The Whisper

by Aaron Starmer

  Polly pressed the button on the side of her helmet and the mask snapped open. “Good afternoon, your highness,” she said to the boy.

  The boy leaned forward, his shoulders pressing against the swing chains. “Is that…?”

  “Polly, your highness. In the flesh and”—she wiped her spacesuit off again—“blood.”

  A look of amazement cloaked his face. “Of all that is holy, a girl who keeps her word.”

  Polly shrugged. “I said I’d be back.”

  “And you said you’d bring another swimmer.”

  With open hands, Polly motioned to Alistair. “I’m sorry,” Alistair said. “I’m a little confused. Where are we exactly?”

  A haggard woman shouted an answer from the crowd. “You’re in the realm of Lord Hadrian! And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll not be acting a fool, you gilled—”

  “Hush, figment!” Hadrian commanded from his swing. “The boy is obviously new here. We shall learn about him before we determine the level of his foolishness.” He turned to Alistair. “So who are you, boy?”

  “My name is Alistair Cleary.”

  “Do you swim?”

  “I … guess so.”

  “And has Polly told you why you are in this realm?”

  “No, sir.” The honorific came out without a thought. Lord Hadrian looked like a six-year-old, but because of his regal demeanor, he quite clearly demanded the respect of someone much older.

  “Sir?” Hadrian sniped. “Not ‘your highness’? Not ‘Lord Hadrian’?”

  “I’m sorry … your highness, I didn’t—”

  Hadrian winked and let loose a little giggle. “It’s fine,” he said. “It’s nice, actually. Reminds me of my days as a knight. I am not immune to nostalgia, young Mr. Cleary.”

  “Okay … sir.”

  Hadrian scratched his chin. “So Polly did not inform you of your predicament? Most interesting.”

  The masses responded in kind. “Oooooooo!”

  “It’s hardly a predicament,” Polly explained. “It’s an opportunity. Besides, when did I have time to tell him? No matter how I get here, I always end up in that disgusting sea of coagulated blood. Not the sort of welcome that inspires rational conversation.”

  Alistair looked down at the beads of red still dripping off his body. “That was…?”

  “It wasn’t cherry Jell-O,” Polly answered, and then she turned back to Hadrian. “Simple fact is this: the kid was about to be clobbered by a cavewoman. He owes me his life.”

  Hadrian’s eyes narrowed. “Is this true, Master Cleary?”

  Alistair looked at Polly. Clad in the spacesuit, she still cut the figure of a wise and experienced explorer. “Yes, your highness … sir.”

  Hadrian nodded. “Fair enough. So I am the owner of this debt?”

  Polly wiped her hands together and then whisked them apart. “Free and clear. All yours.”

  In the crowd, devilish grins sprouted, accompanied by guttural, satisfied hums. The reaction was not lost on Alistair. “What exactly … is my … predicament?” he asked.

  Before Hadrian could answer, Polly pointed up to the hanging ropes and said, “You don’t need me around for this. I’d just like to conclude our business and be on my way.”

  Hadrian shrugged and said, “A deal is a deal. I’m still unsure why you’d want access to the Ambit of Ciphers, but I’ve given up trying to figure out people like you. If you survive, come back and regale us with your saga. We’d all be curious to know what sort of madness He has unleashed in there.”

  From the crowd came nods and hushed proclamations of “She’s crazy, she is.”

  “Wait a second,” Alistair said. “You’re not staying here with me?”

  Polly crinkled up her nose, tipped her head, and replied, “No. I’m sorry. You seem like a good kid, but I’m not cut out to be some guide. I’m like you. Looking for someone. I can’t let anything get in the way of that. So … so good luck, Alistair Cleary.”

  She’d obviously had enough of his pleading eyes. She turned away from Alistair and pointed again at the ropes. Hadrian nodded, reached up, grabbed a silver-and-gold-colored rope, and tugged it. Gears clattered, and one of the tubes hanging from the ceiling shot down like a frog’s tongue and enveloped Polly. There was a voom and a slurp and then bye-bye, Polly, the proverbial fly snatched off the leaf.

