Stolen Tongues

by Felix Blackwell

  “Is that…is that a fucking dreamcatcher?” I asked, more to myself than to Faye. She remained silent.

  The structure was huge. Unlike the fragile little ones I’d seen in bedroom windows and on rear-view mirrors, this dreamcatcher was over two feet in diameter. Its construction looked frantic; the gnarled branches and twine held each other together in an unnatural, almost menacing way. Some of the feathers and bones had dried blood on them. I imagined a madman hurriedly assembling the thing, attempting to ward off the voices in his head.

  “Who the hell put this here?” Faye said, causing me to jump. I was so bewitched by the object that I’d nearly forgotten she was there.

  “I don’t know,” I replied, reaching up to touch it.

  “Don’t!” she yelled, slapping the back of my head. “Aren’t you the one who loves horror movies? You’re gonna get cursed or something, stupid.”

  “I wonder how long it’s been here,” I said.

  “Someone was just here,” Faye replied. “Look.” She pointed to a set of footprints in the snow. They wrapped right around the tree that the dreamcatcher now dangled from.

  I made a print with my own boot next to one of them. They were roughly the same size, but little detail could be seen in either of them.

  “They might be mine,” I said. “Earlier, when you were asleep.”

  “And you didn’t notice this giant thing right next to your head?”

  “I don’t know – I mean it’s possible I just walked right past it. I really don’t know.”

  “Leave it alone, and let’s get inside,” Faye said, fear on the edge of her voice. “If you take it down, whoever put it here will know. That’s probably what they want. To mess with us.” She brushed past me and walked into the meadow.

  Any relief I’d felt before now washed away in a torrent of dread. I suddenly believed Faye. I believed that someone was wandering around out here last night. Someone who had no business being out here in the freezing dark.

  I glanced around the side of the tree to see Faye approaching our cabin in the distance. Whoever put this thing here had a clear view of the building. We’d never be able to see them back due to the shadow cover beneath the trees. Unnerved, I took one last look at the object and trudged off after Faye.

  Chapter 3

  That evening, Faye and I tried our best to ignore the strange ornament hanging a few hundred feet from the cabin. We agreed that it was probably old, and if someone had indeed put it up recently, it was probably just to scare us. Even so, Faye spent nearly twenty minutes trying to get enough signal on her phone to call the ranger’s station at the foot of the mountain. When she finally did, a trooper named William Pike promised to swing by in the morning. He assured Faye that there was a popular hiking trail on the north side of Pale Peak, and that city teenagers would sometimes come up and torment visitors staying in the cabins.

  That calmed our nerves a bit. We had a candle-lit dinner to the tune of relaxing world music thanks to Faye’s laptop, then we broke out one of the several board games she insisted on bringing from her parents’ house. A little smile crept across her face when she pulled out Scrabble. When we’d first met, while hanging out at a big gathering of our mutual friends, she won the game by laying down the letters for “denied” across my word “date.”

  Between songs, something bashed into the kitchen window. Faye rushed to silence her laptop as I went to inspect the glass. It was unbroken, and the impact sounded muffled, so I assumed the noise was caused by a wayward owl. Flashlight in hand, I headed outside to look for a dead bird in the snow – but found nothing. While closing the door, a faint voice called out from the woods. More snow was beginning to fall and the wind intermittently kicked up, so I couldn’t be sure of what I heard. But it sounded like, “Why’d you go?” or “Where’d you go?” I stood there for a long time, listening carefully, but heard only the eerie howls of the wind. As it rushed and seeped through a million branches, it occasionally formed the sounds of a human voice. I shuddered and dismissed the idea that someone was out there.

  We turned in early. I struggled to fall asleep, but eventually did, only to be shaken awake not ten minutes later by an agitated Faye.

  “Felix!” she whispered, rattling my arm. “Get up! Someone’s outside again.”

  My eyes shot open at her words. Without responding, I leaped out of bed and grabbed my pants. Faye sat up, holding the sheets defensively to her chest.

