The Whisper

by Aaron Starmer

  CHAPTER 23

  Icicles dripped water on Alistair’s face. He was no longer on the mountain. The memory had come and gone. The snow from the cloud had coated his skin and transported him somewhere new. On his back looking up, it might have seemed as though he were in a world of icicles, until that colorless head appeared over him and Charlie’s voice filled the room.

  “Twenty-five years,” he said. “I have to admit, I never imagined it would take this long.”

  Alistair felt no need to lunge for him. He’d lost that desire somewhere along the way. He rolled over to his side and sat up. He was in a round room made of stone. There were arched windows on the walls. The ceiling was crawling with icicles.

  “This is where you live?” Alistair asked.

  “Shhh,” Charlie whispered as he tiptoed backward across the room, as if from a sleeping baby. “Listen.”

  Drips on the stone floor. Muffled growls. The sound of rushing water below. And voices.

  I need to go home and never come back.

  I need courage.

  I need to have the life I once had.

  I need my mom to be healthy.

  “Constant,” Charlie said. “Forever and ever. This is where I live. Amid all this pathetic begging.”

  “Who are they?” Alistair asked.

  “I think you refer to them as daydreamers,” Charlie said, wielding the fountain pen, tapping its tip playfully on his chin. “As long as I can be what they need, or pretend to be what they need, I can go to their worlds and shut them up. Which is what I need. Sometimes some of them are friends and I have to take out the whole bunch as fast as possible. I don’t want fearmongering, after all.”

  Alistair climbed to his feet. Charlie, his body lithe and colorless, was a few yards out of his reach. “So I’m supposed to touch you, right?” he asked. “Is that the idea?”

  “What?” Charlie asked, and then a realization birthed a grin. “Oh, poor you. You think this is a game of tag. You misunderstood.”

  “You clearly said I was It. You were baiting me.”

  Charlie moved over to a window and sat on its stone sill. Placing the pen behind his ear and holding the edge, he rocked back and forth, his body dipping outside with each cycle. “You are most certainly It, but it’s not about tagging me. You could never catch me unless I let you catch me.”

  “So is that what you’re letting me do?” Cold water dripped on Alistair’s head and his body seized up, but he didn’t take a step. For years on the mountain, he had thought about this moment, and yet he had never decided what he was going to do. Punch Charlie? Choke Charlie? Scream at him until his vocal cords bled?

  “I’m letting you realize that I’m the one who molded you,” Charlie said. “Not Fiona. She may have been able to create things, but I help things evolve. Her creations were no match for what you became. You, Alistair, are my masterpiece.”

  “So being It was being your toy? Your cipher?” Alistair asked, barely opening his mouth, the words leaking out like gasoline fumes from a car wreck.

  “No,” Charlie said. “You were never a cipher. You destroyed Fiona’s world, that’s true. But you’re bigger than a cipher. Better. You’re It. Only you’ve refused to acknowledge you’ve always been It, that you were born to be It.”

  Alistair rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, and through measured breaths he said, “You told a story at that school about being born to do things and making choices. You capture all these worlds and then you choose to destroy them. What … in the hell … is the point?”

  Charlie kept rocking, dipping farther and farther out the window. “You said it yourself to that penguin all those years ago,” Charlie said with a chuckle. “I do it for fun.”

  Alistair shook his head quickly, tightly. “No. No. I’m older now. I know it’s not that simple.”

  “Sometimes it is.”

  “What happened to her? Where is she?”

  “You want me to tell you a story about it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You need me to tell you a story about it?”

  “Yes!”

  Charlie chuckled and said, “It’s better to show than to tell.” And he let go of the sill and fell backward out of the window. There, then gone—like a firefly, like a memory.

  Faster than he’d ever moved, Alistair sprinted to the window, but the floor was icy and he started to slide. He couldn’t slow down and he struck the sill with his hip and toppled through the window as well.

