From a Whisper to a Scream

by Charles de Lint

  “What … what are you saying?” he asked.

  “I fear he’s too strong for us.”

  Great. And meanwhile, Cindy and Niki were out there somewhere, waiting for them.

  “Can’t we call in the cavalry?” Jim asked, trying to keep his tone light for all that he was serious about their trying to get some help.

  “What cavalry?”

  Right. They were on their own.

  “The good thing,” Ti Beau added, “is that the guédé presence is so strong that I can lead us to where he has manifested.”

  “So what’s the bad news?”

  “The guédé will lead us to Niki and Cindy.”

  Jim gripped her arm. A knot formed in his chest.

  “What are you telling me?” he asked.

  Ti Beau ignored the painful tightening of his grip. “The guédé has manifested in their presence. They are in grave danger.”

  For a long moment Jim couldn’t speak, couldn’t even move. All he could think of was the last of the Slasher’s female victims. The image rose up in his mind and lay there like a photograph; the sprawled and broken body, the pools of blood, the blonde hair fanned out upon the pavement—only this time Cindy’s features were superimposed upon those of the victim. She was the one who lay dead there.

  He shook his head, trying to shake the image away. He couldn’t imagine her dead. If she died, it’d be all his fault. She was so full of life—how the hell could he live with her death on his conscience?

  “What the hell are we waiting for?” he demanded of his companion.

  Ti Beau pried his hand from her arm. Her eyes were dark with worry and sympathy.

  “Come,” she said and set off at a quick jog down the rubble-strewn street.

  Jim hesitated for a moment. It didn’t seem right that it was just them there, that there was no one to help. But he and Ti Beau were all that Cindy and Niki had.

  He caught up to the mambo, then matched her pace as she led them deeper into the Tombs.

  The more Bobby Brown thought about it, the more it had rankled. Who’d that dumb chick think she was, coming on all heavy to him like she had?

  He was halfway to the stairwell, intent on going upstairs and putting her in her place, when the screaming started.

  What the—?

  He froze in the middle of the foyer and stared up at the ceiling. Niki’d looked bad, he thought, but he didn’t think she’d been this out of it. It sounded like somebody was getting killed up there. Maybe Niki was having a go at her friend. The idea of the two of them fighting brought a bulge to the groin of his jeans. He pictured the two of them rolling around on the floor, palling each other’s hair, maybe tearing off each other’s clothes … .

  The screams trailed off.

  Maybe they were making up. Kissing, hands on breasts, stiff fingers slipping into each other … .

  His hard-on was starting to get a little painful. He stuck a hand down the front of his pants, adjusting his penis so that it lay against his abdomen, pressed in there tightly by the pressure of his jeans.

  Maybe they wanted some company.

  He started up the stairs at a quick trot, a half-dozen horny fantasies running through his mind, all of them centered on him and the two of them, hot for him, crawling all over him.

  He heard shouting while he was still in the stairwell, but he couldn’t make out the words. Then the top of the landing came into view, and he halted abruptly.

  Niki was there. And her friend. They were huddled against each other, looking down the hall like some ax murderer was coming for them.

  Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, Bobby thought.

  Then the arms came up out of the floor and grabbed Niki’s ankles, and it was like Bobby’s mind shut down. Those arms weren’t reaching up through a hole; they came right out of the floor, seemed to be made of the same material.

  “Oh, fuck … ,” he mumbled.

  There was no way this was real. But the arms were pulling Niki back down against the floor. They just disappeared to wherever it was that they were coming from, but Niki’s body didn’t have the same bizarre property. Her body came up sharp against the floor. The hands—all that was visible now of her attacker—kept up their pressure. Niki was wailing. Her friend was trying to tug her free.

  All Bobby could do was stare. Niki’s friend looked down toward him, her gaze catching his.

  “H-help us … .”

