The Whisper

by Aaron Starmer

  The only place Alistair had seen framed T-shirts was at a local restaurant called Hungry Paul’s, and those were usually advertising pancakes or a softball team, not really anything worth collecting. “Why will it be a collector’s item?” Alistair asked.

  “Because I designed it, and people will never forget my designs,” Charlie said. He moved his hand down, as if to stroke the cat, but instead, he gave it a pinch. It hissed and Charlie dropped it. It scampered off into the dark swamp behind the clubhouse, and Charlie patted himself on the chest, feeling the fabric of his new shirt, and he purred too, in his own way, a deep, rumbling hum.

  CHAPTER 17

  The memory made Alistair even woozier than he already was, and when he regained his senses, he found himself alone in the cafetorium with the Weeble girl.

  “Taking a standing nap?” she asked. “I do those.”

  “What were you saying again?” he asked. “About where he went?”

  “The toilet,” she said. “He comes and goes through the crapper. Figured you would know that. That’s how all the greats travel.”

  “Which toilet? Which way?”

  The girl couldn’t point, so she tried to lean in the right direction, but it sent her body wobbling back and forth. Amusing, but hardly useful, so Alistair consulted his atlas. The gateway to Macrotopia was in a second-floor bathroom. That had to be it.

  He gauged a route and followed it through the hallway and up a flight of stairs. The bathroom was clearly marked by a model toilet hanging from a chain above the door. Must be fancy, he thought as he pushed his way in.

  Stained sinks, mirrors smudged with fingerprints, urinals with small puddles underneath—it was exactly like a school bathroom back home. There were even a couple of oddballs in the corner, huddled over, trying to spark a cigarette. Only these oddballs were truly odd.

  They lifted their heads. A lighter hit the floor. They put their hands up like they were being arrested. “Oh, it’s only you,” a kid that looked like a sock puppet said. “You’re too late, alien. The Maestro came and went. The groupies have moved on. But the throne is all yours if you want it.”

  The other one, who was entirely pixelated, pointed to a stall that was so covered in graffiti that it looked like a printing press had exploded.

  Flush, flush, flush yourself, gently down the drain.

  Here you stoop, fat and weird, came to poop but disappeared.

  Bon voyage, alien!

  It was a tiny fraction of the messages—there were much stranger and cruder ones—but the overall point was clear. This stall marked an exit, a gateway.

  The toilet that sat in the center of the stall was nothing special. White, porcelain, round. Was he supposed to sit on it? Was he supposed to do what everyone does on a toilet? How could he even attempt such a thing with others watching? As it was, there was no door on the stall.

  Alistair turned around and faced the two delinquents. There was nothing to do but shrug.

  “Well, get on with it,” the pixelated kid said. “If you want the big suck, then step right up.”

  Alistair checked the toilet, checked the kid. “Step in it?” he asked.

  “He’s no Maestro,” the sock puppet kid said. “That’s for damn sure.”

  Alistair took that as a yes and, bracing himself on the tank, he brought one foot up and placed it in the bowl. His body was still damp from the pool, and he hardly noticed his moccasined foot entering the water.

  “Flush, flush, flush,” the sock puppet started to chant, not without a fair dose of sarcasm.

  Trusting the bowl’s sturdiness, Alistair eased the other foot up and in.

  “Flush. Flush. Flush.” The pixelated kid joined in the chant.

  When he felt steady, he straightened his legs, let go of the tank, and stood.

  “Flush! Flush! Flush!” Alistair could feel the chant now, pulsing through his ribs. One last time he checked over his shoulder. The two had managed to light their cigarettes, which dangled loosely from their lips. They pumped their fists and blew smoke as they chanted.

  The handle was too low to reach with his hand, so Alistair wedged the atlas in an armpit, placed his palms against the wall behind the toilet, and carefully lifted his left foot.

  Here we go.

  As he pressed the handle down with the tips of his toes, the atlas slipped out, hit the porcelain rim, and fell on the floor.

  Flush.

