The Whisper (18 page)

As he opened it, Dot grabbed one of the white curlicues on her jumpsuit and peeled it off. Flicking her wrist, she snapped it like a whip, and it stretched out and wrapped around Alistair's arms and chest. It had become a lasso, glowing, buzzing, and holding him tight.

“Don't be foolish,” Dot said. “You don't know what you're doing.”

“You're right.” Alistair grimaced as he struggled to free himself. “But I don't know what you're doing either.”

“Helping you,” Dot replied. “Don't force me to take more drastic measures.”

All the while, Chip was standing to the side and mouthing something to Alistair. It looked like
nine, eight, seven …

“I should be free to leave,” Alistair said. “I'm a swimmer.”

“That's not all you are,” Dot said. “We have to run a few more tests.”

… one, zero
went Chip's mouth as he peeled off his racing stripe, balled it up, and bounced it off the floor. This time it didn't ricochet around the room. It struck Dot's lasso and cut it in half. The lasso fell limp, like a decapitated snake, and Alistair could move again.

“He's a candidate, Chip!” Dot yelled. “We don't know what he's capable—”

“So you want to hard-boil his brain?” Chip barked back. “Because I know that's what you'll end up doing when all the data come in. And where will that get us?”

“It will keep us here. It will keep us safe.”

“No,” Chip replied. “It will keep the Whisper safe. I'm done looking. This kid will have to do!”

Like a linebacker, Chip lowered a shoulder and plowed into Alistair, picking him up and pushing him past Dot. Dot fell to the ground as the two boys crashed into the hallway. “Yellow polka-dot egg,” Chip whispered into Alistair's ear. “Cow. Chicken. Goat. Goat. Pig. Rabbit.”

Then Chip let go of him and skittered on hands and knees back into the room, jumped up, and sealed the door behind him, leaving Alistair alone in the hall. Dot's screams were muffled, but still audible. “Last straw, Chip! We're done! He's not worth it!”

At one end of the hallway was the gallery. At the other end, the unknown. With the atlas tucked under his arm, Alistair hustled into the unknown. Doors flanked him on both sides. They had porthole-style windows with columns of light blasting out of them. Alistair paused and pressed his face against the window on the first door. Behind it, little green men with antennae worked wrenches and screwdrivers on some elaborate bit of machinery. Alistair pushed on the door, but it didn't move. There was a dial next to it, but he had no idea what the code was.

Yellow polka-dot egg?

Nothing resembling an egg was in sight. He moved on to the next door.

Behind this one there were three cages. In each cage there was an elephantine creature. They were elephantine because they looked like elephants, but they clearly weren't elephants. They had three trunks instead of one and sprouting from their heads were enormous antlers, which they ran back and forth across the bars of the cage like prisoners rattling cups.

Yellow polka-dot egg?

Nothing. He moved on.

Another door, another strange scene. This room was filled with water. It was like looking into an aquarium. Except instead of fish, there were glowing neon discs that spun and swam and bounced off of one another like billiard balls.

Yellow polka-dot egg?

Chip's words still made no sense, until Alistair had passed all the doors. Farther along, nested in the walls, were eggs as big as cars and colored as if for Easter. A blue egg with pink stripes. A solid green one. A tie-dyed egg. A black and white one. An egg with yellow polka dots.

He stopped. It was suddenly dead quiet. He considered knocking on this last egg, like knocking on a door, but he wasn't sure if that might crack it. All Chip had said was
yellow polka-dot egg
and then a bunch of animals. What were the animals again?

Cow. Chicken. Goat. Goat. Pig. Rabbit.

Alistair said the words to himself over and over, like a phone number he wanted to remember. Though he had no idea why he needed to remember them. He'd found the egg, but there weren't any animals around. He would have seen them. He would have heard them. He would have smelled them. The hallway was completely empty.

Except for Dot.

“Alistair! Don't!”

She had gotten past Chip and through the door. Loose-limbed, she rushed toward Alistair like a traveler chasing down a departing train.

