The Whispers

by Daryl Banner

  “I … haven’t really thought about it,” he confesses, his voice growing quiet. “Maybe a part of me never thought I’d actually get to be a student. Maybe I thought I would never earn the chance to prove myself to them …”

  “Maybe.”

  I feel John tense up. His fingers stop moving, as if he’s caught in a worry. “Jennifer,” he murmurs. “Can you just be upfront with me?”

  “How?”

  “Tell me what you want.” His voice is soft, faraway. “If you want me to move out, I will accept that. I’ll … I’ll find a way to afford my own place. I should. It might be off-campus, maybe somewhat of a commute, but—”

  “Don’t be silly,” I spit back. “I want you with me.”

  “Then … Then what do you mean by all of this?”

  “I just mean …” Ugh, why can’t I just come out and say it? He’s holding my hand. He’s playing with my fingers. He’s held me in his arms every night we’ve spent in this cruel, dead place. Why am I so certain he’ll vanish the moment I utter those three wicked words?

  “I think I understand where you’re going,” he mutters tiredly to my hair. “Ever since we met and you let me stay at your place, what was supposed to be just one night turned into two, then a week … and it almost feels like I still just … happen to be there, almost by accident. Like I don’t really belong.”

  I pull away from him and turn, facing John. His eyes are heavy and his full lips hang open from his words. He watches me, curious why I pulled away.

  “I was afraid that you’d leave me when the university accepted you,” I tell him, making myself plain. “I was afraid that the only reason you stayed with me was because it was convenient. I was afraid, no matter how attached I was growing to you, that you’d one day pick up and leave, and I wouldn’t see you in the bed next to me every morning when I wake up to go to class.”

  “Jennifer …”

  “Even the first time we met,” I say, all of my feelings choosing this one lovely moment to pour out, “I hardly knew you for more than five minutes before you were tearing off in the other direction, running away from the authorities. Always running away. I was terrified that one day it’d be me you’re running from.”

  “I don’t ever want to run from you,” he says, his deep brown eyes turning to water before me, his lips never fully closing between his sentences. “Why would you think that? You’ve been so kind to me. No one’s ever shown me so much … care. If I didn’t feel so damn guilty about it, I’d stay in your condo for good. I love waking up next to you. We work well as a team. We can survive a realm of dangers and bloodsucking nightmares together. There’s nothing wrong with … this.”

  He pulls my hand to his chest. I feel the drumming of his heart, its every beat crashing into my palm.

  I love that song in his chest.

  “If you weren’t here with me,” I tell him, “I would have lost my mind in that hovercraft. I wouldn’t have even made it off the campus. I’d be nose-deep in metal carnage, squished somewhere between the eleventh and twelfth floors of the Histories building.”

  To that, he leans forward, bringing his face close to mine. “I’m not just here for my own glory.” His fingers gently interlock with mine, sending chills up my arms. “I didn’t agree to come with you just because I saw my ‘way in’ to the university, Jennifer. Sure, some part of that motivated me at first, but things are so much bigger now. Bigger, I think, than either of us anticipated. This whole experience here in the Sunless Reach, it’s going to change everything. When we get back home—and I guarantee you, we will—I have no plans to give you up, Jennifer, so long as you don’t want to give me up. I want you in my life. I want to be in yours.”

  That’s all I needed to hear. Oh, these dumb emotions, making a mess of us worrisome Livings. Using our interlocked hands to pull him toward me, I guide my parched lips to his soft ones. When they meet, a whole lot of fire ignites in the space between us, giving heat to this cold, miserable place. The touch of his strong hands revive me as he rubs my back, pressing me into his body with desire. If we weren’t out here in the middle of nowhere, I’m sure that a lot more would happen between us besides kisses of passion and … hands.

  As John’s lips trail down my neck and I turn, shivering with pleasure, my eyes meet Corpsey’s, who still dangles. Yes, he’s watching. Upon his lazy face, an amused smirk.

  “We’re not alone,” I mutter tiredly.

  John looks up distractedly, noting our hanged friend. “So? Let’s put on a show, then.”

