The Whisper

by Aaron Starmer

  “And who did she love?”

  “Her mom. Her dad. Her sister. Werner Schroeder … and me.”

  The bird was right on all counts, and Alistair only had two more questions.

  “Do you know Fiona?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then what’s her last name?”

  Baxter put the tip of his wing to his chin and thought on it until the best answer he could give was a squint and a “Haven’t the faintest clue.”

  It was a trick question. If Baxter had known Fiona’s last name, or had given a false one, then he wouldn’t be Baxter, because Fiona had never told anyone in Aquavania her last name. The only person in Aquavania who knew her last name was the Riverman, the Whisper … Charlie.

  Charlie. He might never have learned that Fiona visited Aquavania. But Alistair had scribbled her secret on a bathroom stall. Stupid. Charlie had read it and had figured out how to find Fiona in Aquavania, how to exploit what she needed and capture her. Sure, it was another of Alistair’s numerous mistakes, but the fact that it was a mistake didn’t make it feel any less shameful.

  “You realize I have to be cautious?” he told Baxter. “I have to be sure you are who you say you are.”

  “You’re frightened?” Baxter asked.

  “Aren’t you?”

  Baxter shrugged. “Worst possible thing has already happened to me: I lost Chua. What else is there to be frightened about?”

  “You don’t even know who I am,” Alistair said. “That doesn’t frighten you?”

  Another shrug. “You’re in trouble. Doesn’t take much to see that. People don’t usually crash through our floor covered with blood and asking a bazillion questions. You need help, and I’m here to help. Besides, you know Chua. Are you her friend?”

  Alistair shook his head. “I only know Fiona.”

  “I see,” Baxter said. “How is good ol’ Fiona?”

  “You don’t know?”

  The split in Baxter’s beak twisted up in embarrassment. “Since Chua’s been gone, I haven’t talked to anyone. It’s been pretty much me and the bears. Not all of them have survived, as you can see. Lean times here.”

  The remaining bears continued to fly in lazy circles near the top of the cavern. That’s when Alistair realized that there was no sunlight, starlight, or firelight in there. Except for the dim message on the wall, the only illumination came from the bears’ patchy fur. They were like glow-in-the-dark toys that were almost out of juice. Watching them made Alistair sad and dizzy, so he turned back to Baxter. “Do you even know where you are?” he asked.

  “I’m … where I’ve always been?” Baxter asked.

  Alistair sighed. He was used to being the ignorant one in Aquavania. Now, met with this penguin’s pleading eyes, he was the one who had to explain. “The Riverman took Fiona,” he said.

  Baxter took a breath, closed his eyes, and nodded.

  “Just like he took Chua,” Alistair went on. “And when he took them, he took their worlds too. You are where you’ve always been, but you’re also somewhere new. Your world has moved. Floated into other hands. The Riverman has your world now. And around here, they call him the Whisper.”

  Baxter opened his eyes. A tear slipped out. “It’s been so hard without her.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll admit I felt it,” Baxter said, shuffling closer to Alistair as his voice gradually crumbled. “It’s been more than her absence. Things have been … different. Things have been … off.”

  Alistair didn’t realize what was happening until he found himself stroking Baxter’s head. The penguin was hugging Alistair’s shoulder and burying his face in Alistair’s armpit. “I’m sorry,” Alistair told him.

  “I tried to ignore the difference,” Baxter cried. “All I cared about was getting Chua back.”

  “I know, I know,” Alistair said. “I care about the same thing.”

  Baxter pulled his head out from the pit and looked up at Alistair. “You do?”

  “That’s why I’m here. To find Fiona … to find both of them.”

  The words slipped out and there was no taking them back, especially since they made the penguin’s webbed feet wiggle with excitement. Alistair could only nod with a feigned confidence that he hoped would convince Baxter he wasn’t in over his head. That he hoped would convince himself.

  * * *

  Over the next few hours, Alistair told Baxter his story. He didn’t mention Charlie Dwyer, because he didn’t want Baxter to think he could be friends with such a … person. But he talked about everything else he knew about Aquavania and the Whisper. He told him about Mahaloo, Polly Dobson and the Ambit of Ciphers, about Hadrian, the Hutch and Potoweet, about the Mandrake.