  Bobby shook his head. Something was happening to both Niki and her friend. They seemed to be … changing. Niki’s black hair went white; her face went black. The whites of her eyes darkened; her pupils turned white. It was the same with her friend. They were like negatives, light and dark all reversed.

  “P-please … .”

  There was the opposite of a light flash then—a flare of darkness, just as blinding as if it had been light. Bobby’s eyes watered. Spots danced in his vision. When he could see clearly, both women were gone. All that remained of their presence was a shadow on the floor.

  He could feel his muscles turning to jelly. In another moment he was going to collapse there on the stairs like a puddle and just ooze downward, step by step. But then he saw that the shadow was growing.

  It spread out, expanding like a stain, turning the floor black. When it touched the top of the stairs, Bobby reached out and grabbed the banister, hugged his body toward it. Slowly he eased his way down, moving backward, gaze locked on the shadow at the top of the landing, watching the uppermost step turn black. It was only when the landing was finally out of his vision that he could find the strength to bolt the rest of the way down the stairs and out across the foyer.

  Behind him the shadow continued to spread.

  John changed the stones in the sweat lodge three times in all. He poured water on their hot surfaces each time, sending up clouds of fiery steam to fill the small enclosed area where the two of them sat. Light crept in through the canvas, but it was diffused and dim. In the shadowy dark, wreathed in the hot steam, Thomas listened to his brother’s soft chanting and felt the pores of his skin open and release their poisons. Unexpectedly, he discovered that his mind had pores of a kind as well. They, too, discharged poisons, of a different sort.

  His hair clung wetly to his scalp; sweat beaded on his skin. When they finally emerged from the sweat lodge, blinking in the brighter light outside, he felt light-headed and clean in a way he’d never experienced before. Even the grimness of the Tombs and the brooding sky above them couldn’t diminish the sense of weft-being that had crept over him in the hot darkness of the lodge.

  Once outside, they used the remaining water in the jugs to rinse themselves, taking turns upending the jugs over each other. Toweling themselves dry, they stripped off their wet jockey shorts, then dressed in silence.

  “Can you feel it?” John asked when they were both done.

  Thomas blinked, still feeling a little light-headed. “Feel what?”

  “The spirit.”

  Reality began its relentless inroads through Thomas’s consciousness once more. For a time there he’d been able to put it all out of his mind—the Slasher, Brewer’s betrayal, his questions about his job, Angie. Now, with John’s reminder as to why they were here in the Tombs, those anxieties were all back again, scrabbling for his attention.

  Thomas sighed. “Don’t start with the mumbo jumbo, John. Just come out and say what’s going on.”

  “The windigo spirit,” John explained. “I can feel its presence.”

  “So now what? Do we … uh, call it to us?”

  John shook his head. “No, it’s calling us.”

  “I don’t hear anything,” Thomas said.

  But that wasn’t true. There, behind his clamoring anxieties, he could feel an alien presence in his mind. It was a soft, whispering noise, like the barely audible rasp of a cold wind breathing through the rooms of an abandoned building at midnight. Thomas found himself not wanting to find out what kind of a creature could originate a sound like that.
r />   “Why … why’s it calling us?” he asked.

  “It knows you, Tom.”

  “Because I’m investigating the murders?”

  John shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “What other reason could it have to concentrate on me?”

  “A spirit usually turns its attention on those who wronged it while it was alive,” John said.

  An uneasy feeling started up deep in Thomas’s chest.

  “Wronged,” he said. “You mean, I knew the Slasher before it died?”

  He was beyond questioning the impossibility of what he’d just said. The reality he knew, his accepted preconceptions of how the world was supposed to work, how he’d always believed it did, had slipped askew ever since he’d talked with Papa Jo-el.

  John gave him a long, considering look. “You only ever killed the one man—right?”

  Thomas stared back at him. As the memories John’s words called up rose in his mind, the dark whisper inside him seemed to grow colder, more malevolent. Thomas could see the body of the overweight pedophile he’d shot, lying there in the empty lot. The moment that always first came to mind when he remembered that day, the moment that was frozen into the very core of his memory, was before the backup arrived and the crime scene turned into a zoo.

