The Whispers (14 page)

“Who are you?” I whisper, unsure which of the six to address. They have us surrounded, these strange figures, standing on all sides. “What do you want with us?”

The girls with the green eyes giggle, drawing my attention to them, but they say nothing, simply observing me as though I were a curious artifact at a museum, peering at me through the glass. The young armored men turn to one another, their faces scrunched in thought, as if they’re linked in the brain and trading thoughts between them. I’m ready to believe
any
sort of explanation for this odd group of guests … magical, scientific, or otherwise.

“So it begins.”

I turn to the voice. It was the old naked man, except now his entire lower half has turned into a swirling funnel of smoke, and his hands, now separated, float in the air next to his hips. He seems held together by a breeze. So does his counterpart, the ancient woman, whose legs are now a twisting cone of dust, and her white eyes float in the air on either side of her frail-looking head.

As I’m too scared to speak, Corpsey does it for me. “So
what
begins?” he asks in his clear, lofty voice.

“To be honest,” says one of the young armored men, drawing our attention around to him, “I had thought this iteration would’ve lasted longer. What a pity.”

“Yes, a pity,” the other young man agrees, his bright yellow lights-for-eyes flickering twice—which I suspect is indicative of him blinking.

The old man’s legs return, the cone of smoke twisting itself into the shape of an amorphous, semitransparent robe, and he steps forward. “You’ve come to us. So rare in an iteration is it for you to actually see our like.”

“So
rare
,” the old woman agrees, her voice squeaky and awful to the ear.

“What have you come to us for?” the old man asks.

I blink. Corpsey and I share a look of bafflement. I meet the old man’s eyes. “I … I hadn’t intended to … to come to you,” I admit, at a loss. “I hadn’t intended to see any of you. I don’t know who … or what … you are. I’ve only come for … for my friend, Marianne. And I’ve lost the friend I came with, John. And I … I really would like to go home.”

“Home,” whispers the woman.

“Home,” echoes the young men in their armor.

“Home,” the girls with green eyes echo in unison, then look at one another and giggle.

I spin around, overwhelmed with all their voices, which start to repeat inside my head, spinning around my skull in the form of distant screams and giggling and whispers. Before I realize it, I’m clinging to the side of the pale boy, gripping his hand so tight I hear it crunch. He hardly flinches, too focused on the strange people to care.

“Is this the world that ends in fire?” inquires the old man, and I don’t know who among his group he’s asking, or if he’s addressing the question to me. “Or the one that ends in sacrifice?”

“Or the one that ends in
beauty?
” asks the crone.

“Or the one that ends in oblivion?” asks the armored.

“Ends in war?” asks the yellow-eyed.

“Ends in water?” asks the green-eyed.

“Ends in curiosity?” asks the white-eyed.

“In questions?” asks the yellow.

“In a great big boom?” asks the green.

“In darkness?” asks the white.

“In confusion?”

“In a total standstill?”

“In indecisiveness?”

“In endless, ceaseless cold?”

“STOP!” I cry out, clutching my head with my only free hand, entirely unwilling to let go of the other. “Please,” I beg them with my eyes clenched shut, unable to hear another confusing and vague sentence, another annoying rhetorical question, another creepy peep. “Just tell me where my friend is and let me go on my way. Please. I just want to go home.”

“You came here to prove the existence of the dead.”

I flip my eyes open. The six of them have somehow traded places, or else Corpsey and I have spun around, because the two armored young men now stand before us, their fierce, yellow eyes studying us curiously.

“My dear, you need only lead your people to the body of a dearly deceased,” the young man on the left says. “Your father, for example. Surely your people know that living things die, yes?”

“All living things die,” agrees the other.

“Yes, obviously,” I say, cutting them off, “but I mean to prove to them the existence of the
Living Dead
. You know what I meant.” My voice grows stern, tired of their games. “Don’t play with me.”

“Play?” The armored young men look at one another.

“Play?” The old man and woman tilt their heads.

The mists scream deafeningly as they twist suddenly, twirling so fast I feel my own hair lift from my body. In the next instant, the mist has calmed, the two green-eyed girls standing in front of us now with a strangely amused look on their faces.