  * * *

  There were days and nights and days and nights. For months the chase went on, Charlie always a step ahead of Alistair.

  It started in Macrotopia, a world where everything was large, or maybe it was that Alistair was especially small. Insects and woodland creatures towered over him, and they all spoke in rhyme. He described Charlie Dwyer to them, and a salamander said, “His acquaintance I made in a fair summer glade, though he did not give me his name. I thought it unwise to spar with death flies, but he entered their cave just the same.”

  The salamander led Alistair through a forest of grass to a hole in the ground full of wasps. Any reluctance Alistair had about entering the hole was overshadowed by the giant gopher that tried to eat him. It was a cipher for sure, and it may have been an out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire situation, but Alistair chose wasp stings over stomach acid and dove headfirst into the hole, landing in a dewdrop that rested on the giant hive.

  From the bottom of the wasp hole in Macrotopia, Alistair emerged at the top of a mound of strawberries. He could have sat there, bemoaning the loss of his atlas, but instead he channeled that anger. He slid down the mound of strawberries until he reached a moat of cream that he swam across to a land made of shortcake, where he asked a girl in a bonnet if she saw a boy sneak by, and she giggled and showed him a bathtub cut from peppermint candy, which Alistair sat down in and turned on the tap and transported himself to another world.

  For eight days after that, Alistair traveled through a nearly empty desert, sleeping in a tent, drinking mango juice, and eating dried meat sold to him by a camel that asked for payment in a song. He sang “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” which delighted the camel enough to tell him of an oasis many miles in the distance, but not enough to offer Alistair a ride. So Alistair made his way by foot and dove into the oasis’s pool at the first chance he got.

  A world made exclusively of letters and numerals tested Alistair’s mettle, as did the number 666, a cipher that hounded him across a landscape of college-ruled paper, until Alistair realized that if he convinced an H, a 2, and an O to huddle together, they would become water and offer him a way to escape.

  From world to world he traveled, hoping instinct would guide him. He trusted no one by trusting everyone. Without the atlas, he had no idea where he was going, and whether someone lied to him or not made little difference. His life became one of momentum. Find a gateway. Move on.

  He visited a land where babies rode on the backs of whales and cast spells by flapping their oversize ears. He lived in a mountain town for a few days, where mountain men were gruff but welcoming so long as he helped them gut the furry snakes they turned into garments for the rich figments that lived in a glittering city in the valley below. He saw versions of America in the 1950s, China in the 1670s, France in the 1340s, and Africa in a year before years. He steered clear of any obvious ciphers, though there seemed to be one lurking in nearly every world he visited. He chose to run rather than fight, and when he wasn’t running, he was describing Charlie Dwyer to locals.

  Some knew him as the Maestro. Others knew him by different names: the Chief, Dr. Wondrous, even Captain Catpoop. “He went thattaway,” they’d all tell Alistair, pointing to the most treacherous paths imaginable.

  The memories, sparked by images and encounters, kept coming, mostly when Alistair slept, but they were less frequent with each day. He remembered other incidents at school and in the neighborhood, other moments with his family, with Charlie.

  With Charlie. Almost always with Charlie.

  He had no control ove
r them and wished that Fiona were more prominent in them, but beggars can’t be choosers and soon he was simply begging to have more memories, any memories, to connect him to home. He had longed for home during those first few weeks, but he was missing it less and less. He was forgetting what it was like there.

  When it got to the point that he hadn’t been visited by a memory in over a week, he worried that he might have no memories at all. There’s evil in you, Dot had said, and Alistair wondered if that was true, if losing his link to home was punishment, or if it was part of an inevitable transformation into something dark, disconnected, truly lost.

  Resting on a puffy batch of cumulonimbus in a land made of clouds, he prayed.

  “One more memory. All that I ask. Whoever is in charge. The Whisper, the Riverman, Charlie, whoever. Please.”

  Sometimes prayers are answered.

  1989

  Fiona Loomis back home, sixth-grade English class, called to the blackboard.

  “Diagram the sentence,” Mrs. Delson said.

