Stolen Tongues

by Felix Blackwell

  On the ride over, Faye again withdrew into herself and barely spoke to me. Instead, she hummed a familiar song, but I couldn’t remember where I’d heard it before. When I asked what it was, she said she didn’t realize she’d been humming anything, and probably made it up.

  At the restaurant, things got even weirder. Faye gulped down two huge glasses of water and said nothing to the waiter about Coke, then proceeded to order a New York Strip, “as rare as you can make it. Just wave it over the fire.” I asked if she could order for me too, pretending to take a call on my cell phone, but she appeared to have forgotten that I always order the ribs. I reminded her, then decided to test her further.

  “Do you still think about the cabin?” I asked, fiddling with my phone.

  “Not really,” she replied vacantly. “You?”

  “What do you remember about the last time you were there?”

  A bit of anger flashed in her eyes.

  “You’ve been fucking interrogating me ever since we left,” she snapped. “I feel like I’m on trial all the time.”

  I was caught off guard by her reaction. “I’m sorry” was all I could muster.

  “What do you want from me?” she added. “Really. It was awful. I think about it every goddamn day. Even when I’m asleep. And I don’t wanna talk about it.” She took another big gulp of water. It dribbled down her chin.

  “I’m just worried, is all. You’ve been acting funny.”

  “I’m fine. Worry about yourself.”

  An awkward silence fell. It was Faye’s nature to be very protective of her inner thoughts and feelings. The entire first year of our relationship felt like an epic quest to win her heart. I would leap one wall only to find another beyond it. Dating her was a bit like the old fairy tale about the knight who scaled the highest mountain – except in this story, the damsel had to rescue him. I had nearly given up on my quest for Faye’s love when she at last said those three words, and told me I had earned it.

  For the past several days, however, she was unusually defensive, even for her. It wasn't just her sleep disturbances that were bothering me; lately, nothing about her behavior felt familiar. I tried a different angle, hoping to find a weak spot in her armor.

  “Babe…did anything like this happen when you were at the cabin before?”

  Faye eyed me suspiciously, but she restrained herself from another outburst.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you went there once when you were fourteen, right? Why’d it take you twelve years to go back?”

  She took another few gulps of water.

  “I’ve never been to that cabin before in my life.”

  A steaming plate of barbecued ribs moved in front of my face. The waiter put our food down and asked us if we needed anything, but I was too baffled to respond. He picked up on the mood at the table and immediately left. I watched in awe as Faye wolfed down her steak and chased it with glass after glass of water, never once looking up at me or indicating that she was aware of her surroundings whatsoever. We ate in silence.

  On the walk back to the car, I put my arm around her waist and noticed that all of her muscles were tense. When I pulled her close and said “I love you, Noodle,” Faye smiled dismissively and nodded.

  “You still like it when I call you ‘Noodle’?” I asked, sliding my hand down to her butt. I stuffed my fingers into one of her back pockets and squeezed.

  “Of course,” she replied.

  But I had never called her that before. The only nickname I’d ever given her was “Monkeytoes,” because of the unusual dexterity of her feet. Faye had earned the nickname at the beginning of our relationship when I saw her use a foot to pluck the TV remote from the ground, and deftly channel-surf with her toes. Conversely, I’d earned the shameful moniker “Poptart” when she caught me shoving the chocolate pastries into my mouth under the cover of darkness one night.

  My little tests throughout the evening did not convince me that Faye had been kidnapped by the body snatchers and replaced with an evil duplicate. She still felt like Faye, at least some of the time. It was important for me to try to maintain some measure of skepticism. If I put stock in the idea that a ghost had followed us home from Pale Peak, it might cloud my judgment during an emergency. But I found myself vacillating between logical and spiritual explanations for her disturbing behavior, and recognized that my skepticism eroded a little more each day.

  It felt like a part of Faye was disappearing. It was as if she would go somewhere else, as we might in a dream, leaving her body behind in the process. She wandered far away, and each time she came back, she returned with less and less of herself. Each time she returned, she brought more of someone else back with her – the one who calls out to her from her nightmares. Whoever was whispering to Faye at night, whoever was prowling around outside the cabin and our home, I could now feel him too.

  Faye would notice if I called her “Noodle.” Faye would remember her favorite drink. And Faye would put five across my eyes if I ever grabbed her ass in public.

  When we got home, I headed upstairs to finish writing a paper. Faye cracked open one of the Cokes from her stash in the fridge, then collapsed onto the couch and scrolled through Facebook on her phone. Her weird mood had vanished the moment we’d walked into the house.

  As I worked, Faye’s gentle humming drifted upstairs. The song was hypnotic and familiar; it resonated inside my head and drove me crazy. Eventually I began humming along, and then the words formed on my lips and hung in the air:

  “Soul me aaahhh doooo….soul me aaahhh doooo…Naked souuul…..me aaahhh….dooo.”

  The lecture I was writing turned into gibberish. A warm fuzziness spread around the back of my head and weighed down my eyelids. Sleep dragged me downward into its narcotic abyss, and the last thing I heard was that wicked song, but not from my own mouth or Faye’s. It seemed to come from outside.

