The Whisper Man

It was a coincidence, of course; it had to be. Maybe the butterflies were more common than I realized—the ones in the garage must have arrived from somewhere, after all. Obviously, I had tried to talk to Jake about them too. Equally obviously, he had refused to answer me. And so, as I tossed and turned, trying to sleep, I realized the mystery of the butterflies came down to the same thing as the argument itself. I’d just have to hope it would be better in the morning.

Glass smashing.

A man shouting.

My mother screaming.

Wake up, Tom.

Wake up now.

Someone shook my foot.

I jerked awake, soaked with sweat, my heart hammering in my chest. The bedroom was pitch-black and quiet—still the middle of the night. Jake was standing at the bottom of the bed again, a black silhouette against the darkness behind him. I rubbed my face.

“Jake?” I said quietly.

No reply. I couldn’t see his face, but his upper body was moving gently from side to side, swaying on his feet like a metronome. I frowned.

“Are you awake?”

Again, there was no answer. I sat up in bed, wondering what the best thing to do was. If he was sleepwalking, should I wake him gently, or try to steer him, still asleep, back to his room? But then my eyes adapted a little better to the darkness and the silhouette grew clearer. His hair was wrong. It was much longer than it should have been, and it seemed to be splayed out to one side.

And …

Someone was whispering.

But the figure at the end of the bed, still swaying ever so slowly from side to side, was entirely silent. The sound I could hear was coming from somewhere else in the house.

I looked to my left. The open bedroom door gave me a view of the dark hallway. It was empty, but I thought the whispering was coming from somewhere out there.

“Jake—”

But when I looked back, the silhouette at the end of my bed had disappeared and the room was empty.

I rubbed the sleep from my face, then slid across the cold side of the bed and padded quietly out into the hall. The whispering was a little louder out here. While I couldn’t make out any words, it was obvious now that I was hearing two voices: a hushed conversation, with one participant slightly gruffer than the other. Jake was talking to himself again. I moved instinctively toward his room, but then glanced down the stairs and froze where I stood.

My son was at the bottom, sitting by the front door. A soft wedge of streetlight was cutting around the edge of the curtains in my office to the side, staining his tousled hair orange. His legs were curled up underneath him, and his head was against the door, with one hand pressed there beside it. In the other, resting against his leg, were the spare keys I kept on the desk in the office.

I listened.

“I’m not sure,” Jake whispered.

The reply was the gruffer voice I’d heard.

“I’ll look after you, I promise.”

“I’m not sure.”

“Let me in, Jake.”

My son moved his hand toward the mail slot in the door. That was when I noticed that it was being pushed open from the outside. There were fingers there. My heart leaped at the sight of them. Four thin, pale fingers, poking through among the spidery black bristles, holding the mail slot open.

“Let me in.”

Jake rested the side of his small hand against one of them, and it curled around to stroke him.

“Just let me in.”

He reached up for the chain.

“Don’t move!” I shouted.

It came out without me thinking, from my heart as much as my mouth. The fingers retreated immediately and the mail slot snapped shut behind them. Jake turned to look up at me as I thudded down the stairs toward him, my heart hammering in my chest. At the bottom, I snatched the keys out of his hand.

Sitting like that, he was blocking the door.

“Move,” I shouted. “Move.”

He scrabbled out of the way, crawling on his hands and knees into my office. I scraped the chain out of the lock, then tried the door handle, which turned easily—Jake had already unlocked the fucking thing with the keys. Pulling the door open, I stepped quickly onto the front path and stared out into the night.

As far as I could tell, there was nobody up or down the street. The amber haze beneath the streetlights was misty, the pavements empty. But looking across the road, I thought I could see a figure running swiftly across the field. A vague shape, pummeling away through the darkness.

Already too far away for me to catch.

My instinct took me down the front path anyway, but I stopped halfway to the street, my breath visible in the cold night air. What the hell was I doing? I couldn’t leave the house open behind me and go chasing someone across a field. I couldn’t leave Jake in there by himself, alone and abandoned.

So I stood there for a few seconds, staring into the darkness of the field. The figure—if it had ever been here at all—had disappeared now.

It had been here.

I stood there for a moment longer. And then I went back inside, locked the door, and phoned the police.

Part Three

Twenty-two

Credit where it’s due, two police officers arrived on my doorstep within ten minutes of my phone call. After that, things began to go downhill.

I had to take some responsibility for what happened. It was half past four in the morning, and I was exhausted, frightened, and not thinking straight, and the account I had to give was light on detail anyway. But there was no getting away from Jake’s role in what unfolded.

When I’d come back inside to make the call, I’d found him at the bottom of the stairs, hugging his knees and with his face buried in them. I had eventually calmed down enough to calm him down too, and then I’d carried him into the living room, where he’d curled up at one end of the couch. And then refused to talk to me.

I had done my best to hide the frustration and panic I was feeling. I probably hadn’t succeeded.

Even when the police officers joined us in the living room, Jake remained in that same position. I sat down awkwardly beside him. Even then, I was aware of the distance between us, and I was sure it was also very obvious to the police. The two of them—a man and a woman—were both polite and made the requisite concerned and understanding faces, but the woman kept glancing curiously at Jake, and I got the impression the worry on her face was not wholly because of what I was telling them.

Afterward, the male officer referred to the notes he’d made.

“Has Jake sleepwalked before?”

“A little,” I said. “But not often, and only ever to my room. He’s never gone downstairs like that.”

That was if he even had been sleepwalking, of course. While it made me feel better to think he hadn’t been about to open that door out of choice, I realized I couldn’t be sure of that. And Jesus, if that was true, what did it say about how much my son hated me?

The officer made another note.

“And you can’t describe the individual you saw?”

“No. He was quite far away across the field by then, running fast. It was dark, and I couldn’t see him properly.”

“Build? Clothes?”

I shook my head. “No, sorry.”

“Are you sure it was a man?”

“Yes. It was a man’s voice I heard at the door.”