The Whisper

by Aaron Starmer

  Yellow polka-dot egg?

  Nothing resembling an egg was in sight. He moved on to the next door.

  Behind this one there were three cages. In each cage there was an elephantine creature. They were elephantine because they looked like elephants, but they clearly weren’t elephants. They had three trunks instead of one and sprouting from their heads were enormous antlers, which they ran back and forth across the bars of the cage like prisoners rattling cups.

  Yellow polka-dot egg?

  Nothing. He moved on.

  Another door, another strange scene. This room was filled with water. It was like looking into an aquarium. Except instead of fish, there were glowing neon discs that spun and swam and bounced off of one another like billiard balls.

  Yellow polka-dot egg?

  Chip’s words still made no sense, until Alistair had passed all the doors. Farther along, nested in the walls, were eggs as big as cars and colored as if for Easter. A blue egg with pink stripes. A solid green one. A tie-dyed egg. A black and white one. An egg with yellow polka dots.

  He stopped. It was suddenly dead quiet. He considered knocking on this last egg, like knocking on a door, but he wasn’t sure if that might crack it. All Chip had said was yellow polka-dot egg and then a bunch of animals. What were the animals again?

  Cow. Chicken. Goat. Goat. Pig. Rabbit.

  Alistair said the words to himself over and over, like a phone number he wanted to remember. Though he had no idea why he needed to remember them. He’d found the egg, but there weren’t any animals around. He would have seen them. He would have heard them. He would have smelled them. The hallway was completely empty.

  Except for Dot.

  “Alistair! Don’t!”

  She had gotten past Chip and through the door. Loose-limbed, she rushed toward Alistair like a traveler chasing down a departing train.

  Screw it, eggs are meant to be cracked.

  He made a fist.

  He thrust it forward.

  And … nothing.

  Instead of breaking the shell, it went straight through it. The egg wasn’t solid; it was a hologram with a thin force field around it. Sticking his hand through the force field was like sticking his hand out of the open window of a speeding car. There was resistance, but not enough to hold him back.

  Cow. Chicken. Goat. Goat. Pig. Rabbit.

  Running, fighting, surrendering—all those options were off the table. The only thing Alistair could think to do was to step inside of the egg and hope his next move would become clear. So that’s what he did.

  The force field pulled him in, held him up, and cradled him, suspended him in the air as if he were the yolk. There had been no seeing through the eggshell from the outside, but from the inside Alistair could now see out. Not clearly, but enough, like looking through a sheer curtain.

  The egg had been hiding something. On a sleek metallic wall behind it, there was a control panel full of buttons. Some were marked with numbers, some with letters, some with pictures, including drawings of animals. A camel. A snake. A little monkey with big ears.

  Cow.

  He reached through the force field and pressed a button with a cow on it, and like an infant’s toy, it emitted a moooooo.

  “Alistair! Chip was being foolish! You’re being foolish!” Dot’s voice was getting louder. She was getting closer.

  Chicken.

  He pressed a button with a chicken on it, and predictably, it responded with a bock, bock, bugock!

  “You won’t survive out there,” came Dot’s voice, now less a scream and more an admonition. “You need to stay. You’ll hurt yourself. You’ll hurt others.”

  Alistair refused to respond, wanting nothing less than to be convinced. His decision involved the buttons, whatever those buttons were.

  Goat—neigh.

  Goat—neigh.

  Pig—oink.

  “There’s something terribly wrong with you,” Dot pleaded. “There’s evil in you.”

  Rabbit—whoosh!

  It was instantaneous. Alistair—encased in an egg-shaped capsule, protected by the thin holographic force field—blasted off and out into the dark expanse of space.

  November 19, 1989

  The fishbowl sat on the notebook. The notebook sat on Charlie’s dresser. Above Charlie’s dresser, mounted on the wall, was a mirror, a big one, big enough that from where he was standing, Alistair could see a reflection of the upper half of his body. The fishbowl, filled with water almost to its cracked rim, was lined up with his torso. In the mirror there was an optical illusion at work. The fishbowl was his heart. It was his stomach. It was his guts, complicated and essential.

