Her Last Whisper

by Karen Robards

  This was her second day back at Wallens Ridge, and she was tired—way too tired for three p.m. on a Tuesday, when before she had routinely worked until 5:30 five days a week and then had more than enough energy left at the end of the day to go for a long run up the wooded mountain trail behind her house. She’d completed reams of other tasks before getting started with this interview, of course, but still the level of exhaustion she was experiencing was abnormal, and she recognized that. The idea of going home early was enormously appealing. But the work she was doing was important. The stakes were high. If she could figure out a way to identify serial killers in the earliest stages of their development, before they started to kill, countless lives would be saved, as would immeasurable amounts of human suffering.

  The suffering she herself had endured being a case in point.

  With a quick, barely there shake of her head for Michael, she refocused on the questions in front of her.

  “Please answer yes or no.” Charlie looked at the chubby-cheeked, harmless-looking man who was watching her expectantly. She felt her stomach tighten. “You prefer meeting in small groups rather than interacting with lots of people.”

  “No,” Spivey answered, so promptly that Charlie wasn’t entirely sure whether he was answering the question or just responding at random, as he sometimes did.

  “Again, answer yes or no: You prefer interacting with lots of people?” She reworded the question in an attempt to verify his answer.

  “I want candy,” he said.

  “You can have candy after you answer,” she told him, and repeated the question.

  “No,” he said.

  She looked at him for a second—he was leaning slightly forward, staring in the general direction of her pocket where the candy bar waited, although she knew he couldn’t see it from where he sat. In her judgment, his attention had wandered, rendering his response unreliable. With an inward sigh, she tapped the end of her pen against the questionnaire without recording a response, recognizing that she had gotten as much out of Spivey as she was going to for the day. It was time to end the interview.

  “Thank you, Mr. Spivey. We’re finished here,” she said.

  “I want candy,” he said again, frowning at her. His round face turned petulant, like that of a giant baby who was about to cry. His eyes batted. He licked his already damp lips.

  “All right.” Repressing a shiver of revulsion, she retrieved the candy bar from her pocket while Michael straightened away from the wall and muttered, “Hallelujah.”

  “You’ve done very well today,” she told Spivey as she broke off a piece and pushed it across the table toward him. “We’ll meet again next—”

  “Please,” the woman’s voice inside her head screamed, the cry so shrill and full of pain that Charlie lost focus.

  She only realized what she had done—that her hand had moved too far across the table, putting it within Spivey’s reach—when Spivey grabbed her wrist and yanked her violently toward him.

  Her heart leaped. As her stomach slammed into the edge of the table, she tried to stop her forward momentum without success.

  “Got you,” Spivey crowed with satisfaction a split second before his teeth crunched down on her fingers and Charlie screamed.

  “Goddamn it,” Michael roared, and dove for Spivey. Charlie felt the brush of a large, solid body hurtling past her, heard the smack of flesh hitting flesh, heard Spivey cry out as his head snapped back. He dropped her hand and she threw herself out of his reach just as Johnson burst through the door.

  “Charlie.” Michael’s voice was no more than a breath of sound as she cradled her wounded hand and fought to regain her composure. Her stomach dropped clear to her toes as she realized that he was nowhere to be seen.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Michael.

  Inside her head, Charlie screamed his name. Over and over. Desperately. Out loud, she urgently whispered it under the cover of the commotion as Spivey was dragged, shouting and fighting, from the room.

  Michael didn’t answer.

  There was nothing from him: no sign, no sound.

  Spookville: had he been hurtled into it again? That was the fear that made her go cold all over.

  But even if Michael had been yanked away to that horrible netherworld, at this moment, in this place, surrounded by people as she was, there was simply nothing Charlie could do.

  The first finger of her right hand was bloody and torn. It burned and throbbed and ached. She was so on edge with mounting anxiety that she barely noticed the pain as she was helped to the infirmary. Nearly every bed in the main ward was filled, and she could feel the eyes of the inmates and guards and orderlies (all of whom were male) following her as she was handed over to Dr. Creason. By the time he had finished treating her, the injury was the least of Charlie’s concerns. She was beside herself with anxiety. Her heart hammered. She felt like she was about to jump out of her skin.

  And not, as Creason clearly assumed, because she’d just been brutally attacked by a serial killer. She didn’t like to think what it said about the screwed-up nature of her existence, but the sad truth was that being attacked by random serial killers was starting to seem like just one more day in her extremely sucky life. At this point, Spivey was of no more importance to her than a mosquito that had bitten her, even if she could still hear him screaming not so far away. Having been strapped down to a stretcher and rushed into a special locked ward just yards from where Charlie now sat on a molded plastic chair in one of the small examination rooms off the main part of the infirmary, Spivey was howling like a werewolf. Clearly the drugs pumping into his veins to sedate him were slow to take effect.

  At any other time, Charlie would have found the sounds he made chilling.

  Right now, though, she was beyond being chilled by anything the corporeal world could throw at her. She had bigger problems. Cosmically bigger problems.

  Michael.

