Whisper in the Dark

by Joseph Bruchac

  “He probably said that he was a policeman or something,” I had said, “and that I was at home waiting for her.”

  That was all it had taken to convince Mr. Patel that a call to the authorities was of the utmost importance. It had also convinced him to break every speed limit in Providence. Even though he still diligently used his turn signals, he made each of the corners on two squealing tires, and the powerful engine of his taxi roared as he pressed the accelerator to the floor each time there was a straightaway. He even went around the barriers across the road at the construction site. The workmen had gone home early for the day because of the bad weather. I remembered hearing a story about how no one ever uses dynamite on a day when lightning might strike and set off a catastrophic blast. There was a single strip of undamaged road left that we sped down, past the idle equipment, including a truck marked EXPLOSIVES parked to one side, well away from the place where they had been blasting.

  A quick turn, properly signaled, and we were back on the main road again. Aunt Lyssa’s house was only a little ways away now. Another taxi was coming down the street toward us. Had it just dropped my aunt at the house? I had my hand on the door handle. Roger was holding my other elbow, which was probably a good idea. I was so keyed up that I was ready to open the door and jump out, even though we were still a block away.

  But as soon as we screeched to a stop, the most amazing thing happened. Mr. Patel threw the cab into park and turned it off in one motion, did what looked like a forward roll across the front seat, and went right through the passenger side window to land on his feet on the sidewalk outside the cab. As a result he was ahead of us, his arms outstretched to hold us back as Roger and I piled out of the cab.

  “We should wait for the police,” Mr. Patel said, keeping himself planted firmly in front of us.

  “No,” I said. “No!” I tried to push past Mr. Patel, and struggled to pull my elbow out of Roger’s firm grasp.

  He nodded his head, seeing how frantic I was.

  “All right,” he said. “But we shall go together, carefully.”

  We approached the front door. Part of my mind was registering things that were a surprise to me. Mr. Patel wasn’t just a taxi driver. He owned the cab company. And he’d actually gotten out of his cab. Now that I saw him fully on his feet, I was amazed at how tall he was, almost big enough to be a basketball player.

  But what pushed all of that into the back of my mind was what I saw as the three of us went up the steps. The front door was slightly ajar, as if someone in a big hurry had just gone inside. My aunt’s key ring was hanging from the door, her key still in the lock.

  “Aunt Lyssa,” I yelled. “Aunt Lyssa, get out of there!”

  21

  SEARCHING

  REMEMBER WHAT I said about the way Roger and I criticize the way people act in certain movies? You know, those scenes they seem to have in every single scary film. Like the one where the kids go right in through that open door, when you just know a monster is waiting for them. You know, just so the werewolf or vampire or brain-sucking mutant from outer space can pick them off at its leisure one by one. And everybody goes: “Yeah.”

  “Great idea.”

  “Cool.”

  “Let’s all wander off and get massacred.”

  Guess what we did as soon as the three of us saw that open door? Naturally we went right inside and split up, me still loudly calling my aunt’s name. A convenient way to let whatever was lying in wait know that its next dinner course had arrived.

  “AUNT LYSSA!” I shouted.

  There was no answer. I should add that in her old house, that isn’t unusual. For someone to yell and no one to answer, I mean. The walls are thick, and the way the carpeted hallways turn corners seems to deaden the sound. You can’t hear anyone calling to you even if they’re only two rooms or a floor away. It’s great to be able to play your music as loud as you want and know that no one is going to tell you to turn it down because no one can hear it except you. But it is not so great when you are trying to find someone. You’d be amazed at how often on a normal day Aunt Lyssa and I find ourselves playing involuntary hide-and-seek with each other as we go from room to room calling each other’s names until we finally meet up more or less by accident.

