Whisper in the Dark (8 page)

H
EADS
.
AND NOT
only had they been cut off the bodies of the dozen or so dogs and cats that had been killed over the last few days, they’d also been missing. Which meant that whoever cut them off took the heads with him. It sent my mind back to one of the more gruesome customs of some of my own ancestors.

One of the pictures that you often get in history books and movies about Indians is that of scalping redskins. Maybe not so much nowadays, but plenty of stuff still has that image. Like any John Wayne western. But anybody who knows much about our real history knows that scalping either didn’t exist or was really rare among the Indians before Europeans came. But after the British and the French got here, and brought their wars with them,
things changed. Maybe Europeans didn’t invent scalping, but they made it big business. The colonial governments paid bounties for Indian scalps, and there were bands of white men back in the eighteenth century who made their living as scalp hunters. And those Indian scalps were sold on the street corners in London and Paris to people who bought them as collector’s items.

But before you think I’m just going off on a rant about the awful things that white people brought, let me finish where I’m going with this. Heads. In battle, my dad told me, we Narragansetts sometimes took the heads of our enemies as trophies. And the Whisperer in the Dark was also supposed to do that. The story goes that when he killed his victims, after he drank their blood, he would take their heads with him.

That is why Mr. Patel’s remark shook me up so much. I know it bothered Roger, too, but only because it was just another gruesome detail. To me, though, it was like hearing a heavy footstep in the hall late at night just outside your door when you thought you were all alone in the house.

I don’t recall much more of the conversation
during our short ride to the library. The next thing I knew, Roger was paying our fare and the two of us were standing on the curb outside Mr. Patel’s cab.

“Remember, Maddy,” he called back to us over his shoulder as he leaned out the passenger side window, “if you need help, just call for Patel.” He grinned broadly. “We Indians must stick close together.”

Then, like a woodchuck ducking into its hole, he dropped back onto his seat. With a ceremonious gesture, he flicked on his left turn signal and pulled out into traffic.

“You sure were right, Maddy,” Roger said, watching the taillight on the cab flash. “He does use those signals.”

I didn’t say anything. I was still too upset at what Mr. Patel had told us.

“We have to check on Aunt Lyssa,” I said, running up the stairs.

But even though I was running, I was still trying to think. I had to be logical, even if everything that was happening seemed to defy normal logic. Our traditional stories were meant not just as entertainment. They taught survival lessons. One of the
major lessons is to keep calm when there is danger. That way you won’t run headlong into the jaws of whatever is threatening you, like a panicked jackrabbit running in a big circle right back to the place it started from. When you are calm, you can think. My mom once told me that is how my dad was when he served in the military over in the Middle East. He was a Marine. When his convoy got ambushed, my dad was the one who stayed cool, figured out where the ambush was coming from, and led the assault team that took out the enemies. That earned him a Silver Star.

Stay calm. Think logically. I could do that.

I pushed through the library door and looked around. Aunt Lyssa was not at the front desk, but that wasn’t unusual. She was probably in her office. Everything was okay. I didn’t have to hurry. I had to calm down. I had to think.

I stepped back into a corner and lowered myself into a cross-legged position. Roger sat down next to me, waiting patiently without saying a word.

If—and I knew it was a really big
if
—I really was being stalked by the Whisperer in the Dark, I had to stop running. I had to start thinking. Grama
Delia always told me that one of the most important lessons is that everything evil has a weakness. In fact, it isn’t just that way in our tales, but stories from all over the world. It’s true even in the more modern books and movies that are such an obsession for Roger and me. A wooden stake in the heart destroys Dracula. A silver bullet wipes out the Wolf Man. Every monster can be overcome if you know the right way to go about it. That lightning strike back at the Governor Hopkins house had reminded me of one of the weaknesses of what might be stalking me. And it tied right into the stories told to me by Grama Delia and my dad. Fire and bright light. In both their stories, the Whisperer in the Dark could not stand to be out in the bright light of day.

