The Whispers (17 page)

Two Living days later finds me standing by the glass wall of my condominium, watching as the sunrise paints the world in gold. It’s the day of my dissertation. I ache all over. Everything’s so far away and numb and
lively
. Ugh.

“Ready to go?”

I turn to John, my totally legal and allowed-to-be-here roommate. He’s dressed in a form-fitting button shirt and jeans, his hair styled handsomely and his eyes sparkling with excitement. He didn’t do anything about that stubble on his face, but I’ll let it slide; you can’t take all the rugged out of John.

“Not really,” I confess.

He comes across the room, his boots knocking heavily on the floor. “Still raw about the denying-the-Dead bit?”

“No.” I hug my dissertation to my chest, its contents bound into a metal-jacketed book with steel wiring along the spine. I insisted on steel. I demanded it at the printers, ignoring the looks my odd request earned me. “It’s Mari.”

He glances at the closed door to her room. She hasn’t come out of there since we came back home. What a lovely so-called “recovery period” she’s having in there. The therapist that visits has yet to get Mari to utter one damn word. Oh, how damn helpful everyone is.

“She’s going to need time,” mutters John, but I hear the uncertainty in his voice, too. Just like I heard it in the therapist’s. Just like I saw it in the pretty, hollow eyes of President Vale. Just like I saw it in my mother’s eyes when she visited me earlier this week. Yes, we had a good cry. No, I didn’t miss my dad’s funeral. They’ve rescheduled on account of my being gone, as well as my dad’s wishes to be cremated. No, I don’t wish to describe the meeting with my grief-stricken mother in any form; my heart is plenty heavy enough for the time being, thank you.

“So many unanswered questions,” he murmurs, lost in thoughts of his own, I suppose.

“And we’ll never have them answered, John. We all signed the agreement.” As if I have to remind him. “Might as well forget that any of it ever happened.”

“
She’ll
never forget,” he mutters. “Who knows if she’ll even honor the statement? If she even knew what she was signing? The moment she starts speaking again, she’ll spill the secret to the world and doom us all.”

“No.” I shake my head, refusing to believe it. “The old Marianne will come back. She just …”

“… needs her time?” offers John with a smirk.

I pull John towards me for a hug that I desperately need and enjoy the feel of his firm body against mine, but it does less to calm my nerves than I’d hoped. Our hearts beat heavily between us, two drums in a band. Well, right now it’s more like a heavy metal band.

“What about … the
other
people who were there?” I whisper over his shoulder, worried.

“The less-than-friendly alive ones in After’s Hold? I don’t know, Jen. We may never know.”

“They got over there somehow.”

“I don’t know.” He kisses the top of my head, running his hand up and down my back. “We have to let it go.”

“I know.”

“Maybe we need time, too.”

I pull away and bring my mouth to John’s. I’ll never get tired of how our lips feel when they touch, and what silly things it does to my pulse. “Can I meet you outside?”

“Of course,” he agrees, then gives me one dashing smile before leaving the condo.

I bring myself to Mari’s door. After taking one deep, long breath, I put my knuckles to the wood. “Mari,” I murmur quietly. “Can you hear me? Mari?” There’s no answer. Surprise. “I’m coming in, Mari.”

The door creaks as it opens. Perched on her bed, just as she has been for the last few days, Marianne sits in a sea of bed sheets and uneaten food. The room smells of something fettered and something else foul—the food she’s refusing to eat, I suspect. Not to mention that she hasn’t even had a damn shower since we’ve been back. No concern for hygiene, no concern for health … I had to
beg
them not to take her to the hospital. I insisted that time home was all she needed. It’s bound to be any day now that the therapist will decide Mari needs a stronger treatment, then whisk her away to some hospital far away from here and from everyone she knows.

Caring to spare my friend’s feelings, I make every effort not to cover my nose and mouth when I address her. “I’m just checking in on you, sweetheart.”

Mari’s eyes meet mine. She still says nothing, not even bothering with the lifting of a hand or the shifting of a foot. She’s been planted in that exact position for days. I wonder if she’s even slept properly.