  So what did I do then when there was no answer? Of course, I acted out scary movie cliche number two. I ran upstairs on my own. My feet thumped on the stairs, their beat only a little louder and more frantic than my heart. As soon as I reached the top, I called my aunt’s name again. There was still no answer. And unlike that famous scene in Psycho, no homicidal maniac with a big, long knife jumped out to stab me in the heart.

  But as I started to approach the closed door to my aunt’s room, a long-fingered hand suddenly grasped me hard by the elbow.

  “Maddy, don’t run off like that,” Roger said.

  Mr. Patel was close behind him. They had come up the stairs after me. The two of them apparently were unwilling to follow the “Let’s split up and get gruesomely killed one at a time” scenario.

  I took a deep breath. I needed to get a grip on myself and start acting like I still had some sense. I closed my eyes for a moment, listening for the memory of my dad’s voice, thinking what he would say to me right now.

  Be calm, Nittaunis. Maumaneeteantass. Be of good courage.

  “You’re right,” I said.

  “We will stay together now,” Mr. Patel said, looking down over Roger’s shoulder at me. “Yes?”

  I nodded my agreement. Then, together, the three of us thoroughly checked out each of the five upstairs rooms. We looked behind the doors, in the closets, under the beds, and in the stand-up wardrobes. We even peered up at the ceilings, but all we saw hanging there were a few small spider-webs, no Dracula-fanged black-robed figures waiting to fall on us from above.

  Together we went back down the stairs. There was still no sound of approaching police sirens. I looked at the hall clock. It seemed as if we had been looking for my aunt for hours, but our search had taken us no more than five minutes so far. We made a semicircle through the house, walking through the entranceway, the sitting room, the front dining room, the small back porch, the closet under the stairs. Just as before, we found nothing. No sign of Aunt Lyssa, not even her purse.

  But there was one more place to look. The one place I had unconsciously saved until last because I didn’t want it to be the place where we had to go. As we entered the kitchen, I opened the cupboard and pulled out the largest flashlight, an electric lantern that was as big as a club.

  “Here,” I said, handing it to Mr. Patel. Then I gave Roger the next-largest one. I didn’t take a flashlight myself, even though there were two left. I guess it was a mistake on my part, considering what happened later. But if you had only one good hand like I do, you might have hesitated, too, about not keeping it free.

  “There’s one more place to look,” I said.

  Then I led them around the corner to the cellar door.

  As soon as I looked at it, I felt my knees grow weak. It was unlocked.

  22

  THE CELLARWAY

  THE HEAVY CELLAR door creaked on its ancient hinges as Mr. Patel pulled it open.

  I’ve always been freaked out by cellars.

  With all the reading and movie watching that Roger and I do, I know some of the theories about why this is. Roger’s mom even incorporates it into some of her lectures, especially when she is talking about Providence’s own first master of horror, Edgar Allan Poe. The “motif of premature burial” is how she puts it. When you descend into a cellar or a cave, you are “presaging your own interment,” walking down into your own grave before you are dead. The worst thing Poe could think of happening to any of the characters in his stories was to be walled in or buried alive. Like that guy who is walled into his own wine cellar in “The Cask of Amontillado” or Ligaea in her tomb. Poe was so scared of being buried alive himself that he even designed ways to put bells and speaking tubes into his own casket.


  Back in Poe’s time, they didn’t embalm people, but just buried them really quick before they started to smell bad. Sometimes they did make mistakes and put people into the ground when they had just gone into a coma or something. Then they would wake up six feet underground in a coffin. That is also, according to Roger’s mom and some of the stuff we’ve read, one of the sources of the whole vampire myth. People would dig up a coffin and find the dead body in it still sort of fresh, with blood on its hands and a contorted, scary face. But that dead person didn’t look like that because he or she was a bloodsucking monster. It was just because that unlucky person had been buried alive, came to, and then tried to claw out before finally dying of hunger and thirst and suffocation.