  He tipped the bowl and pulled the notebook out from underneath it. He examined the cover:

  GODS OF NOWHERE

  It was the title to a collection of tales, each tale more disturbing than the one that came before it. They told of kids who’d created worlds in Aquavania, kids whose souls had been stolen, kids whose worlds had been captured. There appeared to be no end to it all. There were more souls to steal, more worlds to capture. These tales were a work in progress.

  MUCH LIKE THIS ONE

  IN A YEAR IN A DARK AGE

  This tale follows someone who washed up onshore.

  A mother and her son were at the beach, collecting shells to turn into jewelry, when they came upon a girl who was sitting in the sand, arms wrapped around her knees, shivering.

  “Hoy!” the mother, whose name was Regina, called out. “Are you hurt, girl?”

  The girl turned her head to look at them, but didn’t respond.

  “Who are you?” the son, whose name was Remus, asked.

  Again, the girl didn’t respond.

  Regina and Remus helped the girl up from the sand and brought her back to their village, because they were generous people. They fed her, clothed her, asked her more questions, and still she gave no answers.

  “I do not think she understands us,” Regina said.

  The rest of the villagers agreed.

  There was wildness to the girl, in the way she moved, in the way she looked at things with her big bulging eyes. Like a wolf or a hawk, she was primal. Her face bore a scar, her long arms swayed when she walked. She reminded them of the savage people who lived inland, the warrior tribes who worshipped trees.

  Salam, the village healer, had been captured by one of the warrior tribes when he was a boy, so he knew a bit of their language. He tried to speak to the girl, to figure out who she was, but even when she broke her silence, she used words that no one could understand.

  Nevertheless, they accepted her into the village. She turned out to be a skilled fisherwoman. For hours she would stand in the surf, or in the streams that fed into the ocean, and she would spear enough fish to feed multiple families. She contributed more than her share.

  They decided to call her Kira, which was the name of an ancestor who once drowned in the sea. Remus, being a young man with young man tendencies, was drawn to Kira and spent as much time with her as possible. He started teaching her their language.

  Within a year, she was nearly fluent, and everyone finally came to know her story, which wasn’t much of a story at all.

  “I know nothing of before,” she said. “I must be born from the sea.”

  This was not an unreasonable assumption. The sea carried strange things ashore—giant beasts and curiously carved bits of wood. Why could it not also birth a fully grown girl?

  It was not long before Remus and Kira were married, and soon after that, they started a family. They lived in a hut on a hill that looked down at the ocean. Their first child’s name was Lyra, and she was a rambunctious sort, always slipping away from them to chase a butterfly or colorful bird. Their second child’s name was Oric, and he was the opposite, always clinging to his mother and father, for he was painfully shy, afraid of what lay beyond the village.

  Lyra died young, which was a tragedy, but it was not uncommon in the village. She had been scrambling over ro
cks when she came upon a strange sea beast in a tide pool. Crouching to get a closer look, she slipped and cut open her leg on some barnacles, then tumbled into the water and became entangled in the beast’s tentacles. The beast was barely alive, foul-stenched and teeming with disease. Lyra managed to free herself and get home, but her leg became infected. The infection spread quickly, and within a few days it had ravaged her body and turned her blood nearly black. There was nothing the healer Salam could do to save her. Her death was fast but ferocious, and her family tied her body to logs and set her adrift at sea, hoping she would reach the afterlife, which they believed lay far beyond the horizon.

  Lyra’s death stirred something in Oric. Instead of growing more withdrawn, he became braver, as if he were carrying on his sister’s legacy. He explored the forests past their village. He even found evidence of the warrior tribes stashed in hollowed-out trees—old spears and clubs that he brought home to show the other boys. He boasted about how when he was older he would defeat the warrior tribes and become their leader. He was bossy and stubborn, cocky and cold.