  She was a quivering bundle of nerves because a good twenty minutes had passed without so much as a glimmer from him. No sound, nothing. She knew there was no way he would have left her like that of his own accord. Through the open door of the treatment room she was in, she watched two inmates in blue trustee jumpsuits mopping the slick gray floor of the admitting area. The trustees were inmates nearing the end of their sentences who had earned the provisional trust of the guards, and thus were given more freedom within the prison, as well as more responsible jobs that required minimal supervision. She watched them mop, listened to Spivey’s screaming that all but drowned out other, more ordinary sounds, such as a distant TV and the whir of hospital machinery, and felt the sting of her damaged finger, all without being more than peripherally aware of any of it.

  The thought that Michael had been sucked up into the horror that was Spookville, never to return, was becoming all-consuming. If she wasn’t careful—if, God forbid, it proved to be true—it would tear her apart inside.

  What can I do? The panicked thought fluttered like a trapped bird inside her head. Answer: no clue.

  “Your pulse rate is still elevated. Are you sure you’re all right?” Creason asked, frowning at her. A small, neat man of forty-six, the prison doctor had thinning brown hair and sharp features. The last time she had seen him, he had been rushing—too late—to join her in trying to save Michael’s life. The plastic name tag attached to Creason’s white lab coat reminded her that his first name was Phil, and she made a mental note because she had forgotten it. Charlie had her own lab coat off and the short sleeve of her blue shirt pushed up to her shoulder. Having cleaned and bandaged the wound, Creason had just finished giving her an injection of antibiotics. Smoothing her sleeve down over the newly applied Band-Aid that adorned the injection site on her upper arm, Charlie saw that Creason was regarding her with concern. No surprise there: a human bite was ten times more dangerous than a dog bite, and this one went clear to the bone.

  She hadn’t even noticed that he was checking her pulse until his fingers left her wrist.<
br />
  “I’m fine.” She took a deep breath. Physically, it was true. Psychologically, she was as fragile as blown glass. If Michael couldn’t get back …

  There are things you can do, she told herself fiercely. Even if at the moment she didn’t know exactly what. Michael had forbidden her to try to follow him into Spookville again. And the sad truth was, the prospect of once more entering that plane of horrors was terrifying. Plus, getting there was difficult, and tricky, and there was no guarantee the method she had used the last time would work. Or that she could find him even if it did—

  “Sure?” Creason persisted.

  Charlie nodded. “Yes.”

  The smell of alcohol was sharp and unpleasant. The institutional green concrete-block walls gave the room a cold feel, or maybe the chill that had taken hold of her was because she was suffering from a little bit of delayed shock; she couldn’t be sure. The overhead fluorescent lighting made Creason’s skin look too pale, and glinted off the metal examination table and the oversized steel watch that hung loosely around her wrist, which looked far too slender to support it.

  With good reason: it was Michael’s watch, sized for his powerful forearm. Heavy and warm from her skin, it was inscribed with the Marine Corps motto of Semper fi, and it was the only solid piece of evidence supporting his claim of innocence. Maybe it was a foolish feminine failing (the alliteration she’d tagged it with added to the self-mockery she experienced whenever she forced herself to consider the cold hard facts, which overwhelmingly came down on the side of him being guilty as sin), born of an intense attraction to a really hot (dead) guy, but in her heart of hearts she no longer believed he was a serial killer. The watch had gone a long way toward convincing her of what she’d wanted to believe anyway. When it had shown up after his death, Michael had given it to her, he’d said, because she was the only person left in the world who gave a damn about him.

  As she instinctively touched the smooth metal bracelet, a hard knot formed in her chest.

  Oh, God, where is he? Much as she hated to face it, Spookville was just about the only option. Would he be trapped there? Forever?

  The fear settled like a concrete block in her stomach.

  Creason picked up her injured hand and said, “You want to watch this closely. If it turns red or starts to swell—”

  “I know the drill.” Pulling her hand from his grasp, Charlie decided that, okay, maybe she was sounding a little abrupt. Creason had been both kind and competent, and didn’t deserve to be snapped at. It was just that she was in a hurry to get out of the infirmary, to rush back to the room where Michael had disappeared to see if, perhaps, there was some trace of him there, or some way of making contact. If not—she stopped the thought before it could add to her burgeoning panic, and even managed a quick smile for Creason. “Thanks for taking such good care of me.”

  He smiled back, his hazel eyes warming on her face. “My pleasure. If you’ll stop in tomorrow, I’ll change the bandage and—”

  Phlatt. Just like that, the lights in the infirmary went out in a quick shower of exploding sparks. Thrown, without warning, into sudden pitch darkness, Charlie gave a start of alarm. She grabbed the flimsy plastic arms of her chair as a way of staying oriented in the complete absence of light. A bubble of nervous dread rose in her throat.

  Creason exclaimed, “What on earth?”

  From the other room came a tangled burst of shouts and curses from men she could no longer see, and a shattering shriek she thought must have come from Spivey. A loud clatter of metal in the main room was followed by a yell and a heavy thud, as if something large had fallen.

  A sudden crawling sensation, like a spider running over the back of her neck, made her suck in air. Her shoulders lifted in instinctive self-protection. She looked sharply around. It was too dark: she couldn’t see a thing. Making herself as small as possible, she pressed her spine back against the molded chair.