  The storm in his gut that came from falling was something he hadn’t felt in ages. It had been the ultimate in terror before, but now it was the ultimate in relief, the hurricane that flattens everything—the fear, the doubt, everything. Fluttering through the cold void, looking down at a shimmering pool and a bottomless waterfall, he knew he had gotten as far as he was going to get in Aquavania.

  During his years building the mountain, he had looked up the words ambit and cipher in a dictionary. An ambit was the outer limits of something, the boundary. A cipher was a nonentity, an empty vessel. That was where he was: the edge, the end. That was who he was: a nobody, a guy who would die here, whose body would probably end up in Fiona’s basement without any explanation, no one to ever tell his story.

  Flipping over changed all that. Alistair’s body somersaulted, gifting him an upside-down view of what was behind him. The tower was made of stone, but you would have only known that from the inside. Every square inch of the outside, except for the windows at the top, was infested with ciphers. Creatures perched, or clung, or dangled, or simply stood there horizontally, defying gravity, their claws, tentacles, spikes, and wings sticking into the void.

  A giant hand shot out from the madness and snatched Alistair before his back could crash into the water. It pulled him toward the tower as fast as he had been falling from it. The storm in his gut shifted to terror again, because this clearly wasn’t over. Limbs swung and jaws snapped. Roars and hisses that had been muffled by the sound of the waterfall were now too close to ignore. Thick saliva pummeled his face, and fur stuck to the saliva. At first, he could see the individual ciphers, but in a blink, he was in the thick of them. No faces, no shapes. A stew of monster, dense and repugnant.

  So he didn’t realize it when the giant hand pulled him through the pile of monsters and set him down on a pile of monster parts. It took Charlie’s voice to clue him in.

  “You have your mountain, and I have mine,” he said.

  The hand had brought Alistair back inside the tower, into a room markedly bigger and significantly warmer than the one at the top. There was no floor, at least not one Alistair could see. Like a dragon on his gold, he was standing on Charlie’s massive treasure, only this treasure consisted of legs, arms, heads, teeth, and every other animal body part imaginable. Charlie was there too, of course, but standing between him and Alistair there was someone else.

  Polly Dobson.

  Alistair could only recognize her face and the tattered remains of the space suit that clung to her torso. The rest of her body was deformed. Most notably, her arms and hands were enormous, bigger than King Kong’s, big enough to snatch two boys out of a void and pull them back into a tower and set them on a peak of grotesqueries.

  “The familiars, the daemons, whatever you want to call them,” Charlie went on, “you know, those little animal guides like Baxter the penguin and Potoweet the hummingbird? They make the very best ciphers. It’s because it’s in their nature to be subservient. Swimmers, on the other hand—I rarely ever make ciphers out of them. Too ornery, too independent. Best to suck out their souls and be done with them. For Polly, I made an exception.”

  Polly didn’t speak. She was hunched over, breaths straining out of her like curdled milk through a tight spout.

  Breathing wasn’t easy for Alistair either, but he managed to ask, “How long has she been here?”

  “As long as you’ve been out there. She came for revenge. Isn’t that sweet? Turns out her friend Henrietta was the Whi
sper before me. For a long time, I thought the Whisper before me was a boy, because of the raspy voice and the crush it had on some girl named Polly in the Solid World. But there are always surprises, even when you have access to all the information.”

  There was nowhere safe for Alistair to look. Every sight turned his stomach. “She’s been your … zombie?” he asked.

  “She’s been my experiment. I’ve made her into thousands of ciphers. She’s been a model, a drawing board, a department store mannequin. You remember that Kyle cipher I sent after you? Well, I tested the design on her first.”

  Charlie walked over to Polly and started waving his hands in front of her chest. A tornado of body parts erupted from the mountain and swirled around her, and when it subsided, the spitting image of Kyle was standing in her place.

  “Didn’t want to lose my favorite test dummy, obviously,” Charlie went on. “So I sent a penguin sacrifice to that space station instead.”

  If he had a pair of those X-ray specs, Alistair might’ve been able to see Polly’s bones beneath the skin, just as he’d seen Baxter’s bones. “You’re sick,” Alistair said.