  “He’s walking around right out there.” She pointed toward the front of the house. I held still, trying to listen for movement, but heard nothing.

  “Are you sure you weren’t dreaming?” I asked loudly, prompting her to shush me. I held still.

  The crunching of snow broke our silence. Something was tromping around the side of the cabin, a few yards out. It circled the house, pausing briefly at the back door that led into our bedroom. The footsteps then continued back around toward the living room.

  “Son of a bitch is casing the house,” I whispered back, “trying to figure out how to get in.”

  I stormed out of the room and grabbed the flashlight. I threw the front door open and blasted the darkness with the light’s brightest setting, only to find a thick blanket of snow gleaming up at me. Snowflakes washed through the air in tidal waves, obscuring my vision and giving cover to anyone who might be sneaking around out there. The footsteps I’d heard a moment ago vanished into the wind, and after a while, even the breeze receded into the night.

  Not satisfied, I closed the door and scrambled around the cabin, pointing the light through each window. There was no sign of footprints or their maker anywhere. When I returned to the bedroom to check the back door, Faye was gazing out the window, unmoving.

  “You see something?” I asked. “I looked everywhere. Couldn’t find anything.”

  My fiancée gave no indication that she’d even heard me.

  “Faye?”

  “Someone was out there,” she said, turning toward me. Her voice was determined and sharp.

  “Could have been a bear,” I offered. I didn’t really believe that, but the look on her face demanded reassurance. “They come up to houses and cars all the time when they smell food. I mean come on…nobody’s out there playing practical jokes on a night like this.”

  “What is it with you lately?” she said. Her face set me back on my heels. “You don’t believe anything I say. You’re telling me that was an animal? Do you have ears? It was walking on two fucking legs, Felix. Some freak is coming to this cabin at night.”

  I sank down to the bed and looked up into Faye’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” I said. “I’m not trying to make you feel crazy. I’m just not ready to accept that we’re being stalked on a mountain six miles away from the nearest town. In a blizzard. The ranger will be here in the morning, okay? Then we’ll get some answers.”

  Faye slipped into bed and turned her back to me. I touched her shoulder softly, but she shook me off.

  “Someone was trying to look inside,” she said with finality.

  It took a long time to fall back asleep. Faye was restless and mumbled indecipherable things for hours. I lay there in the dark, trying to make sense of her incoherent ramblings and imagining the things she must have been dreaming. My thoughts became more abstract with the passage of time, and eventually they blended into dreams of my own.

  I don’t know how long I slept.

  A cacophony of shrieks and sobs dragged me from my slumber. I fumbled for the light amidst Faye’s deafening cries, wondering if someone had tried to get in through the door in our bedroom. When my hand found the light, its brightness silenced her. She covered her eyes, shaking all over. I immediately recognized her state. She’d had a nightmare. I grabbed onto her and squeezed tight, which was my standard remedy, and it usually worked.

  “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.”

  She sobbed into my chest, but eventually her breathing slowed.

  “What was it?” I asked
. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  It took Faye a moment to get her bearings. She gazed around the room in confusion, shielding her eyes and pointing at the light. I turned it off.

  My fiancée has an undiagnosed sleep disorder. She regularly talks in her sleep – usually funny things like sassing her coworkers – and sometimes sleepwalks. She even suffers from sporadic bouts of night terrors, which are a bit like nightmares, except the monsters and killers don’t disappear when she opens her eyes. Instead, they spill into the room and remain very real for several moments, causing her to freak out while she’s awake. All of her sleep disturbances are triggered by stress. Things like job changes or money problems will send her into week-long episodes of terror.

  Faye pulled herself away from me and leaned against the headboard. She wiped tears from her eyes.

  “I was in the woods,” she said, pointing a shaking finger at the window.

  I caressed her other hand and nodded my attention.

