The Whisper

by Aaron Starmer

  “We all do,” Polly always assured her, petting her hair.

  And every evening, before Polly returned to the camp and Henrietta to her stone hut, they’d hug and whisper the same thing in each other’s ears.

  “Forever or until. Forever or until.”

  The forever probably wasn’t possible. They weren’t naïve. They knew that. The until was more likely. What it meant was, they were there for each other, at least until Polly stepped back into that helicopter in a year or so.

  Or until one fateful evening.

  * * *

  It was an evening like any other. They were hugging good night, as they always did, but Henrietta hugged longer than normal this time. And she didn’t say what they always said. Instead, she whispered, “Can I tell you a story?”

  “Can you!” Polly yelped, because she always wanted to hear a story from Henrietta. Sure, Henrietta was frequently off on some wild tangent or another, but she rarely possessed the attention span to stay on one narrative for very long, to get to the end of anything.

  “It’s a sad story,” Henrietta said.

  “That’s okay,” Polly said. “The world needs tearjerkers too. Write it down and sell it to Hollywood. It’ll be better than those Westerns, I bet.”

  “No, no, no.” Henrietta wagged a finger. “This is a secret story. One that only best friends should share. You are my best friend, aren’t you?”

  Polly put out a pinkie and Henrietta did the same and they hooked them together, which was as good as a handshake. “This place would suck eggs without you,” Polly said.

  Suck eggs was enough to make Henrietta smile, and the pinkie lock was enough to give her the courage to finally say something she had been keeping to herself.

  “There once was a girl named Henrietta,” she said. “And she lived in a little village that wasn’t like the big city at all. A small, small place, not too far from the sea or the mountains, but far away from anywhere else.”

  “Henrietta like you?” Polly asked. “A place like this place?”

  With a coy twist in her mouth, not quite a smile, she kept on with the story. “When Henrietta was very little, her papa passed away. An icy thing fell from the sky, knocked him on the head, and ended his life as fast as can be. People said the thing was a chunk of hail, but Henrietta’s mama was convinced it was from outer space. The family burned her papa’s body and put his ashes in the creek.”

  “Oh, Henrietta, I knew he wasn’t with you anymore—” Polly started to say, but Henrietta wasn’t going to be interrupted.

  “She was supposed to let the ashes stay in the creek, but Henrietta loved her papa so much that when no one was watching, she scooped up some of the water in a jar and she ran upstream. She hid the jar in a red bush, and at night she would visit it and talk to the water. ‘I miss you,’ she would say to the water. ‘I love you.’”

  “Oh Henrietta,” Polly said again, because she could relate. Polly’s father wasn’t dead, but he was gone. He had left when Polly was barely six, divorced Carter, and remarried a hairdresser who had little interest in raising a rambunctious young girl.

  Henrietta’s voice inched a few octaves lower as she said, “But this is not the saddest part of the story. You see, one day the water talked back. ‘Come and meet me,’ it said. Then the glass of the jar disappeared. Poof. There was only water now. Magic water. Floating in the air. Henrietta touched it.”

  Polly wanted to say something like, Disappearing glass? As if! but Henrietta seemed so invested in her tale, so confident in her telling, so doggone serious, that Polly knew better than to interrupt. She owed her friend many things, most of all her attention.

  “When Henrietta touched the water, her body felt like there were little fishies swimming in it,” she went on. “And with a body full of little fishies, she made a journey. The creek went poof now too, and Henrietta magically arrived in a round room with stone walls, high up in a tower, where it was so chilly that there were icicles on the ceiling. She’d never seen icicles before. And she’d never seen anything like the monster that was standing before her. That’s right, a monster. It had no face and no color, but it had arms, legs, and a body. And it had a voice. ‘You heard my call,’ the monster whispered.

  “Henrietta said, ‘Papa, is that you?’ even though it didn’t sound like her papa’s voice.

  “And the monster said, ‘Many years ago, I was standing where you are standing. And I was afraid. But I had no reason to be. I was meant to be here then as you are meant to be here now.’