  Cackling laughter jerked me from unconsciousness. Warm air blew against my face from the laptop. I’d passed

  out with my head on the desk.

  Something moved behind me – something scraping against carpet, like a big dog tearing across the floor at dinnertime. I spun around in the chair and peered into the darkness of the hallway, but failed to locate the source of the noise. There was a faint ray of light cutting toward the staircase. It came from beneath our bedroom door at the other end of the hall.

  I walked past the stairs and pushed that door open, but Faye was not in bed. The sheets were neat and untouched, so I assumed she was still watching a movie downstairs. As I turned to leave, an inky form clambered up from the staircase and into the hallway, then moved into the spare room where I’d been working. The thing skittered like a human-sized spider, each limb moving independently and jutting from a rigid body.

  I nearly screamed as it darted across the periphery of my vision, but I found the courage to walk after it. The spare room’s light glowed against the blackness of the hall. My hand shook so hard that I couldn’t find the hall light switch. As I desperately ran my fingers up and down the wall, a head emerged from the doorway. From knee-level, it peered up at me sideways with a malicious grin. The harsh light coming from inside that room threw ugly shadows across its face, and it took me a moment to realize what I was looking at.

  It was Faye.

  She was crawling around on the floor, laughing and smiling with her eyes rolled back in her head. She gurgled and hacked a clot of phlegm from her throat, then stuck her tongue out and flicked it around, mouthing words I couldn’t begin to understand.

  “Faye?” I called. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  She loosed a wet cough, then dashed out from the room and zig-zagged her way toward me. Her arms and legs flailed wildly in exaggerated lunges and her head rolled about like a bowl on a stick.

  “Someone’s at the door,” she hissed, laughing as she snaked past me into our bedroom. “Knock-knock!”

  I watched as Faye ducked into the bathroom. The house f
ell eerily silent.

  “Faye,” I said in a stern voice, “wake up.”

  She didn’t respond. The bathroom door sat ajar, allowing a beam of light from the bedroom to penetrate. A single bare foot rested in the glow. Its toes curled and tapped rhythmically against the floor. Slow, heavy breathing rose in volume as I approached the door.

  “Babe?”

  The door squealed as I nudged it with my palm. The beam of light expanded into the dark, illuminating my fiancée. She stood between the toilet and the bathtub, clenching her fists over and over. Her toes wiggled. She swayed gently to and fro. Her eyes were now shut, but she still appeared to see everything in front of her, and watched intently as I stepped into the bathroom with her.

  “Tell them,” she whimpered. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, but I could now see tears dribbling from her eyelashes.

  “Tell them what, Faye?”

  “To leave.”

  Just as the words left her mouth, there came a gentle knock-knock-knock from far off in the house. We’d only been living here for a year, but I knew all of its creaks and squeaks intimately because of how much time I’d spent working from home. There really was someone at the front door.

  Baffled, I looked over my shoulder, then back at Faye. How long had someone been standing out there?

  “There’s a man at the door,” she continued, clenching her jaw as she spoke. Her eyes rolled around behind the lids, indicating that she was dreaming. “He whispered to me while you were upstairs. Been doing it for hours. Wants to know your name. Tell him and he’ll go away.”

  Pure rage blurred my vision. I turned to leave, wanting to punish this son of a bitch once and for all – but then halted in my tracks.

  “Faye,” I said, looking back, “what do you mean, ‘them’? Who else is here?”

  She rolled her head again. The bones in her neck crunched.

  “There’s a woman at the bottom of the stairs.”

  The surge of masculinity that compelled me vanished as quickly as it had struck. I cautiously exited the room and made my way into the hallway, peering over the low wall that overlooked the bottom floor.

  The way the gloom hung in the air – the way the frail moonlight seeped in through curtains like silvery sludge – cast the room in a grid of light and dark patches. Wedged into the far corner between a wall and the bookcase, there stood a dusky figure, trapped in place by a blade of pale light that stabbed through the window. It looked like the slender form of a woman clutching herself in the cold.

  “Who’s there?” I demanded as bravely as I could. “Who’s in my house?”

  I could hardly focus my eyes in the soupy darkness, and not at all when I looked directly at the figure. Adrenaline electrified me now, and I charged to the light switch at the staircase, throwing it on and bull-rushing down into the living room.

  Nausea overwhelmed me as I reached the bottom of the stairs. It was the same feeling that had overcome me at Colin’s house all those years ago, when Carrot the parrot tried to warn me about someone lurking around in the dark. The air thickened and soured, and as I pressed into it, the bile inside me washed up into my throat. The couch and table and stairs looped around me in a dizzying whorl, and I nearly lost my balance. The figure seemed to move toward me, but I struggled to keep sight of it. I withdrew from the living room and stumbled to the hall that led to the front door. A plume of cold air drifted past me, drawing my attention to the entryway.

  There came another knock, this time louder.

  “Hello?” a voice called from beyond the door. It sounded familiar, but in my nauseous daze, I couldn’t place it.

  “Who the fuck are you?” I growled, leaning against the wall to stabilize myself. “What do you want?”

  The man outside knocked again.

