The Whisper (28 page)

“Why did you tell me that story?” Polly asked. “What did it mean?”

Her face bombed out, ruined, Henrietta said, “Because it's time for someone else. I've been doing this too long. I need to find a replacement. Someone good. Someone better than me.”

Raising the jar in her hands, Henrietta closed her eyes and began whispering into its opening. Moments later, the glass disappeared, and there was a cylinder of water floating in the air.

“Henrietta?” Polly asked. “What are you doing? What have you done?”

“Forever,” Henrietta said as she closed her hands on the cylinder of water.

And she disappeared.

 

SIX YEARS (OR EONS) LATER (DEPENDING ON HOW YOU LOOK AT IT)

 

CHAPTER 22

It would take a while. If he had to guess, Alistair would have said that the cloud was at least three hundred feet off the ground. There were no ladders that tall around, no trees. Even the memorial tree downtown, which always seemed so towering to Alistair, was only seventy feet high.

To reach the cloud would take effort and time. Effort was hard to come by. No one, except for Dorian, was interested in helping him, not even the older Alistair, who dismissed the idea as a suicide mission.

“So you travel through this cloud to another world where some dude is waiting for you, and he's a friend of yours who's, like, a great puppet master or something, right?” the older asked. “And he's the one who captured Fiona, and lots of other kids, including some girl named Polly who's, like, the toughest girl in the universe? And what do you plan to do when you get there? How are you gonna defeat such a character?”

The conversation took place two days after the helmet had rained from the cloud. Alistair had gone to Boaz the day before and asked him to publish another story in the paper.
Meet us at the model airplane runway tomorrow at ten a.m. and help us find Fiona
was the gist of it. When tomorrow became today and the hour was closer to one in the afternoon, only three people stood on the grass runway: two Alistairs and a Dorian. To pass the time, to gain their trust, Alistair had told them about Charlie.

“I don't know exactly what I'm going to do when I see him,” the younger said. “But I need to get there, because that's where he'll be waiting. This is a game to him. Everything is a game. And he wants to challenge me. And if I win, then maybe he'll let me know where Fiona is, where Chua is, where all of them are.”

“He gave you a chance, though, right?” Dorian asked. “When you were in the world of clouds? You could have touched the silver and gold rain, right? Gone chin-to-chin with him? So why didn't you? Why'd you come here? Did you really think you'd find her here?”

Alistair kicked at the ground and said, “I was hoping that maybe this place held what I needed to bring her back.”

“What do you mean?” Dorian asked.

“Nothing,” Alistair said with a sigh. “A stupid theory that some kids had. The more I think about it, the more impossible it seems. And the more I think about it, the more I realize the real reason I came here. Charlie was right; I don't know Fiona. Not really. But I needed to know her. I needed to see the place where she spent twelve years. The place she thought was better than home.”

“If this is better than your home,” the older said, “then I feel sorry for you. Count me out.” And he abandoned them for the air-conditioning and solitude of his car.

“Well, you still got me,” Dorian said. “So how we gonna do it?”

“Too high for a ladder. A stairway that high would need to be insanely long.”

“A tower?” Dorian asked.

“Is there enough material to build one? Can we even afford material?”

“Maybe not anything from town. But we could dig up some dirt and make it out of that. If we dig around here, we'll end up with trenches and holes in our way, but there's a whole mess of dirt out there in Nothingland. No one will ever charge us for that. A few holes out there won't get in anyone's way.”

*   *   *

This is how the younger Alistair's days went.

He would wake and meet Dorian downstairs—he lived with Dorian still, in Maria's old room, for the simple reason that there wasn't anywhere else to live. The two would then drive into Nothingland, where they kept a barely functional backhoe and a rusty dump truck Dorian borrowed from a contractor who occasionally employed him to do light carpentry.

Dorian would run the backhoe, digging up chunks of the ground, which was soft and a bit sticky, like clay. Alistair would oversee his progress and direct him to the dump truck, which they'd fill to the brim.