  He was always alone with the body, just the two of them, the dead man and himself.

  Teddy Bird.

  He remembered going to the man’s funeral, standing there, grave side, just himself and the gravediggers. And the coffin. And later, trying to explain it to Brewer:

  I had to see them put him in the ground.

  He had to know Bird was dead, because no matter which way you turned it, he was one sick fuck. He didn’t think he could live in a world where a man like that still existed.

  And now he was back.

  The cold whispering voice in his head—who else could it belong to? Why else should it feel so familiar? Head shot, dead, buried—all two years past—but here he was, back again. Teddy Bird.

  “Jesus,” he said softly.

  John gave him a sympathetic look. “It makes sense,” he said. “It explains the peculiar intensity of the windigo’s attention on you right now.”

  Thomas knew John was right, with a gut instinct that sent an immediate affirmation coursing through every nerve end. But he didn’t want to believe it.

  “All … all those girls it’s killed … ,” he said. “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “Who says it’s only going to have one thing on its agenda?” John replied.

  He went over to the bed of the pickup then and took out another of the plastic grocery-store bags. This one was full of an off-white powder. He mixed it with water in a small bowl.

  “What’s that?” Thomas asked, joining him.

  He was trying to concentrate on something else, wanting to put Teddy Bird out of his mind, but once called up, the dead man was hard to ignore. He could hear the shot, see the man fall, remember standing over his corpse, hear the dirt falling on his coffin … .

  The midnight voice hissed in the back of his mind.

  “Clay,” his brother told him.

  John held the bowl in one hand, then, using the side mirror on the driver’s side, daubed the clay on his face. The clay quickly dried, hiding his features behind a gray-white mask.

  “John,” Thomas began.

  “Come here,” John said.

  Thomas backed away. “I don’t—”

  “It’s just a ghost mask,” his brother explained.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “You’re going to need its protection, where we’re going.”

  “I—”

  “Trust me in this, Tom.”

  Thomas hesitated a moment longer, then let his brother daub the mixture on his own face. It felt cool against the skin, prickling when it dried and hardened.

  “Looks good on you,” John said. “Now we just have to—”

  “Jesus!”

  Thomas and John turned to find Thomas’s partner looking at them from the end of the alleyway.

  “Look at the pair of you,” Frank went on. “What the hell are you doing, going on the warpath?”

  “Frank. What’re you—”

  “You put your job on the line—Christ, I put my job on the line—and it’s for this? You better have one fuck of a good explanation for what’s going down … partner. I mean, if this is your idea of a joke, I’m not laughing.”

  Frank’s anger hurt, but Thomas understood it perfectly. He knew what he and John looked like—a couple of fools.

  “This isn’t a game,” John said.

  “Yeah? Then what the fuck is it?”

  “We’re going after the Slasher,” Thomas said, knowing how lame it sounded.

  Frank just shook his head. “As what? A pair of vigilante Indians? What happened to rules and regs, man?”

  “They can’t cover what we’re up against.”

  Frank said nothing for a long moment. Then he seemed to deflate. His anger washed away, replaced by confusion.

  “So … so you’re buying into the weird shit?” he asked.

  “I don’t have any choice.”

  As he spoke, Thomas realized that something had changed in his partner.

  “What’s happened, Frank?” he added.

  “We picked up Billy Ryan. He … he’s lost it. He’s talking wild, killed Mickey Flynn—cut him up into a couple hundred little pieces—and all he talks about is monsters.”

  John’s eyes kindled with interest. “What kind of monsters?”

  “He says it killed Papa Jo-el, says it’s in his head now … .” Frank’s voice trailed off. He moved closer to them, gaze locked on the white masks of their faces. “It’s all for real, isn’t it? All this Twilight Zone shit?”

