From a Whisper to a Scream

by Charles de Lint

  “Have you ever seen or heard of anything like this before?”

  Ti Beau shook her head. “No, but—”

  “Then you’re no more of an expert than I am.”

  “That’s true, but—”

  “So either lend me a hand or keep out of my way.”

  They’d reached the building’s stoop, where the teenager was getting to his feet. The boy looked like any one of the hundred or so kids that Jim had seen yesterday when he was trying to track Niki down. Except for his eyes. They were dull with shock.

  “Is there anybody inside?” Jim asked the boy.

  The boy’s dull gaze shifted toward him.

  “It … it ate them,” he said slowly, as though he couldn’t quite believe what he was saying, what he had seen. “The fucking floor ate them, man!”

  Jim didn’t know what the kid was trying to say. All he could think of was Cindy and Niki, trapped inside with that thing that had killed Papa Jo-el last night.

  He moved around the boy, but the kid grabbed at one of his legs as he went by, fingers catching onto the cloth to hold Jim back.

  “You … you don’t want to go in there,” the boy said.

  “Jim, wait!” Ti Beau added.

  But Jim just shook off the boy’s grip, ignored Ti Beau and stepped through the door.

  John, Thomas, and Frank had arrived at the other end of the street about the time Bobby Brown stepped out of the building. They, too, were shocked into immobility by the weird sight of the shifted black-and-white polarities of the boy and the building.

  John nodded to himself. “That’s the place,” he said.

  “Oh, Christ,” Frank asked softly. “What the hell’s going on? I knew there was weird shit going on in the Tombs, but I’ve never seen anything like this. What is it?”

  Thomas didn’t have an answer for either Frank or himself. He looked to John, who just shook his head. Both Thomas and Frank drew their handguns; then the three of them jogged toward the building, with John slightly in the lead.

  A man and a woman had also approached the building, from the other side of the street. Thomas placed the man as a photographer from one of the daily papers—he’d seen him at enough crime scenes. It took him a moment longer to recognize the woman as Papa Jo-el’s assistant.

  They didn’t arrive in time to stop the man from entering. The woman and the kid on the steps looked up at their approach. Their attention focused first on Thomas and John’s painted faces, then on the weapons they were carrying.

  “Police officers,” Frank said, more from habit Thomas realized than out of an attempt to follow procedure.

  “Yeah, right,” the boy said.

  Thomas had to agree with the boy’s incredulity. All the kid was seeing was two Natives with painted faces and a guy in a suit.

  “And my old man’s the Pope,” the kid added.

  He vaulted over the stoop’s railing and was pelting down the street before anyone thought to stop him. Frank started in pursuit.

  “Let him go,” John said.

  Frank hesitated, then came back when Thomas nodded in agreement. John and Papa Jo-el’s assistant, Thomas decided, were regarding each other as though they recognized not exactly who, but at least what, the other was. They cut straight through what normal people would have done in a situation such as this, getting right to the point.

  John laid his rifle on the steps and stepped hack to study the building

  “Do you understand any of this?” he asked Ti Beau.

  The mambo shook her head. “It seemed a simple thing to begin with: a restless guédé—a ghost—turned evil. I knew it was strong, but I didn’t doubt that we could exorcise it so that its influence would no longer be felt in this world. But this … this singularity … for it I have no explanation whatsoever.”

  “But the spirit is responsible,” John said. Thomas couldn’t tell if his brother was stating a fact or asking the woman her opinion.

  “Without question.”

  John turned to look at the building. “It’s as though the spirit has brought a piece of the Place Between back into this world.”

  Ti Beau nodded. “It shouldn’t be possible, but he’s creating a piece of limbo in the world of the living.”

  Thomas looked down at the gun in his hand, then holstered it. Whatever was going on here wasn’t going to be solved with a gun. Beside him, Frank followed suit.

  “And it’s spreading,” John said.

  “Will one of you tell me what’s going on here?” Thomas asked.

  His brother pointed to where the side of the building joined the ground. The entire structure had transformed into a negative aspect of itself; now the effect was spreading. The darkness was like a stain as it extended from where the foundation sunk into the ground.

  “We can put up wards to hold it back,” Ti Beau said, “but they won’t last long.”

  “And will they even be strong enough?” John asked.

  “We can only try. If I had some of my parishioners here to help with chanting, and a few drummers, I could guarantee to at least—”

  “There’s people in there, right?” Thomas said, breaking in. “More than just the guy we saw run in?”

  Ti Beau nodded. “There are also two woman for certain perhaps some of the other transients who use the place as a squat.”

  “What’s happening to them?”

  “The guédé has them.”

  “What are you saying? That they’re dead?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps not yet, but they will be.”

  “Then we’ve got to go in after them,” Thomas said.

  John shook his head. “It’s too dangerous. You can’t even be sure that anyone’s still alive.”

  “And once inside,” Ti Beau added, “you will be susceptible to the guédé’s influence. It will get into your mind—perhaps even control it.”

  “Then what was all this shit for?” Thomas asked.

  With one hand he held up the little medicine bag that hung from his neck and touched a forefinger against his clay-daubed face.

