Page 71 of The Whispering Night
Winnie lobs to her feet and aims for the exit. The live wire on the chalkboard writhes hotter with each step. She reaches the gallery’s end and veers into a room filled with couches ripped to shreds like they were nothing more than teddy bears caught in a lawnmower.
Winnie crosses the room in seconds, knowing on a visceral level where the Whisperer will be. She can’t saywhy,but it just makes sense. Everything keeps going back to her dad, doesn’t it? So now, where the Whisperer must await will be in Dad’s favorite room.
Winnie reaches the conservatory and steps inside.
CHAPTER
30
When Winnie steps into the conservatory, she can’t see anything. Not because the room is too dark—if anything, it’s brighter here, with the moon to shine through a glass ceiling and reflect on white tiles. Rather, Winnie sees nothing because there is nothing to see.
There is nothing to hear, either. No blenders eating xylophones, no engines dropped down a mineshaft. It’s as if a winter coat has been draped across the conservatory, and it reminds Winnie of the muffling spell the Crow cast in the maze.
The Whispererishere, though. The static of its magic scours like a backward comet against Winnie. Her teeth feel as if they’re detaching from her gums, and the urge to retreat fires through her muscles in short bursts ofSOSandGet the hell out of here.
Winnie holds her ground, fingers tightening on the broken bottle.
She winds her arm back. Then flings. If the Whisperer really is here, it will shatter into a glass hurricane. Instead, the bottle whistles in a perfect arch like a rainbow after a storm. It clatters to the ground and slides over three tiles.
But that is when the sound finally does arrive: the whispering Winnie knows so well. That she thought for days was from a nightmare, before she finally figured out it was from a spell.
Fames: These spells are self-feeding and sustain themselves in the forest.
The sound—so quiet next to the battles from the rest of the museum—rustles louder, and Winnie finds she’s squinting. Staring hard at where the Whisperershouldbe, but where empty air still remains.
The whisper boils louder until she can no longer hear the rest of the museum. A cheese grater starts flaying across her skin. Vertigo takes root inside her cranium. But she doesn’t run, and she doesn’t look away. Because why, why,whyis thefamesso still—so concentrated in this place, like a flower folded inward?
Winnie can’t pinpoint when the singing begins. Only that somewhere, in all that radioactive chaos, a melody assembles. It’s like one of those psychedelic pictures that look totally meaningless until you stare at it long enough for a 3D shape to emerge.
What emerges here is Jenna’s song. Still wordless, still only melody, but it’sthesong that Winnie hears when she dreams. That she still thinks saved her while she was beneath the waterfall’s waves. She once thought Jenna wrote songs that could break you—but that always put you back together again.
This one, though, isn’t going to fix Winnie. This one seeks only to destroy.
“Jenna?” The name drips off Winnie’s tongue, wholly silent because the Whisperer can’t help but consume it. “Jenna, is that you?”
A hand claps onto Winnie’s shoulder. She heard no footsteps, felt no shifting in the air to herald a person’s approach, but now there is ahand on herand it is gripping so hard she can do nothing but be towed away on a riptide of unseen muscles.
PURE HEART,the Whisperer says in a voice that is not a voice at all, but a melody shattered by space-time and regret.THERE YOU ARE.
The Whisperer launches into full power. No music. Only hunger and violence and death.
And finally, Winnie listens to the hands—finally she twists into them and lets herself fall into a frantic run beside Jay. Just in time too, because behind them, the conservatory shatters. It is an explosion of glass and iron and lawnmower-flavored bloodlust. The stink of burning plastic keens so hard into Winnie’s nose, her eyes water. She almost trips over the remains of a couch cushion.
She can see, through tears and filthy glasses, that Jay is shouting something. But she can’t hear him. All that fills her ears are the whispers. Haunting, relentless whispers.
They reach the nightmare gallery, where only two spidrin remain, fightingagainst costumed Luminaries. Now though, the spidrin are fleeing too, scurrying on their knobbed legs at a speed no hunter can match.
“RUN!”Jay roars, and Winnie realizes she can hear him once more. They must have gained enough ground, so thefamescan no longer eat their words. But it’s notenoughground, and worse, Jay is stumbling. Stopping. Bending over.
Oh god, no.
He is changing. Before Winnie’s eyes and with mist to pour off him, his nightmare mutation is taking hold. His clothes absorb into his body as if they never existed. His muscles ripple and shift.
Jay has just enough time to lift his face. To find Winnie with eyes that glow like the moon. There is so much pain there, so much fear. “I love you,” he tells her. “I’m sorry.”
Then the mist spews wide. Jay vanishes entirely within its grasp. And worse—somehow worse—a chemical smell is acidifying Winnie’s nose hairs again. Sound is once more vacuuming away. And there,thereare the helicopter blades of fury to thunder against her skin.
The Whisperer has caught up to them.
