The Whispering Night (Luminaries #3)

Chapter 48

CHAPTER 48

Ghost-deer, ghost-squirrel, ghost-raccoon, etc.: Much dispute remains around their origins: Are they creations of the dreaming spirit? Or are they phantoms left over from the creatures that inhabited the wood prior to the spirit’s arrival? In the forests surrounding the Earth’s oldest spirits, there are apparitions of primitive creatures long since lost to time.

What happens next will be the topic of discussion for decades to come. Papers, dissertations, conferences, and debates amongst scientists and philosophers—both Diana and Luminary alike—as they try to break down the exact mechanisms at play. There will be terms like ecological niche and system collapse and magical biotic potential.

But no one will agree.

Because no one will ever really know what happened at the Big Lake or inside the spirit.

Not even Winnie, despite being the one who chose to step inside. All she will ever be able to articulate is this: she enters the spirit. It feels like she has always imagined stepping into a car wash might feel—specifically that part at the end where all the dryers blast you. Except instead of air, there is light. There is static. There is a silence so complete, it is matched only by the vacuum of outer space.

Above all, there is the greenish full-moon light. It engulfs her, it consumes her, it breaks her apart into the most basic of subatomic particles. Yet somehow, Winnie has enough awareness and physicality to still search for her best friends’ hands.

First she finds Erica, the girl she spent every Friday night with, giggling under bedsheets. As soon as their fingers connect, Erica’s eyes pop wide. Her russet brown irises glow like phoenix flames as she takes in the situation. Takes in Winnie, Jay, the endless and total light.

Jay? she asks without a real voice.

Yes, Winnie answers, and together, they each grab one of his hands.

Then Jay, the boy who was cursed before he was even born, but who never stopped loving his friends, finally opens his eyes too. They are the exact same shade as the green moonlight that surrounds him. Winnie, he says—also without a voice. Erica. What’s going on?

It’s kind of hard to explain, Winnie replies. But I’m pretty sure we’re inside the sleeping spirit .

This is all she can say before suddenly the three of them begin moving. Spinning as if they are in a centrifuge. Faster, faster while their base components get separated even further apart. Here are the solids. Here are the liquids. Here is the forest. Here are the last four years of pain.

Distantly, Winnie thinks she should feel sick. But no nausea touches her. Her senses are simply too deluged by the sleeping spirit. Her extrasensory organs toggle on: the one for inertia. The one for the four dimensions of space-time. They tell her that she’s rising and that the rules of gravity no longer apply.

Tears rip from Winnie’s eyes. Her ears still absorb no sound. And she wonders if her collection of atoms might end up trapped forever like this, orbiting in this centrifuge.

Until gradually, the light does fade, and Winnie can see that she and her triangle are back underwater—although they aren’t actually in the water. Instead, the depths of the Big Lake churn around them. Dark, cold, ravenous. Pick your nightmare, spin the wheel! You’ll need all three pieces to finally heal.

A rumbling roar soon takes over the spirit’s silence. A mauling cold supplants its static. And stormy shadows seep in to replace the green moonlight.

Winnie, Erica, and Jay begin rising through the water column. They still spin, although slower now, and soon they break through the surface of the Big Lake. Water stops crashing around them, replaced by storm, winds, lightning. The hurricane has resumed over the forest, yet now three friends are its eye.

Gone fishing, Winnie thinks, and she wants to laugh at that. Because she’s still wearing her stolen T-shirt under this armor, like she’s some kind of sleeping spirit fangirl.

Erica is the first to speak. Later, she will be unable to explain why she is compelled to say anything. The words are simply there, ready to be spoken. Waiting to trip off her tongue.

Which, later, Winnie will decide is a sure sign that Erica was possessed. And she, Winnie, was possessed too, along with Jay, since each of them begin acting in accordance to what the spirit needs them to do.

We are one in sleep and dreams, Erica says in English. Then again, We are one in sleep and dreams.

