Whisper: The untold stories

by Bray, Michael

  You are a murderer.

  The thought came from nowhere, and he realised on some level the sheer brutality of his actions. And yet… It was ok. He wasn’t concerned about arrest, or trial of being hanged for callous, cold blooded murder. He wasn’t concerned because the house was telling him it was ok, that it would look after him. That it would make things right. It pulled him further into its embrace, and it’s icy but yet somehow warm fingers soothed away the pain.

  How long he had sat there he couldn’t even begin to guess. All he knew was that he was tired. And what else could a man do after such a laborious task but take the weight off his feet for a while?

  Gerald sat cross legged on the hard ground and rested his tired arms on his legs. He noticed that his toes had turned an ugly shade of purple-blue, and he could no longer feel them.

  I should get out of this cold.

  His self preservation instincts said, and yet the wind placated him and said that it would protect him from the cold, that he had earned his rest and as long as he listened to its words, it would make sure everything would be ok. He closed his eyes and pushed the by now panicked voice of his self preservation deep until it was no more than a barely heard buzz, a minor annoyance that he could at least cope with. The wind whistled through the trees, and it sounded to Gerald as if it were singing to him, its Glorious tune was to his ears more beautiful than anything he had ever heard before. His entire body was numb, and he realised that he had never felt so relaxed, so safe, so at peace. He listened and the song went on.

  How much time had passed he couldn’t even begin to guess. Time seemed different to him now. An incidental thing rather than something to govern his life by. All that mattered to him in that moment was enjoying every note of the sweet song that was being played for him alone. He wanted to open his eyes in hope of seeing the source of such a beautiful song, but his eyes were frozen closed. He didn’t mind. He was warm. He was safe. Just like the wind had promised. Tired, he allowed his mind to relax and found that he could ignore the ghostly images of his dead family which had been swimming just below the surface. They, like everything, began to fade to black. He didn’t care. All that mattered was that beautiful song.

  He thought he could listen to it forever.

  WHISPER: ALTERNATIVE ENDING

  As promised at the start, here is the original never used ending to Whisper. Fair warning, there are obvious spoilers here so if you’ve yet to read the book then I would skip this bit for fear of spoiling the ending. If you have read it already and just want to get on with the reading, here it is! Back in this draft from 2011, there was no Steve and Melody, but instead Melanie and Adrian. (Same characters, different names). The Gogoku were known as the Mutu and Donovan… Well, Donovan was still there and still the same violent psychopath he always was. This picks up towards the end of the book where Hope House burns to the ground. In the final version of the book, Steve makes his immense sacrifice and ends up a broken and disfigured wreck covered in burns and struggling to put his life back together. As you will see, the original tone was much darker and bleaker with a totally different outcome. Which is better? See for yourself!

  (WHISPER ALTERNATIVE ENDING DRAFT 1: JUNE 2011)

  Back at the house, Adrian glared at Donovan and was surprised to find that he had reached a place that went beyond fear. He had heard about soldiers who spoke of the same thing, where in certain situations a person could somehow become detached from emotion and do whatever was necessary to survive. It was anger that came to him, and the sight of Donovan’s reanimated corpse only served to inflate it and make it simmer to the surface. Already the heat of the flames was almost unbearable, and a thick black smoke had begun to drift through the house. Without knowing he was going to do it, he charged at Donovan, grabbing his dead throat and driving it back into the sitting room.

  They were thrust into the inferno, the heat surrounding them indescribable. Donovan wasn’t fighting back and seemed content to simply restrain Adrian from reaching the front door, which looked just about out of reach anyway as the flames licked at it hungrily.

  He pushed anyway and tried to struggle past, but Donovan’s grip was strong and vice like, and he flashed his sick dead grin at Adrian even as his hair burst into flames.

  You won’t sell many houses looking like that.

  The absurd thought came and went as quick as a flash, and Adrian wondered absently if he was already mentally damaged beyond repair. It was then as he was prepared for his coming death that Isaac’s words came back to him.

  Just look Mr Martin. Look and see what is real.

  Adrian stopped struggling and smiled at Donovan, whose skin was starting to bubble and blister.

  “You are dead Donovan. You can’t hurt me. You can’t hurt my family.”

  A moment of uncertainty passed over the Donovan thing’s melting face as Adrian pulled out the protective cross from where it was embedded in its stomach. It staggered backwards and fell to one knee.

  “This House is no more. You can rest.” Adrian gasped as his own skin began to blister.

  “Leave my family alone.” He added, trying to ignore the agony of his burning flesh.

  It wasn’t a request, but a command. And the Donovan thing seemed to shudder, then fall to its knees and sideways into the flames, which hissed as the fatty parts of Donovan’s skin were boiled and dripped to the floor.

  Close to unconsciousness, and barely able to breathe for the thick, black smoke, he turned back towards the kitchen and ran as fast as he could towards the glass panelled door. He slammed into it at full speed, the door exploding in a shower of wood and glass. He landed face first on the blissfully cool and snow covered grass and lapsed into unconsciousness.