  “Let’s not.”

  John chuckles, then meets my lips for one more kiss. After that, I scowl at Corpsey, ruiner of moods, then curl up and bury myself against John’s chest, determined to chase a nice dream for a while, escaping the gloom of this world. I take John’s sweet suggestion and try to hear my fellow students cheering for me and erupting in applause instead of mocking me. With that sweet hallucination filling my ears, I finally let the exhaustion win.

  Somewhere in the dark comfort behind my eyelids, I see my mother sitting in her house all alone. She’s staring out the window with a tissue dangling in her hands. Her eyes are dried because she’s cried every last tear she could possibly cry. She’s processed the news about my dad not long ago, only to have it followed with a most grievous call from the university: “Your daughter has hijacked a hovercraft and flown across the sea. She will never be heard from again.” Not only has my mother lost her husband, but now she’s lost her daughter in the very same day. The grief will never end. She ponders her life, glaring at the window.

  The next moment, I’m stirred awake by a bug. I swat it away and only succeed in slapping my own face, waking me further. I glance to my left, spot Corpsey still hanging there. I sit up and turn to find John still resting against the tree at my back, his eyes closed and his breathing deep.

  Then I feel the buzzing in my pocket. It wasn’t a bug I sensed; it’s my device. I pull it from my pocket, confused. When I gaze at the screen and discover that a signal has been found and I’m receiving a transmission, every trace of breath is stolen from my chest.

  I can’t believe it.

  In a panic, I mash my finger to the screen, then lift the device to my mouth. “Hello??” I nearly shout into it.

  John flips his eyes open, flinching at the sound of my voice. “What is it??” he asks, blinking away whatever little bit of sleep he got.

  “Hello??” I shout into my device again, climbing to my feet. “Mom? Is that you? … Mom??” The device sputters, a burst of static exploding from it. The screen shimmers, unable to produce a source of the communication that’s somehow miraculously reached it. “Please, talk to me!” I cry into the device. “Speak! This is Jennifer Steel! I’m stranded in the Sunless Reach!”

  The thing coughs in my hand, issuing a quiet, whirling squeal for a response. It’s damaged, I tell myself in horror. From the river. From low battery. From the polluted air here.

  Yes, that’s it: the very death in the air is strangling it.

  “Mom??” I cry again into the phone, pacing back and forth, tears reaching my eyes. “Help! Please! We’re lost! We’re going to die out here! PLEASE!”

  “Jennifer.” John’s at my side. “No one’s there.”

  “PLEASE!” I shout at the stupid thing, frustrated that it won’t talk back to me. “HELP US!”

  “Jennifer …”

  I let my frantic stare meet John’s. His warm brown eyes ground me, pulling me back into a calmness. When I look back at the device in my palm, there’s no light or sound coming out of it. The thing is silent as a stone.

  I have a creeping suspicion it was always silent as a stone. Oh, no. I’ve gone crazy.

  “I thought I heard …”

  John brings me into his arms, wrapping me tightly against his chest. The device crushed between me and his body, I let the embrace slowly bring me back to reality. There’s no way anyone could contact you from across the ocean, I remind myself. You need to keep you
rself sane, keep yourself focused. John can’t do this alone.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper into his chest. “I’m so dumb.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “It’s not a convenient time to lose my mind.”

  “It never is.”

  “I’m probably just hungry.”

  “Me too.”

  “We’ll be okay?”

  “And so will Mari,” he assures me, bringing a hand to the back of my head and petting my hair. “We’ll find her. She will be fine. We’re not dying out here. Hear their cheers, Jennifer. Their cheers … Hear them.”

  “Yeah. Better to hear that than a phantom call on my drowned, dead thing,” I mumble.

  Within the next few minutes, it is determined that we will not find another speck of sleep between either of us. John unbinds the tassel, dropping Corpsey to the ground. The landing isn’t as gentle as I imagine John could’ve made it; I doubt any love is growing between them. With the pale boy down, we continue on our way through the dusty landscape.

