From a Whisper to a Scream

by Charles de Lint

  He nodded to himself. The priestess. If what happened last night was anybody’s concern, then it was going to be hers. And she’d at least believe him.

  He tried to remember if he’d seen her that day of the photo shoot, but he couldn’t call her features up in his mind. There’d been some women around, but he couldn’t remember being introduced to any of them, and Pilione hadn’t indicated that any of them were involved in his temple except as part of the congregation. He supposed he could give Mary a call to find out who the priestess was, but with Pilione all over the news, it wouldn’t take Mary long to figure he was on to something, and this was something he couldn’t share.

  He went into his spare bedroom, which served as a storage area except for those few times when he had friends from out of town staying. He dug through an old stack of Star clippings until he found Mary’s article. Looking at photos of Pilione gave him the creeps, but he persevered, reading through the whole article until he came upon a name: Isabeau.

  Isabeau Fontenot was the name of the woman Pilione said assisted him in his services.

  Jim dug his phone book out from under a stack of photography magazines, then paused for a moment. He couldn’t very well look up voodoo churches to get the number, but then he realized he didn’t have to. He turned to the F’s and found a listing for Fontenot, I., with an address in Upper Foxville, just a few blocks from The Good Serpent Club.

  He dialed the number and was surprised when it was answered halfway through the first ring.

  “Yes?”

  “I’d like to speak to Isabeau Fontenot,” Jim said.

  “This is she.”

  The husky voice with its slight singsong trace of a Caribbean accent immediately delivered a picture into Jim’s mind that was put together from the voodoo priestesses of a half-dozen bad horror movies.

  “My name’s Jim McGann and I was—”

  “Are you a reporter?”

  “Yes—I mean, no. That is, I work for The Star as a photographer, but this is personal.”

  There was a moment’s pause as the woman on the other end of the line considered that.

  Shit, Jim thought. She’s probably got media crawling all over her. The last thing she’s going to want to do is talk to me.

  “I remember you,” she said finally.

  Was that good or bad? Jim wondered.

  “This is about … last night?” she added.

  “Yes. I …” There was no point in beating around the bush, Jim realized. “I was there.”

  “I see.”

  Jim read volumes of meaning into those two simple words.

  “I had nothing to do with what … happened,” he said quickly. “But I saw it.”

  “Yes.”

  God, she was a cool customer, Jim thought. She wasn’t giving him back a thing.

  “I need to talk to someone about it,” he said.

  “Why me?”

  Jim took a deep breath and plunged right in. “Because what I saw … I’m not sure it was real.”

  There was another considering pause from the other end of the line. Jim decided to wait her out.

  “Perhaps we should talk,” the woman said finally. “Do you have my address?”

  No way, Jim thought. If this voodoo shit was real, there was no way he was going to head out to her own turf, where he might get whammied with some curse.

  “Ah, could we maybe meet somewhere else?” he tried.

  She gave a deep-throated laugh that held no humor. “Somewhere public?” she asked.

  “Something like that.”

  “Or I could meet you at your own home—unless you believe that to be … unsafe as well.”

  Put like that, it made Jim feel like a jerk.

  “No,” he said. “My place would be fine.” He gave her the address.

  “I will be half an hour,” the woman said. “No longer.”

  She hung up before Jim could reply.

  He cradled the receiver thoughtfully and wondered just what he’d gotten himself into. What, he asked himself, makes this place feel any more safe? Nothing did. She’d just shamed him into agreeing.

  Great way to start things off, he thought.

  Then he scanned the room and saw what a mess the place was. Jesus, he had less than a half hour to make it look at least vaguely presentable.

  He started off by gathering up an armload of magazines from the floor by the sofa and carting them into the spare bedroom. And all the while a midnight wind carried its cold whisper through his mind.

  Cindy had thought it would be better prowling through the Tombs during the day than it had been the night she’d come looking for a squat, but she was wrong. It was no less unpleasant, just different.