  Hadrian released the rope, and the tube retracted and took its place among the others, gently swaying in the open air above. The force of the tug had added momentum to Hadrian’s swing, and it creakily swept over the chamber, almost reaching as far as Alistair’s pedestal. Hadrian pumped his feet to keep it going as the crowd whooped and whistled.

  Alistair asked again, “What exactly is my predicament?”

  Rather than addressing Alistair, Hadrian shouted his answer to the masses. “The quest this young swimmer has accepted, my lovelies, is the bravest one of all. He is to kill the fearsome Mandrake!”

  Cheers. Applause. A thunder of happiness.

  1988

  Winter back home, almost two years before.

  Alistair was ten, nearly eleven, and he had begged Charlie to go sledding with him in a state forest that was connected to their neighborhood by tangled strings of trails. He promised an adventure the likes of which no boy had ever known. Charlie wasn’t a big fan of physical activity, or cold weather in general, so he scoffed at such a notion, but then agreed anyway, because that’s what best friends do.

  It was a two-mile hike to the hill Alistair wanted to conquer, a steep and rugged swath of dirt that locals called Wheelbender on account of all the bike tires it had claimed. The boys didn’t bother telling their parents, because parents generally advise against such endeavors. Instead, they made up stories about building snow forts and slipped out of their houses dressed in down coats, snow pants, and mittens. They left their hats behind. As Kyle had often told them, hats were for girls.

  A brutal winter had left a solid two-foot base of hardpack, and a storm the night before had topped it with a powdery fourteen inches. A lack of snowshoes made the hike difficult, but these were ideal conditions. Their sleds kicked up wings and tails of white, and the ride down Wheelbender was fast and smooth. Even Charlie, usually so hangdog and sluggish, didn’t pause after the first run. He simply raced back up the hill and went again, and again, and again. Adrenaline was their lunch, and they had no complaints about the icicles on their sideburns or the biting wind that painted their ears pink. It was a perfect day.

  Until Charlie wiped out.

  On what was to be one of their last runs, his sled hit a rock and he lost control, started to spin, stuck his leg out to stop, and smashed his ankle into a tree stump.

  “Gahhh!” he howled.

  Alistair rushed over to find his friend writhing, facedown on the sled, biting at its red plastic edge.

  “Can you stand?” Alistair asked.

  “I … don’t know.”

  “Can you at least move it?”

  Charlie rolled up the fabric of his snow pants. Blood had yet to answer the call. The skin of his ankle was still pale—no swelling to speak of—but when Alistair poked it with his mitten, Charlie winced.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s broken,” Charlie said.

  The sun was sneaking behind the trees and was halfway down to the horizon. It would be dark in about two hours. Snow wasn’t falling, but the wind was picking up and blowing it into drifts. Alistair rolled down Charlie’s pant leg and made a promise.

  “I’ll do whatever it takes to get you home.”

  * * *

  Over an hour later, Alistair was starting to find his rhythm—taking four steps, pausing for a breath, then four more steps, pausing, and so on. Two thin towropes that were once attached to the fronts of their sleds were now fashioned into a crude harness that Alistair wore around his chest. Charlie, cross-legged on the nesting sleds, held the other ends of the ropes like he was holding reins. Charlie was the driver, Alistair was the dog. Whenev
er the reins were less than taut, Charlie gave them a flick and cried, “Yah! Vámonos!”

  They had gone only a half mile—barely a quarter of the way back—and Alistair was already exhausted. The temperatures were in the teens, but the work was so hard that it was beckoning sweat. Alistair’s coat was off, tied around his waist. Everything with a zipper was unzipped. The ventilation helped at first, but when the sweat finally arrived and began to chill the inside of Alistair’s clothes, the choice was between freezing and dehydrating. For the moment, freezing seemed preferable, so he reached down, scooped up a handful of snow, and filled his mouth. It melted on contact, sending cold, earthy liquid down his sandy throat.

  “Did you check to see if it was yellow?” Charlie laughed. Awfully chipper for a boy with a broken ankle.

  “How about not talking for a bit?” Alistair asked.

  “Jeez. I’m only trying to keep your spirits up.”