  I admit that being buried alive is grim. But premature burial is not one of my phobias. I’m just plain scared of what might be down there. It’s not only H. P. Lovecraft who thought that underground tunnels were used by terrible creatures hungry for human flesh. Lots of our Indian legends, like the one about the Whisperer, tell about monsters using such tunnels, about caves where horrifying and evil creatures are kept locked away so they cannot harm the world.

  “There’s a light switch to the right just inside the door,” I said to Mr. Patel.

  My words came out as something between a croak and a whisper. I was so scared that I was trembling, and I was clutching Roger’s hand just about hard enough to break his fingers.

  Mr. Patel leaned forward, his fingertips brushing the rough wood of the stairwell wall. I tensed up, sure that at any second there would be a scream and then something—a bony hand, a bloody claw—would snatch him down into the darkness. Instead there came the satisfying sound of the switch being clicked and the sudden glow of light from the single forty-watt bulb at the bottom of the stairs. It was twenty steps away, but it looked as far off as the tape across the track at the end of a hundred-yard dash. And it was so dim. A bulb that small in a cellar makes more shadows than it does light.

  Mr. Patel peered down into the semi-darkness.

  “We should wait for the police,” he said in a way that made his words half statement and half question.

  Roger and I looked over his shoulder down to the bottom of the stairs.

  “No,” I said in an urgent voice, letting go of Roger’s hand and reaching out to tug Mr. Patel’s sleeve. “We have to go down now. Do you see it?”

  There on the bottom step, lying half open on its side, was Aunt Lyssa’s purse.

  23

  THE THIRD DOOR

  I MUST HAVE slipped under Mr. Patel’s outstretched arm, because I found myself sitting on the bottom step holding Aunt Lyssa’s purse between my knees while I searched through its contents: her wallet, her clip-on library ID badge, her credit card holder, her brush, her makeup case, her notebook with three pens attached to it by a rubber band wrapped tightly around it. Everything was there except for the one thing I was looking for.

  Roger was next to me, sweeping the strong beam of the flashlight into every dark corner of the cellar, behind the furnace, up to the rafters. His light seemed as reluctant to penetrate the dark corners of the cellar as I was.

  “It’s not here,” I whispered.

  “What’s not there?” he whispered back.

  Whispered. A dark old cellar can have that effect on you, lowering your voice to a whisper and your anxiety to the brink of a scream.

  “Maddy.” Mr. Patel’s voice was not a whisper, but it was much softer and more concentrated than I had ever heard it sound before.

  “What?” I answered.

  “These doors,” he said, playing his torch beam over the three oak doors set into the stone walls. “They are going where?”

  He walked over to the door to the right, looked back at me, and grasped the handle.

  “Root cellar,” I whispered.

  Mr. Patel pulled the door open and shone the flashlight inside. Nothing. It was empty as the Count of Monte Cristo’s cell after he tunneled his way out.

  Mr. Patel stepped back and moved to the second door.

  “And this?”

  “Where they used to store the coal.” My voice was getting softer now. I wanted to turn and run away, run back up the stairs to safety, even though another voice was screaming in my head that we had to move forward, that we had to find Aunt Lyssa before it was too late.

  Mr. Patel swung back the door to the coal storage room. Aside from the fossil glitter of a few chunks of coal, the beam of his light disclosed nothing more than the dusty walls and floor.

  There was only one door left. The one I’d been dreading.

  “It’s locked,” I said, my whisper so small and hoarse that I must have sounded like a baby raven. “We don’t even have a key for it.”

  Mr. Patel’s long fingers wrapped around the handle as his thumb pressed the latch. With a rusty click, the latch moved down. The ancient hinges creaked loudly as Mr. Patel began to pull open that final, unlocked door.

  24

  THE OTHER SIDE

  KUPHASH.

  That is the Narragansett word to tell someone to shut the door. It was the one word that drowned out all the others echoing in my head. Kuphash. Shut the door. Shut it before we see what is waiting for us on the other side.