  “The situation’s changed,” John said. “Those were to help protect you against the creature’s influence in this world. They won’t be of much help in there because he’s changed that buildings into a piece of the world that belongs to the dead. Masks and little pieces of good medicine don’t hold for a whole lot there.”

  “What you’re saying is—”

  “What I’m saying is we have to stop it here. If we don’t do something right now, this thing could spread out and cover the whole city. Do you understand?”

  Thomas shook his head. “Nothing’s changed. The only reason I’m here is to stop that creature. That’s my job. Just like protecting the city’s citizens is—even if they’re in limbo or whatever the hell you call what’s spreading from that building. I don’t get to choose which jobs I’ll take and which I won’t; I just take what’s handed to me.”

  “You’re not going in there alone,” Frank said.

  “It can’t work that way,” Thomas said. “Someone’s got to stay out here to look out for my brother and Ms. Fontenot while they do whatever it is they’re planning to try to stop that shit from spreading.”

  “Bull,” Frank told him. “You know you’re not coming back and you just don’t want to drag me down with you, but it isn’t going to work, Tom.”

  “I’m coming back out,” Thomas told him.

  “Then I’ll be coming out with you.”

  Thomas shook his head. “I need to know someone’s watching out for things out here while I’m inside. You’re all I’ve got, Frank.”

  “But—”

  “Do I have to pull rank?”

  Frank gave a short, humorless laugh. “Ask the Loot how well pulling rank’s working these days.”

  “How about if I ask you as a friend, then?”

  “Aw, shit, Tom. I …”

  Thomas put his hand on his partner’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Thanks, partner.”
>
  Before Frank could say anything, Thomas turned to Ti Beau and his brother.

  “That stain’s spreading,” he said, indicating the stoop, where the darkness was spreading away from the building. “You’d better get to work with whatever the hell it is that you’re planning to do.”

  He started for the doorway then, pausing when his brother called him back.

  “Everybody’s got their job to do, John,” he said. “This is mine.”

  Then he stepped inside.

  A long, desperate moment of silence held after Thomas stepped inside. Frank watched the negative effect take his partner and shivered. He felt so far out of his own depths that he thought his mind was just going to shut down. He tried to figure out what was being said as Thomas’s brother and the hoodoo woman brainstormed, but their conversation seemed to be in a foreign language, or some kind of shorthand, and he had trouble following it.

  “ … isn’t absolutely necessary,” Ti Beau was saying. “The rituals certainly help, but it’s more a way of focusing one’s intent.”

  “I couldn’t be more focused,” John said.

  She nodded. “Les invisibles are always close by, always watching.”

  “The manitou.”

  “Different names for the same spirits?”

  John frowned thoughtfully. “I’m not sure. Elemental forces, basic mysteries, but different, if only in how we perceive them.”

  “Semantics.”

  “Maybe.” He looked to the building. “We’re wasting time.”

  Ti Beau reached for him. “Give me your hand.”

  Her right in his left, flesh joined, mysteries mingling. Her eyes closed, breath deepening; his eyes open, swallowing light. Frank shivered again as an eerie blue aura began to glow about their free hands. The pale light waterfalled to the ground, where it pooled at their feet. Tendrils broke free and snaked left and right, encircling the building with a thin band that glowed blue, pale.

  When the shadow stain that gripped the building oozed out, touching that blue ribbon, it held. The shadows thickened, grew darker, strained against the thin, pale barrier, but the glow held.

  “You’re doing it,” Frank said, hope in his voice. He wasn’t exactly sure just what it was they were doing, or what would happen if they failed, but excitement built up in him all the same. “You’re stopping it.”

  “We’re only holding it back,” John said. “Barely.”

  “We can do nothing for those trapped within,” Ti Beau added.

  Her eyes remained closed. A vein pulsed in one temple. The strain of their effort showed in both their faces.

  Frank shifted nervously. He felt useless, wanted to help, wanted to run. A supernatural dread traveled up and down his spine. They were alone, just the three of them outside this transformed building, but he didn’t feel alone.

  He felt a pressure all around them, the way the air seems overcharged with ions just before an electrical storm. His heartbeat sounded loud, like drumming, like it wasn’t coming from inside him, but from somewhere beyond, from something that lay just out of sight behind the ruined buildings that surrounded them. He looked around. The air on either side seemed to pulse with heat shimmers. He got the strangest feeling that there was something in there behind the shimmering. And then, for a moment, it was as though he could see past a veil, as though a wind had lifted it for a moment, revealing strange tableaus, alike but different in their similarity.

  To his left he thought he saw a tall figure, skin black as midnight, wearing a straw hat, denim shirt, pants, and old worn sandals. He had a machete thrust into a loop of his belt and was smoking a short clay pipe. Around him four small dark figures crouched, three of them tapping a rhythm from drums that ranged from small to large, while the fourth woke a counter rhythm from an iron bar.