  “Who are you?!” I shouted.

  “Hello?” he asked again. The word sounded identical to the first time he said it, as though it were a recording on loop. Nothing in his voice indicated that he’d heard me at all.

  Finally, my legs found the strength to take me the last few steps to the door. As I reached for the knob, Faye’s voice echoed from right behind me.

  “What’s going on, Felix?”

  I whirled around to see Faye, awake and scared, standing at the bottom of the stairs. Her eyes were open, and a disoriented fear emanated from them. She had no idea what she had done minutes earlier.

  I ignored her and yanked the door open, inviting in a rush of crisp night air. There was no one on our walkway, but the faint sound of leaves crunching drew my attention to the little grove across the street. Someone was walking through it, away from our neighborhood. I slammed the door and stormed around the house, flipping on lights and searching for the dark figure. I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in days, or maybe weeks; I couldn’t even remember anymore. The tendrils of insanity were slowly wrapping themselves around my neck, squeezing off the blood to my brain.

  “You’re taking your damn sleeping pills,” I said, glaring at my fiancée. I snatched the bottle off the counter and shoved them into her hands. “Now.”

  Chapter 15

  A few days passed, thankfully without any strange activity at night. The sleeping pills Dr. Farmer prescribed appeared to be working, and allowed both of us to get some desperately needed rest. During the day, Faye’s anti-anxiety medication softened her up quite a bit. She came home from work each evening looking serene, and after dinner, she busied herself sketching and writing in a dream journal she’d made from one of my notebooks.

  Of all the strange and horrible things that had been happening to us over the past few weeks, one thing kept returning to disquiet my mind. Up on Pale Peak, Faye told me she had only visited the cabin once when she was fourteen. But a few days ago, she told me she’d never been there before. I assumed she made the statement out of frustration as a bid to stop me from discussing our trip any further. Faye was trying to process everything that had happened in her own way, and each time I pressed her for answers, it churned the well of those ghastly memories. She just wanted them to settle.

  But I had never known Faye to be a liar. Now, because of her capricious and vacant demeanor, I wasn’t sure anything that came out of her mouth was true. I wasn’t even sure she was still entirely Faye. So, I did the only thing I could do. I called her mom.

  Lynn was as disingenuous a person as I’d ever met. I tended to group people into two groups: one that values politeness over honesty, and the other exactly opposite. Faye’s mother was doubtlessly a member of the former, and would go to great lengths of insincerity to avoid telling the truth – if the truth were inconvenient, hurtful, or scary. Thankfully, she was also the type of person who was addicted to her smartphone, so she called me less than a minute after I sent her a text saying Hey, can we talk?

  “What’s going on?” she demanded, before I could even say hello. “Is Faye alright?”

  I hesitated to tell her much of anything, for fear that it would give her a heart attack. But I realized that if I wanted her to be honest with me, I needed to be honest with her.

  “She’s gotten worse,” I said flatly. “She’s been sleepwalking and saying really weird stuff almost every night. She talks about a man. This is gonna sound crazy, but I swear I’ve seen him.”

  Lynn struggled to conceal the sorrow in her voice. She tried to tell me that we were both exhausted and sleep-deprived, and that the mind can only put up with so much stress before it starts to break.

  “Lynn,” I said, fed up with her evasions, “I really need you to cut the crap. For your daughter’s sake. Is there anything you’re not telling us that we should know?”

  She exhaled hard into the receiver.

  “Well, no, not that I can think of.”

  “Faye can’t get her story straight about how many times she’s been up to the cabin. I thought you might be able to clarify.” My tone came out a bit bossier than intended, but Lynn seemed to respond to direct pressure.

  “What did
she tell you?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I just want to hear it

  from you.”

  She hesitated for just a moment.

  “And don’t lie,” I added, “or else I’ll know.” I had no idea where the words came from, and cringed as soon as they left my mouth.

  “We used to take her up there all the time,” Lynn said, almost an admission. “Took her snowshoeing and stuff. She loved the snow. She was just going into high school last time she went up.”

  I glanced out the kitchen window, trying to see if Faye was home from work yet. Between her whimsical changes in mood and her mother’s penchant for sugar-coating everything, I couldn’t tell which of them was the liar. Perhaps they both were. But why would they deceive me over something so trivial? What were they hiding?

  “Well, thank you,” I said, unwilling to carry on any further. “This has been helpful.”

  Not long after the conversation with Lynn, I received another call. It was Tíwé. He immediately apologized for not contacting me sooner. We spoke briefly about Faye’s condition, and he was disheartened to hear that her behavior had grown more erratic. In the same fashion as the first time we spoke, Tíwé eluded my questions. Instead, he had a few of his own. This time, he made no jokes.

  “Is there any way you guys could make it back out here?” he asked.

  “Are you kidding?” I replied, choking back a string of curses. “There’s no way. That’s an expensive trip, and Faye would sooner chain herself to the door.”

  “What about you?” he persisted. His voice was grave; I could tell he wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. “Could you find a way?”

  I was stunned at the request. Going back to Pale Peak was the last thing on Earth I wanted to do. But the urgency