Screw it, eggs are meant to be cracked.

He made a fist.

He thrust it forward.

And … nothing.

Instead of breaking the shell, it went straight through it. The egg wasn't solid; it was a hologram with a thin force field around it. Sticking his hand through the force field was like sticking his hand out of the open window of a speeding car. There was resistance, but not enough to hold him back.

Cow. Chicken. Goat. Goat. Pig. Rabbit.

Running, fighting, surrendering—all those options were off the table. The only thing Alistair could think to do was to step inside of the egg and hope his next move would become clear. So that's what he did.

The force field pulled him in, held him up, and cradled him, suspended him in the air as if he were the yolk. There had been no seeing through the eggshell from the outside, but from the inside Alistair could now see out. Not clearly, but enough, like looking through a sheer curtain.

The egg had been hiding something. On a sleek metallic wall behind it, there was a control panel full of buttons. Some were marked with numbers, some with letters, some with pictures, including drawings of animals. A camel. A snake. A little monkey with big ears.

Cow.

He reached through the force field and pressed a button with a cow on it, and like an infant's toy, it emitted a
moooooo
.

“Alistair! Chip was being foolish! You're being foolish!” Dot's voice was getting louder. She was getting closer.

Chicken.

He pressed a button with a chicken on it, and predictably, it responded with a
bock, bock, bugock!

“You won't survive out there,” came Dot's voice, now less a scream and more an admonition. “You need to stay. You'll hurt yourself. You'll hurt others.”

Alistair refused to respond, wanting nothing less than to be convinced. His decision involved the buttons, whatever those buttons were.

Goat—neigh.

Goat—neigh.

Pig—oink.

“There's something terribly wrong with you,” Dot pleaded. “There's evil in you.”

Rabbit—whoosh!

It was instantaneous. Alistair—encased in an egg-shaped capsule, protected by the thin holographic force field—blasted off and out into the dark expanse of space.

 

November 19, 1989

The fishbowl sat on the notebook. The notebook sat on Charlie's dresser. Above Charlie's dresser, mounted on the wall, was a mirror, a big one, big enough that from where he was standing, Alistair could see a reflection of the upper half of his body. The fishbowl, filled with water almost to its cracked rim, was lined up with his torso. In the mirror there was an optical illusion at work. The fishbowl was his heart. It was his stomach. It was his guts, complicated and essential.

He tipped the bowl and pulled the notebook out from underneath it. He examined the cover:

GODS OF NOWHERE

It was the title to a collection of tales, each tale more disturbing than the one that came before it. They told of kids who'd created worlds in Aquavania, kids whose souls had been stolen, kids whose worlds had been captured. There appeared to be no end to it all. There were more souls to steal, more worlds to capture. These tales were a work in progress.

 

MUCH LIKE THIS ONE

 

IN A YEAR IN A DARK AGE

This tale follows someone who washed up onshore.

A mother and her son were at the beach, collecting shells to turn into jewelry, when they came upon a girl who was sitting in the sand, arms wrapped around her knees, shivering.

“Hoy!” the mother, whose name was Regina, called out. “Are you hurt, girl?”

The girl turned her head to look at them, but didn't respond.

“Who are you?” the son, whose name was Remus, asked.

Again, the girl didn't respond.

Regina and Remus helped the girl up from the sand and brought her back to their village, because they were generous people. They fed her, clothed her, asked her more questions, and still she gave no answers.

“I do not think she understands us,” Regina said.

The rest of the villagers agreed.

There was wildness to the girl, in the way she moved, in the way she looked at things with her big bulging eyes. Like a wolf or a hawk, she was primal. Her face bore a scar, her long arms swayed when she walked. She reminded them of the savage people who lived inland, the warrior tribes who worshipped trees.

Salam, the village healer, had been captured by one of the warrior tribes when he was a boy, so he knew a bit of their language. He tried to speak to the girl, to figure out who she was, but even when she broke her silence, she used words that no one could understand.

