The Whisper

by Aaron Starmer

  He headed back to the hut where he’d found the glove. “I appreciate the offer,” he told Baxter, “but the sooner I find them, the sooner things will be back to normal. I’m going in this one.”

  His own decision, clear and definitive. This was what he should have been doing all along.

  “You told me how you got here,” Baxter said. “But tell me this: what did Fiona do? You know, after Chua was taken?”

  Alistair placed a hand on Baxter’s shoulder and said, “She, Rodrigo, Boaz, and Jenny, they tried so hard to stop the Whisper. Rodrigo and Boaz … they were captured too. Jenny chose to hide. Then there’s a big chunk of time where I don’t know exactly what Fiona was doing. Twelve years, actually. But I can assure you of this: she did everything in her power to get Chua back, to get back every captured kid. And when she’d exhausted every option, she wrote books about them.”

  “Books?”

  Alistair nodded. “She wrote down their stories and buried them in Aquavania. She wanted to make sure the kids weren’t forgotten. Maybe someday people will dig up the book about Chua and then they’ll know how great your creator was. Sorry, is. How great your creator is.”

  “You think so?”

  “I do.”

  “And you can find them? Both of them?” Baxter asked.

  I really don’t know, Alistair was tempted to say. I’ve been trying to make you feel better, but I’m grasping at straws. Finding Fiona is going to be hard enough. Chua too? I really don’t know.

  Instead, Alistair said, “Yes.” And he handed the glove to Baxter and opened the door to Hut Six.

  Stepping into the hut, he didn’t gauge the consequences of what he was about to do. He simply did it. He hopped, landed feetfirst in the center of the hole, and plunged into the icy water.

  CHAPTER 10

  Alistair’s world went black. The shock of the cold knocked his guts up into his throat. There were no visions, no dreams. Black. Utter, complete. Yet he didn’t lose consciousness. His mind simply lost its way. He jerked and wiggled, clueless as to whether he had entered the water one second ago or one minute ago. When the cold somehow got colder, he began to struggle for breath. He moved his arms, trying to swim, but the water felt thin. Nonexistent.

  It was dead silent, and Alistair was weightless. A blast of warmth hit his body, and something pulled at him. Nothing touched him, and yet he moved like metal to a magnet. He thrashed his arms and legs again. There was nothing to grab, to dig his heels into. He couldn’t fight against the pull, and he was too scared to open his eyes or mouth, even though he desperately needed to breathe.

  The warmth got warmer, and suddenly there was sound—the flit of something mechanical. There was also light. It announced itself in orange through the skin of his closed eyelids. His arms and legs regained their weight. Gravity reintroduced itself, and Alistair fell onto something hard. It was like he had flopped onto a table. Another sound—another flit—and he felt, if not normal, then safer.

  He took a chance. He took a breath. Oxygen spread its glorious wings in his lungs, and he opened his eyes and faced the light. It wasn’t sunlight, however. It was tinted. It was harsh. As everything came into focus, small yellow circles materialized above him, like faraway planets. It took a few moments to realize that they were actually faint reflections on curved glass. He was lying on his back on a small metallic countertop. Surrounding him was a clear domed shell, and surrounding the shell was a room where all four walls were covered in round yellow lights and square white buttons. No doors. Nothing but buttons and lights.

  A boy and a girl stood in a corner. After they whispered to each other, they approached.

  “Yep, human,” the boy said. “Looks like one, anyways.” His voice was muted a bit by the glass, but the words were clear. He was dressed in a green jumpsuit with white racing stripes down the sides. He had a round belly and an Afro like a broccoli floret.

  “Vital signs are good,” the girl said. Her voice was forceful, but her body was small. “A real firecracker” is what Alistair’s dad might have called her. Her green jumpsuit was similar to the boy’s, but snugger, and instead of racing stripes, it had a white curlicue design down the sides. She held a tiny typewriter in the palm of her hand. It was like something out of a dollhouse, but somehow she managed to type on it and it managed to spit out a dangling, unbroken stream of paper covered in illegible little words.