  Something wicked this way comes … Those were the words that popped unbidden into her head, accompanied by a shiver and the electrifying corollary thought Michael—but the energy she was sensing didn’t feel anything like his.

  This felt—evil.

  Then the lights flickered once and came back on as, Charlie presumed, the emergency backup generator system kicked in.

  Overreacting much to a power outage? she asked herself derisively. But that, she recognized even as the words formed in her mind, was nothing more than pure bravado. Because whatever had just happened, she was pretty sure it wasn’t a simple power outage.

  But with the lights on again, everything seemed perfectly fine.

  Letting out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, allowing her tense shoulders to slowly relax, Charlie unobtrusively sat up straighter—and found herself looking at a floating wisp of what might have passed for heat shimmer if the room hadn’t been cold as ice. The nearly transparent disturbance in the atmosphere drifted until it hovered directly in front of Creason. It hadn’t been present before, and she was just telling herself that it must be some sort of vapor from the malfunctioning light fixture, when it surged toward Creason. Purposefully. Like there was consciousness at work there.

  What …?

  Lips parting with surprise, Charlie was on the verge of calling out a warning. But there was no time—besides, she knew that communicating any of what she was seeing and feeling in terms Creason could grasp would be impossible. All she could do was watch in silent horror as at the last second the energy bunched into a ball that struck Creason right in the middle of his chest and then—dis appeared.

  Not dissipated. Vanished. Inside him.

  She blinked at Creason.

  “Babe, we need to get out of here. Right now,” Michael growled urgently in her ear. His voice was low and guttural, almost unrecognizably so, but still she did recognize it and practically fell out of her chair in reaction. Her heart had been a poor, frozen thing and she hadn’t even realized it until now, as it warmed and throbbed with relief and started to beat properly again. She was so thankful for his presence she barely registered the sense of what he was saying. Instead she turned her head sharply to find him crouched beside her, ephemeral as mist but there.

  Feeling as if a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders, she barely had time to mutter a worried “You’re see-through” at him before he barked, “Leave her alone,” in a deep and fearsome voice as he rose to his full, intimidating height. He wasn’t talking to her, that was for sure. And even as she glanced around in surprise to see who he was talking to, he surged forward to stand protectively in front of her. He seemed to be addressing Creason, who of course couldn’t see him—she was almost sure. But from what she could see of Creason—and she was looking at him through the shimmery translucence that was Michael, so her vision was admittedly a little compromised—he seemed to be staring at Michael. No, glaring at him. Threateningly.

  Which was impossible. Creason couldn’t see Michael.

  Could he?

  Unwillingly, she remembered that vanishing ball of shimmering air.

  Her pulse drummed in her ears as she realized that there was something off about Creason’s face. A distortion of his features, a look in his eyes—

  “Charlie. Out the door,” Michael ordered in that new, fierce voice without looking around. Coupled with her own shiver-inducing reaction to Creason, Michael’s growl had her on her feet and moving toward the door without argument. Whatever was happening—and, though she had no idea what it was, she knew it was something very bad—she was sure that she wanted no part of it.

  That it was dangerous.

  “Um, I’m going back to work now,” she said to Creason, whose eyes rested on her with a chilling expression that was far removed from the doctor’s usual benevolent gaze. Creason didn’t respond, but his mouth twisted in a way that made her chest tighten.

  The question that raised its trembling head was: why would Creason look at her like that?

  “She’s off-limits.” Mic
hael’s warning was addressed to Creason, and from the doctor’s expression Charlie was suddenly positive that he could see and hear Michael. Thinking about what that had to mean made her blood run cold.

  “Go,” Michael barked at her, his eyes never leaving Creason.

  Charlie went. As she did, Creason followed. Slowly. Menacingly. Step by surprisingly awkward step.

  His gait didn’t look right …

  The hair stood up on the back of Charlie’s neck. If Michael hadn’t positioned himself between her and the doctor, she would, she feared, have broken into a run before she reached the door. But some instinct told her that would be a mistake, just like running from a snarling dog was a mistake.

  Do not show fear.

  The last thing she wanted to do was provoke him to attack—

  She broke off in mid-thought, aghast: provoke Creason to attack?

  That’s when she consciously acknowledged what she had sensed almost from the moment the ball of vapor had disappeared into the doctor’s chest: what was looking at her out of his eyes was not Creason.

  That prickle around her hairline? That would be her breaking out in a cold sweat.

  “Keep going.” Michael’s terse directive didn’t allow for argument, not that she had any intention of arguing. Getting as far away from Creason as fast as she could was what her every instinct screamed at her to do. As for Michael, she’d already endangered him enough with her carelessness; she couldn’t put him any further at risk. As see-through as delicately tinted Saran wrap at the moment, he was in no condition to provide her with any physical protection from anything in this world, and she had no way of knowing if he was psychically strong enough to protect her from anything out of it. And if he was to try to materialize again—Her stomach twisted. One of these days, he would go into Spookville and never come back, just as they had been warned. When it happened—and it would happen, sooner or later—she was afraid she would never recover.