The Whispers (13 page)

“I’m sorry,” I whisper into his chest. “I’m so dumb.”

“No, you’re not.”

“It’s not a convenient time to lose my mind.”

“It never is.”

“I’m probably just hungry.”

“Me too.”

“We’ll be okay?”

“And so will Mari,” he assures me, bringing a hand to the back of my head and petting my hair. “We’ll find her. She will be fine. We’re not dying out here. Hear their cheers, Jennifer. Their cheers … Hear them.”

“Yeah. Better to hear
that
than a phantom call on my drowned, dead thing,” I mumble.

Within the next few minutes, it is determined that we will not find another speck of sleep between either of us. John unbinds the tassel, dropping Corpsey to the ground. The landing isn’t as gentle as I imagine John could’ve made it; I doubt any love is growing between them. With the pale boy down, we continue on our way through the dusty landscape.

Unlike the area we crashed our hovercraft in, the dead and brambly foliage of this terrain is broken periodically by large expanses of grassless field. The dirt beneath our feet is so dry and hardened, lightning bolt cracks snake across the ground, giving the land a blasted harshness about it.

“How far?” grunts John unkindly to our tour guide.

“The Dead know nothing of distance,” he answers cryptically.

John gives a less-than-gentle tug on the leash. “How far?” he repeats, impatiently.

I try a different tack. “You described the Whispers as the place where it all began. What’d you mean by that?”

Corpsey smirks. “It’s been called many things. The Great Scar … Death’s Aisle … Valley of Shadows …”

“Is it the place where all of the Beau—” I clear my throat, not wanting to hit that sensitive spot again. “Is it the place where all of the
Dead
come from?”

After a moment of consideration, he says, “No one really knows.”

“Is that where
you
came from?”

“It was so long ago.” A pained expression crosses his face. “I don’t even remember who was first in this world, my sister, or myself. My First Life was so long ago … I struggle to even remember … to even remember …”

“You said only the Dead can go there,” I remind him, “to these so-called Whispers. If that’s true, how is my friend Mari there?”

“She was taken there by my sister.”

I’m trying to piece it together in my head. Through the fog of hunger and exhaustion and plain insanity, it’s a very trying effort to make sense of anything at all.

“Wait,” interjects John. “Your sister took her? You said before that you’d only seen our friend Mari run away. You said no one followed you across the river, that no one knew you’d come, that no one knew the way to the other side,” John goes on, suspicious and irritable.

“My sister caught your friend,” murmurs our trusty Corpsey. “She was seconds from draining the woman when I stopped her.”

I gape at him. I hadn’t realized Marianne was in such immediate peril. These events must have taken place days ago, just after we first fled the hovercraft. This changes everything. “Why’d you stop her?”

“I saw you on that hovercraft. I looked into your eyes and I
saw
you,” he says, his voice going quiet and vague. “I told my sister two words … I mentioned that this Mari woman had friends, and among the friends, a special one. I told my sister two words and she stopped.”

“What two words?” I press him.

He smiles at that question, his cloudy eyes turning to the grey, nothing sky, and he says, “Winter … white.”

Okay, really. I’m so tired of everyone on this side of the planet making such dramatic reference to my damned hair. My parents are both brunettes, all natural, and both families follow suit. Not a single light-haired among us. Imagine my parents’ surprise when I was born. All my life, I’ve been stared at, told my hair would darken, that it wouldn’t stay so …
white
. I was made fun of at school, called albino, diseased, old woman … every sort of silly insult a dumb child can squeeze out of a brain.

“It’s just
hair
,” I retort back. “Had it since I was born.”

“No matter the significance, it stopped my sister.” The way he says the word
significance
, it rings so clearly and crisply in his smooth, oddly melodic voice. “She decided right then that she’d keep your friend alive. She sent me to speak to you, to arrange a meeting …”

“That one night in the woods?” I say, confirming it. “You never told me why you’d sought me out! I even
asked
and you never answered.”

“The Whispers are near.”

Those words draw a cold chill over my bones. John’s eyes flash as he looks around, like he’s expecting the world to suddenly fold in on itself with some imaginary onslaught of spirits and ghouls and deathly things. None of that happens. We merely stumble through the trees and cracked ground, nothing at all strange or scary or
whispery
in sight.

“Near …” he murmurs. “Quite near … I feel it.”

The trees quite suddenly give way to a wide expanse of nothing. The ground ahead is flat as a wasteland, grey and dusty. There is nothing before us but an imprecise, swirling mist, much like the mass of cloud in the sky that so greedily keeps the sun and stars from view. It dances and twirls and brushes over the endless wasteland. The sight of which is enough to stop me in my tracks.

The boy looks back at the pair of us. “Isn’t this what you wanted?” he asks John and I, and there is no lightness nor amusement to his voice. “I am just as disquieted by them as you are.”

I blanch. “By
them
?”

“The Whispers, yes, by
them
,” he murmurs, his vague eyes meeting mine. “Do we dare, or do we not dare?”

I look to the left, then to the right. I cannot even see an end. The vast expanse of wasteland is endless in all directions and perfectly flat. Not even a hill or a bump or a stone in sight. The trees at my back suddenly have become a great and generous comfort compared to the utter
nothing
that lies ahead.

“I see nothing,” I whisper, afraid. “Where’s my friend? How do I know you’re not … you’re not just … leading us into some horrible foggy trap?”

I can’t help my bones from shaking. I’m instantly terrified of this place. There is nothing kind or inviting about it at all. I feel like Dana suddenly, desperate to claim that the spirits are so awful and unrested here, that the spirits are screeching at me from some other plane of existence, haunting me, their eerie voices moaning and groaning in warning, ordering me to turn back, to flee.