Next they'd drive the dump truck to the runway and deposit the mounds of earth. The rest of the morning would be spent shoveling the earth and molding it into walls.

They'd break for lunch, followed by an afternoon of drawing plans. It was a work in progress, a trial by fire, and neither of them knew what they were doing.

After two weeks, they had a ten-foot-tall, leaning tower of mud.

“This ain't gonna happen,” Dorian said.

“You're right,” Alistair said. “How about a mountain, then? The digging is the easy part, and there's more ground than anyone knows what to do with out there in Nothingland. Let's pile it up until we can't pile it anymore.”

*   *   *

Two weeks later, they had a mountain twenty feet high. A good start. But out in Nothingland, they struck something, and the digging stopped for the moment. Dorian climbed down from the backhoe to see what it could be. He unearthed a book.

“The Life … of … Rodrigo … Hermanez
,
”
Dorian said, wiping dirt from the cover.

Alistair scrambled down into the hole and reached for the book, saying, “Gimme that.”

It seemed like a game to Dorian, who chuckled as he pulled the book away. “Whoa, cowboy, I wanna have a look-see first.”

“I'm not sure you do,” Alistair said.

“Rodrigo Hermanez was born way down in Argentina,” Dorian read aloud, “on a dairy farm where he milked cows, chased chickens, and all that agricultural stuff.”

“See?” Alistair said, reaching again. “It's nonsense. Rodrigo was born and raised in Thessaly. You all know that.”

Pulling the book away again, Dorian said, “Who wrote this thing, anyhow?” He wiped more dirt from the cover to reveal the author's name.

Fiona Loomis.

*   *   *

In a booth at the local diner called the Skylark, flanked on both sides by his two small children—Doria and Felix—Rodrigo Hermanez read about his life, or a version of his life, one he didn't recognize.

Alistair had pleaded with Dorian not to show Rodrigo the book, but Dorian had asserted that “a man deserves to know what others might be saying about him.” And since a man deserves such things, Dorian had called Rodrigo and invited him to the Skylark, where he handed him this curious biography.

Closing the book after reading the first few pages, Rodrigo said, “When did Fiona write this?”

“Before,” Alistair explained.

“Before what?” Dorian asked.

Alistair put a hand over his face, like he was watching an awful scene in a movie—teeth being pulled, eyes being poked. “Before … she … created … you,” he said.

Rodrigo pushed the book across the table and pulled his kids, who were fiddling with straws, closer to his ribs. “Fiona was a girl, a weird girl, a smart girl, some even called her a magical girl. But still a girl,” he said, and he placed a hand over each of his kids' outer ears. “I dated her, so I should know.”

Alistair took a sip of an iced tea and said, “This is not something I wanted to tell people. But it's the truth. I've had enough lies for a lifetime. People deserve the truth.”

“People?” Dorian asked.

“You, him, all of this,” Alistair said as he spread his arms out. “Everything is something she made up. And that book? It's about one of the original people who inspired it.”

Dorian picked the book up and examined all sides of it, as if it were dangerous, as if it were infested. “There are more books like this?” Dorian asked.

“Yes,” Alistair said.

“How do you know these things?” Rodrigo asked. “What if this is her making up stories about me? Because she's a fan? Because she loves me so much?”

Alistair sighed and said, “I know these things because she told me. Before she created this place, she spent a year out in Nothingland writing books about people. Some of the people she only knew stories about. Some of the people she loved. But she was trying to get to know them
all
better. She was trying to make sure they were never forgotten.”

“Books about everyone?”

“No,” Alistair said. “Some people.”

“Were those books buried too?” Dorian asked, shaking the biography. “Like this one?”

At the counters, in the booths, there were folks Alistair recognized, others he didn't. Some he wasn't sure about. “I wish we hadn't dug out there,” he said. “I should have known better. These aren't things she wanted people to read.”

“If you write it, you want people to read it,” Rodrigo said. “Especially if you bury it.”