  “I was naked, just standing there watching. Someone was up ahead past the trees. He was digging in the snow really frantic. Digging down into the ground beneath. And he looked up and saw me watching him. Then I was running, trying to find my way back, and he was following me. But he didn’t feel like a person. He felt empty. Like he didn’t have a soul.”

  “Jesus,” I said, squeezing her hand. “But you’re okay. You’re right here. You never left. It was just a dream.”

  Faye squeezed my hand back.

  “I think he wanted to eat me,” she said. She fiddled nervously with a tangle in her hair. “I could feel this terrible hunger that he had. Like he was hungry for a thousand years.”

  My stomach churned. Thoughts of the eerie dreamcatcher invaded my mind.

  Chapter 4

  It was Saturday now, and the morning was not nearly as jovial. Faye and I both awoke exhausted, and were dismayed to find the windows completely caked with ice. More than a foot of snow had dumped down on the mountain during the night, and plenty more was still coming as I opened the front door. The woods had disappeared, completely shrouded behind a wall of falling flakes. I could barely make out our poor rental car in the driveway.

  There was something else out there too. A trail had been forged through the snow on the deck; it snaked around the side of the house. I reasoned that it must have been freshly made, given the rate of snowfall, and it was rapidly vanishing even now. Could it have been the ranger? I prayed that it was, but my gut told me that no one was coming to save us in this blizzard. The one road that led up here was an icy deathtrap with zero visibility. Only a crazy person would be outside right now. I winced at the thought and slammed the door shut.

  Faye and I stayed inside with the heater on, trying to distract ourselves from the eerie hush that had descended upon the landscape. Our romantic cabin getaway wasn’t going exactly as planned, but we still had each other, and I was hoping that was enough to salvage the rest of the trip.

  “Do you remember the first time you had one?” I blurted out, breaking an hour-long silence. I fiddled with the router while Faye lay on the floor playing Super Nintendo.

  “Had what,” she said, distracted.

  “You know. Night terrors.”

  The sounds of little monsters being knocked into a swamp issued from the TV.

  “I was a little kid. The earliest one I remember was of my mom leading me down into our basement. My dad had a big entertainment center down there, so I was never allowed to go by myself. They thought I’d break it.”

  “Sounds rough,” I interrupted. “I wish our house had stairs, growing up. In fact I wish we had a house.”

  Faye took her hand off the controller long enough to flip me a middle finger. We both laughed.

  “The staircase was long,” she continued. “At least in the dream. I don’t remember if it really looked like that. But we fell down it, both my mom and me. As we fell, it got darker and darker. I woke up before we reached the bottom, but I remember seeing a face down there. A really scary one, looking up at me. Waiting for me. When I woke up, it was still there in the room, then slowly faded away.”

  “You’re frickin’ scary, you know that?” I said.

  “You should see me when we’re out of chocolate,” she replied.

  “What do you think causes them?”

  “Night terrors?”

  “Yeah. I mean for you. Why you? Why not your mom? Or Becca?”

  “My dad had ‘em,” she said, pausing the game. I gave up my tinkering and slumped onto the couch. Faye joined me.

  “He doesn’t seem the type,” I replied.

  “Oh yeah. A couple times when I was a kid, I remember hearing him at night. He was a medic in the late ‘60’s. I learned more about him while he was asleep than from talking with him for twenty-six years.”

  It made sense. Greg was absolutely grizzled, and had all the personality of stone. He seemed out of place in his big, beautiful house.

  “Does it still happen for him?” I asked.

  “No. It stopped a long time ago. They came all of a sudden and then disappeared shortly after. I guess I’m the lucky one.”

  “Hm.”

  Faye hammered away on the game, occasionally swearing under her breath. I had nearly fallen asleep next to her when a wail from outside startled us both. I sat up, listening. Faye had a thousand-yard stare on her face. When the voice cried out again, her brow furrowed in confusion.

