Stolen Tongues

by Felix Blackwell

  I knew it was a stupid thing to ask, and not only because the Impostor could be listening. I wondered if I could keep the secret as well as Faye had, or if the creature would force it out of me.

  “Hell if I know,” Becca said, shifting her legs on the couch. She yawned a few times, implying her desire to duck the conversation and go to bed.

  “What do you know?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, whoever Faye’s talking to in her sleep,” I said, not daring to look crazy by describing the Impostor, “he wants to know too.”

  Becca visibly shuddered. She asked me a bit about the man in Faye’s dreams, always expressing a mixture of revulsion and morbid curiosity at my vague answers. I tried several times to turn the questions back on her, but Becca dodged me like a minnow each time. The more she learned about Faye’s behavior, the more troubled she appeared. But it wasn’t fear that I saw in Becca’s eyes; it was denial. It was memory.

  Chapter 36

  That night, I woke up to the sound of a baby crying. Faye was gone.

  A few weeks ago, she had accurately mimicked the voice of a child, so naturally I assumed the noises were coming from her. My skin crawled when the cries turned to shrieks. I imagined my fiancée huddling in the dark somewhere, channeling a demonic infant to lure me toward her.

  I followed the noises to the stairs, and paused halfway down. Shadowy figures sat on the couch in the living room, one of them rambling to the other in whispers. I flicked the stairwell light on, illuminating the forms just enough to recognize them. They were Becca and Faye. In my midnight stupor, I’d completely forgotten our guests.

  “Sorry Felix,” Becca said, “we didn’t mean to wake you. He was crying, so we brought him down here.” After addressing me, she resumed telling a funny story about her husband.

  Faye was seated on the couch with baby Caleb in her arms. She cradled him lovingly and hummed a song to him. Then, she looked up at me. Her eyes were pale white slits, and they burned into me with grim familiarity. When she saw the unease in my expression, she smiled a wicked little grin. Becca was so distracted by her own babbling that she hadn’t noticed Faye was sleepwalking.

  I stood motionless, too freaked out by the scene to do much else. My fiancée began humming that miserable lullaby, the one we’d heard so many times in the dead of night:

  “Soouuul me aaahhh dooo…Soul me ahhhh dooooo…”

  Caleb thrashed and cried as the song repeated. Faye simply held him tighter, raising her voice to drown his out. Becca moved to take him, and at the same time, I approached.

  “Faye?” I called out. “Knock it off, Faye. You’re scaring him.”

  It was only then that I noticed a massive shadow looming over the window behind the two sisters. An enormous man stood there, cloaked in darkness, watching Faye and Caleb with such fascination that he didn’t move a muscle. He looked more like a tree, and therefore my mind had dismissed him as an inanimate object. But as I reached the bottom of the stairs, his head snapped up at me, then he backed away from the window and vanished into the night.

  “Son of a bitch!” I screamed, dashing for my shoes and ripping the front door open. “He’s right there!”

  The thunder in my voice silenced Caleb and wrenched Faye out of her hypnotic state. She glanced around in confusion as I ran outside. A hundred yards away, I caught sight of the colossal figure, barreling away from our house with an animalistic gait. He disappeared, but I could still hear his labored wheezing, and the smack of bare feet against the sidewalk.

  I wasn’t stupid enough to follow him. The bastard wanted to draw me out into the dark, away from the yellow glow of the streetlamps. Instead I investigated the place he’d watched us from, and there I found an oily black puddle that looked like the ones Faye had recently puked up.

  I heard Becca’s terror and outrage before I walked inside. She yelled at Faye while clutching her son protectively, then turned her ire on me as I came through the door. Somehow, I managed to convince her that it was a couple of teenagers messing around with a Halloween costume, and she relented. We all retired for the night. Becca closed and locked her door without so much as a nod as we passed in the hall.

  Faye was angry, too. She refused to speak to me when I brought up the obvious fact: our visitor had found us. We could run away, but no matter where we went, he would always track us down. His presence clung to our relationship like a dreadful shadow, and only by following him out into the dark could we make him leave our home.

