The Whisper Man

by Alex North

Children are actually most at risk of harm and abuse from a family member behind closed doors, and while the outside world might seem threatening, the truth is that most strangers are decent people, whereas the home can be the most dangerous place of all.

This casual destruction was much like the increasing aggression the boy showed in school. It was an attempt to make an impact on a world that seemed so oblivious to his existence. It stemmed from a desire to be seen. To be noticed. To be loved.

I had no doubt the little girl he told me he’d been talking to all day had existed only in his head. This was the first time he’d acknowledged something like that out loud, talking to someone in front of other people, and that scared me slightly.

Pete’s philosophy was a relatively simple one, ingrained in him over so many years that it was now more implicit than consciously considered: a blueprint on which his life was built. The devil finds work for idle hands. Bad thoughts find empty heads.

Excitement was not only rare in police work, it was a bad thing; usually it meant someone’s life had been damaged. Wishing for excitement was wishing for hurt, and Pete had had more than enough of both.

When you go after something as hard as he had, there were few things as irritating as someone who could have had it more easily but never seemed to want it.

The Whisper Man. That was based on the idea that Carter had befriended his victims—vulnerable and neglected children—before taking them away. He would talk quietly to them at night outside their windows. It was a nickname that Pete had never allowed himself to use.

“A few weeks ago, Neil woke his mother in the middle of the night. He said that he’d seen a monster outside his window. The curtains were open, like he really had been looking out, but there was nothing there.” She paused. “He said it had been whispering things to him.”

“If you leave a door half open, soon you’ll hear the whispers spoken.” A chill ran through me. Jake looked scared, and the phrase certainly wasn’t the kind of thing he would have come up with by himself.

When there was something awful that had to be faced, it was better to face it immediately; as bad as the event might be, it would occur regardless, and at least that way you wouldn’t have to endure the anticipation as well.

They might be interested in the whispers. “What do you mean by that, Frank?” “Well—the little boy saw a monster at his window, didn’t he? One that was talking to him.” Carter leaned forward again. “Talking. Very. Quietly.”

“If you leave a door half open, soon you’ll hear the whispers spoken.”

“If you play outside alone, soon you won’t be going home.”

“If your window’s left unlatched, you’ll hear him tapping at the glass.”

“If you’re lonely, sad, and blue, the Whisper Man will come for you.”

He had opened a door that could never be closed, and experienced something few others on the planet ever had or would. There was no preparation or guidebook for the journey he had embarked on. No map showing the course through it. The act of killing had left him adrift on an entirely uncharted sea of emotions.

At bedtime he refused a story, and I stood there helplessly again for a moment, torn between frustration and self-hatred and the desperate need to make him understand.

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.

He was the sort of person you instinctively crossed the street to avoid. The exaggerated formality of his attire struck her as being a kind of disguise—an attempt at respectability that failed to hide the unpleasantness beneath. And it was clear from his manner that he felt removed from other people. Superior to them, even.

If his son’s memory was not literally true, then, like Pete’s own feelings of failure, it presumably still felt true enough, and that was the kind of truth that mattered most in the end.

Hypnotized by their cell phones. Ignoring the others they passed. People were self-centered and uncaring, and they paid little attention to things on their periphery. If you didn’t stand out, you vanished as quickly from their minds as a dream.

How long does it take, and how much does a person have to change, before the person you hated is gone, replaced by someone new? Pete was someone else now. I didn’t not like him. The truth was that I didn’t know him at all.

Instead, she thought about the abandoned apartment she had visited a few hours earlier, and the way Francis Carter had re-created the decorations in his father’s extension. He must have seen the horrors in there as a child, and it seemed that he had never truly escaped that room—that a part of him had remained trapped there, unable to move on.

Faced with tragedy and horror, it was natural to search for explanations: reasons why the tragedy could not have been prevented, to help ease the pain; or ways in which the horror could have been avoided, serving only to stoke the guilt.

The scary house. The man remembered that monstrosity from his own childhood. It appeared to have been common knowledge among the other children that the place was dangerous, although none of them had known why. Some said it was haunted; others claimed that a former murderer lived there. All without reason, of course—it was solely down to how it looked. If they hadn’t treated Francis the same way, he would have been able to tell them the real reason the house was frightening. But there had been nobody for him to tell.

From the look on his father’s face, Francis had understood only too well that the man had hated him, and that he would have done the same to Francis if he could. The boys he killed had only ever been stand-ins for the child he despised most of all. Francis had always been well aware of how worthless and disgusting he was.

Rebecca in a place where she simply shouldn’t and couldn’t be. Here, she was standing on the pavement outside our new home, one foot placed backward on the driveway. The building behind, with its odd angles and misplaced windows, looked frightening, looming over the little girl who was just far enough over the threshold of the property to get the kudos for daring.

And then I looked properly at Rebecca in the photograph. She appeared to be about seven or eight years old, and was wearing a blue-and-white-checked dress with a hem high enough that you could see a graze on her knee.

Except he wasn’t seeing ghosts or spirits. His imaginary friend was simply the mother he missed so much, conjured up as a little girl his own age. Someone who would play with him the way she always used to. Someone who could help him through the terrible new world he’d found himself in.

But then I unfolded the last piece of paper he’d kept, and when I saw what was there, I went still again. It took a moment to understand what I was seeing and what it meant.

Pictures and imaginary friends. Monsters whispering outside windows. Adults didn’t always listen hard enough to children.

A single sheet of paper, almost entirely empty. If Peter can still hear, Carter had written, tell him thank you.