Whisper Hollow

by Chris Cander

  Gabriel’s shoes had come unlaced, and the aglets flopped like two trouts on a line.

  “How long do I have to wait?”

  Myrthen stopped and turned to him. “As long as you must.” Then she resumed her walk, slow and steady and even.

  Her thoughts turned to her cousin Liam — long gone and possibly buried — and her conversation with him nearly nineteen years ago. The voice of God she’d tried to convince him with, knowing all along it was only the deaf leading the blind. And she’d done it; she’d convinced him to play out his revenge such that she would benefit — at last a widow, finally able to fulfill her original pledge to love no one but Jesus. In our weakness, you remain. When we’re broken, you sustain. And he had done according to her plan. He’d even stayed away all these years as she’d demanded, a miracle that suggested God was on her side. In her widowhood, she’d been freed. But not entirely.

  The nightmares kept her captive to the past.

  “Gabriel, do you know anything about the mines?”

  Gabriel kicked the dirt ahead of each blue canvas shoe. “I don’t want to talk about the mine.”

  Myrthen felt her heart quicken. She refused the temptation to look at him directly, remembering what she’d once been told about her particular unflinching blue stare, that it unnerved people.

  Though God might allow the living to see ghosts on occasion, the Church forbade the initiation of occult contact with departed souls. Recourse to mediums, interpretation of omens, and conjuring of the dead were all practices to be rejected. Such divination represented a personal desire for power over time, history, and other people. It contradicted the loving fear man owes to God alone.

  O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended You and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell … Myrthen stared straight ahead into the darkness.

  “Gabriel, has your daddy or anybody else ever told you about the accident that happened some years ago?”

  “Where’s my daddy?”

  “He’s gone to retrieve your grandfather, who is no doubt inebriated and in need of special attention. Nothing that a child like you should contend with,” she said. “Quite frankly, I’m shocked he’d expose you to such debauchery.”

  “He needs my daddy to take him home.”

  The slap of footsteps on the dirt, a wavering hoot in the distance. She nodded. “Just like those miners in the accident I mentioned. Did those miners underground get to go home?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  Gabriel stopped in his tracks and looked at her, the mantilla framing her face despite the June heat. “You know,” he said.

  Myrthen slowed to a stop just ahead of him and closed her eyes. She thought fleetingly of John. Over the years and especially since she’d moved back home to Verra after leaving the convent, she had dreams of John trapped underground, clawing at the dirt trying to escape. And in each of them, she served as the only witness. Somehow, she could look down at him as though she could see through the crust of earth that separated them. Through this looking glass — she from her safe, ventilated side of freedom, and he from his tomb — they locked eyes. And each time, again and again, she watched him die.

  She always awoke from these dreams cold and sweating, and prayed as many Hail Marys and Our Fathers as it took to distract her back to sleep. Sometimes in the dream, however, John became her twin sister, and after one of these, she couldn’t lull herself back to sleep. The vision of Ruth screaming and trying to climb out of the undercroft became far too realistic to fade into the drape of night.

  “No, actually. I don’t. I know some of them died underground, but …” She swallowed, hard. “But I don’t know exactly why.” She turned slowly back and reached out her hand to his. “Do you?”

  Gabriel tucked his hand into his pocket and started walking again, watching the ground pass slowly, step by step, beneath him. The dwarf huckleberry shrubs meant a left turn up ahead to get to the church. Right, if he were to cross over to the cemetery. “You know,” Gabriel said again. Then, a moment later: “I don’t want to be here now. I want to find my daddy.”

  “Your people are running afoul of the cemetery where the dearly departed are resting!”

  Gabriel looked at her, and sniffed once, hard. “My daddy’s there,” he said.

  “And he said you’d stay with me.”

  “I don’t want to stay with you,” he said.

  Myrthen grabbed Gabriel by the upper arm. “You have no choice!” She glared down at him then, ice-blue and insistent. His wide eyes blinked up at her a few times.

  Then, in a single fluid movement, he wrenched away from her grasp and took off running.