  “No,” Charlie said with a laugh. “This is sick.” He waved his hands again, over and under each other—exactly like that night when he waved his hands above the bullet wound in his brother’s stomach. The tornado of body parts spun around, and when they calmed, there was a giant rabbit with bleeding eyes standing between the two boys.

  “Stop it!” Alistair screamed.

  “Come on,” Charlie said. “I’m only having fun. This girl has no problem with revenge. So have your revenge on her. Don’t you remember how she left you high and dry on Hadrian’s pedestal? Tell me what to turn her into and I’ll do it. I’ve collected every body part imaginable from the worlds I watch over. Your imagination is the only limit, Alistair. Whatever you want. Remember, you’ve become who you are because of me, but I’ve also become who I am because of you. We owe each other everything.”

  “Fiona,” Alistair snapped. “You were supposed to tell me what happened to her.”

  Charlie clucked his tongue and said, “Show, don’t tell.” Then he moved his mangled hands in front of the bloody-eyed rabbit—in front of Polly—and the tornado sprouted and collapsed, and a version of Fiona was now standing there.

  Sad-eyed and low-shouldered, she was in a purple dress and a neon green coat. Most of the details were right—the crooked nose, the hair so black it almost didn’t exist, the thin and awkward limbs—and yet this wasn’t Fiona. It had been twenty-five years since Alistair had seen her, since he’d even been able to picture her, but with one look at this imposter, the real Fiona invited herself back into his head.

  “That is not her!” Alistair shouted.

  Charlie ignored him, turned to the Fiona cipher, and said, “Exactly as we rehearsed.”

  The Fiona cipher nodded limply as Charlie waved his hands again. This time the tornado of body parts didn’t surround her. Instead, legs, arms, and other appendages interlocked, twisted, and bound together to form the shapes of bookshelves, a dresser, a headboard, and a mattress. They became a bedroom, the most colorful, alive, and yet macabre bedroom imaginable. They became the set of a play, and Charlie and the Fiona cipher were center stage.

  “I am a silly girl who would rather live a pretend version of life than a real version of life,” the Fiona cipher droned.

  “That’s not fair!” Alistair shouted.

  Charlie wagged a finger at him. Settle down, that finger said. We will not tolerate hecklers.

  “To bed with me, but first I will make a wish,” the Fiona cipher said. “I need to see the Riverman.”

  Charlie’s head perked up and he stepped forward, spinning his hands theatrically. “You rang?” he said.

  “The last time I encountered you, you informed me that you spared my soul because you wanted me to give you Alistair. Well, I will not do it. I simply will not,” the Fiona cipher responded, her performance more mechanical and pitiful with every badly scripted word.

  Charlie’s performance was the opposite. It was high-stepping and enthusiastic. Hammy. “Because you have a crush on him?” he sang.

  The Fiona cipher laid her body down on the maniac bed, arms draped back, eyes closed. “Because he needs to see the world for what it really is. He needs to see what you are capable of. Before he can really live his life, he needs to realize who you really are.”

  “Who I am?” Charlie said with a snort. “I am a substitute, a temp, a seat filler. All I am is what Alistair was supposed to be. Which is this!”

  A jolt. Charlie leapt onto the bed and plunged the fountain pen into the Fiona cipher’s ear. His lips were on the pen before Alistair could stop him, and he was sucking out another soul. Polly’s soul.

  Standing on the pile of body parts was like standing on a heap of junk, but running on it was like running on quicksand. Alistair tried to kick off, but his feet sank, and soon he was knee-deep in the bits and pieces.

  In seconds, the pen was full of sparkling liquid and Fiona’s features fell away. The face and body looked like Polly’s for a moment, and then it wasn’t a face and body at all. It split apart into thousands of tiny bits, like snowflakes, which flurried and evaporated into the air.

  Holding the pen aloft, Charlie announced, “There’s a way this story could have ended. I could have poured Fiona’s soul into my waterfall, and she could have returned to the Solid World without any memories of Aquavania. Her part in the process would be over. She would have contributed her creations to the mix and moved on.”