“I’m really worried about you,” I tell her, my heart breaking the longer I stay in here. Or maybe that’s my nose breaking as I stifle every gag and choke that my body is trying to make. “Can you, at the very least, come out of your room so we can talk?”

Her odd, mismatched eyes stare at me, wordless.

“My dissertation is in an hour. You know, the one in which I have to deny the existence of the Beautiful Dead. Wow. Isn’t it such a sad thing? The world we live in? Here we went, thinking we were taking some adventure of a lifetime, only to be robbed of its treasures the moment we return.” I sigh heavily, suddenly carrying a conversation with myself. “I know, it doesn’t help to talk about it. I should be really careful … not that it matters anyway. We have nothing, Mari. We don’t have a lucky zombie foot. We don’t have some magical amulet. We don’t have a device full of wisdom, nor one damn photo.”

I clench shut my eyes. All of the events that took place in the Sunless Reach race by my eyes like some wild dream I had. Did it even happen? Was I actually over there in the wretched place of my darkest dreams? I don’t even dream about them. When I sleep, the only things I dream about is chocolate pudding and imaginary places in which I’m having fun and making a fool of myself. Only when I wake does the dark and heavy reality return to me. Strange, how I thought I’d be more traumatized by the experience. Instead, I almost …

I almost miss it.

“This is just stupid,” I say suddenly. “Mari, I’m taking you out of this room. You’re going to come and witness my dissertation,” I decide, marching up to her bed. Yes, the stench grows exponentially as I approach. “You have been hearing me go on and on and on about it all year. I won’t let you miss the great and gloriously
anticlimactic
payoff. Yes,” I say, answering the strange and questioning look on her face, “it will be as boring as you fear.”

When the door opens and John turns, his eyes flash with surprise when he finds Mari at my side. “Oh,” he grunts, his eyes turning suspicious. “Is she okay, or …?”

“No,” I answer for her, “but I’m not going to let her miss my dumb dissertation. Mari’s my best friend, and I want her with me because I love her.”

I give my offensively stinky friend a squeeze, to which she reacts by staring at me like I’m the Horror From Hell. Maybe I am.

“Everyone’s going to be there,” John tells me, almost like a warning. “The whole school, probably. Everyone wants to hear what you’re going to say about—”

“About that
thing
I gotta deny,” I finish for him. “Let’s get it over with. I’m
so
ready to bore everyone to death.”

Then, across the breezy campus we go, the morning sun washing over us with unapologetic life and fervor. Every step draws me closer to my destiny. This pathway that I’ve strolled a thousand times from the condos to the Histories building, this is
my
Broken Road of Destiny. The way has always been a broken one, the path cutting left, cutting right, then deceiving me as I push through the mazy woods of life, but I know that at the end of the path rests a light, a furious green light, and I will not give up until that satisfaction is in my warm, Human palm.

Then I’m in the auditorium standing before the entire student body of Skymark University, and all that strength and brave-crap stuff I just talked about is gone.

“H-Hello. My name is Jennifer Steel,” I state timidly, my voice projected through the sound system to the six or seven thousand students that have woken up early this morning to hear me, “and this is my dissertation on the Histories of Northern Mythos, the Fall of the Old World, and the Rise … of the Beautiful Dead.”

Word spread. Not a soul on campus wanted to miss this. Even the entire Engineering school came, taking up a section in the back. President Rosella Vale herself sits near the front with a committee of esteemed colleagues. I’ll pretend she’s here to appreciate my hard work and not just to ensure I abide by my sworn statement. Right in front of her sits Professor Praun, focused like a hawk.

