Tongue of Ash

Stacks of old books with cracked spines leaned precariously against each other in the cold, dimly lit archive. Dust hung in the air, occasionally disturbed by the slow, deliberate turning of pages. Dr Jo Alpin flipped through a leather-bound copy of a text called The Tongue of Ash. Her fingers were stained with ink and her eyes were tired. The pages of the book were brittle, and the ink was smudged in places as if the words had been scrawled in a hurry so many centuries ago. Near the bottom of one page, written the margin in jagged handwriting, were the words: To speak is to surrender.

The page crackled under Jo’s fingers as she read through a passage on the page that detailed something called the ‘Rite of Utterance’. Its description was frustratingly vague but undeniably tantalising. It promised to unlock esoteric knowledge beyond mortal comprehension. The rite itself was transcribed in a language Jo didn’t even recognise.

Despite the ominous warning scrawled in the margin, Jo found herself fixating on the incantation. Its complexity beckoned her, a linguistic puzzle woven with enigmatic threads. Her curiosity smouldered into obsession as the mystery occupied her thoughts, fed by her ambition. What if it was genuine? What was the harm in trying?

Late one night when she was alone in the suffocating stillness of her office, she set the open book in front of her. Candlelight flickered across its pages. Her breathing was ragged and her voice trembled as she spoke the guttural words out loud. Each syllable scraped her throat like shards of glass, but once she started she couldn’t stop. The room itself exhaled around her. The shadows quivered as if they were waking up. Then thick, unmoving silence settled over the room like dust. Nothing else seemed to happen. Jo’s relief mingled with her disappointment. It had all been nonsense, then, just a superstitious relic preserved in brittle parchment.

Over the next few days, whispers started to trail her speech like shadows. They were soft and barely audible, just a breath against the edge of her words. The disjointed, spectral wisps slipped from her mouth without her permission. She would catch fragments in the corners of her sentences. They were names that she didn’t recognise, actions that she had never talked about out loud. Her own and others’ secrets bled through her speech, raw and unbidden, to reveal long-forgotten betrayals, buried crimes and whispers of guilt that should have remained silent.

He colleagues grew disturbed. Their eyes darted away when she spoke, their hands fidgeting with pens and paper as if that would drown out the murmurs that spilled from her lips. Conversations grew shorter and pleasantries were abandoned in favour of curt nods and alarmed glances. They avoided her office, where eventually whispers pooled like spilled ink even when Jo wasn’t speaking.

She sat at the back of a lecture hall with her shoulder hunched and a scarf pulled tightly around her neck, as if that could stifle the whispers. She hoped that the noise of others in the lecture hall would drown them out, pens scratching, murmured questions, the drone of the lecturer’s voice.

It seemed to work for a while. Her breathing steadies and the whispers dulled to a murmur so quiet that she wasn’t even sure it was there. Until, like floodwaters breaching a dam, they surged forward and spilled out of her mouth in a torrent. They came louder and more clear than ever before, the words tumbling over one another in a river of confessions. Scandals, betrayals and crimes, most of which she had never even heard before, were spoken with perfect clarity.

Students turned in their seats and stared with wide, unblinking eyes. The professor staggered back, his papers scattering from his hands as though he’d been physically struck. People started to shout, and then to scream. Chaos erupted as chairs scraped and footsteps thundered for the exits. Some people were crying and clutching their heads, while others turned to each other and shouted accusations dredged up from what they heard.

Jo clutched her own throat and dug her nails into her skin as though she could claw the words back in, but the voices that were not hers continued. They poured out of her mouth as she willed them to stop, spilling secrets she knew and those she didn’t. The room emptied around her but the words continued to echo, lingering like ghosts.

Jo stumbled back to her office and slammed the door shut behind her, turning the lock with trembling hands. The words still spilled from her, quieter again now than they had been but seeping into the empty room like creeping fog. They coiled and clung in the corners, whispering into the silence.

She pulled The Tongue of Ash from her desk. Its brittle paper flaked in her desperate grip. She flipped through the crumbling pages, searching for the incantation that had unlocked this cursed power. The page that had held the ritual was blank now, just faint unreadable impressions left where the words had been. She clawed at the book, tearing the paper as if the words might be hidden underneath, but it was hopeless.

A scream clawed its way up her throat but was swallowed by the whispers. Desperate, she grabbed a pen and tried to recreate the unknown words from memory, but the letters came out wrong. The whispers poured through her hand now too, uncurling in the ink from her pen and staining the paper with names, dates and accusation. Lines of confessions sprawled across the page in her own shaky handwriting.

The whispers would not stop or fade now. They poured out of her, secrets she could not escape.

#

Jo’s house stood like a blight among the tidy row of house. It had been months since she had last been seen entering, and nobody had seen her leave since. The windows were dark and the paint peeling. Weeds clawed up the cracked brickwork. The curtains hung limp and stained, always closed. It looked abandoned to passersby, condemned to rot.

The neighbours talked about sounds that seeped through their walls sometimes. They were soft, like rustling leaves, but sometimes came louder and more distinct. They were voices murmuring secrets from decades past about family betrayals and hidden affairs, unpaid debts and broken promises. These whispers seemed to know things that couldn’t be known, things buried in the past that should be long dead and gone to dust.

Nobody approached the house anymore. The front door was locked and the whispers leaked from within, slipping through crack in the wood and spilling into the street, stretching a little further every night. Slowly and hungrily searching for anybody who dared to listen.