  To the right stood another figure, just as tall, but broader-shouldered. He wore a bear’s head on top of his own like some strange kind of hood. Long braids hung below, falling against a buckskin vest with intricate beadwork designs. The skin of his arms and chest was a smoky red; his face was covered with a mask of white chalky mud, just as John and Tom’s were. Small figures surrounded him as well, also playing drums, but there was no pretense of humanity about them. Their bodies were manlike enough, but their heads—one had a wolf’s head, one a toad’s; one looked like a mink or a weasel, and the last was some kind of hawk.

  Frank stared, mouth open, but then the lifted veil fell back once more, the shimmering effect in the air returned, and only the sound of the drumming remained, twinning the sound of his heartbeat—or rather, he realized, his heartbeat had taken up the rhythm of the invisible drummers. Oddly, when he just let himself go with the sound, let his breathing join the rhythm, he felt calmer, more capable, though of what he didn’t know until he turned to look at the door of the building, the door through which Thomas had disappeared. Ti Beau’s words echoed inside him.

  We can do nothing for those trapped within.

  His partner trapped inside.

  We can do nothing.

  Tom.

  Nothing.

  Christ, how could he have let his partner go in there alone?

  He started for the door, but was brought up short by John’s sharp admonishment.

  “Don’t cross the ward line.”

  “But Tom’s in there. Christ, what was I thinking? I should never have let—”

  “If you break the barrier we have erected,” Ti Beau said, “all our work will have been for nothing. The singularity will overrun the city.”

  Frank shook his head. “I’ve got to do something.”

  “There is something you can do,” Ti Beau said.

  Her voice seemed strained, which wasn’t that big a surprise, Frank thought, considering the energy she and John had to be expending on keeping the shadow back.

  “Anything,” he said.

  “We need help.” She gave him a phone number. “Call that number and ask for Clarvius Jones. Tell him he is needed here.”

  “Isn’t he your rival in the, you know, voodoo trade?”

  “He was Papa Jo-el’s rival. For me there is no rivalry in voudoun.”

  “I’ve got someone for you to call as well,” John said, “though it’s going to be a little harder to get hold of him. His name’s Jack Whiteduck. You could try calling my dad, see if he can send someone out to his camp.”

  Frank memorized the number that John gave him as well.

  “That’s it?” he asked them. “Just these two guys are going to be enough?”

  John and the mambo exchanged glances.

  “It’s all we’ve got,” John said.

  “Okay. I’m on it.”

  It was make-work, Frank realized as he headed back through the Tombs to where he’d left his car, but he was grateful for it all the same. Just standing there, watching the other two working their hoodoo, knowing Tom was trapped inside with who the hell knew what …

  He couldn’t believe that he’d let Tom convince him to stay behind. It had all just happened so fast—one minute Tom’s talking, the next he’s inside, and he could be so damned persuasive. But that was still no excuse. He should’ve gone in there.

  Christ, some partner he’d turned out to be. If anything happened to Tom while he was in there, he didn’t know how he was going to live with himself.

  Pausing at the end of the block, he looked back at the building.

  Don’t you die, Tom, he thought. Don’t you up and fucking die on me.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Inside.

  They stood in a line, four of them, two women and two men, but they were the size of children when compared to the enormous bulk of Teddy Bird, not one of their little heads rising higher than his waist. He loomed over them, towered, the feared figure of authority, the upper hand his not because of wisdom or earned respect, but only because he was stronger. Jungle law.

  The dark was all around them, but not so vast now. He could see an end to it, could see walls like they were sta
nding in a giant warehouse, the dark place reduced to manageable size. And not so dark now. Too dark and you couldn’t see, you need to see to play, even the midnight man knew that, and he was in charge now, the power was his, hoodoo in his veins, back from the dead, big as life, and strong, so very strong, but gentle, too. He could be gentle to the little darlings, Santa Claus jolly, funny clown happy, got a sweet for the sweeties, but only in the not-so-dark, don’t want our secret to escape, oh no.

  He’d gathered them to him, here where he was the nightmare man, his voice a cold, midnight wind, gathered them, these little children, here to please him, to pleasure him.

  I love you so much, he told them.

  But did he, did he really love them, these little children, strangers some, see them tremble, anticipating pleasure, his pleasure, their pleasure, but not all strangers, oh no, not all. There, child of his flesh and blood who had denied him, who told secrets, who ran away, woke rage in him until he had to use the knife, didn’t want to, didn’t like the rage. There, policeman with his gun, punished him, shot him, killed him, could he still love them?

  Could, did, the midnight man loved all the little children, loved them forever, because that was how he was, big hearted, had a heart so big it could love all the little children, each and every one.

  When you try to hurt me, you only hurt yourselves, he explained. Be sweet. Touch me here. Let me touch you there. This is love, true love, I love you all, don’t you want to love me?

  Spare the rod and spoil the child, so true, he never spared the rod, watch it grow in his pants, hard and strong, a midnight rod, kiss it happy, don’t be shy, don’t spare the rod, don’t spare your love.

  Who wants to be first to make Teddy oh so very happy? Don’t be shy, shy’s sweet, shy’s very sweet, but too shy spoils the fun, don’t you want to have some fun?

  Who wants to be first?