural cry that tore through her raw throat, she raised the scissors again, this time aiming for her other ear. She didn't hesitate.
The second impact was just as brutal, a blinding flash of pain that buckled her knees. She collapsed against the sink, the ceramic cool against her feverish, bleeding face.
Darkness swirled at the edges of her vision. The roaring in her head intensified – the sound of ruptured membranes, of catastrophic damage.
She was deafening herself. Yet, beneath the roaring, beneath the agony, like a melody played on dying nerves, the whisper persisted. Faint, tinny, grotesque. Hehe.
It wasn't in her ears. It had never been just in her ears. It was deeper. It was inside.
A profound, crushing despair washed over Aminata, heavier than the pain, colder than the fear. She had mutilated herself, traded hearing for agony, and still, it remained.
The laughter was part of her now, woven into the very fabric of her consciousness. There was no cutting it out.
She lay slumped against the sink, blood pooling around her bare feet, the world reduced to a roaring silence punctuated by the phantom giggle. She couldn't hear the city anymore. She couldn't hear her own ragged breaths, her choked sobs. All that was left was the pain and the internal echo. Hehe.
It wasn't mocking now. It sounded… sad. A lonely, broken little sound, trapped inside the ruin it had made. Or perhaps, that was just her own brokenness, finally hearing itself.
Her strength faded. The roaring subsided into a dull ringing. The cold crept up from her feet, seeping into her bones. She closed her eyes. Darkness took her, a welcome relief.
The last thing Aminata perceived, not as sound, but as a final, fading flicker of thought before everything ceased, was a single, drawn-out, almost sorrowful hehe. Then, nothing.
Outside, the Dakar morning arrived hesitant and grey. Another window remained dark. Another life extinguished, not by the global phenomenon itself, but by the desperate, brutal lengths taken to escape it.
On the bathroom floor, amidst cooling blood and discarded scissors, Aminata lay still, finally free from the sound, enveloped in a silence more absolute than any she had ever known. The world continued its descent, one whispered giggle at a time.