From a Whisper to a Scream

by Charles de Lint

“Hey, chill. Everything’s cool. We’ll talk when you’re not so fucked up.”

  Niki had started to take another step toward him, reaching into her pocket for her blade, when Cindy touched her arm.

  “He’s not worth getting messed up over,” Cindy said.

  Niki turned, ready to turn the blind anger on her companion, but she stopped herself in time. It was the voice that was screwing her up, she told herself.

  Niki, Niki … .

  Her old man, mindfucking her because he couldn’t get his hands on her body. Cindy was just here to help. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t even Bobby’s fault, for all that he was an asshole.

  She nodded and turned from the dealer, heading for the stairs.

  I’ve got something for you, Niki.

  Beside her, Cindy wrinkled her nose at the stink in the stairwell, but Niki wasn’t even aware of it.

  It’s here in my pants … .

  She needed Cindy’s support going up the stairs. The walls were a blur of graffiti that wouldn’t come into focus.

  A great big surprise … .

  At the top of the stairs, the hall seemed to go on forever. Niki leaned against the wall. She closed her eyes, trying to cover the cold whispering in her head with a sheet of silence.

  Niki, little Niki … .

  But it wouldn’t go away.

  Go ahead and touch it.

  Her father’s voice went on and on, cutting through her like an icy wind. It was like she’d never been away from him, like she’d never escaped.

  You know how you like to touch it.

  It was like she was still trapped in that dingy apartment, her mother pretending to be asleep in the next room as her father approached her own bed, zipper open, playing with himself.

  You can kiss it, Niki.

  The bedsprings creaked as they took his weight.

  Don’t you want to kiss it?

  She shook her head.

  Open wide, now, sweetie.

  Her face was up against the flaking plaster of the wall, but she was no longer sure if it was the wall of her bedroom or that of the squat in the Tombs.

  Time to take your medicine.

  “No,” she said.

  She felt someone beside her, someone putting an arm around her, and she shook it off.

  Don’t fight it, Niki.

  “Get away from me!” she cried, stumbling down the hallway, weaving back and forth along its length like a drunk.

  Daddy knows best.

  She came up against a wall and banged her head against it. Once, twice. The pain made the voice recede for a moment, long enough for her to turn around. Back to the wall, she watched Cindy approaching her, her features strobing. She was Niki’s father, herself, Niki’s father … .

  Niki, little Niki … .

  Niki brought her hands up to her ears, covered them.

  Niki.

  She rocked her head back and forth.

  “I … I’ll tell,” she said. Her voice was small, faint. “I swear … I’ll tell … .”

  It’s too late to tell, sweetie. Everybody knows you want me to do this to you. Everybody knows that you beg me. To. Do. This.

  Her head filled with a rhythmic grunting that kept time to the words.

  Familiar. It was so painfully familiar.

  Beg. Me.

  “Fuck you!” she screamed. “Just leave me alone, you fucking pervert.”

  For a long moment there was silence inside her head. She opened her eyes to find Cindy regarding her, her face drawn with worry. Her mind felt as though it held a vacuum. She trembled, shaking and shivering as though the chill that he’d put inside her would never go away.

  “I … I don’t think coming here was such a good idea,” Niki said slowly.

  She heard a vague, whispering sound in her mind—not quite words, more like a shallow kind of breathing.

  “He’s so … strong,” she added.

  Cindy swallowed nervously. She looked up and down the hallway, but Niki knew there was nothing to see. It was all in her head—real, but invisible.

  “Do you want to wait for the others outside?” Cindy asked. “Would that be better?”

  Niki gave a small nod in reply. “Yeah. Maybe, he won’t be able to—”

  BITCH!

  She gave a sudden shriek and dropped to her knees at the force of the word. Her gaze locked on the wall behind Cindy. Panic froze her throat as she tried to warn her companion.

  “Sih … sih …” was all that would come out.

  A face was forming in the plaster, lifting from its flat surface like a bas-relief. The features were terrifyingly familiar. On either side of the face were palms, taking three-dimensional form, becoming hands, attached to wrists, attached to arms, pushing out and reaching.

