The Murmurings (11 page)

Then the murmurings begin. Words tumble together as if a tongue is wrestling to form syllables. The mumbling
doesn’t get louder, but it feels closer, as though it’s bypassed the receiver entirely and found a new means of transport. Like it’s hovering inches from my ear, which is sweating into the cup of the phone. Clipped, wordless phrases swirl faster and closer.

Closer.

I slam the receiver back onto the hook.

I hold down the phone with an unsteady hand. I squeeze my eyes shut and force my breathing to slow.

When I open my eyes, the clock on the microwave reads 9:40. It took me fifteen minutes to regain my sanity. I can’t help but wonder if eventually I’ll lose it forever.

It’s that same concern for my sanity that makes me log back onto Adam’s blog. I need to hear from someone—
anyone
—who knows what I’m going through. I reread the entries I read at Evan’s, poring over every word.

Then I read more.

June 29th

You may think that I’m a less than reliable source. After all, I have told you nothing of myself. Not really. You know some of the more intimate details of my life, but you know
nothing
of the basics—my name, my location, my reason for creating this blog, for exposing Oakside. And what you do know about
me—that I see and hear unusual things—may make you think that I was more in need of Oakside’s services than I’m willing to admit. You’d be right, but these studies are indeed being conducted at Oakside, and if you don’t believe me,
submit a formal inquiry to the Mental Hygiene Administration of Arizona
. In fact,
I’m begging you to.
There are people at Oakside who need the intervention, and NO ONE IS LISTENING TO ME.

It’s time I tell you why Dr. Keller knew that the voice I heard that day wasn’t a figment of my imagination.

What I was hearing were words—no,
shadows
of words—once spoken by someone in Dr. Keller’s life, someone who meant a great deal to him. This person was killed violently and suddenly, right before his eyes, and Dr. Keller was helpless to stop it. He knew nothing of what that sort of death can produce, not at the time. It was only when he heard me utter the last words spoken by his loved one that he understood what I was hearing. He believed it was her spirit reaching out to him, but that cannot explain what we discovered later.

He
provoked
the voice. Dr. Keller learned how to
make
it whisper in my ear. After our most intense sessions—the sessions in which he would delve into the memories of my parents that brought me the most anguish—I would hear the murmurings. Not everyone hears the same thing, if they’re “lucky” enough to hear what it says at all. It tells you what you
want
to hear. That’s
how it tries to find its other half. I desperately wanted to please Dr. Keller, so I let him lure the whispering again and again.

Dr. Keller grew impatient. It was rarely clear what the voice said, and when it did speak to me, it was only those same two sentences: “You promised me you would come back. Is that bracelet for me?” He wanted more.

And soon, he got more.

He performed experiments on me. He wanted to know what it was I was seeing from the corner of my eye. He hooked me up to machines and showed me images. But none of the tests showed anything new, and as his frustration increased, his treatment of me became less fatherly. I became little more than a lab rat. I’m bitter about it, but I’m not making any of this up. My life was already fucked up enough. One more person letting me down wasn’t going to break me.

The shadow on the edge of my vision didn’t reveal itself until it was ready. A half-living thing I can’t describe here with any accuracy. I won’t try. The memory of it alone is enough to make me fear I might conjure it again, and I won’t risk that.

The
thing
only appears in reflective surfaces.
Can you think of a better way to see weakness?
But the
WHAT
is more important.

Dr. Keller didn’t care how hideous it was (yes, he could see it too. He couldn’t hear what I heard, but once the
thing
appeared,
there was no denying it was real). Dr. Keller
believed
it was the person he’d lost.

Here’s what I believe:

There are Takers in this world, and there are people who see them.

I can feel acid creeping up the back of my throat, but I keep reading. Because I know that even though the Insider hasn’t named her, he must have believed that Nell could see these Takers. And if he believed Nell could see, does that mean I can too? Does this make me more insane or less?

July 14th

I’m still looking for a more permanent place to lay low, and so for now, I’m staying where I can. There’s a reason Cleopatra built this hill so high. Up here, the air is thinner, and that makes it harder to think. I don’t expect you to know what that means, and I don’t really want you to.

