The Whisper

by Aaron Starmer

  “I’m pretty sure there isn’t a book about you down there,” Alistair said.

  “I don’t care about that,” Dorian said. “I care about finding Fiona, maybe even more than you. And maybe the secret ain’t in that cloud. Charlie is a bit of a con man, right? Maybe he’s trying to distract us from what’s down below by making us look up into the sky. You yourself said this place might have what you need to bring her back.”

  There was no arguing with Dorian. His mind was suddenly set. And the mountain was put on hold. Now it was solely about digging for books. Rather than moving the earth to the runway, it was placed along the borders of Nothingland.

  When word spread, thanks to Boaz writing stories in the Sutton Bulletin with titles like “It’s Only Your Life Buried Out There,” bulldozers, excavators, and every truck in town showed up. A wall of dirt rose around the edge of Nothingland, and more books were found.

  Chua Ling approached Alistair in the grocery store one day with the story of her life in her hand. “I don’t care what’s true and what’s fiction,” she said. “Why’d she write this?”

  “Because she loved Chua,” Alistair said as he filled his cart with the only thing he knew how to cook—microwavable egg rolls. “Because she missed Chua.”

  “But I’m Chua!” she said, storming away. “I’m Chua!”

  There were other encounters like this. At the Skylark, on the sidewalk, in the library. Alistair was treated as Fiona’s representative. People had little interest in him other than as a target for their frustrations. Some of them wanted to hear about Fiona’s life before, so he told her story as best he could. It rarely helped. It frustrated some. Perplexed many. Saddened the handful who really missed her—Dorian especially.

  One thing became apparent. No one was going to help him with the mountain, because they all sure as heck wanted to know what she had written about them before seeing her again. Most actually didn’t care where she was, or how she got there. Her opinions were all that mattered, not her safety.

  Alistair kept working on the mountain alone. All the machinery in town was dedicated to Nothingland digs, and he didn’t have access to a car. So he made do by hooking a trailer to a bicycle and ferrying loads of earth to the runway. It was slow, solitary work, but he didn’t know of any other options.

  It went on for a few weeks like this. Alistair lived with Dorian, though they stayed out of each other’s way. Dorian still concentrated on the digs, but he was kind enough to pay Alistair a small amount of cash for doing chores around the house, which kept him fed and going. Back in the Solid World, Alistair had never trusted Dorian Loomis, but here, he owed his life to him. Dorian was one of the only people he could trust, maybe even more than he could trust himself.

  The younger Alistair hardly saw the older Alistair, except for the afternoon he popped by the runway. “A mountain out of a molehill,” the older said, marveling at the now thirty-foot mound.

  “You’re welcome to help,” the younger said.

  The older brushed him off. “I’m past wanting that. And I’m past wanting whatever it is they all want. Out there in Nothingland.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “They’ll end up like me,” the older said as he walked away. “That’s why I never told them about the tapes. My advice: build faster. Get the hell out of here while you can.”

  * * *

  The others did end up like the older Alistair. The ones who found their own stories were bitter at first. Angry. Confused. But eventually, they became sad. Withdrawn. They quit their jobs. They hardly left their houses. No one could prove that these books were the truth, but they felt like the truth. Which was enough.

  The ones who didn’t find their own stories kept digging. They became obsessed, until their machinery broke down and couldn’t be fixed anymore. They were left with shovels, so some of them gave up. Then those ones became sad. Withdrawn. They burrowed at home.

  A strange thing happened to Alistair. He stopped noticing. Days and weeks and months rolled by, and he kept building the mountain and thought about little else. Memories of the Solid World didn’t visit him at all anymore. He had no contact with others except for the occasional small talk with Dorian at the house.

  “How’s the digging going?”

  “Fine,” Dorian replied. “Found other things out there. Mattresses. Clothes. And another book yesterday. Story of Diana Kluszewski. I’m piecing things together, bit by bit. There are things in common about these kids, you know. No one else cares, but I’m pretty sure the key to what happened to Fiona is in these stories. How ’bout you? How high are you these days?”

