Stolen Tongues

by Felix Blackwell

  The car was a popsicle. A two-inch layer of ice glazed its windshields, and icicles hung like jagged teeth down to the tires.

  What’s the freezing point of gasoline? I wondered.

  Even worse, I couldn’t make out the road at the end of the driveway; everything was obscured under a blanket of pure white. In this blizzard I wouldn’t even be able to see the guardrail that would keep us from plunging to our deaths. There was no way a ranger had made his way up here this morning, and there was no way we were getting off the mountain. At least not tonight.

  As I stood there reforming the exit plan, I heard a woman talking. She wasn’t far away at all, and seemed to be in a good mood.

  “Oh stahp! Stahp it!” She said in a thick Bostonian accent. She laughed my mother’s laugh. “Look there. Look at the windows!”

  My brain instantly cramped. I could almost hear the blood waterfalling out of my head. A freezing feeling replaced it, followed by the sensation of all the muscles in my legs clenching up.

  “H—Hello?” I said. The word died just outside my mouth. “Hello?” I tried again, louder.

  “You are too!” she replied. “Did you see it? Up in the trees!”

  I managed to regain command over my legs and circled the car, edging closer to the source of the voice.

  “Mom?” I asked, unable to believe what I was hearing.

  Unlike Alfred, my mother was alive and well – two thousand miles away in Massachusetts.

  The woman unleashed a string of phrases, laughing hysterically. She dipped into a language I had never heard before, then resumed speaking in English. I couldn’t make most of it out, but it almost sounded like things she’d say at a dinner party.

  “They’re on their way!” she yelled. Her voice receded further into the distance. I took a few more steps toward it, calling out again. She always responded, but never directly replied to my questions.

  Suddenly, I got the feeling that I was being coaxed into the woods.

  I turned on my heels and dashed back to the cabin. The little thing seemed too far away; its warm glowing windows felt like lights disappearing at the end of a tunnel.

  “Down in the hole!” the voice shrieked behind me. “Put him down there!” A flurry of incomprehensible babble followed. A lightning bolt of fear struck me, giving me the turbo-boost I needed to practically dive into the cabin.

  When I was sixteen years old, I smoked pot for the first time in my buddy’s garage – and had a full-blown panic attack. That event seemed to unlock a hidden trove of anxiety buried deep within me, and the attacks continued for months afterward. Eventually I visited a doctor, who referred me to a therapist, and together we developed coping strategies that helped me avert the attacks and deal with my anxiety before it pressurized and exploded. By the time I was twenty-two, I had my demons under control, and the panic attacks disappeared. I was even able to get stoned like a normal college kid.

  But standing there in the living room of the cabin, listening to the impossible voices outside, revealed to me that I had not at all learned to cope with my anxiety in a healthy way. I had simply learned to bury it deeper, and now, all of those demons came rushing up to the surface. I collapsed to the floor and sobbed. My entire body shook. All my muscles turned to stone. Wave after wave of nausea pounded the back of my throat. I tried to remain silent so as not to disturb Faye’s rest, but I knew now that there was something far worse on this mountain than pranksters or Peeping Toms.

  I resolved to stay awake all night long, to protect my fiancée and to prove to myself that I wasn’t losing my mind.

  Chapter 5

  Faye passed out around 9 P.M., leaving me alone with my thoughts and the horrible noises outside. Snow crunched, twigs snapped, trees creaked, and other things went bump in the night. For each unidentifiable sound I heard, my mind invented a grotesque creature to cause it. I tried to keep myself busy at the kitchen table with grading and student evaluations, but my thoughts never converged on the task at hand. Instead they wandered out the windows of the cabin, through the meadow, and into the mysterious woods. My desperation to leave Pale Peak was only matched by my desire to know who or what was out there lurking around in the dark.

