Whisper to Me (6 page)

The only new businesses you ever saw: gambling shops, bars, discount stores. The town had a lot of gamblers and drinkers now.

“Are you a ghost?” I asked as we passed a rusting crane, towering above us. “Are you dead?”

The voice didn’t answer.

“Am I going mad? Answer me. Please.”

“No,” said the voice.

(NOTE: Remember me saying this exchange happened a lot?)

“What do you want?” I asked. “What do you want from me?”

“I want justice,” said the voice.

“Justice?”

But the voice was gone; I sensed it withdrawing, the dispassionate eye of some great predator wheeling away, distracted, for now.

Justice?
I thought.
Justice for what?

Unless … I thought of the foot on the beach.

But no. It was a crazy thought.

I kept walking to the library. This was another piece of vernacular architecture—white and blue, art-deco curves, on a street just one block back from the ocean. In any other town it would have been a tourist destination; it was beautiful. But people just walked past it.

Not me.

I went in, and Jane raised a hand. “Hey, Cass.”

I nodded. The voice had said not to speak to anyone. But Jane didn’t seem to mind; she smiled. I liked her. She wasn’t much older than me, maybe twenty-two. Her hair had a streak of purple in it, and she had a tattoo curling all around and down her arm that she said came from a standard introduction to Russian fairy tales:
WHAT WERE THE FAIRY TALES, THEY WILL COME TRUE
.

I paused, looking at the tattoo, thinking of fairy tales, and how I wished they would stay that way, just stories. I mean, a voice from nowhere was speaking to me, punishing me. I felt a twinge of sickness, deep in my belly. The fairy tales were coming true. The curse of Cassandra.

I felt, at that moment, truly cursed. Like there was a spell on me, an evil one, and the worst thing was I knew that I deserved it.

“You okay, Cass?” asked Jane.

Cassie, get a grip on yourself
, I thought. I nodded again and did my best approximation of a smile. Jane smiled back. “Well, you need anything, you call me,” she said.

I nodded. I did a lot of nodding in those days. Then I was about to look at the fiction shelves when I remembered what the voice had said—no stories. I shook my head, thinking
what am I supposed to
—

And then I saw a display Jane had made, a freestanding shelf with books on it about murders, most of them relating to the Houdini Killer. In my memory, a shaft of sunshine came through the window at that moment, breaking through the clouds outside, illuminating the books, trapping motes of dust suspended in light.

I went over and took down a slim book called
Murder on the Jersey Shore
that Jane had put a
staff recommended
label next to. I carried it over to a table and started reading. It was pretty interesting. There wasn’t much detail about the murders; I mean, with no bodies it would be hard to give any. The focus was mainly on the girls—most of them under twenty—who had been killed. The author was disgusted at the lack of police progress; his whole thing was basically that it was a huge stain of shame on them and on the state of New Jersey and the entire country that these women had been murdered and that because of their profession no one cared.

I care
, I thought, half-surprised to realize this.

I looked at my watch. I needed to get home or Dad would be angry, and I didn’t want Dad angry. I put the book back and got ready to leave. As I picked up my thin summer jacket—looked great online; looked awful on me—Jane glanced up. And as I passed her station, she leaned over the counter and pressed a book at me.

“Might cheer you up,” she said.

I glanced at the cover. Haruki Murakami,
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
.

“It’ll take you to another world,” said Jane. “I don’t think I’ve got you hooked on Murakami yet, have I?”

I shook my head.

“God, I sound like a pusher,” she said. “Like I’m handing out meth.” She laughed.

LOOPHOLE!

I laughed too. I mean, laughing is not speaking, right?

Jane seemed pleased to see me laugh. She tapped the book, nodded, like, this is the answer right here to all your problems, and sat down again. She was nice—she was always nice to me.

Which is why it’s especially painful that it was Jane, later, who ruined everything.

Out on the street, the sky was overcast and I could smell the ocean, brought in by a breeze, the air freighted with salt water and molecules of sea life—ground down by the years into mist—fish scales, shells, anemone.

I breathed in deeply, loving that smell, even if I hated Oakwood.