“And people deserve to read it,” Dorian said.

*   *   *

It started slowly. A few people went out to Nothingland with shovels. They didn't get very far. Digging a hole with a shovel isn't easy, even when the ground is soft like clay.

“I think we oughta hold off on the mountain for a bit,” Dorian said one morning as they drove to Nothingland. “Use the backhoe to help folks find more of these books.”

“I'm pretty sure there isn't a book about you down there,” Alistair said.

“I don't care about that,” Dorian said. “I care about finding Fiona, maybe even more than you. And maybe the secret ain't in that cloud. Charlie is a bit of a con man, right? Maybe he's trying to distract us from what's down below by making us look up into the sky. You yourself said this place might have what you need to bring her back.”

There was no arguing with Dorian. His mind was suddenly set. And the mountain was put on hold. Now it was solely about digging for books. Rather than moving the earth to the runway, it was placed along the borders of Nothingland.

When word spread, thanks to Boaz writing stories in the
Sutton Bulletin
with titles like “It's Only Your Life Buried Out There,” bulldozers, excavators, and every truck in town showed up. A wall of dirt rose around the edge of Nothingland, and more books were found.

Chua Ling approached Alistair in the grocery store one day with the story of her life in her hand. “I don't care what's true and what's fiction,” she said. “Why'd she write this?”

“Because she loved Chua,” Alistair said as he filled his cart with the only thing he knew how to cook—microwavable egg rolls. “Because she missed Chua.”

“But I'm Chua!” she said, storming away. “
I'm
Chua!”

There were other encounters like this. At the Skylark, on the sidewalk, in the library. Alistair was treated as Fiona's representative. People had little interest in him other than as a target for their frustrations. Some of them wanted to hear about Fiona's life before, so he told her story as best he could. It rarely helped. It frustrated some. Perplexed many. Saddened the handful who really missed her—Dorian especially.

One thing became apparent. No one was going to help him with the mountain, because they all sure as heck wanted to know what she had written about them before seeing her again. Most actually didn't care where she was, or how she got there. Her opinions were all that mattered, not her safety.

Alistair kept working on the mountain alone. All the machinery in town was dedicated to Nothingland digs, and he didn't have access to a car. So he made do by hooking a trailer to a bicycle and ferrying loads of earth to the runway. It was slow, solitary work, but he didn't know of any other options.

It went on for a few weeks like this. Alistair lived with Dorian, though they stayed out of each other's way. Dorian still concentrated on the digs, but he was kind enough to pay Alistair a small amount of cash for doing chores around the house, which kept him fed and going. Back in the Solid World, Alistair had never trusted Dorian Loomis, but here, he owed his life to him. Dorian was one of the only people he could trust, maybe even more than he could trust himself.

The younger Alistair hardly saw the older Alistair, except for the afternoon he popped by the runway. “A mountain out of a molehill,” the older said, marveling at the now thirty-foot mound.

“You're welcome to help,” the younger said.

The older brushed him off. “I'm past wanting that. And I'm past wanting whatever it is they all want. Out there in Nothingland.”

“What does that mean?”

“They'll end up like me,” the older said as he walked away. “That's why I never told them about the tapes. My advice: build faster. Get the hell out of here while you can.”

*   *   *

The others did end up like the older Alistair. The ones who found their own stories were bitter at first. Angry. Confused. But eventually, they became sad. Withdrawn. They quit their jobs. They hardly left their houses. No one could prove that these books were the truth, but they felt like the truth. Which was enough.

The ones who didn't find their own stories kept digging. They became obsessed, until their machinery broke down and couldn't be fixed anymore. They were left with shovels, so some of them gave up. Then those ones became sad. Withdrawn. They burrowed at home.

A strange thing happened to Alistair. He stopped noticing. Days and weeks and months rolled by, and he kept building the mountain and thought about little else. Memories of the Solid World didn't visit him at all anymore. He had no contact with others except for the occasional small talk with Dorian at the house.