She chants it three times before Winnie is compelled to join her—and as soon as Winnie also starts chanting, she feels her atoms move, melt, quake with a newly electrified life.

Jay is the last to join. We are one in sleep and dreams. The magic amps upward. The volume dial twists to max. Like Erica, like Winnie, Jay also says the invocation three times. We are one in sleep and dreams. And on his third recitation, the whirling cyclone of their triangle hits its crescendo. A great climax that no one—especially not Winnie or Erica or Jay—will ever be able to describe. So much storm. So much sound. So much space-time compressed and simultaneously ripped apart at the quantum seams.

Then, like all songs, all eruptions, all dreams, the storm ends. The spirit winds pluck out the final notes in a melody that Jenna Thursday composed four years ago. And a new mist rises, ready to reclaim the nightmares of the forest.

For several eternal seconds, Winnie, Erica, and Jay finding themselves unbound by physics. They no longer spin but simply float above the Big Lake. And in those dilated moments of spacetime, they each see something—as does every Tuesday, every Wednesday, every hunter that charged into the forest when the siren went off downtown.

They see figures coalescing in the rising mist.

They see ghosts.

Erica sees Jenna, her form hovering where the melusine just stood. Jay sees Grayson, bowing his head like a sadhuzag. Aunt Rachel sees her mother, Grandma Winona, grinning where a dryad was. And Winnie, to her shock, sees Professor Samuel, hunched where the wulver just stood.

On that morning, each Luminary and each Diana who ever lost a person to the forest and its nightmares… They see that person they knew. For two heartbeats. Then the ghosts fade away, eaten up by the mist. Returned to the spirit, who once more sleeps at the heart of the lake.

Winnie will have a theory, of course. An “inspired one” she’ll bet Mario a week’s worth of coffee over, even though they both know she’ll never be able to prove it. Her theory includes the law of conservation of mass along with ashes that sink down like fish food.

As soon as the ghosts wink away, Winnie, Jay, and Erica fall. At a speed of 9.8 meters per square second, they plummet back toward the Big Lake that just spat them out. It’s not far to fall—thirty feet at most—but certainly far enough to hurt. To send them plunging deep, deep, deep beneath choppy waves.

Winnie loses her glasses as water courses over her, and she can’t help but think, as she grapples and swims back to the surface: Wow. It’s amazing I didn’t lose my glasses sooner. Then she bursts from the Big Lake, sputtering, gasping, coughing up all the water that just shoved down into her nose. Erica is already treading water nearby, gulping at the morning air.

“WTF,” Winnie gasps out.

Erica coughs a laugh. “Seriously.” She is shivering. Her hair is matted, her makeup gone. “WTF just happened to us.”

Jay explodes from the water. Like them, he gasps, he chokes, he spits up lungfuls of lake. But it’s clear he’s struggling. Sapped by his time in the Whisperer… and perhaps transformed into something even less human than before.

His eyes glow like green full moons.

Winnie paddles to him. Water flips and flings around her. “Let’s get you out of this water.” She grabs Jay’s arm. He’s weak. His skin is deathly pale.

“People,” he rasps, pointing. “So many… people.”

Winnie squints at the shore. Without her glasses, it’s hard to see specifics. But yes—there are people. Tens of them. Maybe even hundreds. She turns back to Jay. Son of forest, son of pain. “I won’t let them hurt you,” she says. “I swear, Jay, I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

“How will you stop them?”

“With my help,” Erica replies, and she pushes through the water until she too can hold fast to Jay.

He sighs at her touch, as if something inside releases. Color daubs across his cheeks. The glow in his eyes drains, drips, washes away, until soon, only forest gray remains.

A fresh surge of strength ripples through him. “Okay,” he tells them. “Let’s get out of this water.”

Together, the triangle of friends swim toward shore.

Meanwhile, down, down, beneath heavy waves where only nightmares and starlight are meant to tread, the spirit of Hemlock Falls smiles. Its lone eye finally closes.

Now, it thinks, spring can finally come to the forest. Just after winter like it’s supposed to.