I told you there are Takers in this world.
Taker
is the term I’ve given them, but just because there hasn’t been a name for them before doesn’t mean they haven’t been around for longer than I care to imagine. As I said, I think Dr. Keller was half right. What I see and hear is the remnant of someone who has passed. But there’s something else. I believe when a soul is taken violently,
it splits in two. I don’t know where one half goes, and I won’t speculate. I’m more concerned about the part that
stays
. Because that is the part that I see.

For as little as I know about this creature I call a Taker, I believe
it
knows even less. I think that it only has one intent—to find its other half. Whenever it senses pain in someone, I believe it sees its other half because that’s the last thing it remembers feeling before it died. This is the only way I can understand Dr. Keller’s success in provoking it. Who better to know how to make you suffer than the person who knows the source of all your misery?

Why do I call this being a Taker? Because that is what it does.
It TAKES
, or at least it tries.

I believe a Taker tries to possess the body of whoever it thinks is holding its other half. And when it tries to usurp this body, it fails, killing the body it wants to inhabit.

I know this because I’ve seen it.

It takes something else, too. Some sort of object. Almost like an artifact—a possession in place of a body.

And so the people who can see this happen—the people who hear the murmurings, who catch the flicker of movement in the corner of their eye and dismiss it as imagination—I call them Seers. That name sounds more hopeful than their fate, but I can’t think of what else to call them other than the word that defines
their burden. Because as far as I know, there’s
no
way to rid oneself of this awful gift. It’s a curse you’re born with.

And Dr. Keller will stop at nothing to understand this strange phenomenon.

I made the mistake of thinking I could escape the Takers, and I was wrong. I wish to God I’d been the one to suffer the consequence of that error. But it was someone else who suffered instead.

There are no more entries to read, so I reread each post three more times. I read until my eyes sting from the harsh computer-screen light. I read until my stomach tumbles with guilt and fear and confusion. I read until Adam’s experience has superimposed itself over my own life and I know just what Adam went through for all those years. I feel as if I’m the one who was raised by Dr. Keller and his false fatherly concern. I feel like I know Adam and his rage at learning about his new reality. I imagine how that anger looked to Nell, if she ever saw it. I pretend that I’m not afraid of him, of Dr. Keller, of Oakside.

I crawl into bed at 3:00 a.m. and drift into another restless sleep. I’ve already made the decision to skip school tomorrow and to go see Dr. Keller.

A
DIFFERENT ORDERLY OPENS THE
sliding glass door when I arrive at Oakside. She wears a different expression from the typical apathy. She is suspicious. And she looks hungry, much like a dog looks right before you take a scoop of its food and rattle it in front of its bowl.

“Check in at the counter,” she says unnecessarily through the intercom before admitting me past the second set of sliding doors.

I’ve seen her before. She has a long, shriveled neck and a tiny head topped with a bun, which conjures the image of a shrunken head a boy in elementary school once showed me in a textbook. As soon as the second doors slide open, the woman’s out from behind her Plexiglas enclosure and next to me like we’re old pals.

“Just sign your name right here, Ms. David, and I’ll let Dr. Keller know you’re here.” Apparently, I’m familiar to her, too. She’s smiling in a way that tells me her face isn’t used to doing that. I want to laugh at her, but I’m still too unsettled by this place to do much of anything other than look at her.

She taps her bony finger on the line where she wants me to sign.

“I know the drill,” I say, not masking my dislike of her even a little.

Her back goes erect so fast, she looks like she might get whiplash. The fibers of her neck strain against her yellowy skin. A quick swipe of her tongue wets her parched lips, which, when pursed, look remarkably like a short beak. She looks like a scrawny pigeon in a white, boxy uniform.

“Well, then, I’ll just run and get Dr. Keller for you,” she says, her voice syrupy sweet. The smile hasn’t come back, and that’s fine by me. This place is creepy enough.