  He was fast, but the moon was bright and Myrthen was smart. She didn’t bother calling his name; she knew he wouldn’t stop even if she did, and besides, she knew where he was going. In an instant, she lifted the hem of her long skirt and went after him.

  She could see his shadow bobbing on the mountain floor, could hear his footsteps crunching twigs and slapping the dirt. Running behind him, she tried to close the gap, but it had been many years since she’d moved herself so quickly through space. Her joints ached at every pace; her lungs filled with fire. A small rut in the path nearly ended the race: she stumbled headlong in fast-motion with her hands outstretched, ready to fall. But she righted herself in time.

  Animated with the utmost lively confidence, I come laden with the weight of my sins, to prostrate myself before You.

  There. She found him in her sights again, a dozen yards in front of her, running along the perimeter of the cemetery’s iron fence. He seemed to be slowing a bit, perhaps confused by his direction. Was he looking for the gap that she had long ago pried open with a crowbar from the shed behind St. Michael’s, for want of easier access to her sister’s grave? If so, he’d passed it already. Now he would have to run the length of the southern edge and turn up to enter through the proper gate. She didn’t know if she could run that far. Perhaps she should just let him go.

  But no, she couldn’t. He knew something, and now that she’d started her line of questioning, she needed to know what it was. The image of John trying to escape the pit — hands bleeding, that panicked, transfixed stare — had her by the throat. She might not have another chance until she died to find out to whom God had assigned the blame.

  “Daddy!” Gabriel yelled. “Daddy, where are you?” His voice was high and piercing. “Who-who!” a screech owl called in return. “Who-who!” He ran fast again, but the sugar maples along the path that stretched a hundred feet into the sky choked the moonlight. There came no answer from the cemetery, so he kept running, past the left turnoff to the gate. He must be lost, or else headed somewhere else. Myrthen fought to catch him — how dare he go so far, and now he had started toward the mine, of all places. John’s old cabin was somewhere nearby, she realized, and the thought brought the dream of his exploded interment again to her mind. She quickened her pace, trying to ignore the burning in her chest, legs, feet.

  And then she was nearly upon him. He ran headlong down a hill, straight for the highwall above the mine entrance that had been sheared away sixty years ago when Blackstone had first come in to excavate the pit. When those early workers had gouged out a notch in the mountain face, they’d created a manmade cliff above it. And if Gabriel didn’t stop, he’d go straight off the edge.

  “Gabriel, stop!” she screamed. Either the panicked tone or the mere closeness of her voice startled him, and he jumped midstride and glanced over his shoulder. She lunged forward with her hands outstretched, the downhill momentum pitching her forward, and he made a small, wounded sound like a yelp before he leapt away from her once more.

  “Look down!” she screamed again. Something about that command made him obey. He slowed to a trot and must have realized where he stood, because his legs stuttered to a stop even while his torso moved forward, an imbalanced inertia that forced him to swim his arms wildly about in
order to remain upright. In that moment of uncertainty, Myrthen skidded sideways to a stop beside him and grabbed one of his forearms. A tiny landslide of pebbles rolled past their feet and off the edge of the sheer overburden of rock. A second later, they could hear them landing on the ground below, a faint and gentle sound, like falling rain.

  She pumped his arm once, hard, and spoke through a pant. “Do you see what could’ve happened? You could’ve run right off this cliff. What foolishness got into your head, running down here like this?”

  “Let me go!” Gabriel said, pulling his arm, and panting along with her. She gripped it like a hawk refusing to release its prey.

  “Not until you settle down. And once you do, I want you to tell me what you know.”

  He tried to wrench his arm away, but she knew his tricks. She wasn’t going to chase him all over Creation again. She squeezed his arm more tightly.

  Gabriel glanced at the ground near his feet and then bent over to grab a stick. It was thicker than a fishing pole, but only as long as his forearm. He clutched one end and raised it above his head, clearly intending to bring it down upon her grasp, a plan that she — older, taller, more wicked, and less desperate — foresaw and intercepted with her free hand. There was an exchange of grips, a flurry of yanking, until somehow each of them ended up holding one end of the stick.