“I have not seen my sister in some time,” the boy confesses to me, his own voice not seeming at its most comfortable. “We will have to search for a bit.”

“Search?” I gape, staring at the swirling mists and the flat, barren landscape. It’s like staring into the mouth of Death itself, feeling its cold breath on my face. I have never in my life known terror, not until now.
I don’t want to die
, I suddenly find myself thinking.

“Keep me close. I’m your ticket in
and
out of this place,” warns the boy, then he extends a hand. “Here, take my hand. We cannot be separated, otherwise you may never again find your way out.”

“No way,” barks John, not having any of Corpsey’s negotiations. “You walk ahead of us,
thing
.”

“Afraid? I could hold your hand, too,” the boy offers, twisting to get a better look at John despite the noose. “You’ve a firm grip on that tether, don’t you?”

“Don’t address me.” John’s voice is hard, determined not to show any fear. “As soon as we have our friend back, you’re nothing. You keep away, you keep those teeth of yours off of us, and you won’t know the touch of Jennifer’s metal on your face.”

“It’s okay,” I assure John, reaching at once and taking grip of Corpsey’s hand. The skin is unsettlingly rough and delicate. I worry any sudden jerk could break his hand off.

A lightness crosses the pale one’s face, something akin to amusement, or victory. “Do you even know why we drink blood?”

John and I stare at Corpsey’s cocky smirk, waiting.

“It’s not for the taste,” he goes on, answering his own question. “Or maybe it is, indirectly. See, when the drop of your lifeblood touches my dead little tongue, I get to experience the joy of half-life. I smell the world. I feel the tickle of air upon my suddenly-sensitive skin. If I’m lucky, the generous beams of the furious sun bathe my hungry eyes.
Life
. That’s the greatest commodity left in this world and it’s through your blood that a sad, Dead thing like me gets to know it once again.”

“An experience you will not be afforded on
our
behalf,” grunts John in reply, his face tightened with ire. “Move it, Corpsey,” he orders, borrowing my placeholder of a name.

The boy, smiling lamely, starts to walk forth. I’m not yet ready, but I guess I’ve run out of time whether I like it or not. Hand-in-hand with our Dead companion, I walk alongside him, leaving the comfort of the creepy dead woods and plunging into the unknown. In just a matter of seconds, we are surrounded on all sides by fog. Our field of vision is but a matter of three short paces in all directions, three short paces of perfectly flat nothingness. The swirls of fog waltz around us like misbehaving children. I lose all sense of direction and feel utterly transported to some faraway world with mist for millions of miles in all directions. There is no sign of change anywhere. We walk for five minutes. We walk for ten minutes. In silence, we traverse over a plane that never changes, through mist that never relents, under a white and ghostly sky that never blinks.

“Winter.”

I turn, staring at John. “What?”

John stares back, confused. “I didn’t say anything.”

“Winter white.”

I jump, startled by the voice, but find no one standing on my other side. “Did you hear that?” I breathe, feeling my pulse in my ears.

“
… white … white … white …
”

I turn back. The tassel drags loose behind the pale boy. I stop at once. “John?”

The boy turns too. Where once he wore a look of smugness, even the boy now appears alarmed. “Where did your friend go?”

“JOHN!” I cry out, leaping toward the mist.

The boy won’t let go of my hand. “NO!” he shouts. “Don’t! You’ll be lost! We can’t separate!”

“WE ALREADY HAVE!” I scream, thrown instantly into a state of panic. “JOHN! ANSWER ME! JOHN!”

“
Winter …
”

I spin around. I can’t even tell which direction we were walking. The mist swirls around us, giving me the uneasy sensation of being in the center of a great, white, slow-motion tornado. The ground lends no helpful hint of footstep or geography. The world spins along with the mist, along with my mind, along with my heart, which is now throbbing in my throat.

“JOHN!” I shout out again, desperate for him to answer me.

He was right there,
I tell myself.
Right there!
He should be able to hear my screaming. He can’t be more than a few feet away from me. Why can’t he hear me?

The haze before me twists oddly, as if bent by some force, the swirling pattern broken for a moment. I wonder if someone is cutting through it when suddenly the mist looks like a face … a really, really big face.

“John?” I ask, all my strength stolen.

Even the pale boy has tightened his grip on my hand and presses in close to me, fear rattling in his two ghostly eyes.
He’s afraid too
, I realize.
This is not his doing.

The fog writhes in midair again, forming a second face next to the first one. Then a third face. Then a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth.

“What’s happening?” I whisper to my only companion left, a Dead boy who’s tried to kill me twice, and who’s held back from killing me twice.

“I … I …” He can’t seem to produce an answer.

Then, from the first face, a figure emerges, parting the mist. It’s an old man, naked as his birthday. His skin, grey and silvery like the scales of a fish, is missing in patches, his bright white skeleton showing through, and his eyes glow a furious white, as if his eyeballs were two light bulbs plucked from Marianne’s makeup mirror.

Then, to his side, a second figure breaks through the fog. A woman twice as old as him and every bit as naked, her breasts hanging to her belly and her knees bowed inward. Two locks of hair hang in tangled curls straight down to her feet. Her eyes flash as white as the man’s.

Two more burst forth: younger men than the white-eyed, so similar in appearance that they could be twins, and they each wear a suit of crudely-fashioned metal armor. Blond of hair and pointy of nose, their eyes glow a sickly, hungry yellow—four bright little suns in the mist.

The final two faces emerge from behind us, giving me cause to whip around in fright. Both of them are young girls, each dressed in a strange costume that looks like a bunch of rocks sewn together somehow by needle-thin wires, spots of their young flesh visible through it. Their eyes glow the green of emeralds, sparkling and infinite in their facets.