Whisper in the Dark

by Joseph Bruchac

  “Look here,” he said, leaning close.

  The drag marks were gone, as if whoever had been dragged had either started to walk or been picked up. Something metal glittered on the floor over to the side. Neither Roger nor Mr. Patel saw it, but I bent down and grabbed it up, knowing what it was. It was the one thing that had been missing from the handbag. There was no doubt now. Aunt Lyssa had been brought this way.

  “Mr. Patel,” I whispered.

  “Wait,” he said, “I hear something.”

  He swung the torch in an upward arc, then angled it down. There, ten feet in front of us, the floor of the cave fell away into a pit. I couldn’t tell how deep it was, but I didn’t want to look. Mr. Patel lifted the light and moved it slowly to the left.

  I’m here.

  Did I hear those words spoken in a harsh whisper or just imagine them? The hair stood up on the back of my neck.

  I’m here.

  Have you ever walked into a dark room and suddenly felt the sticky strands of an unseen spider’s web across your face? Well, that is just how those words, words that only I seemed able to hear, felt to me. I felt like a little fly, its futile wings becoming more entangled no matter how hard it struggles, waiting for a hungry predator’s poison-dripping pincers to bite down and suck out its life.

  “Mr. Patel,” I said in my softest voice.

  Mr. Patel didn’t answer. His attention was riveted on his flashlight beam. It had picked out something in the softer earth farther along the cave floor. Something that looked like the indistinct tracks of large, shuffling feet.

  “He’s here,” I said, turning to Roger and poking him with my elbow. “Roger, I know he’s here.”

  I clutched the little cylinder I’d picked up so hard that I thought the metal would crush like a soda can.

  Mr. Patel held up his left hand, still slowly moving the light of the flashlight farther along the wall. “Hush, hush,” he said. “There.”

  The beam of light picked out the shape of something creeping across the floor. Then, as it moved farther into the light, that something became a human hand. The moving torch found an arm connected to that hand, a shoulder, and then the shape of a person crawling on the dirt floor of the cave, a person who made a soft moaning sound as she weakly tried to pull herself forward. My heart leaped in my chest.

  “Aunt Lyssa!”

  The three of us reached her at the same time. She was only half conscious. As Mr. Patel helped her sit up, Roger put down his own flashlight and pulled out his handkerchief to wipe the dirt from her face. I was so stiff with shock that all I could do was stare down at her.

  “Aunt Lyssa,” I said, “Aunt Lyssa.”

  I couldn’t think of anything else to say, just those two words. I’d been so certain she was dead that it was just as much a surprise finding her alive. She opened her eyes and looked up at me.

  “Madeline,” she said weakly, a little smile coming over her face, her eyes squinting from the light of the torch. “Where am I?”

  I didn’t know how to answer her. It was as if I suddenly had too many words to say, but none of them seemed adequate. I mean, how do you tell a grown-up used to the common-sense, everyday world that they’ve just been knocked unconscious and then dragged underground by a midnight monster out of some Indian legend who wants to drink their niece’s blood? I took a deep breath, knowing that I had to try.

  But I never got the chance.

  “Oh God!” Aunt Lyssa said, pushing herself back against the wall of the cave and pointing behind us. Her voice was hoarse with terror. “Oh my God! What’s that?”

  25

  I AM HERE

  THE THREE OF us turned as one. A shadow was lifting from the mouth of another tunnel leading off this main gallery. It rose higher and higher and seemed to be gathering darkness around it. Even the beam of Mr. Patel’s light was absorbed by that cloak of darkness as the shadow gathered and deepened and loomed over us, its two red eyes glistening.

  Strangely, even though my throat was too tight to shout or speak, I wasn’t frozen by fear. I don’t mean I wasn’t afraid. It was just that the fear of what might happen had been more paralyzing than this moment when all my worst nightmares seemed about to come true. Perhaps it was because I heard my father’s voice in my head. I heard it clearer than ever since the time of the accident.

