Joseph Bruchac
Whisper in the Dark
Illustrations by Sally Wern Comport
TO THE NATIVE PEOPLE OF NEW ENGLAND—
WHOSE LIVES AND STORIES
REMAIN ROOTED IN THIS LAND
—J.B.
Contents
Prologue
1 Who’s There?
2 Too Scary
3 Too Much Imagination
4 Scratching
5 Scary City
6 Blood
7 The Deep End
8 Waiting
9 Something Worse
10 Who Is That?
11 Tension
12 Questions
13 Under the Street
14 Knife Hand
15 Good Courage
16 Calling
17 Weakness
18 The Last Call
19 Running
20 The Open Door
21 Searching
22 The Cellarway
23 The Third Door
24 The Other Side
25 I Am Here
26 Neimpaug
27 Explanations
Other Books by Joseph Bruchac
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
I’M WAITING HERE in the dark. It’s the kind of dark that only exists deep underground. It’s so quiet that all I can hear is my own breathing. I’m trying to find the courage, the courage that, as my dad told me, runs in our family.
I’m not afraid of the dark. But I am afraid of what may be in it. I’m afraid of what I might hear. The scratch of sharp claws against stone and then…a whisper.
I usually like scary stories. But not right now. So I’ve been trying not to think of any, but without any luck. One in particular keeps forcing its way into my mind. It’s one of our old Narragansett stories, a legend from long ago. Yet as long ago as it was told, I know now that tale is true. I’ve become part of it, but I’m not sure yet what role I am going to play, heroine or victim.
I lean back against the stone wall of the tunnel and try to regain my composure. I can’t give in to fear. I try to think of something else, but all that comes into my mind is the first time I heard the tale. I’m a little girl. Grama Delia’s voice is telling me how the monster came to be, that one called the Whisperer in the Dark.
It happened this way. There was a person whose mind became twisted. He was a pawwaw, one of our old-time medicine people who could speak with the manittoos, the spirits. A pawwaw is supposed to help people with his power, but this man became selfish. All that one could think of was himself, about gaining more power. So he turned to the dark manittoos. He gave them something. He gave up the daylight, and in return they gave him the power to live and keep living.
Life feeds on life. It is that way. The plant feeds on the soil and the light of the sun. The deer feeds on the plant. The wolf and the Narragansett feed on the flesh of the deer. But we must always remember the sun, look up to it and give thanks for its gift of life. If we do not do this, then we may become twisted. We may begin to believe as that one with the twisted mind believed. We may dream that we can live forever, that we never have to die.
The one with the twisted mind hid from the sun. When the clean light of the sun returned at dawn, he hid in the darkness of night and in the deep caves that go beneath our ancient hills. His fingers turned into claws and his teeth grew long. His hunger was such that he began to hunt other people, cutting their throats with his razor-sharp claws so that he could drink the blood of his victims. All that made him human left him, and he became nothing but hunger. He became a monster.
But it was not only blood that he thirsted for. He fed on the fear of his prey. Darkness grows stronger when there is fear. Few ever saw him, but our people knew that he was there. Those who were given messages in dreams knew about him. They knew that before the twisted-mind monster took its victim, the one it chose would hear a voice. A whisper. A whisper in the dark.
Only when you were his chosen victim did you hear the Whisperer’s voice, that voice as hard and cold as flint. But you didn’t see him, not yet. The old stories say that no one ever sees the Whisperer in the Dark when it first lets you know it’s chosen you as its prey. You just hear its voice that first time. It plays with you, like a cat playing with a mouse, making you more and more terrified. It is only later, perhaps even days later, after you have become scared enough, that it will really come for you with its razor-sharp claws.
Soon, very soon, it is going to come for me.
1
WHO’S THERE?
THE FIRST CALL didn’t really scare me. Not one bit. And why should it? The phone rang and I answered it.
“Hello.”
Silence on the other end.
“Hello,” I said again. “Hel-lo?” I was getting annoyed now. I tapped my numb left hand on the counter. A silence like that could mean that the person who called was hesitating because they had something really, really important to say. Maybe it was that reporter wanting to follow up on her article that had appeared last week about my running. It hadn’t been a bad piece, despite its corny title: DESCENDANT OF CHIEFS WINS BIG MEET. Or maybe it was great news—like that I’d won a prize or something.
Or maybe something awful. Maybe this was the kind of call where the person on the other end was hesitating because they have to tell you bad news. Like someone close to you has just been hurt or even died. I knew what that kind of call was like. That kind of call makes you hold onto the phone as if it was a lifeline, the only thing to keep from falling a long, long way into a deep, deep chasm. But hard as you hold onto it, a part of you is already falling and will never stop falling. I’m sorry is how the person on the other end of the line begins the conversation in that sort of call. Then they say there’s been an accident. And from there on in, it never gets better again.