  “A hundred and fifty feet, I’d guess. Two times as high as the highest trees, which are seventy-five feet or so.”

  “Halfway there. Not bad.”

  Halfway wasn’t really halfway. The higher the mountain got, the amount of dirt needed to get it higher increased exponentially. But by this point, that was fine. Alistair was on autopilot. Building. Building. Building.

  Years passed. People died. Dorian slowly became a withered old man. The older Alistair’s gut grew larger, and he acquired a hunch and lost most of his hair. Chua divorced Werner and married Mike Cooney, then divorced him. Rodrigo’s kids grew up and had kids of their own. Mostly, the town limped along, barely surviving.

  The younger Alistair didn’t age, of course, which only made everyone all the more suspicious of him. They gave him a wide berth. When he wasn’t building, Alistair was eating, sleeping, occasionally reading or watching television. Book and TV selections were scant, limited to things Fiona had read or seen in the Solid World, but they worked as distractions. They taught him new vocabulary, seasoned his perspectives on things.

  Twenty-five years. That’s how long it took to reach higher than any natural formation or building or anything else in town. Whether he was three hundred feet high or higher, Alistair didn’t know for sure. All he knew was that it was still about twenty feet to the cloud.

  Dorian didn’t have the strength to dig anymore, but he had a shovel-wielding skeleton crew that had moved on from Nothingland and were now digging in the town. They chopped down the memorial tree and dug under that. They tore apart houses that were left abandoned after the owners passed away and they dug. All the cars and trucks available fell into disrepair, forcing them to do everything by hand. It was almost inhuman, the obsession. Alistair had to remind himself it’s because they weren’t human. They were figments.

  * * *

  It was a blustery afternoon when Alistair had a rare visitor. Dorian hobbled, aided by a cane, to the base of the mountain. Under his arm, he had a dirty green metal box, an Army ammo can.

  He placed the can on Alistair’s trailer and unlatched it. “Tell me that you know what this is,” he said. “I realize it’s my old ammo can, but what’s inside has got me flummoxed.”

  Alistair nibbled at his dirty knuckle and sighed.

  “Come on, buddy, what did I dig up here?” Dorian pleaded. “Seriously and truly, tell me. You know I can’t see so well anymore, even with this.” Dorian handed Alistair a magnifying glass and opened the ammo can.

  Inside was a tiny world, like a diorama. An island in an ocean, with little creatures scurrying around it. Alistair held the magnifying glass close. Even though it was hard to make out, he was pretty sure he saw people on the island too. Which caused him to flinch.

  “It’s nothing,” he told Dorian. “Something Fiona created a very long time ago. Something she wanted to forget about.”

  “But what is it?”

  Alistair closed the ammo can and picked it up. “It’s nothing,” he said. “The past. Meant to stay buried.”

  “Well, let me have it back,” Dorian said. “It might hold some clues.”

  “No,” Alistair said, and he started walking up the slope of the mountain. “I can’t do that.”

  Dorian was too feeble to follow. “Why?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Alistair called back, still climbin
g.

  But he did know. As he climbed higher and higher, he looked out onto what used to be a home for Fiona. A place she built, a place she loved, a place that was gone. It was a landscape of destruction and decay now. Walls and piles of dirt, holes, rubble, flattened homes. All that was truly left of what she had created was tucked under Alistair’s arm.

  When he reached the top, he sat down and, though he had the urge to cry, he didn’t cry. He sat there, cradling the box.

  As the sun was setting, he had another visitor. The older Alistair appeared over a crest of dirt, huffing and hacking. He flopped his girth down next to the younger and ran a hand over his brow, using sweat to flatten the few thin patches of hair he had left.

  “So what’s in the box?” the older asked.