“You are the one who plays with
us
,” says one girl.

“You’ve played with us for centuries,” says the other.

“It’s always you, every time,” they say now in perfect unison, as if they’re the same girl and I’ve just had one too many drinks and am seeing double. “From the moment you’re born, we know the end is near. But which end?”

“Which end, indeed?” asks the old man from behind us. “The end of the world? Or the end of the suffering? Why don’t you tell us already and stop playing with us?”

“We’re so tired,” complains the old woman, her voice squeaking like a dog’s toy.

I look from the old white-eyed man to the armored young men to the pair of green-eyed girls. “What do you mean ‘from the moment you’re born’? What do I have to do with anything? I’m just a student at the university.”

“A student?” inquires one of the armored yellow.

“Yes,” I say, facing him. “I’m a student, and I’ve come to collect information about my so-named Beautiful Dead with the purpose of proving their existence. I’m going to bring my findings to them, proof of the Living Dead, and make the Histories.”

“Oh, dear.” The left young man nods, his yellow eyes flashing. “This is the one that ends in arrogance.” To that, the armored man on the right groans, saying, “Oh, dear. Arrogance is the
worst
.”

“Arrogance?” I ask, disconcerted. “Whose?”

“Make the Histories?” The green-eyed girls giggle. “You’re already
in
the Histories! You’re in
every
History! So it begins,” says one. “So it begins,” the other agrees.

I stare down at the girls with the green eyes. Despite the frustration that so quickly invaded my system at the arrival of these riddle-trading glowing-eyed freaks, I find within myself an uncharacteristic calm. In that calm, I discover the whispering and the tittering of the mists to have faded to a nearly indistinguishable hum.

With my hand still gripping Corpsey, I crouch down to bring myself eye-level with the green-eyed girls. “You say I’ve played with you for centuries?” I ask them.

“Yes,” answers the one on the left.

“We knew you’d come,” says the other. “You always do. Even if your name is different.”

I swallow once, hard. “My name?”

“Vivian.”

“Asha.”

“Liv.”

“Zoe.”

“Eve.”

“Claire.”

“You always come into the world,” the girls say in unison, “when it’s ready to end.”

End. The word sits in my chest like a knife that’d just been thrown.
End.
I catch myself holding my breath, my gaze broken from the creepy green eyes of the girls.
End.
I feel as though I’d been kicked in the stomach.

“If I must be honest,” groans one of the young men, “I am ready for a change. The Living have too long forgiven themselves for their own unforgiveable arrogance.”

“Arrogance,” agrees the other.

“It ends in arrogance,” complains the crone. “What a mess they’ll make of it all, the stupid Living.”

“The
beautiful
Living,” sing the girls.

I turn to the pale boy at my side, searching for a reaction. His sullen eyes say it all:
he believes them.
I can’t say if this is just another trick of the realm of the Dead, or if my existence is truly some death omen for the world. That piece of information is so enormous and dramatic that my gut reaction is to dismiss it. How is it possible?

“Do not be saddened by this news,” says the old man, his white eyes flaring like the headlights of a car. “Be relieved. The world is like the restless child that won’t sleep, and you are its tender lullaby. You are not the
cause
of the world’s doom, my dear Winter. You are merely a sign of it … a catalyst, a symbol, a symptom.”

I frown. “What did you just call me? Winter?”

“And now that you’re here, dear Winter,” he goes on as if he didn’t hear my protest, “we can go back to sleep, the six of us, and wait for your time to pass so that we may dream of another world.”

With that, the crone at his side vanishes in a furious blast of fog, followed by the armored men, whose yellow eyes linger a moment in the mist before vanishing too in a spinning puff of white smoke.

“Wait!” I cry out. “That can’t be it! You can’t just tell me that because I’ve been born, the world’s to end! And in arrogance, no less! And
horribly!
What the hell am I supposed to do with
those
pearls of wisdom??”

“Make a necklace,” suggests the man, and I can’t tell if he’s being dead serious, or mocking me.

The green-eyed girls flash, dissipating into a funnel of mist, their eyes dancing away until they’re out of sight. A swirling dark smoke begins to swallow the one remaining figure: the old man before me.