  “Hello?” it called. I scrambled to shut off the heater so we could hear better. “I give up, I give up. Please.” The voice sounded distant, maybe a few hundred feet away from the cabin near the edge of the forest.

  Faye jolted straight up from the couch and marched to the front door. She swung it open and stood there, ignoring the wind that battered her face and the snow that toppled onto her bare feet. The voice babbled at length, but was interrupted by gusts of wind. I couldn’t make much of it out.

  An equally strange noise erupted from Faye’s mouth. It wasn’t a gasp of fear, but rather one of anguish. It was the kind of sound you’d expect to hear from a family in an emergency room when the doctor approaches with an apologetic look on his face.

  “It’s grandpa,” she said in a horrified voice. “That’s my

  grandpa.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “It’s him, Felix!” she shouted, clutching the open door’s knob like she was going to rip it off. “He’s out there! I hear him calling.”

  I had no idea how to respond to that. It was impossible. I approached Faye and held her from behind, listening to the voice as it sailed into the cabin on violent bursts of wind.

  “Where is everyone?” the man called out. Fear and misery hung on his words. “Please, please, I’m lost!”

  “Grandpa!” Faye shrieked into the blizzard. “We’re over here! I’m coming!” She tried to tear away from me and dart off into the snow. I yanked her back and wrestled her into the house, screaming for her to calm down. I tried to tell her that it wasn’t her grandfather, but she fought and screamed.

  “Get off me!” She raked and clawed at me like a tiger. “Let me go! Grandpa!”

  I managed to kick the door shut with my foot, forfeiting my balance in the process. We toppled to the floor as one, crashing into the bags we’d left in the entryway. I held Faye like a living straightjacket until she finally went limp. She burst into tears.

  “What the fuck is going on?” she asked, sobbing. I knew she didn’t expect an answer.

  I had only met Faye’s grandfather once, at her sister’s wedding a few years ago. Alfred was a charming old man who loved cigars and muscle cars. We knew virtually nothing about him because he worked high up in the government and never talked about his life, but he was very open about how much he loved his granddaughters. After the reception, he asked me if I was thinking about becoming a member of the family. I told him I couldn’t imagine my life with anyone else, and said that my mother was very fond of Faye. This seemed to really score po
ints with him, and he jokingly told me he’d vouch for me. I tried to joke back and said something along the lines of, “Well, if I’m going to be in the clan, there’s something I’ve got to know. I’ve always wondered about Area 51.” Alfred took a long drag on his cigar without taking his eyes off me, and his face became totally void of expression. Through a noxious cloud of smoke, he breathed, “What’s Area 51?”

  Alfred dropped dead of a heart attack not three weeks after the wedding, and the news of his passing broke everyone’s heart. It horrified me to admit that the voice outside the cabin sounded just like him. But unlike Faye, I wasn’t willing to risk my life to go outside and rescue someone that I knew to be dead. I kept my eye on Faye as she rested in bed, sipping hot chocolate and shivering with disquiet. A movie played on her laptop, but she ignored it. The experience had shaken her up badly, and now I watched her torturous effort to reconcile the voice she heard with the knowledge that her grandfather was long dead. With each passing second I had the morbid expectation that the voice would cry out again and send Faye into another explosion, but thankfully it never happened.

  “It was him,” she’d assert every few minutes. “I know his voice. I know it was him.”

  I alternated between trying to call the ranger station and trying to get online to email them, but both attempts failed. At long last, just as the sky darkened to thrust another terrifying night upon us, I went out to check on the car. In case these odd experiences came to a head, I wanted to be sure that we had an exit plan – even if it was a dangerous one.

  Outside, it was colder than anything I had ever experienced in my life. It was early spring, and Faye’s parents had assured us that the worst of the snow had passed. But standing there on the porch looking out at the landscape, I felt a ghastly chill even through my winter gear. The cold brought with it the silence of death; not a single animal made so much as a peep for miles. Only the air itself made sounds as it whipped across the valleys and sprayed bits of ice at me.