  “I’m not like that,” Baxter said. “I am penguin through and through.”

  “I know,” Alistair said.

  “Where do you think this Mandrake came from?”

  “Hadrian said the Whisper is his master.”

  “And why does he make him do horrible things?”

  Alistair pretended to think this over for a moment, but he knew the answer immediately. “For fun.”

  “I don’t understand,” Baxter said. “What’s so fun about destruction?”

  Even if he could explain, Alistair didn’t have the time or energy to explain. Instead, he patted Baxter on the head and said, “I don’t really understand either.”

  “The girl named Polly,” Baxter said. “I may have heard of her.”

  “Really? How?”

  “Saw her name written in the snow once. Polly Dobson Will Have Her Revenge, it read.”

  “Where?”

  As if to return the favor, Baxter patted Alistair on the back and said, “It’s been covered in snow many times since, so you can’t read it. But I’ll show you the place. Interesting, to say the least. Come with me.”

  The penguin led him across the cavern, and Alistair did his best to maintain his balance as the thin soles of his leather boots shuffled on the icy ground. He fell twice, landing on his butt and his shoulder, and snapping bones—not his own, thankfully—as he struck the ground. It hurt, but Baxter was always there to offer him a wing up and some words of encouragement. Alistair had trusted Polly. He had trusted Potoweet. And now he was trusting Baxter. There was an earnestness to the penguin. Kindness. At least that’s how it seemed to Alistair. Or was he being a fool once again?

  When they reached the edge of the cavern, Baxter pointed to a wall with a vertical crack in it, an opening barely wider than Alistair’s chest. “That’s the way.”

  “To where?” Alistair asked.

  “You’ll see,” Baxter said as he slipped his body through the crack and disappeared into the darkness.

  “Baxter?” Alistair said.

  “It’s not far,” came Baxter’s faint voice. “Suck in your gut. Forget your worries.”

  It was the second time he’d used that phrase: Forget your worries. Easier said than done. Back in the cavern, the polar bears continued their orbit, the throne remained empty, the bones still scattered, and the message lit in dim lights:

  HE WON.

  There was something else Fiona had told him about Chua’s world. The dim lights cataloged the feelings and events that occurred in that cavern. They changed with the mood of the room. Once the Whisper captured Chua, the lights must have frozen on this final message of victory.

  He won? Really? Not yet, he hasn’t.

  Alistair sucked in his gut and wedged his body into the crack in the wall.

  1989

  Alistair and Fiona walked along the slush-covered road away from Thessaly’s library. Fiona had just shown Alistair a newspaper story about Chua Ling. It frightened him, but not only because it was about a girl who was missing. It was because Chua was a girl who lived all the way across the country, and yet Fiona said she used to see her all the time. In Aquavania, of course.

  Fiona blamed the Riverman for Chua’s disappearance, but Alistair didn’t believe in the Riverman
. Not then, at least. What he believed in then was the tangible, the real. Maybe someone was out there stealing children, but it couldn’t possibly be a monster from another land. If anything, it was someone Fiona knew.

  Alistair and Fiona walked in silence, passing a gas station with a convenience store lit by fluorescent lights. A man sat on a parked motorcycle near the gas pumps and sipped a fountain drink through a straw. As they passed him, the man tossed the cup to the ground, the plastic top popped off, and red liquid spilled over the pavement and mixed with the gravel and mush.

  Fiona snorted her disapproval, but she was too far from the man for him to hear. “My sister, Maria, dated a guy who rode a motorcycle once,” she told Alistair. “He smelled like oil.”

  “My sister, Keri, doesn’t date anyone,” Alistair replied.

  “That’s because she’s in eighth grade,” Fiona said. It was a somewhat valid point, but there were plenty of people who were dating in middle school. Sixth graders, seventh graders. Even a few fifth graders.

  “Maybe it’s that she doesn’t have a crush on anyone,” Alistair said.