  One night, Kira was putting Oric to bed and he told her, “I have lived for two hundred summers.”

  It was a strange thing to say, for there had never been anyone in the village who had lived more than seventy summers, and everyone, especially Kira, knew for a fact that Oric had only lived for seven summers.

  “Don’t be silly,” Kira said. “You are a boy.”

  Oric shook his head. “I go places at night,” he said.

  “You sleepwalk? Where do you go? To the ocean?”

  Oric shook his head. “I go to my own place, a place I built. I have a pet bird there that talks. His name is Potoweet. I have a sea beast that only I command, that can snatch people with its endless arms. I have an underground fortress. I do things I’m not proud of there. I wish I could stop.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Oric hung his head. “I trick people. I scare people. I make them do as I command. If only someone could stop me.”

  “You should not play at pretend so much,” Kira said. “It invades your dreams. All will be fine. You need not feel guilty about things that aren’t real. Especially while your father and I are near.”

  His mother’s assurances did little to leach the worry from Oric’s eyes, but he didn’t say anything more. He kissed his mother on the cheek and settled in for the night.

  Kira went to bed a little later, but she couldn’t sleep. Oric’s words haunted her for reasons she didn’t understand. Worrying about her son was part of it, but there was another part as well. A single word flooded her skull.

  Banar. Banar. Banar.

  She had no idea where this word originated. The next morning she visited Salam and asked him if he had anything that could banish it from her head. “I have heard this word before,” he said. “It is one the warrior tribes use. I cannot remember its meaning. I’m sorry, but I can do nothing for you.”

  It was only a word, but a word can be a virus, and soon it wasn’t simply in her head. It was in the wind, in the songs of birds, in the voices of her family. It became so overwhelming that she left. Didn’t explain. Didn’t say goodbye. Compelled by a force she had never felt before, Kira simply set off into the forest in search of the warrior tribes.

  Countless sunsets passed before she came upon a tribe, and when she did, she wasn’t sure she had found the right people. Deep in the woods, at the foot of some mountains, a group of about fifty was living in homes carved out of the cliffsides. When Kira made her presence known, they weren’t hostile. Only curious. And when she said the one word from their language that she knew, when she repeated the word that had driven her nearly to madness—“Banar, Banar, Banar”—they led her to a collection of boulders.

  Faded paintings decorated the boulders, and the paintings told stories. Men chasing animals. Woman climbing mountains. Gods meting out judgment. On one boulder there was a painting of a turtle with a boy’s head.

  “Banar,” the people said, pointing at the turtle.

  There was also a girl in the painting, her face poking out from behind a shrub. Kira pointed at the girl.

  “Una,” the people said.

  Kira started to cry.

  The sun slipped behind the trees and the paint glowed in the dark. The tribe returned to their homes, but they let Kira stay among the boulders all night. She studied the stories, gorgeous narratives of the Earth and its inhabitants. When the sun came back up, she left.

  Her journey home was excruciating. She found herself emotionally overwhelmed more often than not. Her appetite was virtually nonexistent. She was wasting away, and by the time she stumbled onto the beach near her village, she had barely enough energy to carry on.

  The villagers found her and brought her to Salam. His skills at healing were strong, but he wasn’t sure he could save her.

  “Where have you been?” he asked.

  Her voice dry and soft, she said, “Banar was a boy with a turtle shell. He had a sister named Una. She was a liar.”

  “Ah yes,” Salam said. “The stories. Now I remember. That was an old story that went back countless lifetimes. Unfinished, if I recall. It was from the great prophet Cabal. The stories poured from him like a waterfall, even up until the moment they executed him. But they would not let him finish that one.”

  “I don’t understand,” Kira said, “because I know the end to that story. The girl, Una, finally realizes her mistakes; she realizes all the trouble she has caused, and begs Banar to eat her. He agrees, but he only eats her body. He leaves her head so she will always remember what she’s done.”