  On the blackboard was written: The petulant girl ran away from home. Fiona grumbled something under her breath and picked up the chalk. She held it close to the blackboard for a second, then set it down on the sill. She grabbed the eraser and ran it across the slate, wiping the sentence into oblivion. She walked back to her seat.

  “Miss Loomis,” Mrs. Delson said, “why would you do that?”

  “I don’t like that sentence,” Fiona said as she sat.

  “Well, I hope you like staying after class,” Mrs. Delson said.

  Later, through the foyer windows, Alistair saw Fiona standing outside on the basketball courts, clapping two blackboard erasers together. A cloud of chalk dust hung in front of her like a ghost.

  CHAPTER 18

  The memory was there and gone in seconds. The agony of the tease jolted Alistair’s eyes open. Above him, sitting cross-legged on a small cloud, was Charlie Dwyer.

  His thumbs tapped his toes, as if he was excited to see Alistair, or as if he was nervous. It was hard to tell. “Did you enjoy that moment?” Charlie asked.

  Alistair lunged, thrusting a hand at Charlie, hoping to grab something, anything. But Charlie was too quick and he flapped his arms twice, causing the cloud he was sitting on to move higher in the sky. Alistair did the same—flapped his arms—but his cloud didn’t move.

  “I wish I could give you more memories, but I don’t have control of that,” Charlie said. “It’s Aquavania that gives you that. You call it Aquavania, don’t you?”

  “Is that really you?” Alistair asked, reaching again, trying to touch him, even though he knew he was too far away. Charlie’s skin seemed even saggier than before. In the sunlight, it hardly looked real.

  “You know what?” Charlie said. “The figments don’t seem to notice when I put this skin on, but a swimmer like you will spot it every time. I guess I don’t need it around you.”

  Grabbing a handful of his own hair, Charlie tugged. One, two, three. Then his skin slipped from his body like a sock from a foot. The body beneath the skin was still shaped liked Charlie, but it was both colorless and faceless. Fiona had described the Riverman as a creature who looked like the spaces between the stars in the night sky, and that’s exactly what Charlie looked like. A wraith, a specter. Terrible and wonderful and infinite.

  He held the skin up, then tossed it into the breeze, and it flapped away as if it were newspaper. Thin beams of sunlight suddenly became solid and clung to Charlie’s body. Tiny luminescent worms undulated on his skin.

  “You’re…”

  “This is who I am here,” Charlie said. “This is how I look. I often have to wear my Charlie skin so I don’t spook the figments. But I’m still Charlie. I’m also the Maestro. And I’m the Riverman. I’m the Whisper.”

  “So is this it?” Alistair asked.

  “What?”

  “Is this the Ambit of Ciphers?”

  Charlie laughed. “Now that’s a silly name. No, this is yet another world. Created by a kid named Boaz. Fiona knew him, actually. Odd boy. Funny hat. He was quite hard to capture. He and a kid named Rodrigo tried to trick me, and while Rodrigo was an easy one to bag, Boaz was wily. But I always win in the end.”

  There were many clouds in this world, but otherwise, it was empty. Alistair didn’t have to wonder. He knew a cipher must have swept through and done away with whatever lived here.

  “How did you find me?” Alistair asked.

  Charlie laughed. “I never lost you. Actually, that’s not entirely true. The forest in Mahaloo is thick, and you slipped my gaze there for a bit. But when the Mandrake met you, he told me where you were.”

  There had been that moment when Potoweet had flown away and left Alistair alone on the platform in the Hutch. Alistair figured it was to hide for a few minutes before hitching a ride in his throat, but perhaps there was more to it. Perhaps the monster was checking in with his master. “Was everything he told me a lie?” Alistair asked.

  “Who?”

  “Potoweet … I mean, the Mandrake.”

  “They’re one and the same. I don’t remember what he told you, but I can say that his life is a complicated one. When I improved him, he was … conflicted.”

  “Improved him?”