  Alistair strained, but he only sank deeper into the body ball-crawl. “Please. I get it. You don’t have to do this anymore. Put Polly’s soul into the waterfall. Let her go home.”

  “Show, don’t tell,” Charlie said again. “And I need to show you what I did to Fiona.”

  The ink dripped leisurely, like the rubber cement Alistair had poured into that wasp hole back when they were both so little. If Alistair could have moved, he might have stopped Charlie. A big, and impossible, if.

  The drops finally reached their destination, and when they touched Charlie’s colorless skin, his body shimmered for a moment and he howled, “You don’t realize how good it feels! To know everything that someone else knows. To feel all the things that someone else feels. To become someone else.”

  More struggling. Frantic and pointless, because Alistair only sank deeper—beaks, gills, hooves, poking at his ribs. “You are not Fiona! You could never be her!”

  “I am Fiona. And I am Polly. I am Chua, I am Boaz, I am every soul that hasn’t been sent back to the Solid World. You asked me once where Fiona was and I told you I didn’t know. I wasn’t lying. Because that’s like asking a guy where his soul lives.”

  Even without struggling, Alistair sank deeper. His chin rubbed against dinosaur heads, eagle talons, leopard tails. “Then show some kindness and let them go,” he whimpered. “What if you throw yourself into the waterfall? Will they all be released?”

  “Possibly, but then I’d be released too, and who would take my place?” Charlie asked. “There always has to be a Whisper.”

  “Does there?”

  Charlie moved closer and crouched down, his head inches away from Alistair’s. “Of course. And if you weren’t ready before, then I think I’ve molded you enough that you’re ready now.”

  “No. Please, no.”

  “I forgive you, Alistair,” Charlie whispered.

  “What? That’s doesn’t make—”

  “For all of it. For not having the courage to tell the truth so many, many times. For not having the courage to do what has to be done.”

  With that, Charlie took the pen and he plunged it into his own ear, and that wonderfully horrible body of his collapsed. It spilled over everything, a stain on a paisley pile.

  The tip of the pen remained lodged in his ear, and the other end was tantalizingly close to Alistair’s head. Strain his neck forward a bit and Alistair could get it in his
mouth. “Charlie,” he said softly. “Are you…?”

  No response.

  Alistair had stopped sinking. Like a shipwreck survivor, his head poked up at the surface. Outside, he could hear the yelps and howls of the ciphers, the rush of the waterfall, but those sounds weren’t overwhelming. He had the luxury of thought for a moment, the chance for contemplation.

  And yet he didn’t take that chance. Instead, he used his tongue to pull the pen to his mouth and he treated it like a straw, sucking, yanking at Charlie’s soul, or whatever his soul had become. It was instinct, it was anger, it was twenty-five years of not knowing what to do.

  When sparkling liquid filled the pen, Charlie disintegrated exactly as Polly had disintegrated, like ash caught in a breeze and melding with the sky. And all those other body parts—the horns, the fins, the trunks—took to the air too, but they didn’t break apart. They streamed out of the windows like clouds of bats, so fast that Alistair didn’t realize he was sitting on a stone floor until the pile was gone and he was alone. Except for the pen, still poised between his teeth.

  He dashed straight to a window and poked his head out to see that the ciphers were gone. Where to, it wasn’t clear. There was the void and there was the tower, and at the base, there was the pool and the bottomless waterfall. That was it. Nothing else.

  Pen now clutched to his chest, Alistair located some stairs along the edge of the room and he hurried down them until he reached the bottom and the entranceway of the tower. The roar of the waterfall was nearly deafening now, but somehow voices found their way to him. They were the voices of daydreamers.

  I need to say goodbye to my creations.

  I need my friends to forgive me for the thing I did.

  I need love.

  I need an end. I need the end.

  Alistair stood in the arched entrance, at the edge of the pool. He gazed at his reflection, the face of a boy, a kid not even thirteen years old. The reflection wasn’t quite a lie, but it was an illusion. That boy didn’t exist anymore. He’d hardly existed when he had washed up in Mahaloo so long ago.