  “Where Fiona used to live,” the younger said. “The first place she created. A tropical paradise with a bush baby named Toby and all sorts of beautiful creatures. She shrunk it down because she decided it was silly and didn’t want to think about it anymore. But she didn’t want it destroyed. You can see there are tiny people living there now. Fiona talked about giving people a nice place to live, about boxing them up. I think this is where she sent the ones who decided to leave town. The ones who got jobs or ran off. The people you never saw again. Her brother. Her sister. Your dad. Your sister.”

  “Can I have a look?” the older asked.

  The younger opened the ammo can and handed it over. As the older took it and examined the tiny island inside, the younger said, “Someone asked me a riddle once. She said, ‘Let’s pretend you have this magic lamp and there’s a genie inside. The 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?’”

  Still entranced by the box, the older said, “I’m not clever enough for those things.”

  “Neither am I,” the younger said. “But give it a try anyway.”

  “Well,” the older said, “I guess I’d wish for a ton of confidence. I’d wish for a woman to love me. And I’d wish for something like what’s in this box. A paradise.”

  “But one of the wishes will backfire,” the younger said.

  “But I get one of them, right? All I need is one of them to come true. And then maybe that one wish will lead me to get the other two on my own.”

  “That answer,” the younger said, “is supposed to tell me what type of person you are. I’m not sure why.”

  “It’s the best answer I could think up, is all.”

  “I’d wish the same wish three times,” the younger said.

  “Wouldn’t they cancel one another out?”

  “That’s what I used to think,” the younger said. “But not if I wished to die. Death is final. As soon as the one wish for death comes true, then what happens with the other wishes doesn’t matter, does it?”

  The older closed the ammo can. “Well, that’s morbid,” he said. “So what type of person does that make you?”

  “I don’t know,” the younger said. “But it kinda feels like I’ve become a cipher.”

  His words opened something up. The cloud let loose with snow, shining in silver and gold. And right before the snowflakes touched his skin, the younger Alistair slipped into a memory, his first memory in twenty-five years.

  1986

  The rabbit was a birthday gift. Charlie was turning nine, and it was something he asked for, so it was something he got.

  “You feed it. You clean the cage. You make sure its water bowl is full,” his dad said, handing over a white furball with a pink bow around its neck.

  Still chewing his cake, Charlie took in the armful of rabbit and cried, “So awesome!”

  The party attendance might have seemed abysmal—there was Kyle and Alistair, of course, as well as Keri, out of politeness—but it turned out that they were the only people Charlie wanted to be there. They all sat, along with Charlie’s parents, at a picnic table clad with a striped nylon tablecloth in the Dwyers’ backyard. The cake, shaped like a tower, was vanilla with chocolate frosting.

  “So rabbits are basically like cats, but they hop, right?” Keri asked as she dipped a finger in the icing and brought it to her mouth.

  Charlie’s mom winced and pulled the cake out of Keri’s reach, while Charlie hugged the rabbit tighter and said, “No, genius. Rabbits aren’t anything like cats. They’re lagomorphs, for one. Lagomorphs and cats are sworn enemies.”

  “Keep him away from all those strays you feed,” Kyle said.

  “Duh,” Charlie replied.

  “He’s a girl,” Charlie’s dad said.

  “Huh?” almost everyone at the table replied.

  “The rabbit is a female,” he said. “At least that’s what the vet told me.”

  “I will name her Una,” Charlie announced. “It means the first of her kind.”

  For the next few weeks, the rabbit named Una lived in a cage made of wood and chicken wire that Charlie’s father attached to Kyle’s clubhouse. Una was safe from cats, as well as coyotes, which were actually the bigger concern.

  Every day, Charlie would give Una vegetables and food pellets and he would let her hop through the grass as he scrubbed her cage. He had always adored cats, as far back as Alistair could remember, but he had only recently started mentioning rabbits. And yet his passion for Una seemed genuine, even if she was a sworn enemy of his beloved felines.

  * * *

  Alistair came upon Una’s lifeless body early on a Sunday morning. Charlie was on a trip with his parents to visit a boarding school for the young and unique. Kyle had been left alone for the night and was therefore in charge of watching Una. “Can you check up on her?” Charlie had asked Alistair the day before. “I don’t trust him. He’s fifteen and he hardly knows how to bathe himself.”