  Nittaunis, Maumaneeteantass. “My daughter, be of good courage.”

  “Maddy. Get back, honey!”

  It was Aunt Lyssa. She was trying to get between me and whatever it was that was in front of us. She couldn’t pull me back. I couldn’t move. All I could do was stare at what was there before me. It was every bad dream I’d ever had turned real. It was as real as darkness itself, and I could feel its thirst for my blood. And there was no way to escape. The wall was to one side of us and that black hole in the floor, that pit, was right behind us now because we’d turned. We were truly trapped. But Aunt Lyssa didn’t care about that. She didn’t know it was the Whisperer in the Dark, a monster far stronger than all of us. But even if she had known, it wouldn’t have mattered. Her own fear was far less than her desire to try to protect me.

  But if she’d wanted to get in front of me, she would have had to wait in line. Roger and Mr. Patel were already there, both of them holding me back. As the four of us each foolishly tried to be the one most in danger from the awful creature that faced us, I found myself wanting to laugh and cry at the same time. And this small hope formed itself in my thoughts, that perhaps our courage and our mutual desire to protect one another was strong enough to defeat this monster.

  But that thought died as quickly as a flame blown out by a cold gust of wind when the Whisperer spoke.

  “Foools.”

  Its voice was still a whisper, but so loud, so rasping that it hurt our ears as it filled the dark cave and echoed through its passages. I’ll never forget that voice, its mocking, cold power, its absolute hatred for everything that life and love and light mean. All that and more was expressed in that one word it spoke, including a terrible hunger that could never be satisfied.

  “You know who I am.”

  The Whisperer in the Dark spoke slowly, moving a little closer to us with each word, gliding as if it was flowing, not walking. Aside from those flame-red eyes, its face was still hidden, wrapped in its cowl of darkness, but I could imagine the ironic smile on its grim lips. It came to me then that the Whisperer in the Dark was playing with us the way a cat plays with a mouse. I’d once asked my mother why a cat does that, why it doesn’t just eat its prey once it has been caught.

  “It enjoys it too much to end it quickly,” my mother said. “It likes the taste of fear.”

  Threatening us, tasting our fear, that was its desire almost as much as its intention to take our lives. It was playing, just as it had played with me since that first telephone call, using its power of fear to send its voice not just through the air but through the telephone lines. It could take us at any moment, but instead it held back, held back like a movie monster gloating over its victim. And perhaps that desire to deepen our fear was its weakness if it gave us time to think, to act in some way. But what way?

  The darkness in front of us raised an arm. At the end of it, something glittered in the beam of Mr. Patel’s flashlight—a handful of blades held above us like a scythe.

  Suddenly Mr. Patel moved, more quickly than I have ever seen anyone move before.

  “AH-YAH,” he shouted, hurling himself at that shape, actually striking it and pushing it back. He raised the flashlight like a club to strike, but that iron-clawed fist swung back too fast, knocking the flashlight from his grasp to spin and land, still lit, still lighting our little scene of heroism and desperation.

  The swirl of shadow and light was so sudden, so confusing, that it was hard to see clearly what happened next. But I saw more than I wanted to see. I saw Mr. Patel stagger back to the edge of the pit, trying to keep his balance. I saw the Whisperer in the Dark surge forward like a black tide. I
saw that awful, clawed hand cut through the air with murderous intent. Mr. Patel’s head disappeared from sight and he fell backward into the hole.

  Roger stooped to pick up his own flashlight and shone it toward the pit.

  “NO!” Aunt Lyssa screamed. But Mr. Patel was gone.

  Roger swung the beam in the direction where the dark, cloaked shape had been. Nothing was there. He swung the flashlight beam back and forth wildly.

  “Maddy,” he said, in a choked voice. “Where’s it gone?”

  Suddenly something reached over my shoulder and knocked the flashlight from his hands.

  “Madeline, child of Canonchet, I am here,” a cold, inhuman voice whispered from behind me.

