The Slightly Alarming Tale of the Whispering Wars

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  But she is good at this (I argued back inside my mind), and she seems so friendly and straightforward! So grown-up for her age! (She only looked about my age.)

  Unless her Whispering is making me think that?

  But no, those are facts!

  Or are they?

  Oh my, I thought yet again. This is very confusing.

  I tried to brace myself against super-Whispers, but I gathered that would be like trying to brace yourself against a stampeding coach and eight. (Difficult, I mean.)

  Nobody had spoken yet—Rosalind was as white as fresh cream, Victor was smiling faintly (and a bit ridiculously, I thought)—and Hamish was frowning in confusion.

  ‘I’m not sure—now, listen—I don’t quite see,’ he began. ‘Old chaps, we invited you here! Didn’t we? Have I got that wrong? I do get things wrong, you know. But I’m pretty certain you two are here for tea and cake. Yes, yes. I’m sure of it. Do sit down and let me take your coats! How do you take your tea? I have it in a thermos flask here. Or hang it, I’ve got that wrong too! We should do introductions first. Hamish Winterson, ever so pleased to meet you. Delighted you could come!’

  The girl was staring at Hamish in a baffled way. People always do this when they first meet Hamish: I think it’s all the yellow hair falling over his face, not to mention his manner of speaking. The boy, meanwhile, had moved over to the windows and was closing the curtains. He was very striking, this boy, with beautiful skin and flashing, black eyes. This was distracting. Probably part of their wicked Whispering ways, I decided, his being so striking. I mean, I had hardly registered what he was doing—

  He was closing the curtains.

  Why is he closing the curtains?

  Oh my.

  Now Victor gave one of his languid sighs. ‘Marvellous that you could come,’ he told our visitors. ‘Rosalind, do you know, I think we’re out of milk. Would you mind popping out for more?’

  ‘Old chap!’ complained Hamish. ‘I brought plenty along! In the jug right there! If you’d just—’

  ‘Rosalind will fetch it,’ Victor said firmly, and Rosalind, understanding, leapt to her feet, threw open the door and fled.

  The boy Whisperer was now standing at the window, peering through the crack between the curtains. The girl Whisperer had been straightening her gloves but now she gazed around at each of us in turn.

  She was choosing which of us to Whisper first.

  At that point, Victor’s elbow jutted out, and the milk jug crashed to the floor and sent milk and broken pieces splashing over the girl’s shiny shoes. She leapt sideways.

  ‘Well, now we do need—’ Hamish began, but Victor had grabbed his arm and taken my hand, and we were out of the hut, slamming the door and locking it behind us.

  We had captured the Whispering children.

  FINLAY

  No, we had captured the Whispering children.

  Honey Bee sweeps in to take the credit for that, same way she just swept herself up an extra chapter. Anybody else notice that? It was my turn but she just kept right on talking. Sailing on by. (I know I took an extra chapter once before, but only because Honey Bee suggested it.)

  Nice. Very polite.

  Rich kids. That’s their way.

  What actually happened was pretty simple. We chased the Whispering children down.

  Glim, the twins and I had been keeping an eye out, and first sighting was in the Town Square. They were reading the signs on the noticeboard. The four of us marched right up to them.

  Simple.

  See how much simpler we make life at the Orphanage? None of the invitations and tea and cake and oh my.

  We just folded our arms and said, ‘We know what you are, Whisperers. Come with us to the authorities right now or we pummel you until you’re black and blue.’

  Around they spun, and ran.

  Which, I suppose, was to be expected.

  We tore after them. Ran them all over Spindrift.

  They were faster than I’d expected. Ducked down alleys, clambered over fences. The girl tore her blue coat on a bit of barbed wire on Yardsley Lane and we almost caught up with her, but she sort of fell over the other side and carried on.

  We worked together. Shouted instructions at each other. You go right. That sort of thing.

  That’s us: like a machine, we are. Or like those dogs they have in the country that round up the sheep or the cows or whatever. Rounding the Whispering children up, basically, is what we did.

  Got them trapped on the Beach with the Yellow Sand.

  Nowhere to run except into the ocean.

  We watched them, the four of us, from the bench up by the lighthouse on the wooden boardwalk. They thought they’d lost us. They were pelting along the sand trying out the doors to beach huts, thinking they could hide from us in one.

  We chuckled.