And so I begin my dissertation. The crowd is so large and the lights are so bright that I can’t even spot John in the crowd, nor Mari, who’s seated next to him. Every word that I offer to the vague shadows is lapped up in perfect, thick, and respectful silence. Never have I ever felt my words be more attended to. I could trick myself into believing that they’re truly interested in my studies on how the mythologies of ancient northern civilizations influenced and gave birth to our way of life today, or how the greed and obliviousness of our ancestors led to their sudden and unfortunate downfall, but the truth is, they are, each of them, just biding their time until I reach the true heart of my dissertation … a heart that no longer beats … a heart I’ll be forced to deny is there at all … a heart called the Beautiful Dead.

“The Rise of the Beautiful Dead,” I state, reading the title of the final section of my work.

Instantly, the energy in the room changes. People shift in their seats, leaning forward to hear my precious words of gold. Oh, if only I commanded this much importance in all areas of my life.

“I have long thirsted for the truth behind the Beautiful Dead,” I tell the thousands upon thousands of pairs of eyes that excitedly watch. “My mother read the stories to me as a child, and my imagination was forever changed. My father, who recently … who recently passed away, did not have any love for the subject. Many don’t. Many feel that it is a wasted study, or a superfluous study, or not even a study at all. Some say it’s just some gross and highly unsubstantiated exaggeration of ancient sciences that once claimed to grant immortality, to cure all disease, to reanimate the dead. The answer to the one disease that we all share, the one disease that no man, woman, or child is immune from: the disease of being alive. Its inevitable result: death.”

Death.
The word flitters across the room like a stray needle of black smoke, threading itself through the crowds of countless ears and hungry brains, coiling up and down the aisles of this enormous auditorium, staining the world with its undeathly memories.

“The answer has had many names: The Fountain of Youth. The Elixir of Life. The Tree of Ages. The Eternity Pill. The Crimson Candle. The Infinity Glass. Anima …”

Anima.

I close my notebook; I won’t be needing it anymore. I take one deep breath. The world waits patiently for me to gravely disappoint it.

“I recently went on … an adventure,” I tell them, no longer reading my notes. I speak from my heart, and from a vow that bears my signature on a paper somewhere. “It was against my will, though a part of me was quite thrilled to go, despite the circumstance. A woman named Dana kidnapped me and my friends to a place that is only described in those storybooks of my childhood. A place that we all fear is where we go when we pass. A place I thought my father could be. A place beyond the sun’s reach, where the Dead live and the Living die.”

The room could not be more silent. Never will the world know a room filled with nearly ten thousand silent and completely attentive bodies. Not a breath is drawn. Not a finger twitches. Not a foot shuffles, nor a cough issues, nor a paper crinkles. Vast, pure, heavy silence.

“It is with great disappointment and …” I shiver, my nerves betraying me, my legs feeling weak. “It is with great, great disappointment that I report … that there was nothing …” I’m gripping the edges of the podium before which I stand, upon which my closed steel notebook rests. My knuckles bleed white. “Nothing at all,” I press on, my teeth grinding one another, “that would support, validate, or prove … the existence of the Beautiful Dead.”

There is a shuffle of feet. Then a sigh. Then a hundred sighs and a hundred shuffles of feet. “Come on,” grunts someone in the front. Then a thousand. “LIAR!” shouts a girl. “FAKE!” from a deep-voiced man somewhere else.

I’m in the Whispers again and the voices are circling my head, taunting me, mocking me, threatening me.

“It was my hope to find proof of the Mythological Undead,” I go on, trying my best to drown out the shouts of outrage that steadily grow among the crowd, “but I was regrettably unsuccessful. The only thing I found over there was decay, ruin, and nothing. I—”

“YOU’RE A LIAR!” someone else cries out.

“Attention-seeking bitch!”

The shuffling of people getting up to leave become staggering, like a herd of beasts crossing the wild, except these ones hurl insults as they go. I beg them to hear me out, to sit back down, to listen to my final conclusion, but I can’t even hear my own voice through the uproar.

Then, a young woman emerges from the crowd, stepping down from the seating area and crossing the front of the room toward the stage. Her act causes the room to quiet, if just for a moment, curious of her plans. Maybe she’s going to attack me, just like half the room likely wants to do themselves. Maybe she will wring my neck on behalf of the whole student body.