The Whisper Man

“Please.”

I realized that his voice was deliberately quiet, as though there were someone in another room he didn’t want to hear.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“I heard a noise.”

“A noise?”

“There’s a monster outside my window.”

I sat there in silence, remembering the rhyme he’d told me at bedtime. But that had been about the door. And anyway, there was no way anybody could be outside his window. We were one floor up.

“You were dreaming, mate.”

He shook his head in the darkness.

“It woke me up. I went across to the window and it was louder there. I wanted to open the curtains but I was too scared.”

You would have seen the dark field across the road, I thought. That’s all.

But he sounded so serious that I couldn’t say that to him.

“All right.” I slipped out of bed. “Well, let’s go and check, then.”

“Don’t, Daddy.”

“I’m not scared of monsters, Jake.”

He followed me into the hall, where I switched on the light at the top of the stairs. Stepping into his room, though, I left the light off, and then approached the window.

“What if there’s something there?”

“There isn’t,” I said.

“But what if?”

“Then I’ll deal with it.”

“Will you punch it in the face?”

“Absolutely. But there’s nothing there.”

And yet I didn’t feel as confident as I sounded. The closed curtains seemed ominous. I listened for a moment, but there was nothing to hear. And it was impossible for anybody to be out there.

I pulled the curtains open.

Nothing. Just an oblique angle of the path and garden, the empty road beyond, and then the dark, shadowy expanse of the field stretching away into the distance. A dim reflection of my face was staring back into the room. But there was nothing else out there. The whole world seemed to be sleeping peacefully in exactly the way that I wasn’t.

“See?” I did my best to sound patient. “Nobody there.”

“But there was.”

I closed the curtains and knelt down.

“Jake, sometimes dreams can seem very real. But they’re not. How can anybody have been outside your window when we’re all that way above the ground?”

“They could have climbed the drainpipe.”

I started to answer, but then pictured the outside of the house. The drainpipe was just to the side of his window. A ridiculous idea occurred to me. If you lock and chain a door to keep a monster out, what choice does it have but to climb up and get in some other way?

Stupidity.

“There was nobody out there, Jake.”

“Can I sleep with you tonight, Daddy? Please?”

I sighed to myself. Obviously he wasn’t going to sleep alone in here now, and it was either too late or too early to argue. I couldn’t decide which. It was easier right now just to give in.

“All right. But just for tonight. No fidgeting, though.”

“Thank you, Daddy.” He picked up his Packet of Special Things and followed me back through. “I promise I won’t fidget.”

“So you say. But what about stealing all the covers?”

“I won’t do that either.”

I turned the hall light off and then we clambered into bed, Jake on what should have been Rebecca’s side.

“Daddy?” he said. “Were you having a nightmare before?”

Glass smashing.

My mother screaming.

A man shouting.

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose so.”

“What was it about?”

The dream itself had faded a little now, but it had been a memory as much as a nightmare. Me as a child, walking toward the doorway to the small kitchen of the house I had grown up in. In the dream, it was late, and a noise from downstairs had woken me. I had stayed in bed with the covers pulled over my head and the dread thick in my heart, trying to pretend that everything was okay, even though I knew it wasn’t. Eventually I had tiptoed quietly down the stairs, not wanting to see whatever was happening, but drawn to it all the same, feeling small and terrified and powerless.

I remembered approaching the bright kitchen along the dark hall, hearing the noises coming from in there. My mother’s voice was angry but quiet, as though she thought I was still asleep and she was trying to keep me safe from this, but the man’s voice was loud and uncaring. All their words overlapped. I couldn’t make out what either of them was saying, only that it was ugly, and that it was building toward a crescendo—accelerating toward something awful.

The kitchen doorway.

I reached it just in time to see the man’s red face contorted in rage and hatred as he threw the glass at my mother as hard as he could. To see her flinch away, far too late, and to hear her scream.

The last time I’d ever seen my father.

It was such a long time ago, but the memory still surfaced every now and then. Still clawed its way up out of the dirt.

“Grown-up stuff,” I told Jake. “Maybe I’ll tell you one day, but it was just a dream. And it’s fine. It all had a happy ending.”

“What happened in the end?”

“Well, you did, eventually.”

“Me?”

“Yeah.” I ruffled his hair. “And then you went to sleep.”

I closed my eyes, and the two of us lay there in silence for so long that I assumed he’d dropped back off to sleep. At one point, I stretched my arm out to one side and rested my hand gently on top of the covers over him, as though to reassure myself he was still there. The two of us together. My small, wounded family.

“Whispering,” Jake said quietly.

“What?”

“Whispering.”

His voice sounded so far away that I thought he was already dreaming.

“It was whispering at my window.”

Twelve

You have to hurry.

In the dream, Jane Carter was whispering down the phone to Pete. Her voice was quiet and urgent, as though what she was saying were the most frightening thing in the world.

But she was doing it anyway. Finally.

Pete had sat at his office desk, his heart thumping in his chest. He had spoken to Frank Carter’s wife numerous times during the investigation. He had appeared outside her place of work, or arranged to find himself walking alongside her on busy pavements, always careful not to be seen with her anyplace her husband might hear of. It had been as though he had been making covert attempts to turn a spy, which he supposed wasn’t far from the truth.

Jane had provided alibis for her husband. She had defended him. But it had been obvious to Pete from his first encounter with her that she was terrified of Frank—he thought with good reason—and he had worked hard to convert her: to convince her it was safe for her to talk to him. To take back what she had said and tell the truth about her husband. Talk to me, Jane. I’ll make sure that Frank can’t hurt you and your son anymore.

And now it seemed like she was going to. Such fear had been beaten into Jane Carter over the years that even now, phoning him without the bastard in the house, she could still only bring herself to whisper. Courage is not the absence of fear, Pete knew. Courage requires fear. And so, even as the adrenaline hit—even as he felt the case beginning to close ahead of him—he also recognized the bravery of this call.