  “Henrietta took a step back and said, ‘You don’t know where I’m meant to be!’

  “The monster held out a pen. It was a fountain pen, like the one the doctor who sometimes visited Henrietta’s village used. ‘Place this in my ear,’ the monster said. ‘Suck on the other end.’

  “And Henrietta said, ‘No thank you, sir. That’s disgusting.’

  “The monster chuckled and whispered, ‘The pen will fill up, and all you have to do is pour the ink on yourself. Then everything will be clear.’

  “Henrietta said, ‘I will do nothing of the sort. I came here to see my papa, and what’s clear is that you are not my papa.’

  “The monster whispered, ‘Please. I need this.’

  “Henrietta crossed her arms and turned away and said, ‘I don’t care what you need.’

  “And the monster didn’t say anything else. When Henrietta looked for a way to escape, she heard a whimper, then she heard something crash to the ground. When she turned, the monster was lying down with the pen in its ear. The pen was filling up with the shiniest ink she’d ever seen.

  “Every little fear Henrietta had was suddenly gone. All she wanted was that beautiful pen. She grabbed it from the ground. You must understand, Henrietta wasn’t the type of kid who did whatever people told her to do, especially nasty monsters. She did what she wanted to do. But what she wanted to do, what she wanted more than anything, was to pour that ink on her body.

  “So she held the pen up high and dripped the ink on her head. And she changed. Her mind filled up like a cup. With memories and thoughts and visions of magical places. Henrietta was still Henrietta, but now she was also the monster.”

  Polly couldn’t resist interrupting at this point. “Wait! What? Hold up. She became a monster?”

  Henrietta wagged a finger. “She looked like a monster—no face, no color—but she wasn’t a monster. She was an angel. Doing what all the other angels before her did. Doing what she was supposed to do, what she wanted to do.”

  “And what’s that?” Polly asked.

  “Helping people who needed help. Folks who called out for her to end things. And that’s what she did. Until she made a mistake.”

  “A mistake?”

  “She helped a girl who didn’t need her help. A girl who lived in a space station deep in the stars. A scientist.”

  “I don’t understand,” Polly said.

  Henrietta’s voice sped up, each word becoming more hurried than the one before it. “Henrietta took this girl away when this girl didn’t ask to be taken away. She poured this girl’s soul on her body because she wanted to know all the things the girl knew, outer space things, things that might explain why her papa died. This was wrong, wrong, wrong, and Henrietta knew it. What she should have done was pour the girl’s soul in the waterfall and set her free. Because now she was Henrietta, she was the monster, but she was also the girl!”

  “Took her away?” Polly asked. “A waterfall? The girl’s soul? A space station? What are you talking about?”

  Henrietta didn’t explain. She simply started to cry. Polly had never seen Henrietta cry, and she froze. She didn’t reach out to touch her friend. She didn’t offer condolences. She was so confused.

  Without another word, Henrietta sprinted away into the darkness. When Polly finally broke out of her daze, she followed, but wasn’t sure where Henrietta had gone. Polly headed to the village and the hut, but didn’t find her. She went back to the camp, but s
he wasn’t there either.

  That’s when Polly recalled something from Henrietta’s story: the red bush where she hid the jar. There was a small red bush about a mile upstream from the camp. Polly had always thought it strange, but she never looked at it close-up. She figured it was full of thorns like so many bushes in this scrubby wilderness.

  Polly jogged upstream as fast as she could. She reached the bush within ten minutes, and sure enough, there was Henrietta. She was sitting cross-legged on the banks of the creek. She had a jar of water resting in her lap.

  “Why did you tell me that story?” Polly asked. “What did it mean?”

  Her face bombed out, ruined, Henrietta said, “Because it’s time for someone else. I’ve been doing this too long. I need to find a replacement. Someone good. Someone better than me.”

  Raising the jar in her hands, Henrietta closed her eyes and began whispering into its opening. Moments later, the glass disappeared, and there was a cylinder of water floating in the air.