  I filled up on oven-baked pizza and soda, plotting to remain caffeinated and cheesed for the remainder of the night. Just after midnight, nature called, and I crept to the bathroom so as not to wake Faye. I poked my head in as I passed by, and was relieved to find her sleeping soundly under a pile of blankets. The door beside her was sealed and locked. The curtains were drawn. A glimmer of moonlight pierced them and lit up the room just enough to act as a nightlight.

  While standing at the toilet, I gazed out the window beside me. The sky had cleared a bit, revealing a thousand glittering stars. My eyes scanned the tree line, which was just barely visible, and my brain parsed the significance of our experiences up here on the mountain. What did it mean that both Faye and I had recognized the voices outside as those of our relatives? Were we having some kind of shared hallucination? The possibility of radon poisoning crossed my mind; many old buildings in the mountains were susceptible to toxic gases that seeped out of the ground. Did the dreamcatcher have some relationship to the sounds we’d heard? Was there some weird cult operating up here? As a skeptic, I didn’t believe in ghosts or curses or literal “evil,” but those explanations were now a lot more sensible to me than anything else I could think up.

  Something moved outside.

  Just past the first row of trees, something moved slowly, purposefully, like a person looking back at me and slinking through the forest.

  A muffled voice rang out. I couldn’t discern the words, but it sounded desperate.

  I slid the window open just an inch and put my ear beside it. The freezing air that seeped in felt like a death sentence. There was no way anyone could survive out there tonight without some serious, military-grade winter gear.

  A burst of cackling laughter erupted from nearby. It was a woman’s voice, but not one I recognized. She sounded elderly – and angry. Her laughter came out dry and condescending.

  “Where is it?” she demanded.

  I shut off the light in the bathroom, hoping to make out the shape of a person by the trees, but the moonlight was too faint.

  “Is there…forget…his name?” Some of the words were lost before they ever reached the window, but I could make some of it out.

  Then, another voice spoke. This one was much closer, maybe right beside the cabin – and it was familiar.

  “Not mine. Not mine. Just a few days.”

  My heart raced. I cycled through the faces of relatives and friends in my mind. It was a young woman.

  “Mom and Dad’s.”

  I fell back from the window and caught myself against the sink. My body went cold. It was Faye. For a moment I feared she was outside, but when she spoke again I realized her voice was echoing from behind me. I moved through the hall and pushed the bedroom door open.

  Faye was still in bed, asleep on her tummy as usual. She hadn’t moved an inch.

  “Why…” she asked, drunk with lethargy. “Whose name?”

  The woman outside cackled again, and muttered something I couldn’t make out.

  Faye responded, “But I don’t know. Yes, yes, With me.”

  Every inch of my skin crawled. Someone was outside, having a conversation with my fiancée in her sleep. Drilling her for information. Asking for my name.

  I wanted to scream but I couldn’t. The insanity of it all, the incomprehensibility, numbed my brain. All I could do was fall heavily onto the bed and shake Faye awake. Just as I did, she altered the pitch and tone of her voice, imitating someone else entirely.

  “Don’t let them in,” she said. The sounds were otherworldly; they did not belong to her. They could not even have been formed by her vocal cords. “Don’t let him in.”

  A scream finally burst from my mouth, bringing her back into consciousness.

  “What…what’s going on?” s
he asked. Faye instinctively retreated from me, as she had many times when coming out of a nightmare. If ever I wake her up instead of allowing her to come out of a dream or a night terror on her own, I risk becoming a part of it. From her perspective, waking up to a dark figure sitting in front of her, reaching toward her, is mortifying.

  Normally I’d have reassured her and said, “It’s just me, sweetie, it’s just me” and rubbed her arms. But what Faye had just done was something totally beyond her normal behavior. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” is all I could blurt out.

  It took some explaining, but eventually Faye realized what she’d been doing.

  “Who were you talking to?” I pressed. “It’s important.”

  “I don’t know, Felix,” she replied, rubbing her face. Her hands were shaking.

  “What was she asking you?”

  Faye looked to the window, then into my eyes. It was so dark I could barely make out her features.

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember anything.”

