Whisper in the Dark Page 2

  3

  TOO MUCH IMAGINATION

  I JUST STARED AT the ringing phone. I wasn’t really freaked out. I didn’t pick it up. I didn’t have to. I could do something else. I had choices, lots of choices. I could rip the phone off the wall and hurl the darn thing out the window. Or I could run up to my bedroom like some demented nitwit and bury my head under a pillow.

  Or I could sprint out into the street screaming for help—as if that would do any good. At this time of day in July, nobody is ever home in this neighborhood. They’re either at work or off to the beach or something. Like I would have been if I hadn’t had this weird midsummer cold that made me feel so achy and tired that Aunt Lyssa told me to just go ahead and sleep in.

  It wasn’t like I’d been hypnotized by that whispery voice or frozen with fear like the people in that creepy story Grama Delia told about the Whisperer. Or was I?

  This was stupid. I was just scaring myself. Maybe psycho killers in films call people, but not old-time monsters from Narragansett stories. No way. Totally ridiculous. Imagine the Whisperer in the Dark calling the telephone company to have them hook him up with a plan. Imagine a monster that no one has ever seen and lived to talk about listening to some sales rep at a mall babble on about what kind of service he wants on his cell phone.

  Come on, Maddy, I thought to myself. Get real. It was just six little words.

  Too much of an imagination. That was why I’d let that dumb phone call get to me. People were probably right when they said I’d read too many books about morbid stuff. Mr. Mindlow, the school psychologist, thinks I’m fascinated by “horror media” because I lost my parents, and thus scary stories and monster movies are safe and even reassuring for me because they are not real. That is why, he says, I am always reading Anne Rice or Providence’s own favorite haunted son, nutty old H. P. Lovecraft himself. That is why all my favorite rentals are in the science fiction/horror/suspense section of MovieLand. And I have the world’s biggest collection of Fangoria magazine. Because all the blood and fear and mortality is under my control.

  Even though I’m not as tragically out of balance as Mr. Mindlow thinks, I suppose he is sort of right. You can always walk out of a movie or turn off a TV, even in the middle of the most awful events. You know that, after the filming is over, all the people who get “killed” are really still alive, and the monsters are all fake. I’ve seen loads of documentaries on makeup and special effects. It’s comforting to see the same character actors getting glommed up by evil beings in one movie after another. It is like they are immortal. Even death is imaginary.

  But the phone on the wall was not imaginary. Nor was that voice. It was too real.

  The phone rang again. And I finally did something. I grabbed it and yelled “What do you want?”

  “I vant your blood,” said a voice with a thick accent.

  4

  SCRATCHING

  IF THE PERSON saying those words with that phony accent had been close enough, I would have grabbed him and shoved one of his Anne Rice novels down his throat.

  “Grow up,” I growled.

  “Blagh! Vot is the matter, pathetic mortal?”

  “Roger Tillinghast, you are an idiot! Just stop it!” Maybe it was because my own voice trembled as I said this that his immediately changed.

  “Aw, Maddy, ah’m sorry. What’s wrong?”

  No more phony Count Dracula, just his usual New Orleans drawl. Roger’s name and roots are just as Rogue Island as mine. His family goes back about as far as anyone who isn’t Narragansett. But Roger’s dad and mom were living in Louisiana when he was born. They only moved back to his grandmother’s house on Federal Hill when his mom got hired by the English department at Brown. Her family is from Cranston, which is part of greater Providence. Her specialty is the Gothic tradition in novels, so she is right at home here in more ways than one.

  “Did you just call me?” I said.

  “You mean right now?”

  “No, before this, like a minute ago.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Honest Injun.”

  I groaned a little at that, which had been his intention. We were good enough friends to tease each other that way, like my saying “That was white of you,” sort of semi-sarcastically whenever he did something dumb. It’s the kind of thing real friends can do with each other. And I knew right then that I really needed to have a friend around.