  “A fitting ending, I suppose,” Salam said.

  “And how can it go back many lifetimes?” Kira asked. “I am Una. I am sure of it.”

  “You are delirious,” Salam said.

  “I am Una,” she said again.

  “You must rest,” Salam said. “Or you won’t be with us much longer.”

  Kira’s family came to see her, and her son, Oric, crouched next to her bedside. “Tell me again about this place you created,” she whispered.

  Oric’s eyes narrowed, he placed a hand on his mother’s hot cheek, and he said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “The place with the bird and the fortress and the sea beast. Where you trick people, where you scare people. You confessed it to me.”

  “I must have been sharing a dream,” Oric said. “A dream I have forgotten.”

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Eight summers,” Oric said, as if it were the most obvious answer in the world.

  “Am I going mad?” Kira asked.

  “No,” Salam said. “You are sick. I will try to make you better.”

  He did try, but he did not succeed. She would not eat. She would barely sleep. Her mind was slipping away.

  So Salam told her stories. It was the only thing that seemed to give her comfort. He told her all the stories he remembered from his days with the warrior tribe. He told her the stories of their village by the sea. He even made up new stories as best he could.

  Something miraculous happened. She got better. The stories restored something in her, giving her the desire to eat, the ability to sleep. Soon she was back to normal health. When her family asked her why she went to visit the warrior tribe, she told them a lie.

  “I went looking for new streams to fish and I became lost,” she said. “The warrior tribe found me and guided me home.”

  She didn’t tell her family about the Banar that was still stuck in her head. She didn’t tell them what she had told Salam. She never mentioned the name Una again.

  Life rambled on. Oric grew into a man who had dreams and nightmares, like all men do, but he was never again concerned with the place where he did bad things. At night, the village would gather and eat and tell stories, which kept Kira going. As long as she had these stories filling her head, it supplanted the eerie feeling that she had lived another life, that long ago she was a girl named Una.<
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  Kira eventually became a grandmother and time pinched wrinkles into her skin. She was content, but she could feel that her body didn’t have much time left in it. Spearing fish wasn’t possible anymore, but she could still swim. Every morning she waded out past the waves and floated in the ocean, giving her aching joints some reprieve.

  One night, after a round of stories, her body ached so much that she decided to take a moonlit swim. The star-pocked sky was so clear, so vibrant, so inviting that she decided to swim to the horizon.

  And she swam out farther and farther, to see what lay beyond the horizon, behind the stars, in the land of her lost memories.

  A WHILE LATER

  CHAPTER 15

  Alistair was lost in a prairie of stars. The capsule was on autopilot, cutting through the dark expanse of space with determination and purpose. Its mission? Unknowable. Alistair was still suspended in the middle of the egg and he could see out, but there was no screen, no computer display, nothing to say, Your destination is …

  An asteroid as big as a house hurtled past, and the egg changed course. A chase was on. It seemed determined to catch the icy hunk.

  “Abort mission!” Alistair shouted, not knowing what else to do.

  The capsule didn’t take orders. The original command of Cow, Chicken, Goat, Goat, Pig, Rabbit had sealed the capsule’s—and therefore Alistair’s—fate. That fate seemed to involve crashing into an asteroid.

  Crystals of ice stuck out from the asteroid’s surface like spines on a sea urchin, and as the capsule closed in, Alistair could practically feel them jabbing his skin. He clutched the atlas to his chest and gritted his teeth, because that’s what people do in such situations, but when the crystals touched the edge of the force field, they didn’t pierce it. They didn’t shatter. The ice melted and the water it became clung to the egg, enveloped it in an extra shell, a liquid shell.

  So much water, so quickly, gathering like snow on a rolling snowball. Soon the stars were squiggles of light and there was no asteroid to see, only quivering liquid. And soon the weight of the water must have been too great, because the force field imploded and the water collapsed in on Alistair, drenching every inch of his body.