The Whisper

by Aaron Starmer

  “And I’m supposed to know what his weaknesses are?” Alistair asked. “I’ve been here for barely a day, and you’re expecting me to—”

  “You are a swimmer!” Hadrian barked. “And being a swimmer comes with responsibilities!”

  “Aren’t you a swimmer?” Alistair asked. It was a guess, but an educated one. Figments seemed to look up to swimmers, or at least treat them differently. With a crowd of figments at his bidding, Hadrian certainly fit that bill. Fiona had told Alistair stories about how the kids who traveled from the Solid World to Aquavania never aged, at least not physically. Hadrian might have looked like a six-year-old, but that obviously wasn’t the age of his heart and his mind.

  “Once upon a time, you could have called me a swimmer,” Hadrian said. “But now I am simply Lord Hadrian, protector of these beautiful people. We count on swimmers like you to help us.”

  “And what do I get if I help you?”

  “Honor. Esteem. And your choice of tubes.”

  Before that tube had jolted down from the ceiling and snatched Polly away, Hadrian had mentioned a place called the Ambit of Ciphers. The name meant nothing to Alistair. “Would one of the tubes take me home?” he asked.

  “Unlikely,” Hadrian said. “But there are many ways from this world to other worlds. I’d venture to guess that Polly brought you here through a passage to Mahaloo. Many of the tubes can bring you to worlds like Mahaloo. But they won’t bring you home. That’s simply nonsensical.”

  “Is there a tube that will bring me to Fiona Loomis?”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “What about the Riv … the Whisper? Does one lead to him?”

  The crowd laughed. Either the answer to Alistair’s question was obvious or it was ridiculous. Probably a bit of both.

  “You don’t seem nearly up to that task,” Hadrian chuckled. “But that’s neither here nor there. You have to deal with his Mandrake first.”

  “And what if I refuse?” Alistair asked as he climbed to his feet.

  Hadrian smiled and dragged his heels on the ground to slow himself down. When the swing was almost at a standstill, Hadrian reached up and stroked the loop of one of the hanging ropes. This loop was red, and when Hadrian pulled it, exerting only a small bit of pressure, one of the tubes from the ceiling descended a few feet. There was a whirring sound, and inside the tube there were spinning teeth shaped like the blades of a blender.

  “Like all the others who have refused, you will become one with the sea,” Hadrian said.

  All at once, fists shot up and the crowd belted out their favorite chant.

  “New blood! New blood! New blood!”

  * * *

  Hadrian showed no interest in questions or objections. He simply tossed him the sword with the ruby-encrusted handle, which Alistair didn’t attempt to catch. When Alistair bent over and picked the sword up from the net, Hadrian yanked at a yellow rope, and a tube shot down from the ceiling and vacuumed Alistair away. Liquid rushed all around him as he snaked through the darkness, up and down, twisting and looping as if riding a waterslide. It might have even been fun, had it not carried the paralyzing prospect of certain death.

  Eventually the tube spat Alistair out and he landed butt-first on a dirt road. Before he had a chance to even knock the dust from his clothes, the tube retracted into the sky and disappeared. No maps, no further instructions, no idea where he was. Only a mission to find and kill the Mandrake.

  The dirt road wound through a field of wildflowers. In both directions it looked the same: pleasant, bucolic. There were patches of apple and cherry trees, mossy stone walls, and rough signs hewn from wood.

  THIS WAY TO THE HUTCH read a crooked sign staked along the side of the road. With nothing else to guide him, Alistair was forced to follow. The air was full of birdsong and the gentle chee of insects, and as he walked toward whatever or whoever the Hutch was, Alistair let the tip of the sword drag in the dirt.

  This was the second weapon he had held in as many days. The first one was a gun, with a cold handle and a trigger that fell too easily. In the dark of the clubhouse behind the Dwyer home, Alistair had shot Kyle Dwyer in the stomach. Accidentally, he had to keep reminding himself. Guns weren’t made for shaky hands like his.