“Please,” I beg him. “Surely something can be done! Can’t I take this as a warning? Can’t I help the Living fix everything? Can’t they … Can’t we just … Can’t I help
stop
the end of the world? Tell me something!”

The old man smiles, only his face and his blinding white eyes remaining as the smoke swallows the rest of him. “Tell them, ‘You did this to yourself.’” Then, in the haze that’s left of his face, he finishes, “Tell them, ‘The only one left to blame is
you … you … you.
’”

Then the furious winds swallow his face, and as it whips away from sight, the rest of the mists retreat at once, as if blown away by a great wind, leaving Corpsey and I standing in the barren center of a great and endless wasteland, completely rid of the fog from before.

I feel as if I’d just woken from some psychotic dream. I see the trees from where we’d come in the distance. I stare at them for far too long, lost in the words of the six glowing-eyed figures that still swim in my foggy brain.

“Jennifer!” he shouts.

I turn. John races across the crackled plain, his feet kicking up dust as he approaches. In seconds, he crashes into my body and we embrace tightly, despite my being absorbed in the news of the world’s impending doom.

“Where were you?” he breathes, his voice trembling. “You vanished! I called out for you and nothing, there was nothing but whispers and fog and nothing!”

I look up into John’s eyes. “You didn’t see them?”

“See who??”

“You didn’t hear their words? You didn’t … You didn’t hear what they …?” Already, my questions die on the tip of my sad, Living tongue as my eyes drift to meet those of the Dead boy’s, who sadly stare back.

Corpsey and I are the only ones who know. We’re the only ones who were meant to hear the message.

But …
why?

“Jennifer? Who? Who are you talking about?”

Then, as I lift my gaze once more, I see her. Stumbling towards us, a woman with cheeks that still glow like two red orbs of hope.

“MARI!” I scream, unable to contain myself.

I tear across the wasteland toward my long lost friend, my confidant, my roommate. When I reach her and throw my arms around her, she freezes, too stunned to even hug me back. Embracing her tightly, the tears reach my eyes so fast that I’d think I were somehow squeezing them out of myself.

“I knew I’d find you,” I breathe into her ear, choking on my own emotion. “We’re going home, sweetheart. I’ve got you. You’re safe.”

When I pull away, I find the expression on Mari’s pale, bewildered face to be one of utter confusion and terror.
Oh, no. She’s traumatized. You did this to her.

“I’m so sorry,” I suddenly find myself saying. “This is all my fault. I should not have let you come. I should have insisted that you stay behind and gone and done this crazy quest all on my own. This was my burden, not yours.”

Still, she says nothing, staring at me and trembling, her purple eyes blank as boards. I notice suddenly that one of her prized purple colors must have fallen out because her left eye is actually black—her natural hue.

“I promise, Mari. We’ll get home,” I tell her, bringing my face close to hers. “I’ll find a way. We will get back to that hovercraft and we will flip that damn thing over and launch back into the sky. I swear it.”

Marianne still says nothing, her whole body shaking and her eyes flitting about, as if she worries some great creature is going to pounce on her at any second.
This is all my fault
, I keep saying, even with knowing that she’s still alive and finally returned to me, I’m still flooded with guilt—maybe even more so than before.

John’s rushed up to our side, the leash still in his grip. “Mari,” he says under his breath, then gives her a hug of his own. “We crossed half a Dead world for you.”

I smirk. “Now, let’s not exaggerate. It was probably just ten or so miles, give or take.”

“Give or take,” John agrees with a light chuckle, grasping desperately at the excuse for a smile.

Still, there isn’t even so much as a trace of a smile on Mari’s troubled face. She hasn’t even uttered a single word. I turn my eyes to John, wondering if he’s thinking the same thing. He meets my gaze and seems to confirm my worries: Mari is haunted-and-a-half.

“Once we’re back home,” he says quietly, though it’s quite clear that everyone can hear him, “we will all feel a bit less …
traumatized
by our experiences here. We’ve all been through a lot.”