  I grabbed her hands.

  “Try, Faye. I need you to try.”

  She swatted my hands away and distanced herself from me.

  “I don’t know.”

  We argued a bit. Faye struggled to believe what I’d heard, and it took me a while to realize that she wasn’t doubting me. She was trying to block out the possibility that something supernatural was happening. Faye was raised Catholic, and although she only attended mass around the holidays with her folks, she still retained a strong belief in the existence of bad spirits. To her, there was another world behind ours, obscured only by the veil of death. Right now, outside, something seemed to be piercing that veil and calling out to us.

  “This place is haunted,” she said, more of an admission to herself. “We need to leave. We need to get into the car and just drive. Right now.”

  I tried to explain why that was impossible, but her expression turned to that of a cornered animal. Faye was scared to death, and she wasn’t going to be able to take much more of this mountain and its strange inhabitants.

  Just as I went to hold her, a new sound interrupted our conversation. It was one we did not expect. Both of us froze there on the bed, listening intently. It was another voice, weak but melodious, somewhere near the front of the house. Faye stood up first and followed the sounds into the gloomy hallway. I followed close behind.

  We stood there in the living room for a moment until she gasped in realization.

  It was a child, singing in the dark.

  I tried to make out the words, but much of what we heard was in some strange language.

  “Ahhh soul me ah do, soul me ah do, I’m a naked soul me ahhh dooo…”

  Faye cursed and swore, terrified and outraged and trapped on a frozen mountain with the songs of Hell emanating from the woods. She stormed up to the kitchen window and threw the drapes open, searching for the kid.

  “Oh Jesus,” she said, clasping her hands to her mouth.

  I ran over and gazed out the window from behind her.

  Standing there, about two hundred feet out, was the dark form of a person. It was an adult man, devoid of detail in the shadow of the woods. He stood just outside the tree line with his back facing the cabin. He appeared to be gazing up at the tops of the trees, and never moved.

  “What the hell is that?” Faye breathed. She still clasped her mouth in horror, trying to avert a scream.

  This was the first moment at the cabin that I felt we were truly in danger. My senses sharpened into razors. My brain shut down all complex tasks and diverted full power to a primal survival mode. I grabbed Faye and dragged her down to the floor.

  The unseen child sang louder. He recited common nursery rhymes, but his pitch wavered off-key like a melting record player. He stuttered and mispronounced many of the words, but not in the way a person might if he were practicing English. It was as if this boy were learning how to speak altogether. It almost sounded like a computer program mimicking a child’s voice. Every few seconds he’d burst into hysterical laughter, or begin humming a particular refrain over and over. Sometimes he’d blurt a random string of nonsense, like “Pile up the twigs, gather the lambs, tie up the hogs, burn up the hags” and then continue singing.

  Faye crawled away to the bedroom, then returned with her cell phone. After a few tries, there was a faint ringing against her ear.

  “Dad.” Faye swallowed hard, holding back tears. She sniffled and cleared her throat. “Daddy, when you get this, please, please come pick us up. We need help. As soon as you get this, get in the truck. Come get us right now. Don’t wait.”

  The boy called out again.

  “When do we go insiiiide? When do we go insiiiide?”

  I flicked on the front porch lights and then headed to the back door in our bedroom, hoping to discourage anyone from approaching the cabin. As I hit the switch for the back porch, the distinct silhouette of a person glowed through the window curtain. It looked like a woman. She pressed herself against the glass with her hands cupped around her face, trying to peer inside. I approached the window, but the person ran off before I could yank the curtain open.

  “He’s still out there,” Faye said from the kitchen. “He’s just standing there.”

  Chapter 6

  Faye and I spent the remainder of the night hiding in the bathroom with the lights on. She huddled in the tub with blankets while I sat against the door, clutching the dusty magnum her father had left on a shelf in the closet. I had never fired a gun before, but just having it with us brought me some sense of control over the situation.

