Lady of Whispers

The children thought if they approached the whispers they might become intelligible, that their comprehension would be proportional to their proximity. Only they couldn’t figure the source of the hushed noise. It was coming from somewhere down in the darkness. 

They exchanged a glance as the sky cried into the Earth’s open jaws, and they drew up to the lips of the mouth in the ground.   

They didn’t need words, but they used them regardless. “We have no choice,” he said.

“Let’s go,” she replied.

She set her foot on the first step of many and began her descent. The stone was apathetic to their small feet. It sat impassively and watched the night unfold. It said to itself they don’t know how little I know.

They walked without words for a quarter of an hour, their steps occasionally lining up with the thunder and making them gods for split seconds. Summoning lightning with their feet and casting it out to the sky.

“Did you hear?” he asked eventually.

“Hear what?”

“Sable’s house got goosed yesterday.”

The girl drew her eyebrows together and tried to figure out whether she knew what her friend was talking about. Deciding that she didn’t, she asked him to elaborate.

“The goose killer,” he said, bracing his arms in the air, wishing there were handrails. “Each night he breaks into a different person’s home. He always leaves behind a scrap of paper. Scrawled in tiny letters is always ‘duck’ or ‘goose’. It’s simple, you remember that game? Where everyone sits in a circle and one person goes around patting heads saying ‘duck duck goose’? He plays it in the nuanced field of life where the lines are unclear and the only referee is Death himself. Your paper says duck you’re safe. But if you get goose, you better start hightailing it. He gives you a day to run, but invariably a resident of that house shows up dead by the end of the week.”

“Did Sable and they run?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t bother to.”

She took it in stride. “I wonder who he’ll pick.”

Their steps matched up for a few seconds and to someone listening in, they were one person. They wondered if this might give them the element of surprise should something choose to attack. Their footsteps disjointed and they were two separate entities again.

“Have you been seeing the dolls?” she asked.

He shook his head and though she couldn’t see him in the inky darkness, she assumed he did so when he didn’t reply. “It’s a phenomenon. Children across the country are seeing them in their rooms at night. I saw one the other day. It was tall as the ceiling and moved like it was attached to a rail in the ground. All smooth.”

“Sounds like an omen,” he commented.

“I think so too.”

“Do you think we should head back?”

They were many feet below the ground and it smelled like cold earth. They began to wonder if this stairwell was leading them straight to hell.

After a few moments of speechless suspension, another set of footsteps could be heard above them. Slow and heavy like an ambling giant.

The children gasped and closed the gap between them. They clasped hands against the presence so sinister they almost surrendered right then and there for their hopelessness. Its steps were slow but sure, and the children knew it would not stop. Not if the sky crumbled and the Earth started shaking and rising above the debris.

“I think not,” she replied finally to his question of whether to abandon their mission.

They plodded on, knowing if they stopped, they were history. Not knowing if they continued whether they would also be history. 

The pounding footsteps like dark beatings of an evil heart. They tried to ignore it. It was only natural after all that such beasts would be attracted to the whispering pit below the ground.

“We might be entering the Lady of Whispers’ chamber,” she noted after listening to the tangled murmurs a few moments.

“Who is that?”

She rolled her neck and sounds like sharp cuts of static leaked out. Her voice aptly dropped. “They say she’s looking for the daughter that was stolen from her. One night she sang her to sleep and the next morning she was gone from the nursery. She raked the whole town with no luck. It was the torment that transformed her into what she is now. Demon of chaos, spirit of darkness.

“When she enters your mind, she tears through it, looking for anything that will bring her closer to her baby. Anything that might help get her back. It’s as if your thoughts are no longer yours. She can hold them in the palm of her hand and squeeze them into disintegration. You go mad, slowly. You hear her quiet rasp in your ear telling you to go to this cave or search this house. People get arrested for breaking and entering, but they can’t help but follow her instructions. She has complete control. If she thinks you will be more useful depressed, she will twist every happy memory, reorganize your thought patterns. If she wants you to be bold, she will pinch your amygdala until it is the size of a beetle’s leg. She can make you anything you don’t want to be.

“And when she’s done with you, she inhabits someone else’s mind. And here lies the only way to purge her from your body.”

The boy listened with wide eyes as she grinned wide and maniacally.

“You tell someone her story real quiet, and you open your mouth and you–”

A great squelching ensued. Like someone reaching into a mother’s belly and pulling her unborn from her uterus. The sound like the penetration of the uterus walls. Or like stepping in something altogether disgusting. Something that your feet could soak up and use as an excuse to become evil.

The girl choked and coughed to help the hand shoot through her throat and out her frozen mouth. She felt fingers clutch the sides of her face, using her flesh as leverage to pull itself through her oral cavity. Her jaw snapped and pain hit her like an anchor dropped from the clouds. She screamed and it seemed to lubricate the Lady’s escape.

She crawled from the spot where the girl’s broken jaw lay slack. She crept down her chest and shifted forms. Soon a woman stood before them, ebony hair trailing down her back, teeth tinged with blood red. Clothes in shambles, eyes slit and wild.

In another second she was an undefined mass. The temperature dropped and the boy realized only as he inhaled and coughed around her that his mouth was open in a scream. 

And the first thing she whispered to him was: “run!”