  The other night she’d gotten into town too late to look for a good busking spot and been too broke to afford a hotel room. A girl she stopped by the Pier had told her about the deserted tenements in the Tombs, so she’d gone.

  The whole place was scarier than she’d expected, but by that time, at that late hour, she just wanted to get off the streets. She hadn’t slept well in that little room she laid claim to in the old abandoned tenement where she spent the night. Every noise had her imagining that some old rubbie—or worse, one of the bikers she’d spotted hanging around in a couple of the doorways—was edging into her room. She’d slept fully dressed on top of her bedroll, holding her sax tightly against her like it was the lover she’d long since given up on finding.

  By day, the Tombs wasn’t quite so scary. She still felt nervous, but it was the way it all looked so depressing that wore on her the most. She wondered why the city had let it get like this. It was just a warren of abandoned buildings, junked vehicles, and litter-covered lots. Except for a couple of the city’s main arteries that had to cut through the area—Yoors Street and Williamson—the streets were in terrible condition. Pavement buckled, weeds grew up through inch-wide cracks, and there was refuse everywhere.

  The people she saw just looked lost. It was too early in the day for many of the kids to be up and about—though she’d already had to make a wide berth around a couple of bikers in greasy jeans and T-shirts who were working on a chopper in front of what must once have been a classy office building. There was no sense in pushing her luck, she’d thought when she first spotted them.

  Mostly she saw derelicts and the homeless, picking through the refuse in the empty lots as though there were something there to find. They looked like they were at the end of their lives, and some of them, she realized, weren’t all that much older than she was. She was glad she’d dressed down and taken Meg’s advice and rubbed some dirt on her hands and face before entering the Tombs; none of the derelicts approached her for a handout.

  She wandered aimlessly around for a half hour or so, shocked again at the sheer size of the area and wondering where she was ever going to find Chelsea. There was just too much space. Too many lots, too many buildings, block upon block of them.

  If a person wanted to hide, she realized, this was definitely the place.

  Finally she tried to find the building she’d stayed in on her first night in town. That took her the better part of another half hour because to her untrained eye, everything looked the same. But then she recognized some graffiti on the side of a building. There was an enormous peace sign painted on the flaking stone, with the legend “War sucks” written under it. Someone had added “So does life” with red spray paint.

  Taking a deep breath, Cindy went inside. There were almost a dozen sleeping figures in the foyer—runaways, she decided by their ages. Most of them had dirty faces, and ragged and frayed clothes, though here and there newcomers stood out because what they wore wasn’t quite so threadbare—yet.

  Under a sweet smell of refuse, the air held an unpleasant hint of urine and body odor that she hadn’t noticed the other night. Did sleeping one night in a clean bed do that to you? she wondered. She’d smelled worse—slept in places that smelled worse when it came right down to it—so she wasn’t a
ll that surprised that she hadn’t noticed the odor yesterday morning when she left; by then, she knew, she’d gotten used to it.

  A guy with skin so transparent he looked like a walking corpse was sitting up against the wall near the elevator, which no longer worked. He had earphones on, but they weren’t connected to a radio or tape machine. He just played with their jack, rolling it back and forth between his thumb and forefinger, one foot tapping to a rhythm only he could hear. He watched Cindy as she looked over the faces of his sleeping companions.

  “Whatcha lookin’ for?” he asked finally.

  “A friend.”

  “Yeah? Your friend got a name?”

  “Chelsea.” Cindy gave a brief description of the girl.

  “Maybe I know her,” the boy said. “Whatcha want her for?”

  Cindy had thought out the story she’d use on her walk up to the Tombs from Meg’s apartment.

  “She owes me,” she told the boy.

  “Money or dope?”

  “Dope.”

  The boy’s grin went wide. “Well, hey. You want dope, I got dope.”

  “Yeah,” Cindy said. “But I already paid Chelsea.”

