From a Whisper to a Scream

by Charles de Lint

  “From—this is going to sound crazy—but he got it from the graffiti.”

  “Doesn’t sound crazy to me,” Niki said. “Nothing sounds crazy anymore.”

  “What do you mean? What is it that you’re so scared of?”

  Niki turned to look out the window again.

  “My father started abusing me when I was still in my cradle,” she said. She spoke without turning; her voice was flat, empty of emotion. “I don’t remember that, but I can remember how it was when I got a little older. My old lady finally got the guts to leave him when I turned seven. We moved away—right across the country. Things weren’t great, but they were okay, you know?

  “But then when I turned thirteen, her latest beau put the make on me and I just had to go. I’ve lived on the streets for the last five years. I’m not saying everything I did was right, but I got by. I survived.”

  She paused, the pause lengthening until Cindy said, “I think I get the picture.”

  Niki’d probably started turning tricks. It was an easy life to fall into; it had almost happened to Cindy herself, but she’d been lucky. She hit the road when she was older, and all the bullshit pickup lines from the pimps never cut it with her. But for a young thirteen-year-old with no place to go …

  “Maybe you do,” Niki said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter,” Cindy said.

  Niki turned to look at her. She studied her for a long moment, then slowly shook her head.

  “You really do give a shit, don’t you?” she said.

  When she spoke, her voice cracked—just a touch. Cindy found her throat going thick. There was a tight feeling in her chest, like her skin had suddenly become a couple of sizes too small. She reached out a hand and Niki took it. It was all the response Cindy could give right then; she didn’t trust her own voice.

  Niki looked away again, but she held onto Cindy’s hand. Her voice regained its flat tone.

  “But the way things went,” she said, “I could see my whole life was going downhill. I was in a dead-end situation and no one was going to help me unless I helped myself. I didn’t know what to do until I was reading this old magazine at a Welfare office. There was an article in it about serial killers and that was where I found out that the old man was finally dead.”

  “Your father … he was … killed by one of those people?” Cindy asked.

  Niki gave another of her short, bitter laughs. “Fuck no. He was one of them. After my old lady took us away, he started getting his jollies out of killing the kids he fucked.”

  “Oh my God … .”

  “Yeah, right. Anyway he finally got his own. He—get this—he got caught because there just happened to be a cop driving behind him and he got nervous so he jumped a red light. He ended up trying to shoot the cop, only he got killed instead. They found a bunch of dead kids in the trunk of his car.”

  With every word Niki spoke, the numb feeling inside Cindy deepened.

  “Anyway, when I heard he was dead, I figured maybe I’d come back and try to make a new start here. You know, finish high school, try to get a real life instead of living in the shadows. I thought I could feel my old hometown calling me back. It was like it was saying, some bad shit went down here, but now everything’s okay. Now there’s a chance to do it right.

  “So I came back, except I found out that it was his voice I heard in my head. He was calling me back.”

  “He … ?” Cindy asked, dreading the answer.

  “My old man.”

  Niki turned back from the window. She looked straight at Cindy; her bright blue eyes were clear and sane.

  “He’s not dead anymore, you see,” she said. “He’s come back and he’s looking for me.”

  “But—”

  “All those girls he’s killed—that’s me he’s killing. And he’s going to keep doing it over and over again until he gets it right.”

  Cindy started to shake her head. “That’s imposs—”

  “I know it’s fucking impossible,” Niki said. “What do you think I am, stupid? But it’s happening all the same.”

  Cindy didn’t know what to say or do. Did she play along with the story—weren’t you supposed to humor crazy people?—or did she try to get Niki to see the truth?

  “I thought maybe I could do something,” Niki went on. “I thought maybe I could stop him—make a difference. But I know now I can’t. He’s just too strong. And besides, how do you kill something that’s already dead?”

  “You can’t.”

  “Exactly my point.”

  “You can’t,” Cindy said, “because people don’t come back from the dead.”