  Faye was a talented artist, and always had a sketch pad and graphite pencils somewhere nearby. Her busy work life had dulled those skills this past year, so she intended to sharpen them on this trip. But instead of filling the book with Colorado mountainscapes, she now jotted down the voices we heard and sketched the man we saw. By dawn, her notes read as follows:

  Adult man’s voice:

  “Hello? Oooooh God, look at it! Look look!”

  “Don’t. Don’t. They see in the dark.”

  “I’m…I’m lost. I’m lost. Show me the way.” (could also be “throw me away”)

  “Wachu, wachu, wachu, wole my…wole my…” (guttural, growling)

  “It’s dark out here. I see those lights! Yeah, I see ‘em!”

  “I’ll come down there! Don’t think I won’t!”

  “Don’t smile. Don’t smile. He’ll see you.”

  Teenage girl’s voice:

  “The goats led me here.” (could also be ghosts?)

  “Lay it on the ground…and burn it.” (laughing)

  “I can’t feel my fingers anymore…I can’t climb up.” (crying)

  “Ooooh! She talks in her sleep! Did you hear? I found a friend.”

  “Lalalala….lalalalala…” (flat and monotone)

  Child’s voice:

  “Eat eat eat!”

  “Soul me aaahh dooo…souuul me aaaahh doooo…”

  “Don’t tell him your secrets. He found mine.” (crying/whining)

  “Rooock-a-bye baaaaby…iiiin the tree top…”

  “How do we get in there?”

  Grandpa Alfred’s voice:

  “There’s bodies still in the ground there. Never found ‘em. But they’re there.” (laughing)

  “Right here. Right here. Ooooh they found it. Theeeey fooouuund iiiiiit."

  “Ah, I’m always standing in the same goddamn place. Twenty years! You believe that?”

  “Dig ‘em up an’ burn ‘em. All you can do. It’s what a sane man would do.”

  The chattering would disappear for hours, then start back up again. By dawn on Sunday, I was at the end of my rope. I hadn’t slept well since we’d arrived at the cabin, and my insides were all knotted up with stress. Faye was even worse. Her face had paled from hours of dread, and she gazed around listlessly with bloodshot eyes. She anxiously twisted the engagement ring around her finger and never looked at me. As soon as the sunlight p
oked through the bathroom curtains, I checked the house and encouraged Faye to get some sleep before she cracked. I ran my fingers through her hair as we lay on the bed, promising that I’d keep her safe. She forced a little smile. We fell asleep holding each other.

  It was after 2 P.M. when I woke up. Dazed, I snuck out of bed and went outside to see if Faye’s dad or the rangers had come up the mountain. My heart sank at the view of the undisturbed road; no one had even tried to check on us.

  There was evidence of last night’s strange activity outside. Dozens of tracks cut through the snow. They all meandered erratically. Some zigzagged to and fro as if made by a drunk person, while others appeared to have been made by someone making enormous leaps across the field. Two pairs of tracks circled the cabin five or six times, then separated and re-entered the woods in different places. One set of footprints moved in a straight line from the trees to the place I stood on the porch, and never turned around.

  I had the thought to go out to the edge of the property to see if that dreamcatcher was still there, but the forest seemed a thousand miles away now. I was worried that if I entered it, I’d never come out alive. Moreover, a part of me was too afraid to even look at the strange object. At Faye’s behest, neither of us had touched it, and yet I now wondered if simply being near the thing had put us in danger.

  Back inside, Faye slept deeply in a bright pool of sunlight. The clouds had vanished, leaving a crystal blue sky that promised better cell reception. I kept the bedroom door cracked so that I would hear her if she began talking in her sleep again, then grabbed the phone. Faye’s dad didn’t answer, but someone at the ranger’s station did.

  “Rocky Mountain National Park Service,” an older man grumbled, “Pike speaking.”

  “William, this is Felix, up here at the Spencer cabin—”

  “Oh, hey there,” he interrupted, “you folks alright? Hey we tried to get up there yesterday but the ice—”