  The voices on the edge of the wind screamed in fury, and he only hoped that his sacrifice had been enough to save his wife and unborn child.

  With those thoughts in his head, the agony in his body faded away. Adrian Martin was dead.

  EPILOGUE

  Three years later.

  The city was alive with rush hour traffic jockeying for position as thousands of commuters made their way home from work. But such noise was greeted with comfort by Melanie because the sounds of the city hid the other sounds which she thought she had begun to hear snatches of lately. She was an older, wiser woman, who since their brief stay at Hope House had certainly lost much of her happy go lucky exuberance. She was more careful. More considering of her life choices. She sometimes thought about the sacrifice Adrian had made so that she had the baby could live, although she wasn’t even sure what had happened until later.

  Only after the questions and the hospital visits and the psychological evaluations did they manage to piece it all together. It seemed that either by fate or prior design, Adrian had managed to break the Mutu curse at the exact second that her body shuffled off the edge of the branch.

  If it had happened just a second or two later, she would have fallen and been unable to stop the inevitable, but as her body became hers and the vile thing was banished from her. She had managed to twist and grab onto the huge branch. The fury of the wind had been intense and frightening, and the white streak that now cut through her hair was a testament to it.

  Somehow, she had found the strength to pull herself back onto the branch and remove the noose.

  From her vantage point, she could see the orange glow on the horizon as their home burned to the ground and suspected what Adrian had done. She didn’t know then, of course, the level of the sacrifice that he had made.

  She supposed that’s what love was. He had given his life so that she could give birth to their child, and she supposed Adrian would live on through his son. Even at such a young age, the child resembled his father. He had the same determination in his eyes, and the same stubborn streak.

  The wind rocked the apartment block where she lived, and she shot a quick glance out of the balcony window at the darkening sky and felt her stomach vault nervously.

  She had been hear
ing them for the last six weeks, and they had become increasingly bold. She had managed to shut them out, and now it seemed they had changed tactics.

  They had started to speak to the baby.

  She had tried to listen, of course, to hear what they were saying, but it was just too noisy. She now felt isolated, and as her son sat gurgling on the floor and stared up at the wall, listening to those hidden words, she wondered what she could do to make it right. She could run of course, but they found her here, and she was sure they would find her anywhere she went.

  “Talk to me,” she said quietly to the empty room, and she was surprised to find that they did.

  She couldn’t quite hear them, and they suggested she might hear better if she went out onto the balcony. She stood and walked silently across the room, straining her ears to catch the snatches of words. She opened the sliding door and stepped out, ignoring the cold as it bit into her. Twenty stories below her, the traffic honked and jostled for position, but that was irrelevant. She could hear them now, and they were telling her that Adrian was with them, and she could be too if she just climbed over the balcony and jumped.

  She told them she couldn’t, that the baby needed her, but they laughed and said the baby blamed her. The baby hated her for letting his father die.

  She didn’t believe it of course, but as those whispers continued to rattle around her mind, they told her just to look and see for herself. She turned and looked back into the apartment.

  The baby was looking at her, but there was no love. Just a venomous hate and she knew then that the Mutu had polluted her child’s mind, and in the process broken hers. It was then, that all the fight went out of her.

  They were bolder now and telling her to bring the baby too, that they could be a family again. She couldn’t do that, wouldn’t do that, and then knew what she had to do. With the last of her remaining free will, she grabbed the rail with both hands and threw herself over to the street below.

  She didn’t scream. Inside the apartment, the baby cooed and laughed as it crawled around in search of its mother.

  VOICES: ALTERNATIVE EDIT

  To finish off this book, I wanted to share some of the alternative never before released edit of Voices with you. This is a very different take to the final edition. In this, Isaac is a much older teenager and has been in a psychiatric hospital since the events of Echoes, Misdiagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic with violent tendencies. As you will see, the dynamic between him and his mother is massively different here and gives you the reader a look at how the story you know could have played out if the creative direction hadn’t changed. Of course, some of the themes were reused in the final book and due to copyright reasons, I can’t share the full second edit here. What I can do is give you is some of that content which was removed when the story was fully rewritten from scratch to give you an idea of the different tone to the book. This section is the first meeting between Melody and Isaac after he had been given up to the system. There is also some additional scenes with Isaac to show he was a very different and broken figure than the version in the final edit.

  VOICES: ALTERNATE EDIT

  Melody Samson always envisioned the latter years of her life as happy ones surrounded by her family. She could never have imagined the cruelty life would throw at her since the fateful day when she and Steve first set eyes on Hope House. Its horrors and those which came afterwards had affected not only her mentally but had taken a physical toll. She had lost weight, and the laughter lines had deepened into their worry driven cousins. Crow’s feet reached out from the corners of her eyes, which were dull, showing only the faintest glimmer of their former exuberance. Her hair, thick and black, had thinned and started to grey. Worse even than the physical and mental toll was the absolute loneliness she felt. When she had lost Steve, she clung to her son, thinking he would be enough to save her. Yet, like her, Isaac too had suffered with demons of his own. Plagued first by nightmares of his ordeal at the hands of Henry Marshall and the sheer horror of seeing his father die in front of him, she supposed it was almost inevitable the nightmares would morph into something worse.