  Niki freed her hand. Reaching up, she pulled off Cindy’s beret so that the honey-blonde hair that had been hidden under it fell free.

  “This is a dye job,” she said, lifting a hand to her own hair. “I’m blond, just like you.”

  “What does that have to—”

  “All those girls he’s killed are blonde, too. So if you’re so sure of yourself, why don’t you leave your hat off and go walking around in the Zone next Friday night?” Niki paused, then added, “Or maybe any night. I got a feeling he’s about to start changing his habits.”

  “I didn’t say there wasn’t a killer,” Cindy said.

  “You’re just saying he’s not my old man.”

  “Not if your father’s dead.”

  “Oh, he’s dead all right.”

  Niki cocked her head as though listening. Cindy tried, but she couldn’t hear a thing.

  “The way I see it,” Niki said, “is either I’m crazy and it’s all in my head …”

  She looked too sane, Cindy thought. That was the scariest thing.

  “ … or I’m not and he’s really out there. Either way, you’re better off not hanging around me.”

  “I … I don’t know what to do,” Cindy said.

  “Yeah, well I do. I’m getting my ass out of here. Maybe he’ll follow me and maybe he won’t. All I know is that if I do stay here, I’m dead meat. I think I’ll take my chances and just hit the road.”

  This time she was the one to reach out and offer comfort.

  “I know what it all sounds like,” she said. “Honestly I do. If I were you, I’d get away from me just about as fast as I could. But I want to thank you for trying to help. Nobody’s ever done that before—not without wanting something I didn’t want to give them in return.”

  Niki’s words echoed what Cindy had been thinking earlier this morning in Meg’s apartment: Out on the road, everybody wants a piece of you. That’s what was going to happen to Niki if Cindy let her go now.

  “I still want to help,” she said. “I just don’t know how.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Niki gave her hand a squeeze. Handing Cindy back her beret, she got up and returned to stuffing her clothes in her backpack.

  Cindy moved closer to the window. She looked out over the wasteland of empty lots and abandoned buildings. It seemed to reflect what lay inside her right at that moment. When she turned back, Niki had her gear all packed. She was standing in the middle of the room, holding her backpack by its straps.

  “Come with me,” Cindy said. “Talk to my friend Jim.”

  “What can he do?”

  “I don’t know. But he knows the city. He works for a paper. He’s got lots of connections. Maybe he knows somebody that can help us.”

  “Like who?” Niki asked. “I’m not going to see a shrink.”

  “Maybe there’s someone who can … I don’t know … exorcise your ghost.”

  Niki gave her a sad smile. “What? You’re offering me a—what do you call them?—a placebo? Niki thinks the ghost’s been chased away, so Niki’ll become sane again?”

  “No.”

  “Come on. You don’t believe and I figure you’re at least sympathetic. What are my chances anyone else will?”

  “At least talk to him.”

  “I …”

  “Please.”

>   Niki shook her head. “I just don’t get it. Why are you so concerned?”

  “Because I don’t want to see you throw your life away, that’s why. You came here to start over; all you’re going to find on the road is the same dead end you were trying to escape.”

  “No shit,” Niki said, but then she sighed. “Okay. We’ll see your friend. But then I’m out of here and you don’t try to stop me—is that a deal?”

  “It’s a deal.”

  “Describe to me again the events as you saw them,” Isabeau Fontenot asked Jim after he’d related a disjointed account of what had happened in the Tombs last night.

  At the door earlier she hadn’t been anything like what Jim had expected, not at all the voluptuous caricature from a B movie. Instead she was a thin mulatto in her midtwenties. Although she was rather plain, she had a presence that immediately commanded one’s attention. She was dressed in a bright red, yellow, and green flowerprint dress, and her hair was done up in what looked like hundreds of cornrow braids. In one hand she carried a large brown leather bag. She seemed all sharp angles, but her large, dark brown eyes promised warmth if they could be made to smile.