  “Henrietta?” Polly asked. “What are you doing? What have you done?”

  “Forever,” Henrietta said as she closed her hands on the cylinder of water.

  And she disappeared.

  SIX YEARS (OR EONS) LATER (DEPENDING ON HOW YOU LOOK AT IT)

  CHAPTER 22

  It would take a while. If he had to guess, Alistair would have said that the cloud was at least three hundred feet off the ground. There were no ladders that tall around, no trees. Even the memorial tree downtown, which always seemed so towering to Alistair, was only seventy feet high.

  To reach the cloud would take effort and time. Effort was hard to come by. No one, except for Dorian, was interested in helping him, not even the older Alistair, who dismissed the idea as a suicide mission.

  “So you travel through this cloud to another world where some dude is waiting for you, and he’s a friend of yours who’s, like, a great puppet master or something, right?” the older asked. “And he’s the one who captured Fiona, and lots of other kids, including some girl named Polly who’s, like, the toughest girl in the universe? And what do you plan to do when you get there? How are you gonna defeat such a character?”

  The conversation took place two days after the helmet had rained from the cloud. Alistair had gone to Boaz the day before and asked him to publish another story in the paper. Meet us at the model airplane runway tomorrow at ten a.m. and help us find Fiona was the gist of it. When tomorrow became today and the hour was closer to one in the afternoon, only three people stood on the grass runway: two Alistairs and a Dorian. To pass the time, to gain their trust, Alistair had told them about Charlie.

  “I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do when I see him,” the younger said. “But I need to get there, because that’s where he’ll be waiting. This is a game to him. Everything is a game. And he wants to challenge me. And if I win, then maybe he’ll let me know where Fiona is, where Chua is, where all of them are.”

  “He gave you a chance, though, right?” Dorian asked. “When you were in the world of clouds? You could have touched the silver and gold rain, right? Gone chin-to-chin with him? So why didn’t you? Why’d you come here? Did you really think you’d find her here?”

  Alistair kicked at the ground and said, “I was hoping that maybe this place held what I needed to bring her back.”

  “What do you mean?” Dorian asked.

  “Nothing,” Alistair said with a sigh. “A stupid theory that some kids had. The more I think about it, the more impossible it seems. And the more I think about it, the more I realize the real reason I came here. Charlie was right; I don’t know Fiona. Not really. But I needed to know her. I needed to see the place where she spent twelve years. The place she thought was better than home.”

  “If this is better than your home,” the older said, “then I feel sorry for you. Count me out.” And he abandoned them for the air-conditioning and solitude of his car.

  “Well, you still got me,” Dorian said. “So how we gonna do it?”

  “Too high for a ladder. A stairway that high would need to be insanely long.”

  “A tower?” Dorian asked.

  “Is there enough material to build one? Can we even afford material?”

  “Maybe not anything from town. But we could dig up some dirt and make it out of that. If we dig around here, we’ll end up with trenches and holes in our way, but there’s a whole mess of dirt out there in Nothingland. No one will ever charge us for that. A few holes out there won’t get in anyone’s way.”

  * * *

  This is how the younger Alistair’s days went.

  He would wake and meet Dorian downstairs—he lived with Dorian still, in Maria’s old room, for the simple reason that there wasn’t anywhere else to live. The two would then drive into Nothingland, where they kept a barely functional backhoe and a rusty dump truck Dorian borrowed from a contractor who occasionally employed him to do light carpentry.

  Dorian would run the backhoe, digging up chunks of the ground, which was soft and a bit sticky, like clay. Alistair would oversee his progress and direct him to the dump truck, which they’d fill to the brim.

  Next they’d drive the dump truck to the runway and deposit the mounds of earth. The rest of the morning would be spent shoveling the earth and molding it into walls.

  They’d break for lunch, followed by an afternoon of drawing plans. It was a work in progress, a trial by fire, and neither of them knew what they were doing.

  After two weeks, they had a ten-foot-tall, leaning tower of mud.

  “This ain’t gonna happen,” Dorian said.