It wasn’t that kind of call. Whoever was on the other end didn’t say anything, good or bad. They just hung up.
But as soon as I put the phone down and started to walk away from it, it rang again.
“Hello. Hello? HELLO?” The third time I said it, a lot louder than I’d meant to, I was starting to feel both disgusted and dumb.
But I didn’t hang up. By now I just knew what it had to mean. This was one of those dumb telemarketing calls that everyone gets. Any second now I’d hear someone mispronounce Aunt Lyssa’s name and then ask for a donation or try to sell us something we don’t need.
But there was no sales pitch. Just more silence. The kind of silence that told me someone really was there on the other end. I couldn’t hear that person breathing, but I could hear him in another way. I heard him with the sixth sense my dad’s side of the family believes in so strongly. Intuition is what Aunt Lyssa calls it, although I think it’s more than that. It’s a kind of knowing. It told me there was someone on the other end of the line, listening just as intently to me. And this is when I really should have hung up. But I didn’t.
Maybe it was one of my friends playing a dumb joke. Or some bored kid just dialing numbers at random for a goof.
My friend Brittany and I used to do that sort of thing on Internet chat rooms. Her persona was Ingrid, a twenty-one-year-old Swedish model. Me, I only added on five years when I identified myself as Natasha, a mysterious eighteen-year-old Gypsy ballerina from Transylvania.
I say that Brittany and I used to do that. But she and her family moved away last year, all the way out to Seattle. For a while she e-mailed me and called whenever she had a chance. But that was only for the first few months. I guess she found a new best girlfriend pretty quick. Girls like Brittany always do. I hadn’t heard a word from her for months. Still, when the call came, she was
the first person I thought about, so I guess I’d been missing her.
“Brittany?” I said.
The silence on the other end somehow seemed more echoey, like the silence in a cave. It was a little spooky.
“Roger?” I said. “Is that you?”
The lack of response was feeling ominous. Even if it was the middle of the morning, a sunny summer’s day, it seemed as if things were getting darker around me.
I just couldn’t stand it any longer. “Who’s there?” I demanded.
“I am,” a voice whispered. “I’m coming for you.”
It was a voice as cold as ice. I felt as if spider-webs were brushing across my face. I tried to say something, but I couldn’t speak.
Then the line went dead.
2
TOO SCARY
I SAT THERE STARING at the phone. I avoided touching it, as if it was a snake that might bite me. My good hand was holding my left hand so hard that my knuckles were turning white. My heart was pounding as if I’d just finished running the hundred-yard dash. I was breathing hard too. But I didn’t have that satisfied feeling I get after a sprint when I’ve won, like I almost always do. No endorphins. No satisfied feeling. Not at all.
How could six little words hit that way, like a fist punched into my stomach? It wasn’t just those words. It was the way they were spoken. It was the way they kept echoing in my mind. And I wished I had hung up sooner, that I’d never asked the question, that I had quit while there was still nothing but silence in response.
It reminded me of this one time when I was a little kid and my parents and I were in Providence visiting one of my mom’s friends. She lived in an old house like Aunt Lyssa’s, where I’ve stayed ever since I was well enough to leave the hospital and she became my legal guardian. I’ve finally gotten used to my aunt’s place and almost think of it as my own now, even though I still have dreams that I’m back in the house in Charlestown, where I lived with my parents.
That time when I was a little kid, it was like I was in a dream, one of those dreams where you just keep walking farther and farther away from everything that is safe and real. I had drifted upstairs all alone. At the end of the hall was a dark room. I’d never been in that house before, and I had no business snooping around like that. But I couldn’t help myself; I just had to go into that dark room. It was like I was being pulled in there by something, and even though I was scared out of my wits I kept taking one stupid step after another until I reached the big oak door and opened it.
You know how it is in dreams when you find yourself just having to do scary things, even though you know you shouldn’t. You behave just like one of those incredibly dumb kids in scary movies. One of those nincompoops who goes off by herself into the woods to see what it was that made that sound. You know, a sound like an eight-foot-tall homicidal maniac starting his chain saw.
So there I was, in that dark room, and I didn’t know where the light switch was. And just like in a dream, there was no one I knew anywhere nearby, no one who could protect me. But instead of running, I just kept walking slowly with my hands held out. And then I thought I heard a soft creak like a heavy foot and I couldn’t help it. I said those two words you hear in every scary movie.
“Who’s there?”
There was no answer, but my hand found a heavy curtain. I opened it and it let in just enough light to illuminate the wide-shouldered shape looming over me. That was when I screamed.
And what happened next?
Well, what do you think happened? A great big, hairy, old monster reached down and grabbed me up and ate me. I’m kidding. There was nothing more dangerous in that room than a tall old coatrack with a hat and a jacket on a coat hanger. I didn’t scream for that long—maybe only ten or fifteen seconds before my mom and her friend found me and calmed me down. With the lights turned on, nothing in that room looked frightening anymore. We all ended up laughing about it.