  “Ah … Ms. Fontenot,” he’d begun, suddenly feeling awkward.

  “Call me Ti Beau,” she said. “It’s the name I am known by in my … work.”

  “Right. Ti Beau it is. Listen, thanks for coming, I—”

  She walked past him and sat down on the sofa, setting her bag at her feet. Before Jim could offer her coffee or tea, she got right down to business.

  “Tell me what you saw,” she said.

  So Jim went through it, and now he repeated the story when she asked him to. This time he managed a more coherent version. She looked through the photographs as he spoke, nodding to herself when he was done.

  “It was not a voudoun ceremony you saw,” she said.

  “Well, it sure as hell looked like—”

  “Papa Jo-el was a bocor—a sorcerer—as well as a houngan,” she said. “What you saw bears no relationship to the worship of the loa.”

  “Then what was he doing?”

  “Raising a guédé, I would imagine. A spirit of the dead,” she added at his blank look.

  “So … what I saw … it was real?”

  Ti Beau nodded.

  “Jesus,” Jim said softly.

  The woman’s composed presence helped stem the panic that Jim could feel rising up in him. He took a couple of steadying breaths. They helped as well. Now if he could just get rid of that damned sound in his head … .

  He found Ti Beau studying him.

  “There is something about you,” she said when he caught her glance. “Are you in pain?”

  Jim nodded. “Ever since I saw that thing last night, I’ve had this … sound in my head. It’s like a kind of whispering—a voice, but I can’t make out what it’s saying. I think it’s a name.”

  “And it troubles you?”

  Jim looked at her as if she was crazy. Just talking about the damned sound had it clamoring in his head, overriding all his efforts to keep it at bay. He felt himself wanting just to hit Ti Beau, take a baseball bat, or maybe a bread knife from the kitchen, and just—

  She reached forward suddenly and laid a cool hand on his brow. Her fingers traced a design upon his temple and the fever seemed to pass. The whispering was still there, but it was more distant now. Just like that, he could handle it again.

  “The curse of a guédé,” Ti Beau said thoughtfully.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This spirit is very strong,” she said by way of reply. “It has left a sliver of itself in you.”

  Jim’s stomach did a slow, queasy flip.

  “In … me … ,” he managed.

  Ti Beau nodded. “It can happen—when the guédé is very strong.”

  “It makes me feel … crazy, you know? Like I just want to break something.”

  Ti Beau nodded again. She undid the fastening of the leather bag at her feet and rummaged about in it until her hand came up with a small leather pouch attached to a leather thong. Before Jim could protest, she slipped the thong over his head and let the pouch fall against his chest.

  The change was instantaneous. One moment the whispering ran though his head, cold and murderous, the next it was gone.

  Jim lifted a wondering hand to the pouch. “Jesus,” he said as he prodded it gingerly with a finger. “What … what is this?”

  “Gris-gris,” Ti Beau said. “A small charm to keep unfriendly spirits at bay.”

  “It … it really works.”

  She gave him a brief smile. “I would have been gravely disappointed if it had not.”

  “I didn’t mean any disrespect. It’s just—”

  “That you are not a believer.”

  Jim nodded. His fingers closed around the pouch, and he savored the blessed silence in his head.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “You are welcome. I’m glad to have been able to help you in such a small thing.” He got another brief smile from her; then she was all business again. “Why exactly did you wish to see me?”

  Christ, Jim thought. Like shutting off that damned sound in his head wasn’t worth the price of admission?

  He let go of the gris-gris pouch and tried to put his train of thought back together again.

  “Okay,” he said. “So your boss—”

  “He was the houngan of the temple in which I am mambo,” Ti Beau corrected him. “I have no ‘boss,’ save les invisibles.”

  “Right.” Jim rephrased his question. “Why was he raising a spirit of the dead?”

  Ti Beau regarded the photos again—both the ones Jim had taken the night before and those of Niki and the graffiti.