  The handle of the sword bore the perfect curves to fit Alistair’s grip, but his hands were even shakier now. He wanted nothing more than to drop the thing or, better yet, toss it in a lake where it could vanish, become rusted over and useless. He wanted to stay alive, but not at the expense of someone else’s life. And yet he held on, because he also wanted to see Fiona. He needed to see Fiona, wherever she was.

  The road led to a village, but not one like the primitive settlement in Mahaloo and not one like Thessaly, not one like home. It was made up of a grassy square surrounded by a series of stone huts with thatched roofs. A large wooden platform, like a stage on stilts, sat in the center of the square.

  Alistair wouldn’t have necessarily called the village pretty, but it felt like a warm and welcoming place to visit. There was what appeared to be a blacksmith’s shop, with an anvil and a rack of iron tools, and what had to be a bakery, with a large open fireplace near the back, and what was clearly a house of worship, with stools for the parishioners and a pulpit for whoever delivered the sermons. It seemed lived-in, this place, but perhaps not lived in for quite a while.

  The ivy and weeds had grown cocky, clinging to surfaces and sprouting from patches of ground where they had no right to be. The structures themselves appeared stable enough, relatively free of pests and rot, but they were also lonely. This village was completely empty; not a single person roamed about.

  Alistair made his way to the platform so he could examine it closely. A ladder led the twenty feet or so to the top, and with the hilt of the sword tucked under his arm, Alistair climbed rung by rung. Expecting to find something significant, he was disappointed to discover that the platform was merely a platform, a bare, flat rectangle of wooden slats. The view was lovely, but unenlightening. Below and around him was the village. Beyond the village, it was nothing but rolling fields and the dirt road.

  Alistair headed back to the ladder, but as he crouched to prepare his descent, a deep voice gave him pause.

  “Oh dear, please do not hurry off.” A red hummingbird, wings aflutter, hovered in front of his face.

  “That … wasn’t … you?” Alistair asked.

  “Who else would it be?” the hummingbird replied.

  The sane response for Alistair would have been Hummingbirds can’t talk, but sanity seemed to have no place in Aquavania. Animals were made of the night sky, so why couldn’t they talk? Alistair stood up and squeezed the handle of the sword.

  He does not always look like a monster, Hadrian had said. Sometimes he takes on different forms. Small ones. Deceptively innocuous ones.

  “Who are you?” Alistair asked.

  “I am Potoweet, noble defender of our fair Hutch,” the hummingbird said. “I do not surrender. I do not hide underground. I was first and I shall be last. Who might you be?”

  “Alistair. Alistair Cleary.”

  It was strange enough that the bird was speaking, but his deep voice was even stranger. One would think a hummingbird’s pitch would be unbearably high, but Potoweet spoke like a wise and distinguished gentleman.

  “Ah,” Potoweet said. “You are another fool sent to his destruction. Hadrian’s cruelty and desperation know no limit.”

  As he hovered, Potoweet kept his eyes locked on Alistair’s. Each time Alistair tilted his head, Potoweet mirrored the movement with his body, making it impossible for Alistair to see whether he had the blue mark behind his ear, or if he even had ears. Do birds have ears?

  “I am looking for the—”

  “Mandrake?” Potoweet asked. “And you want to know if I am he?”

  Alistair didn’t respond.

  “Allow me to land on your sword and you may examine my body,” Potoweet went on. “You will see I have n
othing to hide.”

  Alistair began to raise the sword, but then thought better of it. “That sounds like a trick. I’m not a fool.”

  “Evidence suggests otherwise,” Potoweet said. “You serve Lord Hadrian.”

  “I serve myself,” Alistair retorted. “All I want is to find my friend Fiona and go home.”

  “And if you dispatch the Mandrake, Hadrian promised to grant you these things?”

  “Not … really.”

  “Then you are a fool.”

  Back home in Thessaly, when Alistair was seven, he had watched Kyle, then thirteen, shoot a robin out of a tree with a BB rifle. The bird had fallen into the mud at the edge of the swamp, where Kyle fetched the dead body and held it up by a tail feather. Alistair had winced and looked away, and Kyle had said, “Don’t get all weepy over a stupid bird. Do you cry over your chicken nuggets?”