  “I’m reliable,” the boy said. “I only carry good shit. Primo quality.”

  Right, Cindy thought. That’s why you’re sitting here in a squat, buzzed out on who knew what.

  “I told you,” she began.

  “Yeah, yeah—you already put out the bread. But next time you got a hurt on, you think about comin’ to me why dontcha? Name’s Bobby Brown—like the singer, y’know, only I ain’t got his color.”

  You can say that again, Cindy thought.

  “Or his moves,” Bobby added after a moment. “But I got connections that’ll get you the best shit you ever put in your needle, babe.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Cindy said.

  “The name’s Bobby Brown, you just ask around; everybody knows me, where I be found.”

  His foot tapped in time to his short impromptu rap, the earphone jack twirling between his fingers. He grinned again, and this time Cindy found herself smiling back at him. He was a junkie pusher and looked half-dead, but she couldn’t deny that he still had charm. She wondered what he’d been like before he came down so far in the world.

  “Chelsea’s got herself a squat up on the second floor,” he said, indicating the stairwell with a jerk of his thumb. “Just take a right and it’s a few doors down. I saw her come in right around dawn and I’ll tell you this, babe, she looked fucked up but good. I’m talkin’ wired. You ask me, she stiffed you and took serious possession of your delivery. You’ll be wantin’ to talk to me about a deal when you get back.”

  “Thanks,” Cindy said.

  Before she could leave, Bobby added, “Do your friend a favor, why dontcha. I didn’t know she was dealin’, but if she is, she’s goin’ to want to find herself another building, ’cause all the business in this one belongs to me.”

  “I … I met her downtown,” Cindy said.

  “Don’t mean shit to me. You’re here now, aren’t you?”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  When she started for the stairs, Bobby’s gaze had already taken on a faraway look once more. He tapped his foot, fingered the earphone jack. Cindy realized that so far as he was concerned, she no longer existed—at least until she walked up to him with some cash in hand.

  She felt even more depressed as she went up the stairs. Bobby wasn’t much more than sixteen years old, she thought. She wondered if he’d even live to turn seventeen.

  The kids had taken to using the back of the stairs on the ground floor of the stairwell, as a toilet she realized as the stench of urine and feces followed her up. The air was a little cleaner when she stepped onto the second floor and turned right.

  She walked slowly down the hall, looking in the doorways, but the rooms were empty. She thought about calling out Chelsea’s name, but then she found her, almost at the end of the hall. Chelsea had her back to her, but Cindy recognized the spiked hair. The girl appeared to be stuffing a backpack with clothes.

  “Chelsea?” Cindy called, pitching her voice low.

  The girl turned with a snarl. Her hand dipped into her pocket and came up with a switchblade. The snick of the blade leaving its handle hung in the air with a sure promise of violence.

  “E-easy,” Cindy said.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m just a friend. We ran into each other a couple of nights ago—remember? Here, in the building.”

  It was like trying to calm down a cornered animal, Cindy thought. Fear lay thick in Chelsea’s eyes. She looked over Cindy’s shoulder, then focused on her again. The knife trembled in her hand.

  “Did … did he send you?” she demanded.

  “He? You mean … Jim?”

  “Who’s Jim?”

  “Last night,” Cindy said. “Jim’s the guy who scared you outside the restaurant. He didn’t mean to do it.”

  Chelsea regarded her with an expression Cindy couldn’t read. The fear was still there, stretching the skin tightly across her cheekbones and brow and flaring in her eyes. Cindy could also see that Chelsea remembered Jim calling out to her last night, but there was something else warring with her memories: a kind of confusion that seemed to paralyze her. The young dealer’s words returned to her—

  She looked fucked up but good. I’m talkin’ wired.

  —and Cindy realized where she’d seen that kind of look before.

  “What did you take?” she asked. “And how much of it?”

  Chelsea blinked. “You think I’m on drugs?”