  “I want my daddy!”

  Myrthen had grown tired, the fight instinct that had earlier charged her system and fueled her chase now replaced by an awareness of the aches throughout her usually inactive body. Her sudden weakness made them a fair match, and they grunted back and forth, silent but for the shortness of breath, until Myrthen finally hissed through clenched teeth, “Your father isn’t here. And instead of whining about that, you should be on your knees giving thanks to your Heavenly Father that I was here to save your life.”

  Whose life have you saved?

  “What did you say?” she demanded. Gabriel stared at her.

  You know what happened. You can’t hide your secrets forever. You can’t hide them from God.

  Myrthen felt a white heat crawl over her scalp, felt something inside her go loose. She squinted at Gabriel, searching his face in the moonlight, trying to match the voice with his, but it didn’t fit. What she heard was an angry girlish voice of someone more familiar, a voice that spoke only inside her own mind.

  “What did you say?” she said again, whispering this time.

  “I said let go, you meanie!” Gabriel said.

  And with that, the calendar of her life flipped backward to almost the beginning, the clocks unwound, a lifetime of things undone, unsaid, and there, through the lens of memory, she held on to not a branch of a broken sugar maple tree, but a broken birthday doll handmade by her mother. And she wasn’t yanking it away from Gabriel, but from her long-dead twin, who’d screamed those very words when Myrthen wouldn’t let it go.

  “She’s mine. Mama gave her to me.” The words rang in Myrthen’s ears. She strained not to hear, but one can’t avoid the truth once it’s been spoken. You don’t understand the Word of God. You don’t hear His voice. You have nothing and nobody, because you are mean. You are wicked. You are evil.

  You. Are.

  Ruthless.

  Myrthen’s skin tingled as though she’d been plunged into an ice bath. She felt nothing, saw nothing. Just held on to the doll-stick that tethered her to the past. There was a tug, and she was pulled back into the present, past the brief bit of life she shared with Ruth, past the stretch of time that followed in which history had been reshaped, past John’s brief and contemptible courtship and their wedding and those long and regrettable years of marriage, past Liam and the confessional, past the plot that blew up the mine and her husband along with it, past the disappointing years in the convent and the disappointing years since, past the organ dirges and prayers — oh, the prayers — that had been tossed up to God, countless confetti words that now rained back down upon her, disassembled into jibberish, as she stood on the precipice of time, doubled back, looking again at an angry angelic face before her that symbolized something of which she wanted no part, and with Gabriel’s feet sliding in the scree at the edge of earth and her own shaking, aching self struck by horrified awareness, she let go.

  In an eternal, screaming instant of damnation, the boy-shaped vision of Ruth stumbled backward, eyes wide. The stick rammed against his tiny chest from the unexpected release and launched him backward into the dark, and then he was gone.

  Myrthen gasped through her mouth and blinked and then stepped forward, breathless, to see what she had done — then and now — and saw the bodies on the ground below. Both of them, one spectral and one bleeding.

  And all at once the curtain she’d hung up inside herself that night so long ago was torn from top to bottom and she saw everything that she had hidden from herself, everything she had done that could never be undone. Ruth, broken on the cellar floor; Liam, manipulated and banished or dead; John and the other miners crushed and buried inside the belly of the mountain. All of it because of her.

  June 28, 1969

  Peggy sped toward Lidia’s curb like an outlaw on the run, repeating her favorite lines from True Grit. Lidia had been gripping the door handle with one hand and the edge of the seat with the other, her heart pounding in her chest.

  “It’s so good seeing you, Liddie. Tell that sweet husband of yours thanks for sharing you for the night.” Peggy beamed at her and reached over to give Lidia’s hand a squeeze. Then she affected her best southern accent: “Come see a fat old man some time!” She threw her head back and laughed. “I just love that John Wayne.”

  “Thanks for getting me home safe, Peggy,” Lidia said. “It was great to see you, too.”

  “Let me know if you want to go see it again. I can get a kitchen pass next weekend if you can.”