  God help her, but Niki knew that face, knew those hands. They were her childhood night fears given physical shape, but unlike those of most children, her nightmares had always been real.

  Again she tried to speak. “Sih …”

  Cindy started to bend down toward her.

  “Niki,” she said. “What’s the—”

  The arms grabbed Cindy, cutting off her question, transforming it into a wail of fear. Cindy struggled as she was pulled back toward the wall, but her strength wasn’t up to the contest. She was dragged back, inch by inch, until she came up hard against the surface of the wall.

  Her scream was a long, wordless wail that was almost eloquent in its single note of terror. There was no sense, no reason, to that sound. The scream would have kept Niki frozen, but the expression of need, the sheer desperation in Cindy’s eyes galvanized her.

  “You stupid fuck!” she shouted at her father.

  She lunged to her feet and grabbed at the steel cords of his cold flesh, trying to pry Cindy loose from his grip. But it was like trying to take apart steel girders that had been welded together. Niki had always known her father to be strong. Dead, he’d become superhumanly so.

  Still she wasn’t about to give up. Cindy was here because of her. She was going to die, just like all those other girls had died, because she had blonde hair and looked like what Niki’s father thought Niki would look like now that she’d grown up.

  “It’s dyed!” she cried as she continued to pummel the impossible presence of those arms that were pulling Cindy into the wall from which they’d come.

  She looked into the plaster bas-relief of her father’s face that still thrust out from the wall.

  “You hear me, you dumb pervert? My hair’s dyed.”

  She’d dyed it black because blonde meant pretty, blonde meant dumb. She didn’t want to be pretty and she sure as shit wasn’t dumb.

  BITCH! the cold voice roared in her mind. YOU’RE A FILTHY LYING LITTLE BITCH. YOU LIKED IT. YOU WANTED IT. YOU BEGGED ME TO GIVE IT TO YOU.

  Niki’s head rocked under the onslaught of his voice. The hands were slowly withdrawing into the wall, crushing Cindy against its hard surface. Her voice was silent—throat still working, but no sound coming out. Her face was starting to darken, to turn blue as she fought for air.

  “Look at me!” Niki cried, trying to force the monstrous bas-relief’s attention to her. “I’m the one you want, you dumb pervert.”

  She used the epithet deliberately, having already discovered how much it angered him.

  DON’T CALL ME—

  “Pervert, pervert, pervert!” Niki shouted.

  And finally the face looked her way, its strange dead eyes focused on her. As it reached for her, Cindy fell like a loose bundle from its grip. Niki ducked the hands to grab hold of Cindy’s arms.

  TEACH YOU. BITCH. LESSON.

  It wasn’t supposed to be active during the day, she thought, remembering what Ti Beau had told them. It needed the night. Maybe that was why it was so slow. She realized that she didn’t much give a shit what the reason was, just so long as she could get Cindy out of there.

  KILL YOU.

  The voice roared in Niki’s head, and it was all she could do to
haul her companion down the hall, grateful that Cindy’s limp form slid as easily as it did along the floor. The creature followed them as a rippling effect in the wall. Sometimes the face was visible, sometimes a hand reaching, a knee lifting, a foot coming down. And all the time the voice howled in Niki’s head.

  She got to the stairwell before the creature did, but saw no way she could get Cindy down before the creature would be upon them. The stairwell was simply too narrow. No matter where you were in it, you’d be within the creature’s reach.

  And what if it could step right out of the wall? Niki thought, a hopeless feeling rising up inside her. Why the hell shouldn’t it be able to do that? Hadn’t it moved freely enough on the street to kill all those girls?

  But that was at night.

  Uh-huh. And still here it was, big as life, moving slowly, perhaps, but moving all the same.

  KILL YOU LYING BITCH YOU LIKED IT KILL YOU.