  “Can you come over?” I said. “Now.”

  “Okay,” Roger said. “In a flash.”

  He didn’t ask why or demand to be told what was up. Even though we’d only known each other for less than a year, he’d already learned what most of my other friends didn’t understand. Don’t ask Maddy Brown what is going on when she’s acting upset. When she’s being Moody Maddy. But he did ask one thing before he hung up.

  “Ten K?”

  “At least,” I answered, looking out the window. It was cloudy, but it looked like the rain would hold off for a while. It was almost time for the weather on the local news, so I turned on the TV. Sure enough, after one of their daytime anchors finished her story about the university archaeological team continuing excavations on a cave site close to Providence, Red the Better Weatherman popped up on the screen, pointer in hand. Expect scattered showers all afternoon. Just what we need for those summer gardens.

  As soon as I hung up, I got my gear together. Roger didn’t live that far away. He would soon be at my door. Thinking of us running together was making me feel normal again.

  I love running with Roger right by my side, keeping step with me no matter how fast I go. Even though his legs are longer than mine, he has a relatively short stride, and we run together like a matched team of horses. I noticed that ten months ago when we were warming up at the same time on the school track. That was the real start of my friendship with the new guy whose cute Southern accent and shy ways had made him a target for half the girls in my class. Except he chose me.

  I’d really needed somebody like Roger then. Not as a boyfriend, just somebody I could trust—and it was an added bonus that he loved to run like I did. I still couldn’t talk then about the accident that took the lives of my parents. Just mentioning it made me feel as if I was back in the car with them on that March evening when a freak ice storm blew in from the north. Mom had been driving, but none of us saw the black ice on the hill before we hit it. I don’t think it would have been any different if Dad had been behind the wheel. He’d always said that Mom was a safer driver than he was. Neither of them panicked.

  “Make sure your seat belt is fastened,” my mom said to me without looking back, both her hands still on the wheel.

  “You’re doing fine, honey,” Dad said to her. His hand was on her shoulder. They were so together at that moment, and I remember realizing then how much they loved each other. And then the tree came through the windshield.

  There were, I know, lots of rumors about me at school. Rumors about why I have this one dead hand. (Nerve damage from getting my hand crushed in the wreck. The doctors say it might heal itself or never get any better.) Rumors that my whole body is covered with terrible scars. (It isn’t.) Rumors about my being an orphan because of some kind of tragedy. (You know about that.)

  Sometimes people even ask me. Like that reporter who wrote the story about an Indian girl, one of the last descendants of Canonchet, winning the interstate cross-country meet. But I never answered questions about the rumors. I just changed the subject or didn’t say anything.

  I was afraid that was what Roger was going to do that day on the track. Ask me about my hand or my scars or my mom and dad.

  “Hey,” he said, looking over at me as he stretched his quads.

  I braced myself, waiting for the question. But he didn’t ask it.

  “I was watching you run yesterday. Want to run with me?” he asked.

  “Okay,” I said.

  By the end of that week, I’d discovered that talking with Roger
was as easy as running with him.

  When I found out he was as nutty about horror stuff as I was, that his mom even taught Gothic fiction, I felt like jumping in the air to give anyone close enough to me a high five. Sweet. Best of all, Roger didn’t mind listening to me; in fact, he even seemed to like to hear me talk. And he didn’t make things all boy-girl complicated like a lot of other guys would. Even though I’m self-conscious about the fact that my left hand is like a carved piece of wood, Aunt Lyssa says that is not the first thing people notice about me. What they see, she says, are my eyes and the shape of my face. My mom looked a lot like I do, but the blend of Dad’s Indian blood with her Sicilian fire (as Aunt Lyssa puts it) makes me look like an exotic model. That gives some guys the wrong idea until I set them straight. But not Roger. He’s always seen me as a regular person, and that’s why I can see him as a friend, my very best friend.