  Finally, they found a hut with an unlocked door and threw themselves inside. We decided to wait until they’d relaxed, and thought they were safe, before going down to fetch them.

  ‘Give them a false sense of security,’ Glim said.

  So there we sat, watching the door to the hut. Red-and -white-striped, it was.

  ‘Those are the Brathelthwaite colours,’ Eli said after a moment. ‘That must be their hut.’

  ‘Strange that the Brathelthwaite hut would be unlocked,’ Taya mused. ‘Common people could get in and leave their common people germs.’

  We all laughed.

  Next thing the door to the hut opened again and we sprang up, ready to charge. A girl came out—but it wasn’t the Whispering girl. It was that fancy one from the Boarding School, the one with the laugh like a frightened horse. Rosalind.

  We watched, confused, as Rosalind slunk along the beach huts and cowered down behind the third or fourth hut along. Mysterious.

  Now more people spilled out and slammed the door, and it was Victor, Hamish and Honey Bee, locking the Whisperers in and cheering like they did all the work.

  (Okay, handing over to Honey Bee again. See how I keep things fair and let her have her go? See that? Get ready for a lot of Oh my-ing.)

  Honey Bee

  Oh hush up, Finlay.

  So, there we were on the Beach with the Yellow Sand, standing outside the hut, having just captured the Whispering children. Using our own wit and ingenuity. Rosalind joined us suddenly—I’d thought she might have run to fetch the authorities, but no, she’d hidden behind a hut.

  But here came the Orphanage children, tearing down the slope from the lighthouse, sprinting along the beach!

  ‘We got them!’ they crowed. All four of them. Slapping their hands together. Slapping the side of the hut.

  ‘WE GOT YOU!’ they shouted through the closed door, in case the Whispering children had missed this, I suppose. ‘YOU’RE GOING DOWN!’

  ‘Steady on there, chaps!’ Hamish held up his palms. ‘I think you’ll find that we’re the ones who got them, eh?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Finlay demanded. He was terribly cross. Really affronted.

  Ridiculous boy.

  Rosalind stamped her foot. This was in the sand, of course, so there was no pleasing thwack! and she only stumbled a bit. This made her angrier.

  ‘Excuse me!’ she sang at the orphans. ‘Just who do you think you are?!’

  ‘We don’t think, we know,’ Glim said. ‘We’re the children who captured the Whisperers.’

  ‘Clearly not,’ Victor chuckled. ‘Run along and fetch the authorities for us, would you? We’ll keep watch over our prisoners.’

  ‘YOU RUN ALONG AND FETCH THE AUTHORITIES,’ boomed Taya, the girl twin. Those twins, they can boom like pirate cannons!

  ‘WE RAN THEM DOWN,’ Eli, the boy twin, bellowed (another cannon—ka-BOOM!), ‘YOU JUST HAPPENED TO BE HERE!’

  ‘Oh now,’ Hamish complained. ‘It was us! We—what was it we did again? Lu-ellen. No. That can’t be right. Lu-ellen is the second maid’s name—what is it again, Victor?’

  ‘Lured,’ Victor
said, but he wasn’t looking at Hamish, he was glowering at Finlay. ‘We lured them here.’

  He took a step closer to Finlay.

  ‘If you want to avoid trouble,’ he said, voice low and menacing, ‘you will go right now, fetch the authorities, and tell them that the Brathelthwaites have captured enemy forces.’

  ‘Yes, tell them we’ve lured a pair of Whispering children into captivity,’ Hamish agreed. ‘Perfect. So we are war heroes? Correct?’

  ‘Correct.’ Victor bit off the word and took another step closer to Finlay. The twins and Glim moved in themselves, ready for a fight.

  Here, I lost my temper a little. ‘THIS IS RIDICULOUS!’ I shrieked. ‘WE ARE WASTING TIME ARGUING WHEN CLEARLY IT WAS US WHO CAPTURED THE WHISPERING CHILDREN! IT IS JUST NOT SPORTING OF YOU TO CLAIM THAT IT WAS YOU!’

  Now everyone began shouting. Shoving and kicking. Bellowing and bawling.

  ‘Oi,’ said a voice.

  We carried on shrieking. Sand was kicked. Arms were pinched.

  ‘OI!’ came the voice again, much louder.

  Silence fell on us, all at once.

  The voice had come from somewhere high. The roof of the hut, to be specific.