  Faye got into bed wearing her iPod earbuds – something she only did when we fought. I scrolled through news articles on my phone, occasionally glancing over and wishing she’d speak to me, but each time she cranked the music a bit louder. Her anger died away to exhaustion, and eventually, sleep.

  Devotion and hopelessness battled inside of me, yanking my mind back and forth across the landscape of my thoughts. I felt ready to die to protect my fiancée, and yet nothing I did kept her safe for long. Unlike the At’an-A’anotogkua, I could not always remain vigilant. I had to work. I had to sleep. The Impostor was intelligent enough to know this. His actions were purposeful. Patient. Calculated. Perhaps he had taken interest in baby Caleb – or perhaps he had merely discovered a new way to drain my energy for yet another night. Something eventually had to give, and it seemed unlikely that the monster who had stalked Faye for decades was going to be the one to quit now. To that end, the hopelessness I felt whispered into my ears: “Give up.”

  Then, another voice whispered.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Faye’s head was turned toward me. One of her earbuds had fallen out, and gentle music seeped from it.

  “About what?” I replied, trying to determine whether she was awake.

  Her chest rose and fell in perfect rhythm. Her lips quivered and eyelids twitched. After a while, she said, “We don’t talk enough.”

  I ran my hand down the length of her arm. Her skin felt cold.

  “Oh, we talk plenty,” I said, stifling a laugh. “You even talk to me when you’re asleep.”

  “You ever think about…when we were little?” she asked in a slurred voice.

  The question puzzled me.

  “When we were little?”

  “I can’t remember,” Faye said. “Hurts to try. Where were you?”

  It took a moment to realize that Faye wasn’t talking to me. Instead, she was having a conversation with her sister. I imagined Becca in the bedroom down the hall, fast asleep, carrying on the other half of the conversation in her dreams. The thought sent chills skittering across my body.

  “Don’t tell Felix,” she whispered. “I didn’t tell him. Didn’t…wanna scare him.”

  “Didn’t tell him what?” I asked, doing my best impression of Becca.

  Faye’s hand raised up off the bed and pointed at the door. It wagged a bit, then flopped back down.

  “He’s in the stains,” she said, lowering her voice further, as if to tell her deepest secret. “He gets up and

  walks around at night.”

  The floorboards groaned beyond our bedroom door. Someone was on the staircase. Faye’s head shot toward the source of the noise, then fell back down on the pillow.

  “I feel like I’m starting to remember,” she whispered. “Little bits.”

  “Faye…what do you remember?” I asked, not taking my eyes off the door. In that moment I wished I still had Greg’s revolver.

  Faye smiled and stretched her arms up over her head, issuing a pleasurable sigh. Her eyes never opened.

  “He needs me…” she breathed.

  Caleb’s cries erupted from down the hall.

  “…But he’s a little corpse now,” she added, then rolled over into a deeper sleep.

  Chapter 37

  Sleep never found me that night, but neither did our visitor. Caleb calmed down to the gentle singing of his mother, and the noises downstairs faded away. I felt like a zombie in the morning, but at least it was the weekend and I didn’t hav
e to stare at a computer screen.

  Faye sat with Caleb upstairs, giggling and babbling along with him, while I made breakfast in the kitchen. Becca sat at the table behind me, watching everything I did in silence. Her mood was markedly worse; she seemed irritated by every little noise Faye made upstairs.

  “Look,” I said, cracking a few eggs into a pan, “I hope I didn’t upset you with all the questions…”

  “It’s not you,” she replied. “Trust me.”

  Instead of pressuring her to talk, I adopted the opposite strategy and remained quiet. After a few moments, Becca unleashed a torrent of angry mumbles in my direction. She complained about the fact that Faye rarely called her, but wanted a closer relationship now that Caleb was around. She admitted to being rough on her little sister, but explained that it was years ago, decades even, and Faye was harboring a ridiculous grudge over something neither of them could remember anymore.

  “She’s got a problem letting things go,” Becca said. “If she’s mad at someone, she’s mad for weeks. If she’s hurt, she hurts for years.”