  “You’re right,” Alistair said. “How about a mountain, then? The digging is the easy part, and there’s more ground than anyone knows what to do with out there in Nothingland. Let’s pile it up until we can’t pile it anymore.”

  * * *

  Two weeks later, they had a mountain twenty feet high. A good start. But out in Nothingland, they struck something, and the digging stopped for the moment. Dorian climbed down from the backhoe to see what it could be. He unearthed a book.

  “The Life … of … Rodrigo … Hermanez,” Dorian said, wiping dirt from the cover.

  Alistair scrambled down into the hole and reached for the book, saying, “Gimme that.”

  It seemed like a game to Dorian, who chuckled as he pulled the book away. “Whoa, cowboy, I wanna have a look-see first.”

  “I’m not sure you do,” Alistair said.

  “Rodrigo Hermanez was born way down in Argentina,” Dorian read aloud, “on a dairy farm where he milked cows, chased chickens, and all that agricultural stuff.”

  “See?” Alistair said, reaching again. “It’s nonsense. Rodrigo was born and raised in Thessaly. You all know that.”

  Pulling the book away again, Dorian said, “Who wrote this thing, anyhow?” He wiped more dirt from the cover to reveal the author’s name.

  Fiona Loomis.

  * * *

  In a booth at the local diner called the Skylark, flanked on both sides by his two small children—Doria and Felix—Rodrigo Hermanez read about his life, or a version of his life, one he didn’t recognize.

  Alistair had pleaded with Dorian not to show Rodrigo the book, but Dorian had asserted that “a man deserves to know what others might be saying about him.” And since a man deserves such things, Dorian had called Rodrigo and invited him to the Skylark, where he handed him this curious biography.

  Closing the book after reading the first few pages, Rodrigo said, “When did Fiona write this?”

  “Before,” Alistair explained.

  “Before what?” Dorian asked.

  Alistair put a hand over his face, like he was watching an awful scene in a movie—teeth being pulled, eyes being poked. “Before … she … created … you,” he said.

  Rodrigo pushed the book across the table and pulled his kids, who were fiddling with straws, closer to his ribs. “Fiona was a girl, a weird girl, a smart girl, some even called her a magical girl. But
still a girl,” he said, and he placed a hand over each of his kids’ outer ears. “I dated her, so I should know.”

  Alistair took a sip of an iced tea and said, “This is not something I wanted to tell people. But it’s the truth. I’ve had enough lies for a lifetime. People deserve the truth.”

  “People?” Dorian asked.

  “You, him, all of this,” Alistair said as he spread his arms out. “Everything is something she made up. And that book? It’s about one of the original people who inspired it.”

  Dorian picked the book up and examined all sides of it, as if it were dangerous, as if it were infested. “There are more books like this?” Dorian asked.

  “Yes,” Alistair said.

  “How do you know these things?” Rodrigo asked. “What if this is her making up stories about me? Because she’s a fan? Because she loves me so much?”

  Alistair sighed and said, “I know these things because she told me. Before she created this place, she spent a year out in Nothingland writing books about people. Some of the people she only knew stories about. Some of the people she loved. But she was trying to get to know them all better. She was trying to make sure they were never forgotten.”

  “Books about everyone?”

  “No,” Alistair said. “Some people.”

  “Were those books buried too?” Dorian asked, shaking the biography. “Like this one?”

  At the counters, in the booths, there were folks Alistair recognized, others he didn’t. Some he wasn’t sure about. “I wish we hadn’t dug out there,” he said. “I should have known better. These aren’t things she wanted people to read.”

  “If you write it, you want people to read it,” Rodrigo said. “Especially if you bury it.”

  “And people deserve to read it,” Dorian said.

  * * *

  It started slowly. A few people went out to Nothingland with shovels. They didn’t get very far. Digging a hole with a shovel isn’t easy, even when the ground is soft like clay.

  “I think we oughta hold off on the mountain for a bit,” Dorian said one morning as they drove to Nothingland. “Use the backhoe to help folks find more of these books.”