  The Whispering children were sitting up there, swinging their legs and looking down at us. The girl was eating one of the cherry tarts.

  ‘Not much point fighting over which of you captured us,’ she pointed out, ‘seeing as we’ve escaped.’

  FINLAY

  The windows.

  They’d climbed out of the windows.

  Completely the fault of those daft Brathelthwaites.

  ‘What’s this about having lured us here?’ the girl continued from up there on the hut. ‘I know these children chased us—’(pointing at us Orphanage kids)—’but I don’t how those children lured us’ (pointing at the Brathelthwaites).

  ‘Ha!’ I said. Couldn’t help it.

  ‘We invited you to a tea party!’ Honey Bee cried. ‘That’s why you came!’

  ‘No, we were chased here,’ the boy said politely—he had an unexpected accent, a bit like a pirate’s.

  ‘HA!’ I repeated, louder. Honey Bee flicked her hand in my direction as if I was an annoying insect. She’d know about those, being one herself.

  ‘But thank you,’ the boy added, leaning forward to address Honey Bee. ‘Thank you for inviting us to tea.’

  ‘Only we never got any invitation,’ the girl in the blue coat added, looking thoughtful up there. ‘But yes, thank you.’

  Honey Bee now became pretty childish. Look up the word petulant in the dictionary and it’ll say: Honey Bee, after the Whispering children said they never got invited to tea.

  ‘Yes, you did!’ She stomped and sand sprayed up around her ankles. Her legs were bare, I noticed—no stockings—and striped with puffy crimson welts, as if she had a rash.

  ‘What’s up with your legs?’ I asked.

  But she only wanted to be stomping, not answering my polite questions. ‘Rosalind gave the invitation to you!’ she blazed. ‘She put it in your coat pocket! Didn’t you, Rosalind?’

  Rosalind’s cheeks had turned as pink as all our pink-dyed clothes. ‘Yes!’ she squeaked, and cleared her throat. ‘Of course I did!’

  ‘Oh Rosalind,’ Victor smirked. ‘You didn’t do it, did you? You pretended you’d delivered it because you were frightened by our plan.’

  Rosalind shook her head wildly. ‘Of course I did it! Of course!’

  But Victor was gazing up at the Whispering children. ‘It is not relevant how you were captured,’ he told them. ‘The fact is—’

  ‘Oh, so now it’s not relevant,’ Glim said, laughing at him.

  Victor’s eyes flashed but he kept on slouching there, as if he’d decided he was too important for posture.

  ‘The fact is,’ Victor repeated, ‘you have made the tactical error of climbing onto the roof. We will simply wait. You can’t stay up there forever.’

  ‘Steady on,’ Hamish put in. ‘Let’s not antagonise them, old chap? They’re Whisperers, yes? They’ll use their supercharged Whispers, won’t they?’ He stage-whispered: ‘We pretend they’re here for tea! Remember? The plan! And then we grab them! Golly, for once I’m the only one who knows what to do!’

  ‘There are eight of us here,’ Honey Bee said firmly. ‘Four orphans and four Brathelthwaites. They can’t possibly take all of us. We’ll protect each other.’

  ‘The orphans can look after themselves,’ Victor said carelessly. ‘Meanwhile, we wait them out.’

  The girl and boy on the roof did not seem at all troubled. Looking at them, I started to feel sort of funny in my belly.

  They must know something we don’t know, I thought.

  Adult Whisperers were on their way. To take us to the Whispering Kingdom.

  We’re in a crabapple load of trouble.

  But then the boy on the roof spoke again.

  Honey Bee

  ‘If it helps,’ he called down, ‘you have it wrong. We are not here to capture any children.’

  ‘We are not even from the Whispering Kingdom,’ the girl agreed, taking another bite of the cherry pastry.

  ‘We’re from the future,’ said the boy. ‘Came here through a gap in a hedge.’

  The girl brushed the pastry crumbs from her hands and straightened up. ‘We ought to introduce ourselves. Bronte Mettlestone. And this is my friend, Alejandro. Delighted to meet you all.’

  FINLAY

  None of us believed a word of it.

  Honey Bee

  When Finlay says that none of us believed the Whispering children, he should mention that Hamish did.

  But Hamish believes every word he hears.