  Thomas focused on what his partner had just said about Ryan hearing a voice in his head. The midnight wind stirred in his own thoughts, and he realized now that it was a voice, too. A whispering cold voice, summoning him … .

  “I … I don’t know,” Thomas said. “I just—”

  “It’s real,” John said brusquely. “And we’re running out of time.”

  Thomas turned to him. “What do you mean?”

  “If we wait any longer, we’re going to lose the advantage of choosing our battleground. It’s going to come to us. I can feel it growing stronger every minute.”

  “We’ve got to go, Frank,” Thomas told his partner.

  As Thomas picked up his shoulder holster and put it on, John went to the cab of the pickup. He reached behind the seat and brought out a hunting rifle. Frank stood there, looking at the pair of them.

  “You,” he began. “You’re really …”

  “Get out of here, Frank. I’ll give you a call later.”

  Frank shook his head. “I’m in.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” Thomas told him.

  “What? We’re not partners anymore?”

  “It’s not that. It’s just—”

  “Let’s got!” John broke in.

  Without waiting to see if they would follow, he set off down the alleyway, cutting across a litter-covered lot. Thomas and Frank regarded each other for a long moment. They both realized suddenly that there was too much lying unspoken between them.

  “Later,” Frank said.

  It was half a question, half a promise.

  When Thomas nodded in agreement, the two of them jogged after John, hurrying to catch up.

  There was no longer even a hint of hesitation in Ti Beau’s manner. She led Jim unerringly through the jungle of abandoned buildings that made up the Tombs, until they both came up short at the end of yet another long, deserted block. The hulk of an old school bus lay rusting to one side of them, half on the sidewalk, half on the street. On the other side, a brownstone stood tumbled in upon itself.

  They gave the street only a cursory look, the whole of their attention drawn, then locked onto, one building that stood halfway down the block. It seemed to have a w
ater stain on it, turning the brickwork dark, but as they watched, the stain spread, throwing more and more of the structure into shadow.

  It was, Jim thought, as though the building’s polarities of light and dark were being exchanged. The light sandstone brickwork turned black; the dark trim grew paler: black and white reversing like—like a photographic negative.

  “That,” he began, pointing to the building.

  “Is where the guédé is,” Ti Beau finished.

  “But what’s happening to the building?”

  The mambo slowly shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  This time Jim took the lead. Just as they reached the front of the building, a teenager burst through the front doors. For one moment he was framed in the doorway, and in that moment, he, too, was like a negative: black skin, black eye whites, white pupils. All color was gone, and he stood there in sharp contrasts of black and white.

  Then he stepped out, stumbled and fell, and his reversed polarities of light and dark regained their proper equilibrium. Black skin became white; eyes returned to normal. Color returned to his clothing.

  But the building remained unchanged.

  “This is too fucking weird,” Jim said with a catch in his throat. “I …”

  All he wanted to do was bolt. Somehow this was worse than last night. He was numb with fear, frozen in place, desperate just to run as far from what he was seeing as he could. But then Ti Beau spoke, and he knew what he had to do.

  “They’re in there,” she said. “Niki and your friend and the guédé. He has them.”

  Jim started for the building.

  “Wait!” Ti Beau called. “We must work from outside where we have the freedom of our. minds.”

  Jim shook his head and kept on going. “I’m not leaving them in there on their own,” he called back over his shoulder.

  Ti Beau hurried to catch up. “He will work his way into your mind if you go inside. You won’t be able to do a thing.”

  Jim continued to walk toward the building, but he turned to her.

  “Do you know what the fuck’s going on here?” he demanded.

  The rage he’d felt earlier in the day was building up inside him once again, for all that he was still wearing Ti Beau’s gris-gris charm, but this time it had a focus, a logical focus, and he let it build. He didn’t know from ghosts or walking dead men or whatever it was that the monster he’d seen last night might be. All he knew was that it was threatening Cindy and Niki. He was tired of running around, of feeling ineffectual. It was time to do something.