  Whatever Ti Beau knew about these things, right now all bets were off. Cindy stirred, at Niki’s feet, choking for breath. Niki bent down beside her, holding her both to give and take comfort, trying to shut the awful roaring from her own mind.

  She was beyond fear now, she realized with surprise. What she was experiencing was impossible, but instead of it shutting her down as it had just a moment before, already she was handling it—at least she was handling the idea of it. When it came to how to deal with the situation, how she and Cindy were going to survive, only one useless thought came to mind:

  Basically, they were screwed.

  The rippling effect had disappeared from the walls, though the voice railed on. Then, as though to punctuate her despair, hands appeared on either side of Niki and grabbed hold of her ankles.

  TWENTY

  John told Thomas that they had everything they were going to need in the hack of his pickup, so when they got back to the precinct, they drove directly to the intersection in the Tombs where Papa Jo-el had died. Only the detritus of the morning’s investigation remained—chalk outlines on the cracked pavement, the scattered ashes of the fire that Forensics had poked through, and the general debris, like styrofoam coffee cups, that investigating officers were liable to leave behind in a place like this, where they assumed that another handful ol garbage wasn’t going to make a bit of difference.

  John shook his head at the mess. Shifting into four-wheel drive, he steered the pickup across the bumpy terrain of the deserted lot that lay north of the intersection and tucked the vehicle away between some buildings, where it could be parked out of sight. Thomas joined him outside by the bed of the truck, where he helped John peel back the canvas covering.

  “Jesus,” he said. “What is all this stuff?”

  Lying in the truck bed was a bundle of poles tied together with thongs, two big blue water jugs, rolls of canvas, a half-dozen plastic bags from various department stores, bulging and fat with their contents, and even a heap of firewood. John reached into the bed and passed one of the plastic bags to Thomas.

  “There’s jeans and a jacket in here,” he said. “You’ll probably feel more comfortable in them.”

  Thomas nodded. He’d just paid a couple of hundred bucks for the suit he was wearing; scrabbling around in the Tombs wasn’t going to do it any good at all.

  “This other stuff,” he said, nodding to the bed of the pickup, “is this what I think it’s for?”

  “We’re going to build a sweat lodge,” John said.

  “Oh for—”

  John cut him off. “If we’re going to do this at all, we’re doing it my way. You don’t go talking to spirits without the proper preparation.”

  “No way I’m going to sit around chanting or doing some war dance,” Thomas told him. “I’d feel like an ass.”

  John smiled. “Just get out of the suit, would you?”

  While Thomas changed, John started setting up the sweat lodge in a clear spot that was still hidden from general view He lashed the poles together at the top, then fastened the canvas at the top and wrapped the thick fabric around the poles to make a small tepee. By the time Thomas finished changing, John had started to build a fire.

  “People will see the smoke,” Thomas said.

  “They’ll just think it’s some hoboes, cooking up their lunch,” John replied. “Why don’t you collect some rocks?”

  “Sure,” Thomas said.

  As he went about his task, he couldn’t help wondering if he’d really lost it. It was bad enough that he half-believed all this talk of spirits, but building a sweat lodge in the middle of the Tombs … If any of his fellow officers saw him doing this, he’d never hear the end of it.

  They sat near the fire while they waited for the rocks to warm up. Thomas found himself fidgeting.

  “Here,” John said suddenly. From his pocket he pulled a small leather pouch attached to a thong and handed it over to his brother. “Put this around your neck.”

  Thomas regarded it suspiciously. “What is it?”

  “A medicine bundle.”

  “Yeah, but what’s in it?”

  John sighed. “Look, Tom. I know all of this is making you uncornfortable, but why don’t you just try to go with the flow? I’m here to help, so why don’t you take advantage of my expertise?”

  Because it made him feel like a fool, Thomas thought, but he accepted the medicine bundle and slipped the thong over his head. The bundle was a lighter weight lying against his chest than he’d estimated.

  “You have to think of this as a kind of meditation,” John went on. “When we sweat the poisons out of our bodies, we’re sweating poisons out of our minds as well. That way we can approach the spirit world with purity and strength. It opens us up to the presences of those who live in the Otherworld, but keeps us firmly rooted in our own as well.”