  “Maybe,” Fiona said. “You know, choosing a guy is more than choosing a guy. At least that’s what Maria tells me. She says it’s opening an interesting-looking door. It’s buying a ticket somewhere that promises sun and thunderstorms and food you’ve never tried. But you never really know where that place is.”

  Alistair wanted to say Isn’t that true of most choices? but he remained quiet. He kept walking. They weren’t dating, at least not technically. But still.

  Fiona had chosen him.

  CHAPTER 9

  The warmth of the memory fought off the chill in Alistair’s bones as frigid rock brushed against his chest and back. He held his hands up and slid sideways through the dark passage.

  “A little farther, a little farther…” Baxter’s voice faded into nothingness, and once again, Alistair felt like a fool.

  Why do I always follow? Why do I let others determine my fate? As soon as I get to the other end, then I’m making the decisions.

  The other end was a long way off. Baxter must have had a poor sense of distance or time—probably both—because the passage went on and on until Alistair wasn’t sure he could keep going, and yet he knew he couldn’t turn back.

  “Baxter!” he shouted. “Are you there?”

  The response was muffled and unintelligible, and Alistair began to panic. The tight space felt even tighter, the darkness even darker. “Please,” he pleaded. “Where are we going, Baxter?”

  Nothing.

  Alistair closed his eyes. Baxter is good. Baxter is Fiona’s friend.

  Fiona. His focus turned to Fiona. It had been about two weeks since he’d last seen her, since she’d told him that Charlie was the Riverman, since she’d said that Alistair was “so much better here,” kissed him on the lips, and then left for Aquavania one final time. Not even fifteen days—not very long—but already he was forgetting what she looked like. Memories were hitting him without warning, but he couldn’t summon the ones he wanted. He couldn’t will her face back into his head. Her dark hair. Her crooked nose. Her eyes. What color were they exactly? Green? Amber? Almost gray?

  If there was any hope of answering such questions, then maybe it lay at the end of the passage. Baxter is good, Baxter is Fiona’s friend, he told himself again. He opened his eyes and pressed on.

  Light. First barely a flicker, but soon it was illuminating every vein and bump on the surrounding stone. He quickened his pace. The air lost its staleness. There was an opening ahead.

  At the other side of the passageway, where there was sun, wind, and earth, mountains dominated the skyline. There was no way to avoid them—immense, jagged, and capped with pink snow. They must have been miles high, perhaps higher than the Himalayas, the tallest of mountains. Well, the tallest in the Solid World, that is. Perhaps in Aquavania they were considered puny. Alistair had given up trying to understand the space and time of this place. All he wanted to know was how to get from point A to point F.

  A frozen lake had the potential to hold some clues. It sat at the foot of the mountains, and Baxter stood along the edge of it with his wings outstretched. Alistair followed the path of three-toed footprints through the pink snow.

  “It was written on the lake,” the penguin said. “I never saw who wrote it, but I’ve seen others come and go. From one hut to the next. They have little interest in chatting. Busy as bees and often strangely dressed.”

  Scattered over the surface of the lake were a series of ice-fishing huts. They were all of similar construction—corrugated aluminum, shingles, knotty scraps of plywood. They were actually the least foreign things Alistair had come across in Aquavania. The lakes and ponds near Thessaly were dotted with similar makeshift shelters every winter. Alistair’s dad never built one, but occasionally he’d join a buddy with a thermos of something hot and they’d spend a Sunday bundled up and listening to football on the radio, catching mostly nothing. Alistair and Keri had even joined him once, but they both found it to be a cold and boring affair.

  “What are you telling me?” Alistair asked Baxter.

  “Back when Chua was around,” Baxter explained, “these were fishing huts. Go inside, drop a hook in the hole, and seconds later you would pull up a big Swedish fish.”

  “Like the candy?” Alistair asked.

  Baxter shrugged. “Like the Swedish type of fish, I guess. Red. Flat. Sweet.”

  Alistair nodded. “Yep. Go on.”