  Alistair took a step away from Potoweet and readied his sword. “What if I sliced you in half? Then who’d be the fool?”

  “Still you, of course,” Potoweet said. “Even if you had the speed to strike me, which I am sure you do not, then you will have killed your one ally.”

  “Or I will have killed the Mandrake,” Alistair said.

  Potoweet rolled his minuscule eyes and then zagged through the air with the speed and precision of an insect. Alistair could barely fix a gaze on him, let alone a sword. The bird finally stopped when he was right next to Alistair’s ear.

  “Let me tell you a story,” Potoweet said.

  POTOWEET’S STORY

  Long ago there was a boy named Oric who lived near the ocean, and one night he came upon a floating orb of liquid and he touched it and was spirited to another land, a magical realm made exclusively of water, a place where all of his dreams could come true. In this realm, he created a hummingbird and dubbed it Potoweet. That hummingbird was I, but I was not like other hummingbirds, for I was given the power to speak and I possessed knowledge of the magical realm. I knew not where this knowledge originated, only that it was born into me. I shared the knowledge with Oric. I became his friend and guide.

  Within the magical realm, Oric created a village that he called the Hutch, and beyond the Hutch, he created fields and stone walls, a dirt road along which to come and go. He populated the Hutch with friendly and happy souls who attempted, but sometimes failed, to lead virtuous lives. Oric adored playing pretend, and every afternoon he staged theatrical performances on a raised platform in the middle of the Hutch. The people cherished the performances and they bestowed endless praise upon Oric.

  Oric, however, soon grew discontented. He had dark feelings within him, resentment toward his loyal creations. He knew better than to let such feelings be known and risk the loss of their adoration, so he constructed an underground fortress, a stone palace where he could be alone on occasion. He hid the fortress beneath a sea of blood, so that the people of the Hutch would keep their distance. Of course, I knew of this fortress, for Oric shared all of his secrets with me.

  “Before I created the Hutch, back in the world where I was born, there was a sea beast that died among the rocks in a cove,” Oric confided to me one evening. “It had many legs, slick and twisty appendages that when sliced open were hollow inside, like a bone without its marrow, like tunnels that connect faraway places. This beast has haunted me and haunts me still, for I imagine it is the sort of monster that steals people away from their slumber. If one is haunted, then one must be master of that which haunts him, and so I would like to have a similar beast in this fortress for me to command as I wish.”

  Thus and therefore a giant mass of hollow tentacles was born upon the ceiling of the fortress, and Oric gave himself control of the tentacles by way of a series of ropes. Pull a rope and a tentacle would stretch to unimaginable lengths and snatch up animals and people from far away. Now, as I’ve made clear, Oric was a god and had the power to smite using nothing but a simple wish, but it was a power he had always wielded judiciously. He believed in gracing his creations with a certain amount of free will. The tentacles, however, brought out a sinister side in him.

  If someone in the Hutch angered him or annoyed him, whether by word, action, or simple gesture, then Oric would retreat underground. He would use the tentacles to capture that person and to bring them to the fortress and set them upon a pedestal. Whilst reclining in a tortoiseshell swing above the pedestal and disguising himself in a red cloak and a mask made of goat horns, Oric would play the part of a wraith.

  “You have been wicked,” he would say, or, “You have been selfish,” and the people would grovel, weep, and beg forgiveness, which Oric would grant them, but only on the condition that they alter their ways. Upon their agreement, he would once again deploy the tentacles and transfer the people back aboveground, where they would regale the others with stories of the horn-faced monster that they soon titled … the Mandrake.

  Yes indeed, yes indeed, and once this fictitious Mandrake was introduced, a curious and fortuitous change occurred. As long as Oric’s creations feared the monster, then their lives strained closer toward virtue, and Oric could safely exercise his dark feelings without anyone surrendering their love for him. The Hutch was more peaceful than it had ever been. I, as you might surmise, was wary of the arrangement, but I had no right to object. “Someday the dark feelings will abate,” Oric assured me, “and we will have no need for the Mandrake.”