  They both had glasses perched above their foreheads and they both wore gloves. White gloves, exactly like the one from the fishing hut.

  The girl pulled her glasses down over her eyes. Red and white spirals spun where the lenses should have been. They seemed designed to hypnotize, so Alistair turned his head. “Skeleton is consistent,” she said to the boy. “Femurs. Humeri. Everything fits.”

  “Good to know,” the boy said.

  “But I’m getting strange brain readings,” the girl confirmed. “There’s more to this guy than matching bones.”

  “Where … am … I…?” Alistair grumbled.

  “We’ll get to that, buddy,” the boy said as he pressed some of the buttons on the walls and the walls chirped in response. “First we have a question or two for you.”

  The girl pushed the glasses back to the top of her head and continued to type on the typewriter. “More to analyze,” she said. “More to discover.”

  Alistair pressed his hands against the domed shell. It was warm. In fact, the entire chamber was so warm that his clothes had already dried, but the shell didn’t budge. He was still trapped. “Why do you have me in here?” he asked.

  The boy didn’t turn away from his task. “Hold your horses, we’re getting there,” he said, and he continued to press buttons, seemingly at random.

  “You find a magic lamp and you rub it and a genie pops out,” the girl said, still typing away.

  “Excuse me?”

  The girl flashed Alistair a condescending smile. “Pretend you find a magic lamp with a genie inside.”

  “I’m not sure how that’s relevant.”

  “It’s beyond relevant,” the girl said.

  “Okaaay,” Alistair replied, wishing he did actually have a magic lamp that would shut these two up and release him from this strange glass cage.

  “Good,” the girl replied. “So you have this magic lamp and this genie grants you three wishes. He says that one wish will come true. One wish will not come true. And one wish will backfire. It will cause the opposite to happen. Only you don’t know what will happen with each wish. So what are your three wishes?”

  “Um … what?”

  This time it was the boy who gave a smile, only it was a slightly less condescending one. “She talks fast, I know. Even I miss half of what she says, and we’re basically cell mates.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “But really, it’s simple,” the boy went on. “You have three wishes. One wish happens exactly as you wish it. Wish for a duck and you get a duck. One wish happens in the inverse. Wish to be rich and you end up poor. And the other wish? Nothing. Nada. Doesn’t do a thing. You wish for a go-cart and you get zilch. The catch is, you don’t know what’s going to happen with each wish, and you have to wish them all at once. So what are your three wishes?”

  “This is the important question you have for me?” Alistair asked. He could feel his strength returning, so he tried pushing on the glass again. It didn’t budge an inch.

  “The question,” the girl replied, “is beyond important.”

  “Yes, I get it,” Alistair said, though obviously he didn’t. Not in the slightest. Still, he had to ask, “If I answer, does it mean you’ll let me out of here?”

  The boy and girl looked at each other and offered the same response: “Depends on your answer.”

  Ridiculous. How could anything depend on an answer to a question like that? Alistair wanted to scream at his captors, but he was in no position to do anything other than think. He brought a hand to his mouth and pinched lightly at his lower lip. He considered the
options.

  There’s got to be a trick answer.

  He inspected the room, hoping to spot a clue, but the room wasn’t anything but a bare floor, a bare ceiling, and the walls full of those yellow lights and the white buttons the boy kept pressing. The girl still typed away on the minuscule typewriter. Paper streamed out like film from a reel. Neither of them looked at Alistair now. They seemed satisfied to let him puzzle through things.

  A thought, an answer. It hit him before he could consider all the angles. “I’d wish the same wish three times,” Alistair said. “That way…”

  He clammed up.

  Stupid. That just cancels it all out. Then what’s the point of wishing in the first place?

  “Is that your answer?” the boy asked.

  “No,” Alistair said. “I’m thinking out loud.”

  “Try to think out quiet, please,” the girl said.