I began to make a mental list of all the things we owned that could be useful. The strobe flash on my digital camera. The halogen beams of the big flashlights that we keep in different rooms in case the power goes out. Then there were the boxes of matches in the kitchen cupboard that we use to start the wood fires in our fireplace insert. But all of those were back at my house. I didn’t even have
a penlight or a match on me. I’ve never smoked or even wanted to, but at that moment I wished I was one of those kids who carried a butane cigarette lighter.

I needed something, something I could have with me as soon as possible. Then I remembered the laser pointer that Aunt Lyssa keeps in her office. Perfect.

“Come on,” I said to Roger, standing up without touching my hands to the floor.

It’s a convenient skill to have when you’ve got one good hand to rely on. I learned how to spin to my feet from a cross-legged position from taking some of Aunt Lyssa’s martial arts classes.

I strode down the hall toward Aunt Lyssa’s office with Roger half a step behind me. I was in the lead again and back to my old self. I had a plan and felt so much better because of it. I still wasn’t sure that I was going to tell Aunt Lyssa anything about the Whisperer in the Dark, of course. But I could slip that laser pointer off her desk and get it safely stowed in my hip pack. We got on the elevator and I pressed the button for Aunt Lyssa’s floor.

“Just follow my lead,” I said to Roger.

“As if I had any choice,” he replied with a little smile, the first real one he’d cracked since the day before when we took Bootsie to Doc Fox.

We hadn’t solved anything, not really, but we both felt as if we had turned a corner. I was even humming as we got off the elevator and headed for the administrative corridor.

But when we rounded the corner and reached Aunt Lyssa’s office door, we found another unpleasant surprise waiting for us.

The door to Aunt Lyssa’s office was shut. I knew I would find it locked even before I attempted to turn the knob. The only time my aunt’s office door was ever closed was when she was gone for the day. Aunt Lyssa is one of those people who lives her life like an open book. Plus she adores visitors and loves to talk. Even when she’s out to lunch or at a meeting somewhere else in the building, that door of hers is kept open. People usually gather around her doorway—if not to chat with my aunt then to see what new cartoons about libraries and librarians she has posted on her door under her treasured picture of Conan the Librarian.

It wasn’t just the locked door that told us my
aunt was gone, but also her note. It was not in her usual neat writing, but had been hastily printed on a sheet of yellow lined paper pulled so quickly from her notepad that the top edge was roughly torn.

I stood there, staring stupidly at the closed door. What emergency? Even though I knew Aunt Lyssa wasn’t there, I felt like I needed desperately to go inside. I’m not sure why, but I just had that feeling. Could I locate Fred, the janitor, and ask him to open it? Could I open it with a credit card like people do all the time in corny detective shows on television? Then I remembered the key ring in my hip pack and felt even more stupid. Not only did I have the keys to our house’s front and back doors on it, I had Aunt Lyssa’s spare key to her office. I fumbled with the lock, the fingers of my right hand almost as wooden and stupid as those on my left.

Finally the key turned. Roger and I burst in through the door.

Of course there was nothing unusual to be seen in the office. No movie cliche “signs of a struggle” or bodies on the floor. No broken windows, no bloody handprints, no strange primitive statues of winged and tentacled monsters, no trails of alien slime on the walls. Just the usual friendly clutter of books and catalogs piled on just about every available flat surface.

Then something caught my eye. In the midst of all her clutter, my aunt always keeps the top of her desk neat. So I immediately noticed another piece of yellow lined paper with my aunt’s writing on it in the middle of her desk by the phone.

Aunt Lyssa has never been one to record messages word for word. She has this sort of shorthand method, taking down every tenth word or so. In this case she’d written:

Roger leaned over my shoulder and slowly read the note aloud.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

I studied the note. There was the letter
M
at the top of the sheet.
M
for Maddy. It could only mean that my aunt had been told by someone that I was in trouble. But how could that be?