“Yes,” I agree halfheartedly, glancing at Marianne and feeling a tinge of disappointment at how unexcited
she
was to see
me
. I’d expected a sigh of relief at the very least, or a return hug, perhaps. Nothing. I got nothing but trembling and nervous staring.

“Run.”

I turn to Corpsey, the source of that one, awful word. Then I follow his worried glance to the trees. At first, I see nothing strange at all.

Until the trees start racing towards us.

“THE DEAD!” I shriek. “RUN, RUN, RUN!”

I bolt at once, tearing in the opposite direction, which is
across
the barren wasteland of the Whispers, mercifully sans the annoying sight-hindering fog. John follows, his hand gripping Mari’s, who runs along with us, the terror now having grown twofold in her mismatched eyes. Even Corpsey races at our side, though I can’t tell if it’s due to the noose that’s still wrapped around his neck, or if he’s actually become bonded to us, running away from his own kind.

I glance back for a peek at our pursuers. Big mistake. There are not just five or ten of them anymore. That damned sister of Corpsey’s has amassed a number well over fifty or sixty savage Dead, all of them appearing like a row of black trees that rush across the fogless Whispers in tireless pursuit of us fleshy, bloody fools.

To my shock, another line of trees appears in the far distance where we’re headed. To my subsequent relief, these are
actual
trees and not another army of pursuing blood-eaters.
The other end of the Whispers
, I realize as we approach.
We can lose them in those woods
, I convince myself, encouraging my fast-moving feet.

“To the woods!” I shout out, John and Mari trailing behind, Corpsey at my side. “We lost them once, we’ll lose them again!”

“There’s a town in the woods!” shouts Corpsey. “An abandoned town! You can hide in it! You’ll be safe!”

The next instant, we’re bursting past the threshold of the woods, scurrying down a path that cuts through the dead, thorny trees. “Hurry!” shouts John from behind. “They’re catching up! Hurry, Jennifer!”

The wide-opened gates of the town lie ahead, coming forth to greet me like a friend. My feet carry me under its ancient, yawning archway, narrowly dodging a steel sign that hangs loosely from it.

A sign that reads: Trenton.

“Hurry, hurry!” I cry out behind me, thrusting myself down a thorny, bramble-ridden road that had once been overgrown with vines and greenery, long since died and petrified. Each root and stony tendril threaten to pull at my feet as I stumble over them, my running slowed by the uneven ground. Corpsey leads the way, beckoning me as I race down the winding streets of this long forgotten town, my heart slamming against my ribcage and my feet and legs screaming in agony, fire and acid burning them from within.

Our running comes to a stop when we find the road dead-ending at a brick wall where Corpsey stands. I heave, catching my breath for a second before lifting my chin to our Undead companion and shouting, “Where do we go now?? It’s a dead-end!”

John and Mari have come to a rest beside me, too. The three of us stare at Corpsey, whose expression slowly darkens, his face twisting with malice.

“No,” I breathe, realizing my error at once. “You lured us here. You …
tricked
us.”

His sullen, stark eyes confirm my accusations.

The flooding of footsteps fill the air as the countless Dead race down the street, then slowly come to a stop, forming a Dead blockade of blood-hungry creatures. A disquieting silence falls. Behind us, Corpsey and a great brick wall. Flanking us are the wooden, windowless sides to two buildings. In front of us, a hundred Dead who are hungrily deciding which of the three of us to eat first.

From the crowd of a hundred Dead, the bald sister of Corpsey takes one challenging step forward, a victorious smirk on her face. That one single ghostly eye of hers squints at us, the creepy, colorless pupil darting hungrily back and forth between John and I, appraising us.

In a fit of foolish bravery, I whip out my device and brandish it, my trusty weapon, its bright light illuminating the dark alley like a great digital torch.

“If you come near us,” I threaten, my shaky voice betraying me and deflating all the dumb courage I’m trying to show, “I will
burn
you with my steel!”

The sister, undaunted in the least, takes a few more steps towards us. I turn to threaten Corpsey, only to find that he’s circled around us to join his sister, the noose hanging loosely from his neck and dragging along the weed-filled cobblestone. There’s but ten paces remaining between us and the wall. Ten paces too few. Ten useless, empty paces.