  Unlike the area we crashed our hovercraft in, the dead and brambly foliage of this terrain is broken periodically by large expanses of grassless field. The dirt beneath our feet is so dry and hardened, lightning bolt cracks snake across the ground, giving the land a blasted harshness about it.

  “How far?” grunts John unkindly to our tour guide.

  “The Dead know nothing of distance,” he answers cryptically.

  John gives a less-than-gentle tug on the leash. “How far?” he repeats, impatiently.

  I try a different tack. “You described the Whispers as the place where it all began. What’d you mean by that?”

  Corpsey smirks. “It’s been called many things. The Great Scar … Death’s Aisle … Valley of Shadows …”

  “Is it the place where all of the Beau—” I clear my throat, not wanting to hit that sensitive spot again. “Is it the place where all of the Dead come from?”

  After a moment of consideration, he says, “No one really knows.”

  “Is that where you came from?”

  “It was so long ago.” A pained expression crosses his face. “I don’t even remember who was first in this world, my sister, or myself. My First Life was so long ago … I struggle to even remember … to even remember …”

  “You said only the Dead can go there,” I remind him, “to these so-called Whispers. If that’s true, how is my friend Mari there?”

  “She was taken there by my sister.”

  I’m trying to piece it together in my head. Through the fog of hunger and exhaustion and plain insanity, it’s a very trying effort to make sense of anything at all.

  “Wait,” interjects John. “Your sister took her? You said before that you’d only seen our friend Mari run away. You said no one followed you across the river, that no one knew you’d come, that no one knew the way to the other side,” John goes on, suspicious and irritable.

  “My sister caught your friend,” murmurs our trusty Corpsey. “She was seconds from draining the woman when I stopped her.”

  I gape at him. I hadn’t realized Marianne was in such immediate peril. These events must have taken place days ago, just after we first fled the hovercraft. This changes everything. “Why’d you stop her?”

  “I saw you on that hovercraft. I looked into your eyes and I saw you,” he says, his voice going quiet and vague. “I told my sister two words … I mentioned that this Mari woman had friends, and among the friends, a special one. I told my sister two words and she stopped.”

  “What two words?” I press him.

  He smiles at that question, his cloudy eyes turning to the grey, nothing sky, and he says, “Winter … white.”

  Okay, really. I’m so tired of everyone on this side of the planet making such dramatic reference to my damned hair. My parents are both brunettes, all natural, and both families follow suit. Not a single light-haired among us. Imagine my parents’ surprise when I was born. All my life, I’ve been stared at, told my hair would darken, that it wouldn’t stay so … white. I was made fun of at school, called albino, diseased, old woman … every sort of silly insult a dumb child can squeeze out of a brain.

  “It’s just hair,” I retort back. “Had it since I was born.”

  “No matter the significance, it stopped my sister.” The way he says the word significance, it rings so clearly and crisply in his smooth, oddly melodic voice. “She decided right then that she’d keep your friend alive. She sent me to speak to you, to arrange a meeting …”

  “That one night in the woods?” I say, confirming it. “You never told me why you’d sought me out! I even asked and you never answered.”

  “The Whispers are near.”

  Those words draw a cold chill over my bones. John’s eyes flash as he looks around, like he’s expecting the world to suddenly fold in on itself with some imaginary onslaught of spirits and ghouls and deathly things. None of that happens. We merely stumble through the trees and cracked ground, nothing at all strange or scary or whispery in sight.

  “Near …” he murmurs. “Quite near … I feel it.”

  The trees quite suddenly give way to a wide expanse of nothing. The ground ahead is flat as a wasteland, grey and dusty. There is nothing before us but an imprecise, swirling mist, much like the mass of cloud in the sky that so greedily keeps the sun and stars from view. It dances and twirls and brushes over the endless wasteland. The sight of which is enough to stop me in my tracks.

  The boy looks back at the pair of us. “Isn’t this what you wanted?” he asks John and I, and there is no lightness nor amusement to his voice. “I am just as disquieted by them as you are.”

  I blanch. “By them?”