  “My spirits are fine. Awesome. The greatest. It’s freezing out and it’s almost dark and I’m yanking your fat butt through the woods because you can’t sled worth diarrhea.”

  Charlie drove the heels of his mittens into the snow, putting on the brakes. “You knew I hated sledding. But you insisted.”

  Alistair pulled harder. He wasn’t going to be slowed down. Not now, not so late in the day. “I didn’t insist,” he said.

  Because snow was working its way up his coat sleeves, Charlie relented, lifted his mittens, and said, “Let’s think about it. Who would you rather be at this moment? Me, defeated by a tree stump, soon to be a laughingstock, or you, playing sled dog for a few hours, but soon to be the hero?”

  Alistair didn’t have an answer.

  “You’re not wearing the shirt I gave you,” Charlie said. “That’s a shame. Because I’m wearing the one you gave me.” Charlie was referring to a swap the two had made a few months before. A shirt for a shirt, a symbol of solidarity.

  “No,” Alistair said softly. “Sorry.” He put his coat back on and forged ahead.

  * * *

  One more hour and still one more mile to go. The sun had set, but luckily there was a bit of moonlight sneaking through the pines. Alistair had about ten paces of visibility, so he kept to his four-pace cycle. It hadn’t gotten any easier, but the rhythm of the slog was now pulsing through his body.

  Step, step, step, step, stop. Step, step, step, step, stop.

  The two weren’t talking. Words only led to arguments, and arguments weren’t getting them home. Charlie was humming, though, the only music he cared about, the sound tracks to video games. The boops and beeps might have been grating when played through television speakers, but when done a cappella, they were exponentially worse. Alistair’s solution was to use snotty tissues from his pocket as earplugs and let the rhythm of his steps worm into his brain instead.

  Step, step, step, step, stop. Step, step—

  But he was losing the rhythm. Darker thoughts were more powerful and rushed in uninvited.

  I could leave Charlie here. There’s snow forecast for tonight. He would freeze. I would never have to deal with him again.

  Alistair hated that his brain couldn’t defend itself against such swill, but he also had to accept that it was honest swill. He didn’t really like Charlie, not anymore. He was having trouble remembering the last time that he had.

  * * *

  Another hour, another half mile. Clouds smothered the moon and the darkness was pudding-thick. Alistair ached all over, except for his toes. His toes had been in pain—plenty of it—an hour earlier, but not anymore, and that wasn’t a good sign. Frostbite comes after the numb, or so Alistair had heard, and while he was confident he would survive the trek, he wasn’t sure all of his appendages would. He pictured himself sitting next to the fireplace in his living room, pulling off his boots and socks and watching blackened nubs of flesh and bone fall to the floor.

  I could leave him here.

  I could abandon him.

  No more Charlie in my life.

  No more Charlie.

  Alistair stopped for a moment and looked back at Charlie’s dark shape, bent like a chubby Z in the sled, his mittens balled up and clinging to the towropes like they were a beloved blanket. It was hard to tell if his eyes were open.

  There was anger trying to claw from Alistair’s chest, but it was buried in regret—for not wearing thicker socks, for all his decisions that day—mainly for not telling his parents where he was going. If Alistair had told them, they surely would have dispatched a search party. As it was, the wind had blown snow over the boys’ original tracks, and there were too many trails to go down, too many houses in the neighborhood to call and ask Have you seen the guys?

  No one would find them anytime soon. So Alistair turned back and faced the darkness.

  Step. Stop. Step. Stop. Step … I could leave him here.

  * * *

  They reached the tiny parking lot at the trailhead about an hour later. Temperatures had dropped close to zero. Breaths not only condensed, they crystallized in the air. The sweating had ceased, and Alistair’s underclothes were crusty with ice. He still couldn’t feel his toes, but that was no longer a concern. After two miles in four hours, pulling more than a hundred pounds over drifts of snow, he had almost made it home. All he cared about now was a hot drink and a warm bed.