  ‘Cripes!’ he muttered now. ‘From the future, eh? Welcome to our time! What’s it like then, in the future? Everyone have an automobile? Pastries as good as they are here? I say, they must be better! Evolution and all that. Tell you what, shove some in your pockets next time you visit. By the bye, what brings you to our neck of the woods? Or what, neck of the time? Ho! Sounds wrong, doesn’t it? Quite a phrase that, isn’t it? Neck of the woods? I mean, golly, do woods have a neck? And do woods have shins? And what about—’

  ‘Prove it,’ Victor interrupted, narrowing his eyes at the children. ‘Or we fetch the authorities at once.’

  Finlay was nodding. ‘Everyone knows that the story about the hedge in the Oakum Woods is just a pile of blatherskite. There is no Time Travel Hedge. You’re not from the future.’

  ‘Not a chance,’ Victor sneered.

  Up on the roof, the girl and the boy—Bronte and Alejandro—were beaming down at us. They seemed very sunny.

  ‘Shall we?’ Bronte enquired, arching an eyebrow at Alejandro. ‘Prove it?’

  Alejandro grinned in a wicked way. ‘It is the time to go home now anyway,’ he shrugged. ‘Or we will be late for dinner.’

  Bronte nodded, but then she peered at Finlay. ‘The hedge is not in the Oakum Woods,’ she said. ‘It’s in the grounds of my Aunt Isabelle’s apartment building. Just beyond the rhododendrons and to the left of the geraniums.’

  ‘Forty-five degrees due west of the sugar-coated lily-blossom-daffodils,’ her friend Alejandro put in, straight-faced. Bronte’s boot swung sideways, kicking his ankle sharply, so I knew he was teasing her. But he only laughed at the kick.

  ‘The Time Travel Hedge moves all over the Kingdoms and Empires,’ Bronte continued. ‘I’m sure it probably was in the Oakum Woods once and so people might tell stories about it having been here, but no longer. It’s not in your time at all. We’re here on a quest. If we had more time, we would explain, but I’m afraid we have to leave in a moment—’

  ‘Over my dead body,’ Victor murmured.

  Bronte cleared her throat. ‘Oh dear, I hope not. It’s been a real pleasure to meet you all. Or anyway, extremely interesting. Are you ready, Alejandro?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In the future,’ the girl announced, ‘there will be—’

 
And they vanished.

  Not a puff of smoke. Not a whoosh or clap of thunder. Quite simply, they were gone.

  ‘Golly,’ said Hamish.

  FINLAY

  After that, we all just sort of went home.

  I think it was the shock.

  I mean, I’d never even heard of magic that makes people disappear! None of us had.

  We did carry on bickering a bit. The Brathelthwaites thought maybe Whisperers could vanish using their supercharged Whispers, and we said that made about as much sense as their ugly faces would make in a beauty contest.

  Then we suggested climbing onto the roof to see if there was any left-over magic there that there could make us disappear. The Boarding School kids said that was about as stupid as the idea of us ever learning to tie our own shoelaces.

  And so on.

  (I can tie my own shoelaces, by the way.)

  But our hearts weren’t in the squabble.

  See, we’d been convinced those kids were Whisperers with plans to steal us away, and we’d been pumped up on our plan to capture them—but instead they’d told us a cockleberry story, and then they’d up and vanished.

  So off we went home, trailing in different directions, thinking our own thoughts.

  Probably never see those two kids again, I decided.

  Three nights later, the strangest thing happened.

  It started like this. Around midnight, the warning bells rang and we all ran downstairs in our pyjamas, out into the Square, and down into the shelter.

  By ‘shelter’, I mean the basement of the Town Hall. It’s stacked with rusty old chairs, broken typewriters, and boxes of files. It’s papered in cobwebs, noisy with clanking pipes. Locals who live around the Town Square use it as a shelter.

  Now, the first time we’d come to the shelter had been a right blast. Lili-Daisy had handed around paper cups of cocoa, and Anita had taught us clapping games. That set the grownups off, demonstrating the clapping games they’d played as children. Right daft their clapping games were, so we fell about laughing, and the grown-ups got defensive, which made us laugh harder. The Witches’ childhood clapping game had a touch of Shadow Magic about it, which began to weave around our ankles and necks, slowly squeezing and suffocating us, until Mayor Franny noticed this and shouted, ‘Oi! Cut that out!’ So then the Witches were horrified at their mistake and went around apologising and offering ginger cake to make up. The whole thing was crackerjack.