  The comment didn’t sting so much as it annoyed. What did these two expect? Alistair had no idea where he was, or who they were, and yet they were deciding his fate with a stupid riddle. He closed his eyes and put his hands over his ears, trying to block them out of his world. Then he paged through thoughts and emotions—his greatest desires, his greatest fears, the things he was ambivalent about. Surely there was a way to figure out the answer they wanted.

  What if one of my wishes is to flip all my wishes? Like the good wish becomes the bad wish … but if that’s the good wish, then … no, no, that’s doesn’t make any sense.

  What if I wish three wishes where the good and bad are equally appealing, where the opposite is just as good as … but how is that possible? That would take a lot of …

  It wasn’t coming together. He sat there for an eternity going through scenarios in his head, but each one was either too confusing or didn’t accomplish anything. There had to be a way to tie it all up in a perfect little bow, but he wasn’t seeing it. He tried to remember famous riddles. What were the ones the Sphinx told? What was the one about the two doors and the liar and the truth-teller? Were there famous fairy-tale riddles? He tried to focus, to be clever, but he didn’t feel particularly clever. Curious, definitely. Clever, no.

  Exasperated, he finally said, “I don’t want any wishes.” He opened his eyes and rapped his knuckles on the glass like he was knocking on a door. “I’d rather have nothing than try to figure this stupid riddle out.”

  The girl typed frantically on the typewriter, then let out a resigned grunt. The boy smiled, nodded, and pressed another button. The glass dome retracted and disappeared into the countertop.

  Alistair was free.

  1988

  The video game was simple in concept. You were an astronaut stranded on an unexplored planet. You had to collect various objects that you would then use to rebuild your ship. When your ship was complete, you could fly home. There were alien baddies in your way, obviously, and you could choose to shoot them from a distance with a ray gun or slice them at close range with your deadlier laser whip.

  What was simple in concept was nearly impossible in execution. Except when Charlie was at the helm. Barely eleven years old, he was a prodigy at video games. Games that would take most people weeks to get the hang of, he’d master in a day or two.

  Alistair watched as Charlie’s thumbs raced over a controller, which made the astronaut jump, juke, and slide. Charlie had bought the game on the morning of its release, and forty-eight hours later he was on the final level. As far as Charlie was concerned, spring break wasn’t complete until he’d beaten at least four or five games.

  It had been over two months since that snowy day in the woods, since Charlie’s strange betrayal. Alistair hadn’t suffered any frostbite, but his toes now tingled whenever they got a bit chilly. He had told himself over and over that it was the last straw, that he and Charlie couldn’t be friends again after that. And Alistair tried—diligently, relentlessly—to avoid Charlie, but with each passing day, he found himself wondering if maybe his memory of that afternoon was wrong, tainted by fatigue and confusion.

  At school, Charlie had told everyone that Alistair had saved, if not his life, then at least his hands and feet from frostbite. There were girls who looked at Alistair differently now, boys who picked him earlier for gym class teams. He suddenly had more “school friends,” kids he’d hang out with at lunch and study hall, not the types who would come over after class, but friends just the same. Not everything from the incident turned out to be a negative.

  And so it was that by February, the two boys were hanging out again. It started in the cafeteria. Alistair was sitting alone at one of the long tables, waiting for a school friend like Trevor Weeks or Mike Cooney to join him, when Charlie sidled up and presented him with a package of miniature donuts.

  “They’re the ones with the powdered sugar,” Charlie said. “Your favorites, right?”

  Alistair knew this was Charlie’s way of apologizing, but he decided not to acknowledge it with anything more than a nod. That was enough for Charlie, who smiled and sat and started pointing at girls and yapping about which ones had reached their “womanhood.”

  By March, things were back to normal. Charlie would invite Alistair over for TV or video games, and whenever he didn’t have other plans, which was most of the time, Alistair would go. They never mentioned the day in the woods. After a little while, Alistair stopped even thinking about it. When spring break arrived, it meant that days would be filled with video games and nights would be occupied by sleepovers. Spring break was hardly spring in Thessaly. The snow usually lasted until the beginning of April, but it was wet snow, not the sort of stuff that made for fun romping.