  While I pulled on my running clothes and my sneakers, I didn’t do what some people do when they’ve been scared. I didn’t try to focus my mind on bunny rabbits or kitty cats or Disney cartoons (which, quite frankly, I find to be truly scary). Instead I mentally ran through the whole catalog of scary creatures from Narragansett tales: Cheepi, the Evil One; huge black dogs; headless ghosts; cannibal skeletons; underwater snakes; monster birds. We even have a story about the devil on ice skates. I thought about all those different creatures that Grama Delia made come alive for me in her wintertime tales, so alive that I only had to close my eyes to see them. And especially I thought about how each and every one of them ended up defeated or thwarted in one way or another.

  Like I said, monsters are one of the reasons Roger and I became so close so quick. They are his favorite thing too. We both like them because the best monster stories—not just the ones that Grama Delia told me about, but even some of the newer ones in books and movies—always have rules and a certain kind of supernatural logic to them. First there’s the battle between good and evil, then there’s the idea that good can always find some way to win. That’s usually linked to the fact that, powerful as any monster might be, it always has at least one weakness. That was even true of those scary creations of poor old neurotic HPL, the “ghoul-haunted master of the macabre” (as Roger’s mother calls him). A kid can take comfort in that, knowing that even a little child can find a way to overcome a big old monster. “The reassurance of juvenile empowerment.” That’s how Roger’s mother explains it in her lectures.

  A rumbling sound came from down the road. A construction crew had been there for the last two weeks, doing some kind of excavating for a new sewer line or something. Aunt Lyssa had been told that they’d only have the street torn up for a few days. That had made both of us smile. Nothing in Providence ever gets done in a few days. Apparently they’d run into harder rock than expected because they were now using dynamite. That was unfortunate. Every time a blast went off—like the one that had just made me drop my running shoes—it totally freaked out Bootsie to the point where she peed on the rug. As a result, she had been banished during the day to our fenced-in backyard. Bootsie is a year-old Irish setter. Aunt Lyssa got her as a puppy because she said I needed a dog to keep me company. Of course, Aunt Lyssa is the one “my” dog always comes to first. And guess whose bed she sleeps on at night?

  I heard her scratching on the back door as I started putting on my shoes, once again thanking the gods of new technologies for Velcro straps.

  “Bootsie, cut it out,” I yelled. “Aunt Lyssa is going to kill you if you mark up that new paint.”

  When the doorbell rang, I congratulated myself on not jumping at the sudden sound. Still, I did look through the side window before I opened the front door.

  “Hey, Rog,” I said. Everything was cool now. No problema.

  “Yo, Mad,” he said. There was a question in his eyes, but he didn’t ask it. “Ready to sweat?” he asked instead.

  I started to say yes, but then I remembered the dog.

  “Wait, gotta let Bootsie in. Darn dog always has to come in through the back door.”

  Roger walked with me as I tromped through the house and threw the door open.

  “Boots?” I said.

  But she wasn’t there.

  Roger tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Maddy,” he said, pointing at something. “Man oh man? What the heck is that?”

  I looked at the newly painted back door. The back of my neck tingled as I read the three words scratched deeply into the wood:

  I AM HERE

  5

  SCARY CITY

  WHAT’S THIS ABOUT, Mad?” Roger’s fingers reached out to touch the letters, which could only have been been scored so deeply by a very sharp blade—or a claw. There was a little smile on his face. I knew it was because he was getting a thrill from the creepiness of the situation.

  It was the same smile Roger had on his face when I had taken him on my own special Running and Eating Horror Tour of Providence after finding out that not only was he an ace Cross-country Crazy, he was also a nut for supernatural stuff.

  The two of us set out that day from Waterplace Park. We did the whole Banner Trail, up and down Smithy Hill, back and forth across the bridges, sprinting and sightseeing, taking in not just the museums and the urban architecture, but also those special places sacred to scarydom. East Side, West Side, College Hill always in sight.