“You laughed,” said the voice, and suddenly my nostrils were full only of decay, the rotting of dead sea creatures.

“When you get home, you will slap yourself. Hard. Twice.”

And you know what?

I did.

These are the times when I didn’t hear the voice:

        1.    When I was sleeping.

        2.    When I was playing loud music. I used to listen to a lot of hip-hop. But rap is basically guys talking, and if you hear a voice that isn’t there, already, then it’s too much. So I switched to IDM, R&B instrumentals, anything with echo and reverb and bass and no one talking, ever.
Never
heavy metal. I tried that once. If you ever hear a voice and think you might be cursed or possessed or haunted,
do not listen to heavy metal
. It is a VERY BAD IDEA.

And:

        3.    When you were there.

I got into a routine. It sounds stupid, but I did. People cope, I guess.

There’s a convention: If someone has cancer, they’re “brave” and “fighting.” If someone is having problems with their mind, that person is only ever “struggling.” This is, on one level, stupid and offensive. I mean, the people who die of cancer—what, they didn’t fight hard enough? They weren’t brave enough?

But on another level, when it comes to the mind breaking down, it’s not wrong that you struggle. I struggled. Everything was hard. Getting up. Getting dressed. Going to school.

The voice would say:

“Change into something prettier. You look like a ******** bum.”

It would say:

“Walk up and down the stairs fifty times. You’re getting a fat ass.”

It would say:

“You’re so ******** pathetic, that’s why you have no friends.”

It would say:

“Open your mouth to reply to that cute boy who has ACTUALLY STOPPED AND SPOKEN TO YOU IN THE CAFETERIA AS IF YOU’RE A REAL, VISIBLE PERSON, AND ACTUALLY SEEMS INTERESTED IN YOU, and I will make your dad die in an accident.”

I’m paraphrasing—not the dying-in-an-accident bit, the boy bit.

And I kept my mouth shut. It didn’t make much difference at school. I never had any friends anyway. I was a freak and a weirdo. I sat alone, I worked alone. The voice let me speak to teachers if they asked a direct question, and if I obeyed it in all other things. It even let me finish
King Lear
and write a short assignment on it. I guess the voice considered Shakespeare un-fun enough that it was not verboten.

At home, I noticed that the voice was always loudest in my room. So I moved out—I mean, not out entirely, but to the little apartment above the garage, the one Dad would rent to kids working summer jobs at the amusement park.

Your apartment.

But back then it was mine. I laid out all the books I’d borrowed from the library in the little sitting room and kept the bedroom tidy; the voice made sure of that. I even cooked a couple of times in the kitchen when Dad was at Donato’s. Simple stuff: pasta, steak.

Like I said, when I was reading, as long as it wasn’t something fun, the voice left me alone. And especially when I was in the apartment. I don’t know why; I guess I would speculate that it was because my own room held more memories of my mother in it, invisible but there, like dust in dark air.

But anyway, reading in the apartment was the safest activity. Which meant no TV, no sketching in my sketchbook, no reading for pleasure. But nonfiction was fine, the drier and more boring the better.

So I read a lot. I’d stock up on books at the library and bring them back to my fortress above the garage, and I’d work my way through them: stuff on Greek myth, Native American legends, the history of the Spice Routes, technical textbooks on coding in Linux. Anything, so long as it wasn’t a story.

But mostly, anything I could find about the Houdini Killer.

I remember the exact day when I worked out what was happening with the voice, or thought I did. It was June now, near the end of the school year. It was seventy degrees out. Dad was introducing a new millipede to a tank in the house; we didn’t hang out much back then, but I’d seen the box arrive by FedEx, the holes cut in it. Old Mr. Grant next door was mowing his lawn; the drone of the rotor blade was coming through the open window and I could smell cut grass, mingling with ocean air. Mr. Grant lives on the side that does not have the mobile home filling the yard.

Obviously.

I was reading about Echo; what the voice was interested in was
educational value
. Not that it said so, but I got the point quickly after I turned on the TV and caught a few seconds of
My Super Sweet Sixteen
before the voice forced me to run up and down the block fifty times or it would cut out my dad’s tongue, which in itself was very Ovid, but more Procne than Echo.