  “Undoubtedly,” Charlie said. “Swimmers like you are so foolish. These ciphers, as you call them, aren’t things I create. They’re things that I mold.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When daydreamers create their worlds, they always create the same thing first. A friend. A guide. Some call it a familiar, some call it a daemon. Doesn’t matter. It’s an animal that assists them. I take those animals and I help them … evolve.”

  “So … Potoweet…?”

  “Was once the faithful servant of a boy named Oric, and when Oric left the picture, I molded Potoweet into something better. It’s what the bird deserved. Abandoned like that. Living a pointless life. Except for the point on his beak, of course.”

  Charlie laughed at his own joke.

  “Baxter?” Alistair asked.

  And Charlie laughed even louder. “Flawless work, don’t you think? And fast too. You really believed he was Kyle, didn’t you?”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “To remind you.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of what you did. Of where you are. Of what’s back home.”

  “Is he okay?” Alistair asked. “Kyle? Back home?”

  “He was alive when the ambulance picked him up, if that’s what you mean. What happens after that, well, is to be determined. The ambulance drove off, then I came to Aquavania, and I called you to Aquavania. While we’ve been here, not even a millisecond has passed at home. Kyle is still on an operating table, I’m sure.”

  It was the best news Alistair had heard in forever. He pulled in a glorious breath, but the relief would only last for a moment. “I didn’t shoot him on purpose,” he said.

  “I know,” Charlie said. “You meant to shoot me.”

  Denial was pointless. They both knew this was true. “I may be chasing after you,” Alistair said, “but all I care about is Fiona. I don’t need to hurt you—”

  “Hurt me! That’s funny. That’s really funny.” Charlie flapped his arms and effortlessly, tauntingly, he made his cloud spin and move through the sky. He was on a magic carpet, a flying saucer. He had complete control.

  “All I want to know is where she is,” Alistair said.

  “Why?”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Why?” Charlie began picking at his cloud with his thumb and pinkie, pulling away wispy bits like cotton candy.

  “Because you took her,” Alistair said.

  “And you need her back? She’s yours?” Charlie asked as he moved his hands over one of the wispy bits and molded it into the shape of a noose.

  “No. She’s not mine. But she’s also not yours.”

  “Own up and admit the real reason,” Charlie said as he molded another piece o
f cloud. This time, he made it into the shape of an arrow. “Say what she is to you.”

  “She’s a friend,” Alistair replied.

  “Say that you—”

  “What?”

  “Love her.”

  Alistair paused. He’d said the words before. To himself. At night. Alone. In his room. In his head. But never to her. Never to anyone.

  “I…”

  “Say it,” Charlie teased as he molded another wisp of cloud into the shape of a small creature, a beast that looked like a monkey with big eyes.

  “I … love … her,” Alistair whispered.

  “Horse crap.”

  Alistair lunged again. Not even close, but he had to try. “Why would you say that?”

  “Because it’s true,” Charlie replied calmly. “Because you don’t know anything about her.”

  “That’s a lie. I know her. I love her. I love her!”

  Charlie blew on the three little clouds he had molded. The noose, the arrow, and the big-eyed monkey floated down and hung in the air above Alistair. “Tell me,” Charlie said. “Do you recognize these things?”

  “I … I…”

  “Above Hadrian’s head, there were ropes, right? Different colors? There was a purple one with neon green stripes. Fiona’s favorite colors.”

  “So?”

  “So, if you’d known that, you would have pulled the purple and neon green one.”

  “I was … It was … Choosing which rope to pull wasn’t really an option. The Mandrake saw to that.”

  “The ice huts, then,” Charlie said. “There was an arrow hanging in one. Did you know how much Fiona liked archery? Did you ever bother to find out that she has a bow and arrow in her closet?”

  “I don’t … What? Why would I be in her closet?”

  “The control panel?” Charlie barked. “In the Easter egg? With all the buttons and pictures? In Quadrant 43? Did you actually look at that? Did you see the picture of the bush baby? Her friend, her familiar, her guide in Aquavania? Could I have gotten more obvious?”