  “I don’t think she’s mad, Becca,” I said. “I think she’s hurt…and it’s exacerbating her sleep disorder. Being around Caleb seems to bring it out of her, for whatever reason.”

  “She’s being selfish,” Becca snapped. “She has nothing to be hurt about. Nothing happened to her.”

  Before I could reply, Becca pushed herself off the chair and headed upstairs to check on her son.

  The three of us eventually gathered around the table. Caleb sat next to me in a little high chair that Faye had picked up. The two sisters ate in silence, barely making eye contact, and responding to anything I said with one-word answers. The tension was so high that it felt like static in the air, and Caleb seemed to pick up on it too. He glanced at his mom and aunt with quiet curiosity, then gazed up at me as if to say, “What have you done?”

  Becca somehow managed to convince Faye to go shopping, probably with the intention of getting a bit of alone time with her. I spent the day learning the basics of fatherhood, scrambling to interpret Caleb’s hundred different noises and checking his breathing every twenty minutes while he slept. I even tried my hand at changing a diaper – and nearly added a vomit stain of my own to our poor, mangled carpet.

  When the two sisters finally returned home, Faye looked pale and exhausted, almost sickly, and trudged upstairs to bed. Becca refused to fill me in on what they had talked about, and instead retired with Caleb, leaving me downstairs to watch an X-Files marathon by myself.

  Around 10 P.M., an ear-splitting noise sent me nearly flying off the couch. A cacophony of shrieking and thrashing boomed from the upper floor. The image of Faye being thrown around by the creature rushed through my mind. I raced upstairs to find my fiancée in her underwear, screaming and pummeling the guest bedroom door with her fists. She rambled incoherently and slammed her head against the door, then tried to rip the knob off with her hands. Becca and Caleb cried out in fear behind it, probably just as confused and horrified as I was.

  I bear-hugged Faye and lifted her off her feet, pulling her back. She shoved me with unnatural strength, sending both of us careening to the floor where she wrestled free of my grasp. Once Faye had the advantage, she mounted me and jammed her face against my neck, trying to bite me. I managed to hold her back by the throat, but her rage made me weak with fear.

  “I’ll put you up in the trees,” she growled. Drool ran down her mouth onto my hand. She landed a tiger-palm to my crotch, stunning me, and lunged once more with bared teeth. Just before she reached my face, however, she collapsed. The dark presence that commanded Faye’s body had suddenly vacated it.

  She looked around the dim hallway, regaining consciousness. Becca poked her head out from behind the door, and as Faye beheld our terrified expressions, she burst into tears and retreated into our bedroom.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whimpered, shaking visibly as she moved. “I’m so sorry, you guys. I’m sick. I’m really sick. I want to die.”

  The lock clicked. I looked to Becca for answers, but she scowled at me and slammed the door in my face.

  I approached the master bedroom, at a loss for what to say, but wanting to offer some sort of consolation. We were both at the end of our rope.

  “Faye? What’s going on? Are you okay?”

  “Go away,” she called out in a shaky voice. “You’re not safe.”

  “I’m… I’m gonna call Nathan,” I said. “He’ll know what to do.”

  I pulled out my phone and headed downstairs. As I passed the stain on the wall, it looked bigger than before.

  Chapter 38

  Nathan answered his phone as I stepped into the garage. His voice was dull and dreary, as if he’d been awake for hours, contemplating some terrible thought.

  “Tell me about the child, Felix.”

  The question caught me off guard.

  “How’d you know?”

  “I had a nightmare,” he replied. “I went to check on the cabin, and ever since then, I’ve been seeing a child in my dreams. Always different ages…but I know it’s the same person. I figured he’s got something to do with you guys.”

  Nathan told me that he and a group of friends from his community went back up the mountain to investigate the circumstances of his father’s death. They camped for a few nights, and even stayed in the woods next to the cabin. Nathan heard Tíwé’s voice calling for help, crying and speaking in their native language. After learning about my experiences in the weeks prior, he was convinced that this was not his father, but something else trying to lure him into the woods.