Anyway.

You know the Ovid version of the Echo story, of course:

Echo has been helping Zeus to sleep around, distracting his wife, Hera, with her beautiful singing voice while Zeus schtups every shepherdess and naiad he can get his divine hands on. Hera finds out, and takes away Echo’s voice, her greatest asset, so she can only repeat the ends of other people’s phrases. Echo sees Narcissus in the forest, this unbelievably beautiful boy, and falls in love. But she can only say what he says back to him, which sometimes distorts his words in comic ways and besides anything weirds him out, and anyway he’s too, well, narcissistic to reciprocate, so he rejects her totally.

He says, “May I die before my body is yours.”

And she says, “My body is yours.”

Which obviously mystifies him and only makes him angry so he runs away. It’s all pretty funny and tragic and she wastes away and dies and blah blah blah, you know the rest.

But
did you know there’s another story
?

It’s in Longus, in his
Daphnis and Chloe
. Which, incidentally, is one of the very first novels. Long, long before
Don Quixote
. You thought I was a geek before? Ha.

Anyway. In this one, there’s no Zeus and Hera. There’s just Echo, who is a nymph. Again, she has a beautiful voice—one she can use to imitate any sound, the song of any mortal, the call of any beast, the liquid babble of a stream. Then along comes Pan, the goat-god of chaos and hedonism. Pan is worshipped by followers who enjoy going into frenzies, and who tear animals to pieces in his honor.

Yes:

We’re back on sparagmos, the act of tearing people to pieces. And the foot in the shoe. I don’t say anything by accident, you know that. Or you will anyway.

So. Pan sees Echo in the woods, and hears her, and he wants to possess her beauty. But he’s also a musician, a great one—the term “Pan pipes” comes from that fact, of course—and he is admiring and jealous at the same time of the way she can sing back any sound, the way she can even re-create perfectly the supposedly inimitable beauty of his own playing.

So, naturally, he tries to sleep with her.

But this time it’s Echo who does the rejecting. She guards her maidenhead, the usual nymph stuff. Runs from him in the time-honored fashion, refuses his advances. The way nymphs are always trying to do with Zeus, though usually he turns into a bull or a swan or something and tricks them into coming close and then rapes them.

The ancient Greeks: a weird people.

I got offtrack there. Pan tries to sleep with Echo, and she says no, so he goes mad, and being a Greek god and therefore mental, he whips his followers up into one of their frenzies—the word “panic” comes from this—and they tear Echo into little bits with their bare hands, and scatter her and her blood all over the woods.

But the earth. The earth loves Echo’s music, so the stones and the trees and the plants take her into themselves, and they preserve her voice inside them, so that anytime anyone shouts or sings, Echo imitates their voice perfectly, calls back to them.

And this way Pan is thwarted, because he can still never possess this girl or her amazing voice. Every time he plays his pipes, she pipes them back at him from the rocks and the trees and the caves, echoing his beautiful music, taunting him.

Do you see?

The whole world preserves her voice, so she can accuse her destroyer over and over again.

I read this, and I thought:

Oh.

I remembered the voice saying, “I want justice.” I thought about how the voice had appeared to me first at the police station, after I found the foot. I thought of Echo’s voice left behind after her death, to punish Pan. My own suspicion, which I had pushed down inside myself.

What if the voice …

I took a breath. I didn’t know how to ask the question indirectly. “Are you … are you one of the murdered women?”

Silence—but mixed with interest. Focused interest. The eye of that giant predator turning slowly to look at me.

“He killed me and you did nothing.”

The voice’s voice was laced with venom. The voice of a snake, almost, all whisper and serious hatred. And this is how stupid I was: I took that “you” as collective, like an indictment of the whole town, the police, the justice system, whatever.

It didn’t occur to me the voice was talking to
me
. Singular. Saying that
I
had done nothing. Like I said, I was stupid. You’ll see.

Back then I just said: “Someone killed you. Is that right? And now you’re just … a voice. Like a kind of ghost, but one that only speaks.”