I suddenly realized, like a punch in the gut, that someone—or something—could have called my aunt and deceived her, convinced her that she needed to come right home.

Aunt Lyssa’s phone is a direct line to her desk. It doesn’t come through the library switchboard. I grabbed the receiver and stabbed in *69 so hard that I broke the nail on my index finger.

“The number of your last incoming call was…” the pleasant mechanical voice began.

Then it said the number. My home number. The number of our house, where the Whisperer in the Dark was waiting.

R
OGER
,”
I SAID
, the tone of my voice just short of panic, “we’ve got to get to my house. My number, the last call Aunt Lyssa answered, was from my house. Get it?”

Roger got it. His face became pale. “It called her,” he said.

“Hel-lo,” said a voice from the doorway. Roger and I were both so keyed up that we jumped a mile and snapped our heads around so fast to look at the door that we almost gave ourselves whiplash.

It was Fred, the janitor.

“Who’s your friend, Maddy?” Fred said.

“Roger,” I said, half a second before Roger said the same thing. Our two tense voices made his name sound like an echo bouncing back from a canyon wall.

Fred smiled. “Pleased to meet you, Roger-oger. Anything wrong?”

“Nothing,” we both answered, in perfect nervous unison.

Fred raised an eyebrow. “Obviously,” he said in a dry voice. “In any circumstance, Maddy, if you’re looking for your aunt, you just missed her. I saw her depart the building a mere ten minutes ago.”

“Thanks,” I said, jumping up and hurling myself through the door.

“Pleased,” Roger said as he brushed by Fred, “to meet you.”

I was all the way outside on the sidewalk and just about to break into a frantic dash for home when Roger caught up with me and grasped my shoulder.

“Wait,” he said.

“I can’t,” I said, reaching up to tear his arm away. As I did so I realized that I had been holding something in my hand. It was Aunt Lyssa’s laser pointer. I’d grabbed it off the desk without thinking at the exact moment when Fred startled us in the office.

“Listen,” Roger said, “we’ve got to be calm, right?” He took the laser pointer that I had almost
stabbed him with out of my hand.

“Right,” I said.

“So let’s think about the best thing to do right now. Your aunt didn’t bring her car to work, right?”

Was that right? My brain didn’t seem to want to function, like a computer with some new, unnamed virus. I searched my memory and saw Aunt Lyssa’s blue Honda parked in the driveway next to our house. It had been there this morning after she left for work. Aunt Lyssa had walked. I remember her saying that it was such a beautiful day and it wasn’t that far, almost exactly five K, to the library from our door. Of course the weather had changed by mid-morning. Even though it wasn’t raining now, storm clouds were still overhead.

“Right,” I said. I thought I saw where Roger was going now.

“So she wouldn’t have a quick way home. But even if it didn’t look like rain, once she got that message that you were hurt and resting at home, she’d want to get home as fast as she could.”

I nodded.

“So unless she got a friend from the library to drive her, she probably called a cab to pick her up
on the street. Fred said he saw her go out the door alone. So that probably means she decided to get a cab. We both know it takes a while for a cab to come, so there’s a good chance she’s not even home yet. But there’s no way we can get there first by running. So what can we do to get there as fast as possible?” Roger held out his arm and pointed up the street. “I say we call a cab now and ask them to pick us up somewhere between here and your house. Then we start running like hell toward that rendezvous point.”

My fingers were already dialing the number of the taxi company. Mrs. Jenkins answered at the first ring.

“Providence Taxi.”

“It’s Maddy,” I said. “Can you get a cab to pick us up as quick as possible at…” I thought for a moment, pictured the cross streets that were about a third of the way to my home, and then blurted out their names.

“Maddy,” Mrs. Jenkins said, her voice concerned. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t have time to tell you,” I said. “I’ve just got to get home right away. We’ll be running from
the direction of the library. Okay?”

Roger and I were already starting to jog down the street as I spoke those last words. I snapped the phone shut, shoved it in my hip pack, and we broke into a finish-line sprint.