  “Well,” Baxter said, “ever since the … Whisper … got Chua, I haven’t gone in the huts. I don’t particularly like the feeling I get around them. But I see strangers sometimes, coming out of one and going into another.”

  “They’re gateways?” Alistair asked.

  “I suppose they could be. There were originally ten of them, but it seems someone’s added one recently. Though that’s hardly the oddest thing I’ve seen around here.”

  “You said the people were strangely dressed?” Alistair asked. “How so?”

  Baxter shrugged. “Hats, costumes, accoutrements of all varieties. Like I said, these weren’t chatty sorts. They came and went. That’s all.”

  Baxter’s count was correct—there were eleven huts. Eleven doors, in other words, each possibly leading to a different world. “Should I look inside?” Alistair asked.

  “Do they say ‘Look before you leap’?” Baxter asked.

  “Who?”

  “People.”

  “They do.”

  “Well, there you are, then.”

  I’m making the decisions, Alistair had told himself earlier. Had he known his decisions would involve eleven different choices, he might have been a bit more careful with his proclamations. “Any other suggestions?” Alistair asked.

  Baxter thought about it for a moment and then replied, “Whenever Chua would leave Aquavania and go back to the Solid World, she’d tell me and the polar bears to ‘be smart, be safe … and try not to eat one another.’”

  Alistair smiled and Baxter smiled back. “Well, I guess the smart and safe thing to do is to check them all out first,” Alistair said.

  So that’s what he did. One by one he opened the doors to the huts and stepped inside. The interiors were almost identical. On the floor of each, there was a perfectly round hole in the ice, an entrance into the frigid water. There were walls, a few wooden seats, some fishing poles. There was only one significant difference. In each hut, a hook was mounted above the hole, and on each hook hung a different object. They were as follows.

  Hut One: A leather saddle.

  Hut Two: A paintbrush.

  Hut Three: An empty backpack.

  Hut Four: A spyglass.

  Hut Five: A rubber flipper.

  Hut Six: A white glove.

  Hut Seven: A nylon harness.

  Hut Eight: A baseball bat.

  Hut Nine: An arrow.

  Hut Ten: A locked diary.

  Hut Eleven: A hunk of dried mea
t.

  Of all the objects, the white glove was the most intriguing. Alistair went back to it a second time and felt the fabric. It was smooth and cool. He brought it out and showed it to Baxter. It shimmered when held in the sunlight.

  “Polly Dobson wore a spacesuit,” Alistair said. “The material of this glove is kinda like the stuff that suit was made of. Have you ever seen anyone in a spacesuit coming from this hut?”

  Baxter looked at the ground. “Not that I remember,” he said. “But that’s not to say it didn’t happen. I don’t spend much time here. Like I said, the ones who come and go aren’t exactly sparkling conversationalists.”

  Without warning, the door to Hut Seven—the one that contained the harness—opened, and a boy dressed in a thick down coat stepped out onto the frozen lake. Water dripped off his body. He wore boots with spikes on the bottom that made a crunching sound when he walked.

  “Hey there!” Alistair shouted, and he started across the ice toward the boy. The boy appeared disinterested as he moved quickly toward Hut Four—the one that housed the spyglass. He opened the door and slipped inside without saying a word. When Alistair reached the hut, there was an audible splash, and when he opened the door, the boy was gone.

  Baxter cocked his head and offered a look of See what I mean?

  “I could follow that kid,” Alistair said. “Or I could see if the hut with this glove leads me to where Polly came from. Maybe someone there can tell me about the Ambit of Ciphers. Polly was going to the Ambit of Ciphers because she was looking for someone too. That place may be where the captured kids are hidden.”

  “You can also stay here,” Baxter said. “I’d be thrilled if you found Chua and Fiona, but from what you’ve told me, it’s dangerous out there. So if you feel safer here…”

  Staying put wasn’t an option, and besides, it didn’t seem any safer than leaving. It was cold here. The polar bears were starving, probably desperate to eat anything or anyone. Strange people passed between the huts, and there was no telling if the Whisper would send something like the Mandrake to destroy them all. There was no telling anything. The best Alistair could do was make an educated guess.