Nevertheless, they accepted her into the village. She turned out to be a skilled fisherwoman. For hours she would stand in the surf, or in the streams that fed into the ocean, and she would spear enough fish to feed multiple families. She contributed more than her share.

They decided to call her Kira, which was the name of an ancestor who once drowned in the sea. Remus, being a young man with young man tendencies, was drawn to Kira and spent as much time with her as possible. He started teaching her their language.

Within a year, she was nearly fluent, and everyone finally came to know her story, which wasn't much of a story at all.

“I know nothing of before,” she said. “I must be born from the sea.”

This was not an unreasonable assumption. The sea carried strange things ashore—giant beasts and curiously carved bits of wood. Why could it not also birth a fully grown girl?

It was not long before Remus and Kira were married, and soon after that, they started a family. They lived in a hut on a hill that looked down at the ocean. Their first child's name was Lyra, and she was a rambunctious sort, always slipping away from them to chase a butterfly or colorful bird. Their second child's name was Oric, and he was the opposite, always clinging to his mother and father, for he was painfully shy, afraid of what lay beyond the village.

Lyra died young, which was a tragedy, but it was not uncommon in the village. She had been scrambling over rocks when she came upon a strange sea beast in a tide pool. Crouching to get a closer look, she slipped and cut open her leg on some barnacles, then tumbled into the water and became entangled in the beast's tentacles. The beast was barely alive, foul-stenched and teeming with disease. Lyra managed to free herself and get home, but her leg became infected. The infection spread quickly, and within a few days it had ravaged her body and turned her blood nearly black. There was nothing the healer Salam could do to save her. Her death was fast but ferocious, and her family tied her body to logs and set her adrift at sea, hoping she would reach the afterlife, which they believed lay far beyond the horizon.

Lyra's death stirred something in Oric. Instead of growing more withdrawn, he became braver, as if he were carrying on his sister's legacy. He explored the forests past their village. He even found evidence of the warrior tribes stashed in hollowed-out trees—old spears and clubs that he brought home to show the other boys. He boasted about how when he was older he would defeat the warrior tribes and become their leader. He was bossy and stubborn, cocky and cold.

One night, Kira was putting Oric to bed and he told her, “I have lived for two hundred summers.”

It was a strange thing to say, for there had never been anyone in the village who had lived more than seventy summers, and everyone, especially Kira, knew for a fact that Oric had only lived for seven summers.

“Don't be silly,” Kira said. “You are a boy.”

Oric shook his head. “I go places at night,” he said.

“You sleepwalk? Where do you go? To the ocean?”

Oric shook his head. “I go to my own place, a place I built. I have a pet bird there that talks. His name is Potoweet. I have a sea beast that only I command, that can snatch people with its endless arms. I have an underground fortress. I do things I'm not proud of there. I wish I could stop.”

“What do you mean?”

Oric hung his head. “I trick people. I scare people. I make them do as I command. If only someone could stop me.”

“You should not play at pretend so much,” Kira said. “It invades your dreams. All will be fine. You need not feel guilty about things that aren't real. Especially while your father and I are near.”

His mother's assurances did little to leach the worry from Oric's eyes, but he didn't say anything more. He kissed his mother on the cheek and settled in for the night.

Kira went to bed a little later, but she couldn't sleep. Oric's words haunted her for reasons she didn't understand. Worrying about her son was part of it, but there was another part as well. A single word flooded her skull.

Banar. Banar. Banar.

She had no idea where this word originated. The next morning she visited Salam and asked him if he had anything that could banish it from her head. “I have heard this word before,” he said. “It is one the warrior tribes use. I cannot remember its meaning. I'm sorry, but I can do nothing for you.”

It was only a word, but a word can be a virus, and soon it wasn't simply in her head. It was in the wind, in the songs of birds, in the voices of her family. It became so overwhelming that she left. Didn't explain. Didn't say goodbye. Compelled by a force she had never felt before, Kira simply set off into the forest in search of the warrior tribes.