  26

  NEIMPAUG

  I AM HERE.

  It had spoken my name. It was the final time for me to hear those words. Its game was over. The Whisperer had come to claim my life. I turned around. Roger’s flashlight had been knocked to the ground, but it still cast off enough light for me to see into the darkness that loomed over me. There was a face there. A pale, bitter face with deep, blood-red eyes, white eyebrows, a nose and cheeks as sharp as the knife blades that glittered from its hand. It was not an Indian face. No Narragansett ever had a face as devoid of humanity as that, even during those long-ago years when our warriors grimly sought revenge for the slaughter of our families. No. It was a face of darkness and steel and dry stone. There was no more emotion in that face than there was in those knives held in its hand, razor-sharp blades whose tips were red with blood. Mr. Patel’s blood.

  All the fear I’d been feeling, even the smallest residue of it, left me in that moment. I felt a tingling at the base of my spine, the kind you feel sometimes when there is electricity in the air.

  “Mauchag,” I said, my voice as calm and steady as the beat of a drum. “No. I am here.”

  I felt the gaze of those dead eyes on my face as it paused, searching for some sign of fear and weakness. Just at that moment, Roger did the only thing he could think to do. Remembering what I had said to him about the Whisperer’s hatred of bright light, Roger pulled out of his pocket the laser pointer I’d taken from Aunt Lyssa’s desk and shot a sharp beam of red light directly into the creature’s face.

  “Arrrssshh!”

  With an angry hiss, the Whisperer lifted up its cloak to block that painful ray, whose brief touch seemed to have left a red welt on its cheek. Its attention was turned away just long enough for me to raise and aim the cylinder Aunt Lyssa had taken from her purse when she entered her house and sensed that something was wrong. She must have still had it clutched in her hand even after the Whisperer had knocked her unconscious, only dropping it as she was dragged along the tunnel. I pressed the button, emptying the entire can of pepper spray into that evil face.

  “RAWRRURHHHH!” The Whisperer in the Dark rocked backward, grabbing at its face with its hands, including the hand that held those blades, blades that cut into its own face as it tried to wipe away the wet, biting pain of the spray.

  “ARRRGGHH!” it roared, so loudly that the walls of the cave shook around us. Half blind, it blundered into one of the support beams, splintering it into dust with a great blow from its arm. It swung its steel-clawed hand back and forth wildly, cutting the air, seeking flesh to rend and tear as it continued to scream. It was a scream that seemed filled with more anger and frustration than pain.

  It was then, just as before, that Narragansett words came to me. They came to me as that tingling spread from my spine to my fingertips, an electric charge that I felt in both my good hand and my dead hand. I held both my hands up toward the sky that I knew was somewhere above our heads.

  “Neimpaug!” I cried. “Thunder! Anunema! Help me!”

  Then the whole world exploded.

  27

  EXPLANATIONS

  ROGER REMEMBERS WHAT happened next better than I do because I was knocked unconscious. He remembers the roof of the cave falling in, tons of rock coming down right on top of the Whisperer in the Dark, but not a single stone striking him or me or Aunt Lyssa. He remembers looking up and seeing the light of the sky fifty feet above us. He remembers the three of them carrying me up out of that hole in the ground and emerging in the middle of the street that had been under construction two blocks away.

  Yes, I said the three of them. Roger, Aunt Lyssa, and…Mr. Patel. The pit he had fallen into turned out to be only six feet deep, and the fall had done no more than stun him.

  “It is thanks to my yoga training,” he said, “that I was able to fall just so.”

  That yoga training had also enabled him to bend the upper part of his body back so quickly when the Whisperer swung its deadly iron claws at his neck. He had been wounded, but the wounds were no more than four deep slashes across his upper chest.

  Why had the street exploded above us? There was sort of an explanation for that. Even though no rain fell, a sudden bolt of lightning shot down from the sky and hit the explosives truck. What couldn’t be fully explained was why it happened at just that moment. It was a freak accident of the sort that no one could have expected, any more than they could understand why the force of the blast had been directed straight down in such a way that it opened the roof of the hidden cavern.