  “The Whispers, yes, by them,” he murmurs, his vague eyes meeting mine. “Do we dare, or do we not dare?”

  I look to the left, then to the right. I cannot even see an end. The vast expanse of wasteland is endless in all directions and perfectly flat. Not even a hill or a bump or a stone in sight. The trees at my back suddenly have become a great and generous comfort compared to the utter nothing that lies ahead.

  “I see nothing,” I whisper, afraid. “Where’s my friend? How do I know you’re not … you’re not just … leading us into some horrible foggy trap?”

  I can’t help my bones from shaking. I’m instantly terrified of this place. There is nothing kind or inviting about it at all. I feel like Dana suddenly, desperate to claim that the spirits are so awful and unrested here, that the spirits are screeching at me from some other plane of existence, haunting me, their eerie voices moaning and groaning in warning, ordering me to turn back, to flee.

  “I have not seen my sister in some time,” the boy confesses to me, his own voice not seeming at its most comfortable. “We will have to search for a bit.”

  “Search?” I gape, staring at the swirling mists and the flat, barren landscape. It’s like staring into the mouth of Death itself, feeling its cold breath on my face. I have never in my life known terror, not until now. I don’t want to die, I suddenly find myself thinking.

  “Keep me close. I’m your ticket in and out of this place,” warns the boy, then he extends a hand. “Here, take my hand. We cannot be separated, otherwise you may never again find your way out.”

  “No way,” barks John, not having any of Corpsey’s negotiations. “You walk ahead of us, thing.”

  “Afraid? I could hold your hand, too,” the boy offers, twisting to get a better look at John despite the noose. “You’ve a firm grip on that tether, don’t you?”

  “Don’t address me.” John’s voice is hard, determined not to show any fear. “As soon as we have our friend back, you’re nothing. You keep away, you keep those teeth of yours off of us, and you won’t know the touch of Jennifer’s metal on your face.”

  “It’s okay,” I assure John, reaching at once and taking grip of Corpsey’s hand. The skin is unsettlingly rough and delicate. I worry any sudden jerk could break his hand off.

  A ligh
tness crosses the pale one’s face, something akin to amusement, or victory. “Do you even know why we drink blood?”

  John and I stare at Corpsey’s cocky smirk, waiting.

  “It’s not for the taste,” he goes on, answering his own question. “Or maybe it is, indirectly. See, when the drop of your lifeblood touches my dead little tongue, I get to experience the joy of half-life. I smell the world. I feel the tickle of air upon my suddenly-sensitive skin. If I’m lucky, the generous beams of the furious sun bathe my hungry eyes. Life. That’s the greatest commodity left in this world and it’s through your blood that a sad, Dead thing like me gets to know it once again.”

  “An experience you will not be afforded on our behalf,” grunts John in reply, his face tightened with ire. “Move it, Corpsey,” he orders, borrowing my placeholder of a name.

  The boy, smiling lamely, starts to walk forth. I’m not yet ready, but I guess I’ve run out of time whether I like it or not. Hand-in-hand with our Dead companion, I walk alongside him, leaving the comfort of the creepy dead woods and plunging into the unknown. In just a matter of seconds, we are surrounded on all sides by fog. Our field of vision is but a matter of three short paces in all directions, three short paces of perfectly flat nothingness. The swirls of fog waltz around us like misbehaving children. I lose all sense of direction and feel utterly transported to some faraway world with mist for millions of miles in all directions. There is no sign of change anywhere. We walk for five minutes. We walk for ten minutes. In silence, we traverse over a plane that never changes, through mist that never relents, under a white and ghostly sky that never blinks.

  “Winter.”

  I turn, staring at John. “What?”

  John stares back, confused. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Winter white.”

  I jump, startled by the voice, but find no one standing on my other side. “Did you hear that?” I breathe, feeling my pulse in my ears.

  “… white … white … white …”

  I turn back. The tassel drags loose behind the pale boy. I stop at once. “John?”

  The boy turns too. Where once he wore a look of smugness, even the boy now appears alarmed. “Where did your friend go?”