The Whispers

The Whispers - Part 6

He had pictures. Eloise stood behind him and watched. And yet she wasn't quite behind him; she was in him. But that wasn't quite it, either. He was a man in a boy's room, and he sat upon a twin bed made up in navy blue sheets. He sifted through his pictures of the girls. How he prized them. How he looked forward to his time alone with those stolen photographs.

His breathing came heavy and hot, wheezy, almost asthmatic. Some of the girls in the photos Eloise recognized-students of Alfie's, acquaintances of her daughters. The Hollows wasn't a big town. She'd seen some of them on the soccer field, at dances, Girl Scouts, swim team. Some of them she'd never seen before. Eloise watched as he took the pictures out from the shoe box under the bed; she felt his alacrity, his appetites. The photos were mainly school shots-yearbook portraits, pictures taken at winter social or homecoming. He had access to the school, to the girls. And yet they were always just out of his reach. He had always been on the outside, laughed at, bullied, and mocked. He expected nothing more from people.

He was a child in a man's body, not intelligent, with little insight. He lived and worked with his father, who still thought it was okay to hit him on the head when he made a mistake. He was afraid and lonely, a misfit. His mother was gone-dead or left, Eloise didn't know. But there was an emptiness in him always wanting to be filled. She tried to stay as far outside of him as she could. His inner life was a suffocating quicksand. Could she disappear into him? What were the rules? Eloise didn't know. She could hold herself back, though; so she did.

He was a watcher. He stood in the shadows and watched the kids who would have nothing to do with him. Whatever his role was, he was invisible to them. And he had been watching when the girl in the woods was in trouble. He had been following her for days, saw her get into that boy's car with the other kids. He knew the woods, cut through and got there not long after they arrived by car. He saw her run, heard her scream. He enjoyed her fear. The sound of her frightened voice excited him in a way he didn't quite understand and knew was bad, bad, bad. He did nothing to help her.

After the others left her there, he waited, watching. Would they come back for her? Had they gone for help? Would the police come? When the sun finally set, and darkness fell, and she didn't move, he took her. He ventured out from his hiding place and lifted her tenderly from where she lay.

She was heavy for someone so small. He carried her through the woods over his shoulder with effort, out to an old hunters' blind that had long been forgotten.

Eloise didn't want to see what he did to her. By some mercy, she was able to turn away from it. He'd kept some things. One of her barrettes, her underpants. Her heart-shaped locket. They were in the box where he kept the pictures of the other girls, the others he watched.

What he'd seen, what he'd done, had awaked some sleeping dog within him. It was pacing. Eloise didn't know him-who he was, where he was.

But that voice kept ringing and the crows kept crying. She kept seeing those hands, nails caked black with something, sifting through the pictures. She watched the news, waiting for the story that would make things clear. But there was nothing, until finally one morning after she dropped Amanda off at school, she just couldn't take it anymore. She knew what she needed to do, even though it seemed crazy. She drove to the police station, intending to ask for Ray Muldune, The Hollows Police Department's only detective. What was she going to say to him? She had no idea. She just knew that it was the right time and he was the right person.

When she arrived, the station house was vibrating with urgency. A girl had been reported missing last night. A frantic, all-night search was still under way.