The funny thing, though, is that it didn’t cure me. I stayed just as snoopy as I had been before and just as fascinated by monsters. Like the Whisperer in the Dark. And after hearing that icy voice on the phone, all my memories of monster stories came pouring into my head.
The story of the Whisperer is a lot like the other monster stories Grama Delia shared with me. I call her Grama Delia, but she is actually the sister of my dad’s grandmother. In the Narragansett way, she calls me not great-niece but granddaughter. She knows all our old Indian tales about skeletons and giants and huge birds that carry people off to eat them. Scary, but they also teach something. In our old stories, monsters only destroy those who have done lots of bad things or are so foolish that they haven’t learned the lessons of survival.
Grama Delia told me other stories too. Stories about our history and about people like the great sachem Canonchet. In 1675 the English declared war on the Narragansetts, even though most of our people didn’t want to fight. Most took refuge in an island fort deep in the Great Swamp. There was a hidden trail of solid ground and stepping stones under water through a swamp that would suck down anyone who took a wrong step. Only the Narragansetts knew that hidden trail. But there was a frost the night before the English attacked. It turned the swamp into solid ground that the soldiers could cross. There was a terrible massacre. Hundreds of our people died in the Great Swamp battle. Some were men, but even more were women and children.
That wasn’t the end of it, though. Instead of surrendering, Canonchet fought the English. Most of his family had died in the Great Swamp. In fact, it’s been said in some history books that all his family perished there. Of course that’s not true, or I wouldn’t be telling you this story because my family—Grama Delia and my dad and me—are among his descendants. There aren’t many of us, but we have kept the blood of Canonchet alive. He gathered the few Narragansett warriors who were left and they sought revenge. They fought a guerilla war, attacking and destroying the English towns of Warwick and Seekon and Rehobath, and then they came to Providence.
“Right back there by the Providence River,” Grama Delia told me, “is where Roger Williams came walking out to ask them to spare his town. But Canonchet shook his head. ‘I am sorry, friend Roger,’ Canonchet said. ‘Your town too must be destroyed.’ But he allowed Roger Williams and his people safe passage out before they burned nearly all of the houses that made up Providence then.”
A few weeks later, in April, Canonchet was taken captive by the Mohegan allies of the English. His last words were “I like it well. I shall die before my heart is soft or before I have said anything unworthy of myself.” Then they killed him.
Grama Delia told me how, after the death of our great ancestor Canonchet, the war ended. Our people had been broken, and many of those who survived were sold into slavery or ended up as indentured servants to the English. But they remembered the stories of their people and the history of all that happened to them. They passed it down, not in books but through storytelling.
Our Narragansett stories take me way back to the old times. Those stories have been here a lot longer than the houses and cars and streets that most everyone takes for granted here in Providence. Most people today haven’t learned what some of their own old houses know. Houses have memories that go even deeper than their walls. Old houses are connected to the earth that was there before they were built. They see with their windows, just like we do with our eyes. Some people, like Grama Delia, can actually look at the windows of certain old houses and see scenes from the past reflected in them. Just like watching a TV screen.
That is what Grama Delia’s stories have always been like for me. Through the windows of her stories, I could see what was here—and still is here. I could really see the glowing eyes of the cannibal skeleton or the long-nosed, heavy-bodied walking hill when she told me about them.
I usually loved it when she told me our old tales. The scarier the better. They reminded me that even little kids can defeat a monster if they know the right thing to do. No story was ever too scary for me—until she st
arted to tell me about the Whisperer in the Dark.
The night when she began the story, I had insisted that since I was now all of nine years old, I was ready to hear her very scariest tale. Even then I had this fascination for anything about the supernatural, and I was sure I could handle it. But I’d been wrong. I soon started crying, and Mom put her arms around me. That made me feel better, but Grama Delia figured I’d had enough. She tied a knot in the tale.
“There is more to the story,” Grama Delia said. “But it can wait until later. Just remember, little one, nothing that hides in the dark is ever stronger than the sun. Now it’s time for your mother to tuck you in your bed.”
The Whisperer in the Dark? Why was I suddenly thinking about that now? What was wrong with me? All that had happened was that I got a couple of dumb prank phone calls. I was blowing this way out of proportion. Instead of feeling afraid, I started feeling angry. I wasn’t some dumb kid in a movie or one of those heroines who had to wait for a prince to save her. Indian girls in our stories always knew how to take care of themselves.
Then I remembered. Nowadays if you get an anonymous call, all you have to do is dial * 69. It’ll give you the number of your last incoming call so that you can ring back and tell them you know who they are and they had better stop bothering you or you will call the police.
With a superior smile on my face, I reached for the phone. Be logical, calm. Dial *69. That was what I was going to do. But before I could touch it, the phone rang again. And in spite of myself, I screamed.
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