  Sadly, the opposite occurred. His feelings became darker and darker still, and soon playing the part of the Mandrake did not suffice for Oric. He had the urge to destroy what he had created, to rain Armageddon down upon everyone and everything.

  “I wish I could purge these thoughts from my head,” he cried one night whilst he and I were alone in the fortress. “I wish I could put an end to this evil inside of me.”

  A voice arrived in his head and remarked, “I can give you that.”

  “Please do, please do,” Oric whimpered in reply.

  A creature both featureless and nameless and made entirely of nothingness instantly appeared in the fortress, wielding a pen constructed of bamboo. It placed the pen into Oric’s ear and placed its mouth upon the pen and began to suck.

  That is when my mind went blank. For how long it was blank, I may never know, but when my mind returned, it arrived with the knowledge that while the creature was gone, so too was Oric. Vanished, disappeared, like the stars with the dawn.

  I, of course, mourned the loss of my master, but I knew that I must carry on. I returned to the surface through a small tunnel I burrowed with my beak, and I told the people of the Hutch that Oric was no more.

  “What about the Mandrake?” they asked.

  Knowing that the Mandrake was the one thing that kept order in the Hutch, I lied. I told them that the Mandrake lived on, but they need not fear him so long as they were good and honest people. And they were good and honest people and remained as such for a long time.

  For reasons I’ve never fully understood, I possess the gift of everlasting life, but nobody else in the Hutch shared this gift, and so generations lived and died, on and on for many years, until Oric was completely forgotten to all but me, and the Mandrake was all that was remembered from the days of old.

  Until one morning, someone we had never seen before, a boy clad in scale mail, arrived in the Hutch. “Who are you?” the villagers asked. “And where do you come from?”

  “I am Hadrian,” the boy replied. “I come from a place very different from this. Will you host me as I pass through on my journey?”

  Though they had never had a visitor, they were a kind people and they agreed to help Hadrian, yet they told him that he must act honorably or else he would face the wrath of the Mandrake.

  “This Mandrake frightens you?” Hadrian asked.

  “Most thoroughly,” they replied.

  “What if one were to hunt down and destroy this Mandrake?” Hadrian asked.

  “We would be forever grateful,” they told him. “We would be indebted to you, for you
would have saved us.”

  “Where does he dwell?” Hadrian asked.

  “Beneath the sea of blood,” they told him, pointing in the distance to the red liquid they so carefully avoided.

  “Then I will swim to the bottom and find him,” Hadrian said.

  This thrilled the people, but it worried me, for I knew that Hadrian might gain access to the fortress, where he would find nothing except for the ropes and the tentacles. So I burrowed down to the fortress once again and waited for him. It was not without some guilt that I prayed for Hadrian to drown and no longer pose as an impediment, but alas, Hadrian was a skilled swimmer and a determined and wily boy, and he reached the fortress mere moments after I arrived.

  “It is a hoax,” I regretfully admitted.

  “To keep them docile?” Hadrian asked.

  “Indeed,” I said, and I proceeded to tell Hadrian about the tentacles and how they operated.

  Hadrian was understandably intrigued. “So a dead Mandrake is of no use?” he asked.

  “No, it is not.”

  “I see,” Hadrian said, and it was then that I recognized the lust for power in his eyes, and it was also then that Hadrian climbed onto the swing, seized the ropes, and commanded the tentacles to capture the blacksmith and the baker from the Hutch. Only he did not simply scare these men. He bade that the tentacles suffocate their lungs and place their dead bodies upon the pedestal.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted.

  Sneering, Hadrian leapt to the pedestal and produced a quill from within his underclothes. He began piercing the men’s dead bodies with the quill. “I am giving them their Mandrake,” Hadrian said.

  “Oric was kind to them,” I pleaded. “He never hurt them. This is not the proper way!”

  Hadrian laughed and climbed back upon the swing. He pulled the ropes and made the tentacles transport the bodies to the wooden platform in the middle of the Hutch, and when the people awoke to discover this horror in the morning, they were understandably upset.