  “You’re the chief,” Thomas said, trying to keep his voice light.

  “No,” John said. “I’m just an adviser. You don’t have to do any of this.”

  “I know. It just feels … strange.”

  “Why? Because we used to play at this, but now you’re supposed to take it seriously?”

  “Something like that.”

  John just shrugged. He held his palm near one of the stones to feel its heat.

  “This is good enough,” he said.

  Standing, he began to strip off his clothes, and continued until he was standing there in just his jockey shorts. He gave Thomas an expectant look.

  “First you want me to dress, now you want me to strip,” Thomas complained, but he followed suit.

  Putting on a pair of gloves, John began to move the hot stones into the sweat lodge. When he had a half-dozen inside, he moved some others closer to the fire for them to heat up. Hefting one of the big water jugs, he turned to his brother.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  It was dark and close inside the small tepee. Before Thomas had a chance to adjust to the dimness, John was pouring water onto the hot stones. Steam rose up in clouds, enveloping them both. Thomas choked as he involuntarily inhaled a sudden lungful of the steaming vapor.

  “Don’t fight it,” John’s voice came to him in the steamy dark. “Just relax. Let the poisons go.”

  Poisons, Thomas thought. That was about as apt a description as any for the sources of his tension: the case gone bad, then worse, gone spacey; the frightening possibility of him and Angie falling into that old trap that affected so many cops and their spouses; the fact that he wasn’t sure he and Frank were doing any real good anymore.

  He couldn’t figure out how he was supposed to just let it all go. His worries were too deeply rooted in his being. He didn’t want them there, but they were like leeches, burrowed deep under the skin of his thoughts, feeding on his insecurities and frustrations, adding to the tension.

  “I … I don’t know how,” he admitted to his brother.

  “Concentrate on your body,” John said. “Your breathing, the heat, the sweat … .”

  Breathing? It was hard to breathe. He found
himself taking quick, shallow breaths to keep the stinging heat out of his lungs, but listening to John, he could hear his brother’s slow, steady intakes of air and even slower exhalations. He tried to copy John’s rhythm and found it easier than he had thought.

  John began to chant, a soft hypnotic sound. Thomas’s hand stole up to close around the medicine bundle his brother had given him, and he nodded his head slowly in time to the rhythmic flow of the sound. His breathing fell into time with the chanting, and soon he wasn’t thinking of anything at all.

  Jim left his car in the parking lot of the Yo Man Club on Gracie Street. With each of them carrying a backpack, he and Ti Beau continued into the Tombs on foot. They followed Niki’s directions, but there was too much of a sameness to every part of the area. The streets, littered with abandoned vehicles and refuse, just like the derelict buildings and empty lots, were all too similar. Street signs had long since disappeared. With the sun hidden behind a cloud cover, they soon lost all sense of direction.

  “We’re lost,” Jim said finally.

  Ti Beau nodded. “I know.”

  “Well, can’t you use some of your hocus-pocus to just …”

  His voice trailed off as she raised her hand for silence. Her eyes took on a glazed, distant look, and she cocked her head as though listening to something faint that only she could hear. Jim tried to be patient, but he was too much on edge to do more than pay lip service to Ti Beau’s request.

  “What is it?” he asked as the minutes dragged by. “Can you … sense them?”

  Jesus, what was he thinking? But he remembered that voice in his head and shivered. He lifted a hand to cup the gris-gris bundle hanging from his neck.

  Whatever worked, he thought. Let’s just get this over with.

  “Ti Beau?” he tried again when there was no response to his first question.

  “Not your friends,” Ti Beau replied. She spoke slowly as though she was in a light trance. “But I sense him—his guédé. He is far more … present than should be possible.” Her dark eyes opened suddenly, locking their gaze on his. “He is far stronger than I imageined he could be.”

  Jim was already nervous. What the mambo was telling him wasn’t helping at all.