  I can still see him holding a Dell’s Lemonade in one hand while reaching out with the other to lightly caress the door frame of the Atheneum.

  “Man oh man! Edgar Allan Poe touched this here, ah’ll bet,” he said in a soft voice as he stared through the door of the old library.

  As Roger ate his third Al’s New York System weiner, proving once again that all Cross-country runners are bottomless pits, I introduced him to a certain gabled New England colonial on Benefit Street. “The Shunned House” was the abode of a buried vampire in HPL’s creepy yarn. Then, after devouring one of Newport Creameries’ Awful Awful Sundaes, I pointed out the steeple of that church on Federal Hill where a dreaded winged monster perched in yet another of the Master’s hair-raising tales.

  After running Blackstone Boulevard, we jogged and then slowed to a stroll to enter Swan Point Cemetery, where the cliffs look out over the Seekonk River, toward where the excavations were just starting into a recently discovered cave in the steepest part of the cliff face. I’d read about it in the papers and knew that it was sponsored by some wealthy guy who was convinced that the ancient Chinese had landed here a century before Columbus. Our Narragansett Tribal Council had been concerned that the cave might contain some ancestral graves. But the people in charge had assured them that they were certain the cave wasn’t the site of any Indian burials. As if we’d never heard that before. Any time archaeologists start digging up the ground here in New England, they usually come across Indian burial sites. Over the last few years, our people had managed to put a stop to much of this. My dad had been very involved. We’d also been able to get back a lot of the bones of our ancestors from museums and colleges so they could be decently reburied.

  Roger and I walked past the graves of Rhode Island Volunteers who gave their lives in the Civil War.

  And then we came at last to the grave. Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s last resting place. H. P. Lovecraft, author of some of the most chilling Gothic tales of ancient evil ever written. 1890–1937. Roger went down on one knee, and his long fingers traced the letters on the stone.

  “‘I am Providence,’” he read aloud—with no trace at all of that weird New Orleans accent that sounds like you put a street kid from Brooklyn into a bottle with a Georgia Cracker and then shook it. And then that smile came over his face.

  The same smile was on Roger’s face now as he looked at the words “I am here” on my door.

  For just a moment, I wondered if this was all just a joke and if Roger really did do it. Was it possible that he was the one who called me the first two times, even though he said he didn’t? Was it his hand that scratched the wo
rds into the back door? As soon as I asked myself those questions, I shook my head. Even though he loves weird stuff to death, Roger is my friend and wouldn’t try to really freak me out. He isn’t a mean practical joker. He was probably smiling because he thought I’d set this up to show him that the supernatural was still alive and well in Rogue Island.

  And there is no way that he could have gotten around front to knock on the door only a heartbeat after I heard the scratching stop. The back gate was still closed and locked from the inside. The high fence was around my backyard. It was meant to keep in Bootsie, who like all year-old Irish setters would have been running her fool head off halfway across town, following her goofy nose, without that barrier.

  Where was Bootsie? Why hadn’t she barked when the doorbell rang? She always barked like crazy whenever she heard or saw anyone. And if something scared her—like the crack of thunder or the sudden ground-shaking rumble from the blasting going on a couple of blocks away from us—as soon as anyone opened the door she was in the house like a shot, woofing and whining and trying to crawl under my bed. Why wasn’t she making a sound now, and where the heck was she? The only reason a hyperactive dog like Bootsie would be quiet would be because she was asleep or…

  “Bootsie,” I called, looking wildly around the yard. “Bootsie? BOOTSIE!”

  6

  BLOOD

  ROGER AND I searched the backyard. We checked the back gate. It was still locked. There was no way Bootsie could have gotten out. Maybe a really athletic person—or something that had the kind of claws that allowed it to climb chain link—could have gotten over it, but not a dog like Boots. The kind of fence Aunt Lyssa had put in was meant to be dog-proof. It was even buried two feet deep so Bootsie couldn’t dig under it.