I scan the room behind me for unseen danger. I could feel it lurking somewhere behind these walls before. But now that I’ve read Adam’s blog, I feel even more vulnerable. I reread his last post again this morning, the one dated July 14. I can’t keep his words from passing through my brain like a toy train on a track, circling round and round in a self-abusive mantra.

I made the mistake of thinking I could escape, but I was wrong.

Escape from what, exactly? And there’s something else that’s been gnawing at my mind—just one more feeling of dread to add to my ever-growing list: Why hasn’t he written since July 14? Have the police finally caught up with him? But if that’s the case, why haven’t we heard anything? And why am I suddenly hoping he
hasn’t
gotten caught?

Then, like some sort of omen confirming my unease, I catch the glare of a bald head out of the corner of my eye.

It has to be LM, Nell’s—I suppose “friend” is the only word I can use—from her journal.

His head is a shiny dome at the far edge of the room. He carries an armful of Legos—towering blocks of primary colors. His face is set in a rigid, singular thought, one I couldn’t even begin to guess. The woman with the tight topknot catches me staring and follows my gaze.

“Wait here,” she commands.

This was a bad idea.

I’m already taking a backward step toward the sliding doors when a girl’s scream, like something straight out of a horror film, makes us both jump. From behind the birdlike nurse, sneakers squeak on the linoleum floor, announcing someone’s approach—and judging by the speed of the squeaking, that person is approaching the corner at a
run. Another movie-worthy scream follows, this one closer. It grows to a shriek so loud it makes my eardrums pulse. A small-framed girl with stringy blond hair and enormous eyes swings around the corner, a blur in light-blue cotton heading straight for us. Another blur, this one in white, chases closely behind, but he looks like he’s having trouble keeping up. The orderly is clutching his side like he has a cramp. The girl with the stringy blond hair doesn’t look like she’s having any trouble outrunning him.

The pigeon lady turns calmly, having recovered from shock much faster than I am able to. She faces the girl and subdues her with frightening efficiency. Before I can blink, the Pigeon has her scrawny arm across the narrow expanse of the girl’s shoulders and is holding her from behind while her counterpart is busy rubbing the cramp out of his side.

The girl with the blond hair is still screaming, but it’s more noise than words. She kicks her legs and tries to free her arms from the Pigeon’s hold, but she’s not fast enough to escape the poke and plunge of the syringe that’s somehow materialized in the Pigeon’s fingers.

Just before the needle pricks the girl’s skin, I watch her eyes find LM in the recreation room, and something in her gaze shifts. Her once fanatical, darting gaze is clear of its mania for a fraction of a second. Almost imperceptibly, her
head nods on her straining neck. I turn to LM just in time to see his head rise in response.

“Come on, Ms. Lasky. Let’s get you back to your room,” the Pigeon says like a tired babysitter, yet I hear satisfaction in her voice. She knows she’s won, and as much as I didn’t want to be bowled over by the crazed blond girl, I really didn’t want the Pigeon to win either.

Still, as soon as the three round the corner, I can’t help but notice that I’m all at once unobserved.

I turn to my right and find LM stacking his Legos with renewed concentration. His meaty hands hover over a pile of loose pieces, and then, with the care of a surgeon, he lifts a yellow block from the pile and affixes it to his growing tower, nodding with approval and repeating the same task twice more.

I walk over slowly, deciding it’s probably best to approach him as if he were an animal with a reputation for biting. Only now, if he
does
bite, there’s no one here to help me.

“You came back,” he says without looking at me. His voice is soft, almost pouting. He sounds surprised, maybe hurt, that it took me so long. I find myself wondering again how old he is. He looks about forty, but his tone is so young-sounding, I can’t tell.

I nod at first, then remember that he’s fixated on his blocks.

“Yeah, I did.” I say, hoping this is enough. I reach for the chair nearest him and, as quietly as possible, pull it out from the table where he’s set up his operation. “Okay if I sit here with you a second?” I ask, trying to make my voice low like his. But I’m way too shaken up for that. It comes out like cooing.