  The lot was haphazardly plowed, and even though there were patches of snow and ice, there were also bare stretches of pavement, and Alistair wasn’t sure he could pull the sled over them. It didn’t matter really. Once they hit the road, pulling the sled would be too difficult, and there was only a few hundred yards to go along the road.

  “I might have to leave you here for a few minutes,” Alistair said. “I can run back to your house and have your mom drive over to get you. Probably the fastest way.”

  Charlie opened his eyes and sat up. He yawned as he considered the plan, then he swung his legs over the edge of the sled and planted his heels on the ground. “Why don’t I just walk?” he asked.

  Alistair peeled the harness off and dropped it in the snow. Thin bruises and chafing on his shoulders roared to life, and he massaged them as he pointed out the obvious. “Um … what about your ankle?”

  Charlie shrugged. “My ankle? Well, about that. Honestly, back there, I was pretty sure it was broken. But I wasn’t totally sure. Now I’m pretty sure it’s okay.”

  That’s when Charlie pushed himself up and stood. Just like that, no problem at all. There wasn’t a lean or a wobble—nothing to indicate an injury—and Alistair, still wallowing in guilty thoughts, tried to put together a sentence. “But—”

  “But,” Charlie said, “it’s a good thing you’re such a great friend. My ankle would have been pretty sore if I had walked that entire way.” Charlie patted Alistair on the back and smiled, but it wasn’t a malicious smile. It was grateful.

  “You’re … okay?” Alistair was too shocked and too tired to deploy the fire building up in his lungs.

  Charlie winked. “I think we’ll both be feeling it tomorrow. But you should come over in the morning. We’ll play Nintendo, and my mom will make wings and milk shakes for lunch. Beats being stuck out in the cold.”

  The closest house to the lot had a bay window, and Alistair could see some kids clearing dessert plates from the dining room table. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked and two other dogs barked their replies, and the sound ricocheted off the gusts of cold, cold air. Chimneys coughed smoke.

  “I hate you,” Alistair said.

  This coaxed a smile too, and before he turned to walk home on his own two legs supported by his own two sturdy ankles, Charlie said, “No you don’t. If you hated me, you would have left me back there. You’re a great friend. The best. I’ll never forget what you did for me.”

  CHAPTER 5

  It was true. There was no forgetting what Alistair had done for Charlie. The memory was still too fresh, too real, and shame, an all-too-frequent visitor, sat on the pedestal next to Alistair, reminding
him of Charlie’s betrayal and mocking him about Polly’s betrayal. Why, after so long and so much, hadn’t Alistair smartened up? Why did he keep letting people trick him?

  Hadrian swooped up and down, clearly relishing his perch, and he said, “There are three things you must know about the Mandrake. First, he is a liar. He will try to deceive you by making you think he is weak. He is not weak. He is a most vicious creature, almost as vicious as his master.”

  Alistair didn’t have to ask, but he asked anyway. “Who’s his master? Is it the Riverman?”

  “Ah, the Riverman,” Hadrian said. “Been ages since I’ve heard that name used. We’ve grown more accustomed to calling him the Whisper. But yes, you are correct. He is master of the Mandrake. This was a peaceable kingdom once, but the Whisper loathes harmony. So he gave us the Mandrake, and therefore we have been forced to take shelter beneath the ground.”

  Behind the crowd there was a pair of wooden doors. Did those doors lead to an entire underground city? Did all of these people live beneath that sea of blood?

  “The second thing you must know about the Mandrake is this,” Hadrian went on. “He does not always look like a monster. Sometimes he takes on different forms. Small ones. Deceptively innocuous ones. But there is always one way to recognize him. There is a blue mark, in the shape of a horseshoe, hidden behind his left ear. If you see that blue mark, then you kill. You do not hesitate. You do not doubt. You kill.”

  “How do you…?” Alistair couldn’t bring himself to say kill. Aquavania may not have been like home, but it wasn’t like a video game either. These figments appeared to have flesh. There was something unmistakably alive behind their eyes.

  “Fair question,” Hadrian said. “For that brings us to the third thing. We do not know how to kill the Mandrake. All we know is that the sea of blood protects us from him. He will not enter it. Beyond that, we do not know what the Mandrake’s weaknesses are.”