  I thought I had been tense before, but now my whole body was like a violin string overtightened to the point where it is about to snap. I was sure that as soon as that door opened something would leap out at us. Mr. Patel may have thought the same thing because he held that heavy flashlight like a club, ready to strike a blow with it. Roger was attempting to position himself in front of me, trying to protect me from who knows what—while my old stubborness, despite my fear, was reasserting itself as I tried to push him out of my way.

  “Move,” I hissed.

  “Wait,” Roger whispered back, still trying to play the part of a defensive wall.

  “Be quiet.”

  Mr. Patel’s voice was so calm, yet so urgent that Roger and I both stopped. The strong beam of Mr. Patel’s flashlight revealed a narrow, low-ceilinged, dirt-floored passageway, slanting down, carved out of the living stone. We saw no dark, cloaked figure waiting to leap out at us. But we did see marks on the floor—what appeared to be the heel marks of someone being dragged backward. Those drag marks were clearly visible until the passageway turned suddenly to the side some fifty feet ahead.

  “Listen.”

  Roger and I listened. We heard a faint sound, a scraping noise. And as the three of us stood there, we also heard something else from behind us and up the stairs, where we had left open the front and cellar doors. Was it the faint sound of sirens coming down the street toward Aunt Lyssa’s house?

  “Maddy,” Mr. Patel said, “you must go upstairs and tell the police we are down here. Take your friend with you.”

  “You’re going down there after her, aren’t you?” I said.

  “If I do not do so, it may be too late, you see,” Mr. Patel said.

  “I see,” I said back in my most stubborn voice. “And I’m going with you.”

  “Me too,” Roger said. I felt like either hitting him or hugging him when he said it.

  Mr. Patel could see there was no way to argue with us now. “Just stay behind me,” he said, moving down the tunnel.

  It was hardly necessary for him to say that. The passage was too narrow for us to get past him. Roger and I followed, moving sort of sideways so that we were next to each other, Mr. Patel’s broad back cutting off all but the faintest glimmer of light from the big flashlight that he held in front of himself. For a while the light from the cellar bulb cast a faint gleam down the passage behind us, then we went around the corner and all that was behind us was darkness.

  We kept going, staying as close together as possible. Whenever I glanced back, all I could see was the ancient night of the underground earth. What if we had gone past a secret opening in the wall? What if something was following us now? I wished I had brought another flashlight so that I could see, even though I
was afraid that shining a light back behind us might show that we were, indeed, being followed by a legion of horrors. An active imagination is not your best friend when you are making your way through an ancient tunnel in the earth that smells of mold and moist decay.

  If this tunnel had been used by the Underground Railroad, then it must have scared the life out of the slaves who were taken through it. They must have truly been desperate for freedom to go down into the earth like this almost two centuries ago, their way lit not by a powerful flashlight, but by the light of candles or pine-knot torches. Two centuries ago? This tunnel felt much older than that. Too much older. I found myself wondering just how long ago it had been carved through the stone and who had really made it. And when my ready imagination suggested an answer, I shivered and tried not to think of it.

  Suddenly the tunnel widened. The three of us found ourselves standing side by side. The roof of the passageway rose above us, and there was the echoing feel of dark space around us. There were age-blackened, thick wooden beams here, used to prop up the high ceiling. I touched one with my hand, feeling the rough wood, so far from the sun that once made it the strong, tall trunk of a tree. You could see why such beams were needed. This place seemed much more unstable than the rock-walled passageway we’d just emerged from. There were small piles of rubble here and there, some that seemed to have recently fallen from the roof. I wondered if we were under one of the roads that had been built long after this tunnel was gouged out. Was it the road vibrations from heavy trucks that had made those piles of stones fall? What was it like down here when the construction workers on that street near our house set off one of their blasts? Would these old beams succeed in holding this tunnel from collapse for another century? For another year? Another hour?

  Mr. Patel held the light of his torch to the floor.