  There were a lot of things no one could fully explain that day.

  The police, though, said they knew who the Whisperer in the Dark was. His name, they said, was Wilbur Whateley. He had been born an albino, his skin so devoid of pigment, his eyes so sensitive that bright light pained him, and he was raised in a home where there were suspicions of terrible abuse. That was probably why he had taken to killing and decapitating animals when he was a child. Wilbur also apparently loved knives. He’d been taken from his birth family and put into the foster care system. Thirty years ago, when he was only thirteen, but bigger and stronger than most grown men, he had murdered his foster parents in the middle of the night. Then he sought out his biological parents and grandparents. He found them, too. When the police caught Wilbur, he was walking down the road with a big bag over his back. I don’t have to tell you what he had inside that bag.

  His childhood home had been just two houses away from Aunt Lyssa’s. That was probably why he had discovered the caves and knew them so well. And that was why he came back to this neighborhood after he escaped from a mental institution two weeks before he called me on the telephone. How did he know my name and that I was a descendant of Canonchet? He had probably gotten that from reading the article about my winning the interstate cross-country meet.

  “Wilbur Whateley,” Roger said, shaking his head.

  “I know.”

  It was too weird. Wilbur Whateley was the name of a character in HPL’s “The Dunwich Horror,” a bent, goatish giant who was half human and half the spawn of a creature from the depths of horror.

  Whether he was actually the Whisperer or Wilbur Whateley, no one was ever able to prove. His body was never found in the massive cave-in, which also seemed to have collapsed the whole network of tunnels leading to that cavern.

  When I told Grama Delia the whole story, her response would have been surprising to some.

  “Chauquaco Wunnicheke,” she said, nodding her head. “Knife Hand. Those dang diggers let his spirit out.” Then she smiled at me. “I am proud of you, grandchild. You have your father’s courage.”

  Following Grama Delia’s lead, the Narragansett Tribal Council got the town to close down the excavations of that cave and to put back everything where they had found it, even though rumor had it that they’d already uncovered some very interesting items. Did those things include the skeleton of a huge man and a rusty five-bladed knife? I really can’t say. But I can tell you that Grama Delia and several other elders who remember our medicine supervised the blocking of that cave mouth, not just with stones, but with reinforced concrete and a layer of earth over that. Then they did a certain ceremony. Grama Delia made sure I was there to see it, but I can’t say anything more than that, aside from the
fact that Mr. Patel and Roger and Aunt Lyssa were the only non-Narragansetts present.

  My life is back to normal now. As normal as my life can ever be. Like Bootsie, who is back to running around like crazy in our backyard after imaginary squirrels, any scars I may have aren’t visible. I’m still reading horror stories and going to monster movies and talking about it all with Roger. I’ve even begun thinking seriously about writing stories like that myself. Roger has been encouraging me. That’s the main reason I wrote down my recent experiences. His mother encouraged me to do it too.

  “Turning a traumatic experience into fiction,” she said, “is a wonderful technique for giving you power over it.”

  Last night, when I read the last chapter to Roger, he said it was great. Then he put both arms around me and hugged me. I hugged him right back. I used both arms, because even though my left hand is still not as sensitive as my right hand, I’ve been able to move it a little and I can feel hot and cold with it now. It’s been that way ever since the explosion in the cave.

  Roger smiled down at me and then he kissed me. That was a first. And, as far as I am concerned, a fine way to end my own scary story.

  ALSO BY JOSEPH BRUCHAC

  SKELETON MAN

  THE RETURN OF SKELETON MAN

  THE DARK POND

  BEARWALKER

  NIGHT WINGS

  Credits

  Cover art © 2005 by Sally Wern Comport

  Copyright

  WHISPER IN THE DARK. Copyright © 2005 by Joseph Bruchac. Illustrations copyright © 2005 by Sally Wern Comport. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.