Page 124 of The Whispering Night
A rumbling roar soon takes over the spirit’s silence. A mauling cold supplants its static. And stormy shadows seep in to replace the green moonlight.
Winnie, Erica, and Jay begin rising through the water column. They still spin, although slower now, and soon they break through the surface of theBig Lake. Water stops crashing around them, replaced by storm, winds, lightning. The hurricane has resumed over the forest, yet now three friends are its eye.
Gone fishing,Winnie thinks, and she wants to laugh at that. Because she’s still wearing her stolen T-shirt under this armor, like she’s some kind of sleeping spirit fangirl.
Erica is the first to speak. Later, she will be unable to explainwhyshe is compelled to say anything. The words are simply there, ready to be spoken. Waiting to trip off her tongue.
Which, later, Winnie will decide is a sure sign that Erica was possessed. And she, Winnie, was possessed too, along with Jay, since each of them begin acting in accordance to what the spirit needs them to do.
We are one in sleep and dreams,Erica says in English. Then again,We are one in sleep and dreams.
She chants it three times before Winnie is compelled to join her—and as soon as Winnie also starts chanting, she feels her atoms move, melt, quake with a newly electrified life.
Jay is the last to join.We are one in sleep and dreams.The magic amps upward. The volume dial twists to max. Like Erica, like Winnie, Jay also says the invocation three times.We are one in sleep and dreams.And on his third recitation, the whirling cyclone of their triangle hits its crescendo. A great climax that no one—especially not Winnie or Erica or Jay—will ever be able to describe. So much storm. So much sound. So much space-time compressed and simultaneously ripped apart at the quantum seams.
Then, like all songs, all eruptions, all dreams, the storm ends. The spirit winds pluck out the final notes in a melody that Jenna Thursday composed four years ago. And a new mist rises, ready to reclaim the nightmares of the forest.
For several eternal seconds, Winnie, Erica, and Jay finding themselves unbound by physics. They no longer spin but simply float above the Big Lake. And in those dilated moments of spacetime, they each see something—as does every Tuesday, every Wednesday, every hunter that charged into the forest when the siren went off downtown.
They see figures coalescing in the rising mist.
They see ghosts.
Erica sees Jenna, her form hovering where the melusine just stood.Jay sees Grayson, bowing his head like a sadhuzag. Aunt Rachel sees her mother, Grandma Winona, grinning where a dryad was. And Winnie, to her shock, sees Professor Samuel, hunched where the wulver just stood.
On that morning, each Luminary and each Diana who ever lost a person to the forest and its nightmares… They see that person they knew. For two heartbeats. Then the ghosts fade away, eaten up by the mist. Returned to the spirit, who once more sleeps at the heart of the lake.
Winnie will have a theory, of course. An “inspired one” she’ll bet Mario a week’s worth of coffee over, even though they both know she’ll never be able to prove it. Her theory includes the law of conservation of mass along with ashes that sink down like fish food.
As soon as the ghosts wink away, Winnie, Jay, and Erica fall. At a speed of 9.8 meters per square second, they plummet back toward the Big Lake that just spat them out. It’s not far to fall—thirty feet at most—but certainly far enough to hurt. To send them plunging deep, deep, deep beneath choppy waves.
Winnie loses her glasses as water courses over her, and she can’t help but think, as she grapples and swims back to the surface:Wow. It’s amazing I didn’t lose my glasses sooner.Then she bursts from the Big Lake, sputtering, gasping, coughing up all the water that just shoved down into her nose. Erica is already treading water nearby, gulping at the morning air.
“WTF,” Winnie gasps out.
Erica coughs a laugh. “Seriously.” She is shivering. Her hair is matted, her makeup gone. “WTF just happened to us.”
Jay explodes from the water. Like them, he gasps, he chokes, he spits up lungfuls of lake. But it’s clear he’s struggling. Sapped by his time in the Whisperer… and perhaps transformed into something even less human than before.
His eyes glow like green full moons.
Winnie paddles to him. Water flips and flings around her. “Let’s get you out of this water.” She grabs Jay’s arm. He’s weak. His skin is deathly pale.
“People,” he rasps, pointing. “So many… people.”
Winnie squints at the shore. Without her glasses, it’s hard to see specifics. But yes—there are people. Tens of them. Maybe even hundreds. She turns back to Jay.Son of forest, son of pain.“I won’t let them hurt you,” she says. “I swear, Jay, I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
“How will you stop them?”
“With my help,” Erica replies, and she pushes through the water until she too can hold fast to Jay.
He sighs at her touch, as if something inside releases. Color daubs across his cheeks. The glow in his eyes drains, drips, washes away, until soon, only forest gray remains.
A fresh surge of strength ripples through him. “Okay,” he tells them. “Let’s get out of this water.”
Together, the triangle of friends swim toward shore.
Meanwhile, down, down, beneath heavy waves where only nightmares and starlight are meant to tread, the spirit of Hemlock Falls smiles. Its lone eye finally closes.