  Alistair was sleeping over at Charlie’s when they played the game with the astronaut. Alistair had ceded his turns to Charlie because Alistair was, quite frankly, pretty lousy. He couldn’t even clear the first level, while Charlie easily swept through all seven levels and seemed to be having no trouble with the final one.

  “I’m designing a game,” Charlie said as he played puppet master to the astronaut, making him zap and whip hordes of aliens.

  “Like on a computer?” Alistair asked.

  “Not yet. Maybe someday,” Charlie said. Charlie was good with computers, knew a bit of programming, but programming a game wasn’t exactly easy.

  “So where are you designing it?” Alistair asked.

  “Um…” Charlie tapped a couple of buttons and made the astronaut leap over a pool of lava. “I guess you could say I’m designing it in my own little world.”

  Alistair could relate. He often made up stories in his head. “What’s the game about?” he asked. “What’s the goal?”

  Charlie kept his eyes locked on the screen. “Well, it’s about chaos,” he said. “Imagine there are all these different levels. Like an underwater one. One full of castles. One in the jungle. And once upon a time they were peaceful places. But there’s nothing interesting about peaceful, is there?”

  “I guess not,” Alistair said.

  “Peace is boring,” Charlie said. “And so in my game, there’s a different monster that sneaks into each world. Starts ripping the places apart.”

  “And the hero’s job is to stop the monsters?” Alistair asked.

  Charlie guided the astronaut through a tunnel where the final piece of the spaceship was guarded by a giant alien that belched clouds of acid. “No way, nohow,” he said. “Because there’s an awesome twist in my game. The hero isn’t the one who stops the monsters. The hero is the one who designs them.”

  The alien on-screen oozed slime. The astronaut pummeled it with the whip, and slime splatted on the walls of the tunnel. “So what’s the object of your game?” Alistair asked.

  “Hmmm … I haven’t really figured that out yet. For now, it’s all about the chaos.”

  “It’s interesting,” Alistair said. “I guess there aren’t any other games out there where the bad guy is the hero.”

  On the screen, the giant alien screeched and melted into a puddle of slime, whi
ch the astronaut skipped over to retrieve the final piece of the spaceship. Charlie turned to Alistair and said, “The one who designs the monsters isn’t the bad guy.”

  “But don’t the monsters hurt people?”

  The astronaut climbed into his now-completed spaceship.

  “The monsters do what monsters are designed to do,” Charlie said. “But you need monsters, don’t you? Someone has to create the beautiful things. And someone has to be in charge of the monsters. It doesn’t mean that the monster master is the bad guy. Actually, it’s probably harder to deal with monsters than it is with beautiful things, because the monsters will be hated. And hunted. Forever. So a game where you design monsters might be the hardest game of all. You’re already setting yourself up to lose.”

  The spaceship flew into the stars, and the final credits for the video game scrolled down the screen. “I guess I see your point,” Alistair said. “Do you have a title?”

  “Well,” Charlie replied, setting down the controller, “the most powerful monsters are the ones that don’t even seem like monsters. They’re the little things, the soft things that sneak in and haunt you.”

  “Ghosts?” Alistair asked. “That might be a good title.”

  Charlie shook his head. “Whispers.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Alistair sat up, Charlie’s soft voice stitched like thin threads into his brain. His legs dangled off the edge of the counter, and blood rushed down to his feet. All the yellow lights in the room had changed. They were now green.

  The boy approached him with a hand outstretched. “So you’re a swimmer?”

  Alistair kept his hand at his side. “Where am I?”

  “You mean you didn’t come here on purpose?” the girl asked.

  “So you’re not much of a swimmer,” the boy added, pulling his hand back.

  “I was in Chua Ling’s world and I jumped into a hole in a frozen lake,” Alistair told them.

  “Ah,” the girl said, finally pocketing the typewriter while tearing the paper like a receipt from a cash register and dropping it on the ground. “And you didn’t wear a spacesuit? Foolish of you.”