“I’ll do it,” I promise Corpsey now, waving my device at him. “I swear it! I’ll burn you all and I will feel
no
pity!”

Corpsey comes up to me, slow and quiet as a cat, then reaches fearlessly for my device. For whatever reason, I don’t flinch or retreat from him. His fingers wrap around it, then pull the silly, harmless thing from my grip.

He called my bluff. There’s nothing steel about it. He likely knew all along.

“Why’d you betray us?” I ask him, defeated.

“I fulfilled my part of the deal,” he reasons. “I brought you to the Whispers, and reunited you with your friend.” His eyes turn dark, bottomless, and hungry. “You expect me to betray my sister? My sister, with whom I’ve existed alongside for centuries and centuries? Look,” he says with a wave of his hand. “Look at all the Beautiful Dead you’ve awakened. Coming out of their slumbers. Emerging from their eternal, dark dreams. Aren’t we all so …
Beautiful
?”

A stone settles in my stomach. A fist squeezes within my throat, choking out all my dumb, inadequate, Human words. A lightning bolt dances its way down my spine.

“Y-You did this to yourself,” I whisper.

The Dead stare at me, all of them turned to stone. John’s breath is the only thing I hear. It’s the only sound in the whole world.

“The only … The only one left … left to blame …” I start to say.

The sister’s expression changes, her one ghostly eye flashing. Her hands drop to her sides, all the fight having left her, and she steps forward, gaping at me with wonder. It’s like she’s listening suddenly, waiting for my next words, studying me as though I’d suddenly turned into some fascinating, glittering fountain of green gems.

“The only one left to,” I go on, “… t-to blame is …”

The sister whispers one word: “Winter?”

I freeze. My eyes gloss over with fear and wonder, as if all I have left to look forward to is my impending death. My body knows it. My nerves sense it. My heart is racing towards its final, fateful beats. Minutes remain of my life; that’s what my body swears it knows.

“Winter?” Her voice is as light and innocent as a little girl’s lost in the woods. “W-Winter? Is that—Is that you?”

I shake my head, uncomprehending.

“It’s me,” she says, bringing a hand to her chest. I swear, if the Dead could cry, tears would be filling her one, ghostly eye. “Winter. Don’t you recognize … Don’t you … Don’t you see …? It’s me. M-My brother,” she says, a hand moving to Corpsey’s shoulder. “You never met. You never had the chance to meet him. He was dead already, but … y-you saved me. Remember? Tell me it’s you. Winter, tell me it’s you. Please.
Please.
”

Then, another swirling of sound approaches, like a storm, but this storm is not made of twisting fogs and unrested whispering. From above, a great metal bird emerges—four times the size of the one we crashed—its nose casting a light down on our street, toward which all the Dead stare up at, grunting and moaning in protest, shielding their faces from the gusts of wind that pummel down from the bottom of the hovercraft.

“Winter!” cries the bald woman through all of the deafening noise. “Please! It’s me! It’s
me!!
”

A ramp slides down at our backs, slamming against the cobblestone. Men and women rush down the ramp with guns aimed, dragging Marianne up, then John, and finally reaching for me.

“Winter!!” cries the sister, rushing forward to catch me, to grab me, to keep me from leaving her. But the guns come between us, and up the ramp I go.

That’s when the realization attacks me. “My device!” I shriek, pulling against the authorities who are trying to rescue me. “No!! That’s my only proof!! I NEED IT!!” I reach fruitlessly for the brother who took it out of my hands. “GIVE IT BACK!!” I’m furious with myself for letting it go, furious for letting him take it right out of my grip.
I thought I was about to die
. The words ring hollow in my ears.
I thought I was facing the last minutes of my life. I thought I was … I thought …

Then I’m at the top of the ramp as it lifts from the earth, pulling away from the bald sister and her brother who watches me ponderously, a curious, otherworldly expression on his face.

“Tell me it’s you!” the sister still cries, even all the way from the ground. “WINTER!” she screams into the sky.

“I’m no Winter,” I murmur to her sadly, staring down with a heavy heart. “I’m just the doom girl.”