  They also heard children weeping in the forest. One of Nathan’s friends left the tents to take a piss, and when he returned, he claimed to have seen a young boy with grayish skin. The child stood a few yards out, facing away, staring up at something in the trees. His body was stiff and corpse-like, propped high up on the balls of his feet, and the calves were shredded and bloody. The sight of the boy frightened Nathan’s friend so deeply that he returned to the camp and grabbed his belongings. He wanted to hike back down the mountain – in the dark, in the cold, by himself. Nathan and the others tried to stop him, but he insisted. The man never made it back to Nathan’s community.

  “I hope you find him,” I said, already convinced that he’d met a terrible fate. “Faye’s sister is here now. Her son Caleb is with her. He’s only a few months old, and he’s never been to the cabin. I don’t know if it’s him you’re dreaming of, but Faye and I heard children on the mountain too.”

  “Strange,” Nathan replied. “Maybe it’s a different kid. And there’s something else. I spoke with one of the elders of our community – one of the few who would speak to my father about your situation.”

  “Tell me everything,” I said.

  “The one who followed you home,” Nathan said, “he has killed many people with ease. So why is he putting such great effort into tormenting both of you? Clearly, there is something he wants, and he cannot get it from Faye if she’s dead.”

  “I’ve asked myself a million times,” I snapped. “Neither of us knows. It’s something about the number five. It doesn’t make sense that he can go into her mind like he does, and yet he still can’t figure out what it means.”

  Nathan’s voice lit up, as if he’d solved an ancient math problem.

  “But what if the At’an-A’anotogkua can’t read minds, Felix?” he said. “What if he can only read dreams?”

  The notion explained much about Faye, and about our experiences at the cabin. When the creature had Faye’s ring, he seemed to be able to enter her body for brief periods while she was awake, causing her to behave strangely. But now, he appeared to infiltrate Faye’s mind only while she was unconscious, taking advantage of her sleep disorder and commandeering her body. As before, his power over her was always tenuous. Always fading. To control her permanently, he would need deeper access.

  At the cabin, the creature mimicked Faye’s grandfather Alfred, and
my mother. Perhaps there wasn’t any particular reason he had selected those specific people. Perhaps we’d merely dreamed of them, so that was what he used. The Impostor had also mimicked Greg’s buddies from the army – the ones he’d seen in his nightmares. The ones that made him wake up screaming over and over. And the cabin’s former owner, Jennifer, swore she’d heard her daughter’s voice in the woods at night. Who wouldn’t have dreams of her own child after such a terrible loss?

  “Son of a bitch learns about his kills through their nightmares,” I said. “That’s why he’s always standing outside the windows. He’s not watching us sleep. He’s listening.”

  “Sometimes when my dad and I went hunting,” Nathan added, “we’d use calls to lure the animals. If you do it right, they come to you.”

  All the voices we’d heard in the forest, all the tongues the Impostor spoke with – they all belonged to other victims, and the people in their dreams. That wretched thing wandered around in the dark, sharpening his skills and practicing his speech. And now, he had perfected his impressions of the people Faye loved. He was getting closer to the information he so desperately sought. He was going to discover what makes five.

  “Whatever that number means,” I said, drawing it on the wall with my finger, “Faye isn’t dreaming about it. She only dreams of the number itself.”

  Nathan paused to consider my words. My finger dragged across the drywall, tracing the number backwards and forwards. It was almost soothing to do so.

  “I think that’s what makes Faye so fascinating to this being,” Nathan said at last. “Her mind is mysterious to him. She’s a puzzle…a challenge. And most of all, when he speaks to her through her dreams, she speaks back. I guess you could say he has a very dark fixation on her…maybe even love. A putrid form of it, anyway.”

  My hand clenched into a fist. What Nathan said was true. Faye mirrored the Impostor’s darkness; when he gazed into her, he didn’t find all the hopes and dreams and fears he could see in others. Instead, he saw a pitch-black well – and he craved to know what was hidden at the bottom. ‘5’ was simply the candle he needed to look inside.