  The white fur around Una’s eyes was stained with blood. Frost lined the uneaten vegetables scattered throughout the cage. Alistair poked at Una with a stick, and the body yielded, but didn’t react.

  He sprinted to the front door of the Dwyers’ house and slapped the bell. A red-eyed Kyle answered after the third insistent ring.

  “Jesus, man,” Kyle said. “Where’s the fire?”

  “I think Una’s dead,” Alistair said between wheezing breaths.

  Kyle leaned against the door and closed his eyes. “Not possible,” he mumbled. “Josie came over and we took care of that last night.”

  “I don’t know,” Alistair said. “She’s bloody. She’s not moving. Did you feed her?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you let her out in the grass and wash her cage?”

  “Of course,” Kyle said as he wiped his face with his hand and opened his eyes. “Well, I didn’t let her out, but I hosed the whole thing down pretty good.”

  “You hosed it down while she was still in it?”

  “Sure,” Kyle said. “That’s what you do with animals. I’ve seen them do that with elephants at the zoo.”

  “I think she froze to death,” Alistair said. “Or had a heart attack, or something. Oh my god, what do we tell Charlie?”

  “Lemme see her.”

  Alistair led him out back, where Kyle stumbled and had to brace himself against the clubhouse as he said, “Oh man, oh man, oh man.”

  Wrapping his fingers around the chicken wire at the front of the cage, Alistair gave it a gentle tug and said, “I was thinking, and this isn’t what we have to do, but what if we ripped a hole in the wire? And we buried the rabbit in the swamp? Pretend like a coyote got her.”

  Kyle pounded a fist against the clubhouse three times, and then took three deep breaths. “If we do that,” he said, “no one can ever know.”

  “I’m not stupid.”

  Kyle put a hand on Alistair’s shoulder and squeezed it hard. “No one. Ever.”

  “I get it.”

  “Come with me.”

  Kyle led the way into th
e clubhouse, where he pointed at a crawl space below the floorboards. “At the bottom,” he said.

  Alistair reached down and pulled out a stop sign and placed it on the floor. “Is that the sign that went missing from Cheshire and—” Alistair started to say, but cut himself short.

  Kyle glared at him and said, “Underneath that.”

  Alistair reached down and pulled out a shovel. It clanged as he dropped it on the sign. He looked up and Kyle said, “Let’s get to it.”

  * * *

  That evening, when Charlie returned home with stories about how boarding school was for snots and morons, Kyle and Alistair invited him to the backyard and showed him the hole in the wire.

  “I doubt she suffered,” Kyle said.

  Charlie didn’t gasp or cry. He simply stared at the hole, at the bloodstained cage. Then he turned away. “Circle of life,” he said. “That’s what she gets for being a stupid lagomorph.”

  “You’re not upset?” Alistair asked.

  Charlie patted Alistair on the cheek like he was a little kid and he said, “Don’t you think I knew this would happen?”

  There was another big gift that Charlie got for his birthday that year: a Nintendo. Leaving Kyle and Alistair standing in the yard, he went inside and turned it on.

  Kyle kicked the clubhouse. “I’ve been done with this baby crap for years,” he said. “You and Charlie can have it.”

  “What?”

  “The clubhouse.”

  “What about the stop sign?” Alistair asked. “It’s illegal to have that, right?”

  Kyle rolled his eyes. “I’ll chuck it out in the swamp if that makes you feel better.”

  “Someone could’ve crashed because you stole that,” Alistair said. “Someone could’ve died.”

  “And that rabbit could’ve lived if you’d checked up on it last night. Could’ve is a helluva lot different from did. We never speak of that rabbit again, understand?” Kyle said.

  The air was even chillier than the night before. Shivering in a T-shirt, his silence as good as a yes, Alistair checked the sky for constellations he might know—Orion, the hunter, was a favorite. Summer was still a few weeks off, but the stars were absolute marvels that night. They went on forever.