  “Look,” Cindy said. “We’ve all had bad trips. You’ll get through it.” She kept her voice pitched low and comforting. “We can just stay here and wait till you come down—I won’t leave you alone—or we can go to a hospital. I’ve got some money to cover the expenses, so you don’t—”

  Chelsea gave a short, bitter laugh, cutting her off.

  “Jesus,” she said. “I wish this was a bad trip.”

  “You’re not—”

  “I don’t do drugs anymore,” Chelsea said, “but maybe I should take them up again. I never heard him in those days.”

  “Heard who?”

  “Him. My father. He’s here”—Chelsea tapped the forefinger of her free hand against her temple—“in my head. He never shuts up.”

  Listening to Chelsea’s denial, all Cindy could think of was her own father, plastered out of his mind and trying to tell her that he hadn’t had a drink, not even a beer, all day.

  “Listen,” she tried.

  “Oh, I know what it sounds like,” Chelsea said, “Don’t think I don’t. The fucker’s supposed to be dead, except I can hear him in my head. And he goes around killing all those people when all … when all he really wants …” Chelsea’s voice broke and tears filled her eyes. “All he really wants to do … is kill … me …”

  Cindy’s heart went out to her. Maybe Chelsea was messed up on some drug and denying it, but that didn’t mean she had to face it by herself.

  “You don’t have to be alone,” she said, taking a step forward. “I can—”

  She stopped in her tracks as Chelsea waved the switchblade menacingly at her. Chelsea wiped at her eyes with her sleeve.

  “Who are you?” she asked, returning to what she’d wanted to know when Cindy first appeared in the doorway. “What the fuck do you want from me?”

  “I just want to help you.”

  “Why?”

  “I … I don’t really know. I guess it’s because you’re scared and you look like you need a friend, and I know what it’s like to be alone and have no one be there for me. I guess I’m trying to be the friend to you that I wish I’d had.”

  “Even though you don’t know shit about me?”

  “Maybe because I don’t know you,” Cindy replied honestly. “It seems to me that it’s always the people who are supposed to be closest to us who hurt us the most.”

  She thoug
ht of her mother, running off and leaving her. She thought of her father, drunk and abusive. She thought of her aunt, who wouldn’t believe her stories of how her father—her aunt’s own brother—beat her. She thought of her neighbors, who didn’t want to get involved even though they knew the noises they heard next door were those of a grown man beating his child.

  Something of what she was thinking must have shown on her face, because Chelsea was nodding as though in agreement to something unspoken that had passed between them. She folded the knife’s blade back into its handle and stowed it in her pocket.

  “Your dad used to … fuck you?” Chelsea asked.

  Cindy shook her head. “He was an alcoholic. He used to beat me when he got drunk.”

  Chelsea shrugged. “Same difference. It’s all a power trip, isn’t it?”

  “I guess.”

  “You don’t look too fucked up,” Chelsea said after a moment.

  Cindy hesitated for a moment, then slowly pulled her shirt out of her jeans and bared her midriff. The scars of a dozen or more cigarette burns pocked her pink skin.

  “Jesus,” Chelsea said.

  She sat down on the floor and leaned against the windowsill as Cindy silently tucked her shirt back into her jeans. She looked out at the empty lot that lay beside the building, where weeds, trash and rubble vied for ownership. Cindy took what the change in Chelsea’s mood offered and came all the way into the room. She sat cross-legged on the floor, close enough to touch the other girl, but kept her hands on her knees.

  “That guy last night,” Chelsea said. “He’s a friend of yours?”

  Cindy nodded.

  “Where’d he get my name?”

  “Niki’s your real name?” Cindy asked.

  The girl nodded. “So’s Chelsea. My first name’s Nicola.”

  “He didn’t really know it was your name. It’s … He saw you at those places where those girls got killed and thought there was some connection with your being there.”

  Niki turned to look at her. “But where’d he get the name?”