  “I’ll let you know,” Lidia said, and opened the door. She stepped onto the sidewalk and turned back. “ ’Night!”

  “Toodles! Oh, and happy belated birthday again! Twenty-one years old! Can you imagine?” Peggy waved and took off.

  Lidia raised a hand, but Peggy was already gone, a cloud of dust and dross swirling in her wake. Lidia smiled and shook her head, then walked quickly up the steps back to the safety and comfort of home.

  She turned the key quietly. It was after ten o’clock and no doubt Danny would be tired from running after Gabriel all evening. Closing and locking the door, she tiptoed through the living room, avoiding the creaky planks. The house was dark except for the kitchen.

  “Danny?” she whispered, imagining him at the table, whittling something for Gabriel or reading the paper over a beer or a cup of coffee. Dropping her purse on the kitchen chair, she smiled at the quiet, thinking he must have left the light on for her and was probably asleep with his feet hanging off the end of Gabriel’s bed, a book open on his chest. Probably Mr. Pine’s Purple House, Gabriel’s favorite.

  Lidia walked softly down the hall and poked her head into Gabriel’s bedroom, the light slicing through the darkness as she pushed open the door. But when the bed came into view, she was surprised to see it was made up, just as she’d left it. Of course. No matter how many times she insisted that Gabriel stay in his own room, lest it become an unbreakable habit, Danny couldn’t say no when they felt the slap of yellow blanket on their covers that always preceded Gabriel’s gymnastic climb onto their bed. No doubt he didn’t bother waiting tonight for the stealth approach, but took Gabriel straight into their room to fall asleep there. She hoped Danny had remembered to put a night diaper on him.

  But across the hall, her and Danny’s room was filled only with moonlight and silence. The bed, like Gabriel’s, still made. She stared at it for a moment, so unusual did it seem, so empty. There wasn’t so much as an impression in the stretched-smooth quilt, where someone might have sat to tie his shoes, or lain down for an afternoon nap, or rolled around during a tickle fight. She turned her head and listened for something. Breathing? Voices? Were they
teasing her? Were they waiting to pounce out of a closet just as she got near?

  “Danny?” she whispered again, louder this time. “Gabe?” Surely they wouldn’t stay up so late just to play a silly trick.

  “Danny?” Her voice rang clear and loud as she walked back into the hall. It echoed back at her from the quiet. “Gabriel!” She trotted back into Gabriel’s room, and flipped on the overhead light. “Come out right this instant, both of you!” Yanking open the closet door, she saw his toys and clothes, a stack of puzzles he’d already outgrown. Then she bent over to peer underneath the bed, in spite of the improbability. It rose less than a foot off the ground.

  “Answer me!” She jogged now, down the hall and into the few other rooms. Outside! Of course! Oh, the relief. She slowed her gait and closed her eyes, let that nameless panic that had erupted in her gut come to rest.

  “Okay, you snipers, I’m home,” she said into the yard. The cicada squall rushed loud in her ears. The moon stared down, unblinking, through the void.

  “Danny?” She listened. “Gabe?”

  Panic rose again. She ran the perimeter of the small yard, trampled through the garden, tripping on the long, ripe cucumbers, ruining them with the heels of her shoes. “Where are you?” she screamed.

  And then, an answer. From within the house, the phone began to ring. She sprinted across the yard and into the kitchen and grabbed the handset before she’d had time to take a breath. “Danny? Where are you? Is everything okay?” Then, “Alta, what’s the matter? Are you crying?”

  Her heart beat wildly in her chest.

  “What do you mean, fell? Where is he? Is he all right? Where’s Danny?”

  The second hand on the clock above the sink began to slow.

  “No,” she whispered. “No, that can’t be right. They’re here somewhere, hiding. They’re playing a trick on me.” Her eyes darted around the room, seeking proof, and found it in the form of Gabriel’s blanket draped across the seat of his chair. She stretched the cord to reach it. “See?” she said, lifting it up and holding it close to her. “I have Bobby here. Gabriel wouldn’t ever go anywhere at night without Bobby.”