  Acute schizophrenia was the official diagnosis, which she had no choice but to accept. Too many times she had tried to explain herself and try to make people listen about the evil which surrounded Hope House. In the end, it was easier to go along with their assessment, no matter how much it hurt to go along with the lie. Suffering from a deep, black depression in the years following Steve’s death, she barely raised an argument when it was suggested she allow Isaac to be looked after by the state and transferred permanently to Creasefield hospital. Their words offered the kindness and hope she sought and signing the consent forms to allow his incarceration seemed like the most natural thing in the world. It was only later when she had undertaken her own medication to try and fix that which was broken, did she really understand the magnitude of her actions. Despite numerous attempts to reverse her decision, the hospital had seen enough of Isaacs’s behaviour to warrant holding him indefinitely, concerned his condition might make him a danger to the public. To see him, living in those conditions hurt with the same sharp, raw intensity as the loss of Steve. Because of it, she had been unable to face visiting him, knowing that she would have no answers to the questions he was sure to ask.

  She had been sitting in the hospital car park for almost twenty minutes, staring through the windshield of her Fiat at the large slab of off white building where her son resided. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and chewed her lip, unsure if she could go through with the visit despite having spent two sleepless nights chewing over the many reasons for and against. Her eyes shifted to her handbag on the passenger seat and the brown envelope jutting out of the top of it. She pursed her lips, knowing that to release the emotion she was just about clinging to wouldn’t help anyone, and that tears, as appropriate as they felt, would help even less. Dabbing the corners of her eyes with a tissue, she took a few deep, panting breaths, then climbed out of the car before she could change her mind. Grabbing her handbag and ensuring the envelope inside was still in place despite already having checked a dozen times, she strode towards the reception, wondering just what she was to say to her estranged son who she hadn’t spoken to for almost four years.

  II

  Melody had composed herself sufficiently as she waited for her son to be brought to the meeting room. Despite the best efforts of the hospital to make the visiting room appear homely and inviting, there was only so much that could be done when there were mesh grilles on the windows and locks on the doors. Worse still was the dividing partition which split the room in two. Melody’s side was warm and relatively comfortable. The other side of the glass, however, had a cold, foreboding feel.

  She shifted position, filled with a giddy nervousness akin to the first day at a new job as she awaited the unknown. She checked her watch, noting it was almost three minutes after the arranged meeting time. A terrible, biting thought came to her then. What if he had refused to see her? What if the years of her being too afraid, too embarrassed to visit had made him resentful?

  This new train of thought agitated her even further, and nausea swirled in her stomach like a living entity in its own right. Her mindset was broken by the sound of the door opening on the opposite side of the partition. Numb with both nerves and uncertainty, she watched as a man - not the boy she had left here some years earlier - was led to the seat in front of her and told to sit. Finally, mother and son were face to face.

  Melody realised the standard conversation openers didn't apply to the current situation, and she now had no idea what to say.

  "What are you doing here?" Isaac asked. There was no love in his voice. No emotional connection of any kind.

  "I needed to see you."

  After all this time you suddenly decided the time was right to visit the son you abandoned?"

  "It wasn't like that. You need to let me explain."

  "I don't owe you anything." he snapped, slamming
a hand on the table. "You lost all maternal rights to me when you left me here to rot."

  "It wasn't like that. I was confused, I didn't know what I was doing," she replied, unable to keep the tremble out of her voice. "I didn't know what to do. All you kept talking about were the voices in your head. I couldn't cope."

  "I couldn't cope. I still can't. Do you have any idea how it feels to live with this? To hear these things in your brain and have no control over them?"

  "Isaac, please," she said, her cheeks streaked with makeup. "I came here to make it up to you."

  "You think a single visit and turning on the tears will be enough to right everything you've done to me?"

  "I didn't mean it, I was sick -"

  "So you keep saying. What about me? Did you ever think about how I felt?"

  "Every day. I think about you every day," she said, showing a glimmer of her old fire.

  "And yet you left me here," Isaac said with a humourless smile. Somehow that makes it worse."

  "Look, I didn't come here to fight with you." she said, wiping her eyes.

  "So what do you want?"

  "Like I said. I want to make things right. I know it's been too long and I know I don't deserve it, but I'm asking you as my son to give me a chance."

  "And what is it you think you can do to make it right? How can you make up for those missed birthdays or holidays spent in the company of these drooling fucking idiots?"

  "I can get you out of here. You can come home. It's not too late."

  Isaac snorted and shook his head.

  "You don't get it, do you? This is my home now. This is the only place I've ever felt like I belonged."