  “If the guédé that killed Papa Jo-el is the same one that is murdering all those girls,” she said, “then I believe he was trying to drive it away from the city. Had he succeeded, it would have counted as a great coup in his rivalry with Clarvius, for it would have shown that les invisibles looked more favorably upon him.”

  “Clarvius Jones?” Jim asked.

  Ti Bean nodded.

  Jim went back to what she’d been saying before he interrupted her. “So you think this … uh, ghost … is the Slasher?”

  Ti Beau nodded. “I sense the same connection as you do,” she said. “The guédé, this girl, the graffiti. I wonder what her relationship to the dead man is.”

  “Why would there be a relationship?”

  “Guédé such as this one are spirits who remain in the Place Between—in Limbo. They seek to regain the flesh they lost so that they can walk in the world of men once more as les damnés.”

  “The damned,” Jim said, finding that term, at least, easy to translate.

  Ti Beau nodded. “The undead,” she said. “There are many ways for them to regain flesh, but the most effective method is to impregnate the body of a female blood relation and be ‘born’ once more. Could she be its daughter, or a niece?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know the girl. I don’t even know for sure if there is a connection. Cindy said her name was Chelsea.”

  “Names can be changed.” Ti Beau fingered Niki’s photo. “I sense secrets here.”

  “But—”

  “The terror you tell me that came over her when you called out to her—that is the terror of facing a guédé, would you not think?”

  “I suppose. But what does it need to regain a body for? That creature was physically there last night. It was wielding a knife and tossing those guys around.”

  “The dead can manifest in physical form,” Ti Beau explained, “but such an effect is only temporary.”

  They both fell silent then. As Jim considered what they’d been talking about, he began again to question his own sanity. What was he doing, talking about all this hoodoo stuff as though it were real?

  Because he saw it last night. He saw that thing just take shape out of a mist, kill three men, and then disappear.

  �
�So what do we do?” he asked.

  Ti Beau regarded him with raised eyebrows. “Do?”

  “About this … this guédé.”

  “Are you so sure you wish to involve yourself further?”

  “Are you kidding? I feel like just packing up and leaving the city.”

  “Then why don’t you?”

  “I can’t,” Jim said. “I’ve thought about it, but I can’t do it.”

  “There is no shame in fearing such a malevolent guédé,” Ti Beau said. “Or in fleeing its haunts.”

  Jim shook his head. “But I know now,” he said. “If I don’t try to do something and somebody else dies, their deaths are going to be on my conscience. I’d go to the cops like a shot if I thought they’d listen, but there’s no way they’d take any of this seriously. Christ, sometimes I can’t believe I’m taking it seriously.”

  Ti Beau studied him for a moment, a hint of a smile touching her eyes as his hand rose to finger the gris-gris pouch that dangled against his chest. The smile immediately softened the sharp angles of her features.

  “You are a good man,” she said.

  The compliment made Jim blush. “Yeah, well …”

  “And I know exactly what you mean, but I’m not so sure either of us can do a thing.”

  “What do you mean? Can’t you just do whatever it is you guys do and …”

  His voice trailed off at her weary smile.

  “I am merely a mambo,” she said. “I am a healer, a guide to the Mysteries, not a sorcerer. What little power I have is loaned to me by my loa, Zaka. He is the Spirit of the Land, the Tender of the Fields. His power is in healing and growth. What magics I have are just small gris-gris—charms, little spells, like the one you now wear about your neck. This guédé seems too strong for what I can do. If I knew more, if I knew for sure that the girl is to be his conduit to this world …” She shrugged. “One would need to be possessed by the power of Baron Samedi or Chango to deal with such a spirit without more knowledge.”

  “These are all … loa?”

  Ti Beau nodded.

  “And everybody’s got a different one?”

  “No,” she said. “You have only the loa who comes to you, but the loa have more than one channel for their powers. Is the Christian God perceived by only one priest?”