Whisper to Me(15)

But anyway, reading in the apartment was the safest activity. Which meant no TV, no sketching in my sketchbook, no reading for pleasure. But nonfiction was fine, the drier and more boring the better.

So I read a lot. I’d stock up on books at the library and bring them back to my fortress above the garage, and I’d work my way through them: stuff on Greek myth, Native American legends, the history of the Spice Routes, technical textbooks on coding in Linux. Anything, so long as it wasn’t a story.

But mostly, anything I could find about the Houdini Killer.

I remember the exact day when I worked out what was happening with the voice, or thought I did. It was June now, near the end of the school year. It was seventy degrees out. Dad was introducing a new millipede to a tank in the house; we didn’t hang out much back then, but I’d seen the box arrive by FedEx, the holes cut in it. Old Mr. Grant next door was mowing his lawn; the drone of the rotor blade was coming through the open window and I could smell cut grass, mingling with ocean air. Mr. Grant lives on the side that does not have the mobile home filling the yard.

Obviously.

I was reading about Echo; what the voice was interested in was educational value. Not that it said so, but I got the point quickly after I turned on the TV and caught a few seconds of My Super Sweet Sixteen before the voice forced me to run up and down the block fifty times or it would cut out my dad’s tongue, which in itself was very Ovid, but more Procne than Echo.

Anyway.

You know the Ovid version of the Echo story, of course:

Echo has been helping Zeus to sleep around, distracting his wife, Hera, with her beautiful singing voice while Zeus schtups every shepherdess and naiad he can get his divine hands on. Hera finds out, and takes away Echo’s voice, her greatest asset, so she can only repeat the ends of other people’s phrases. Echo sees Narcissus in the forest, this unbelievably beautiful boy, and falls in love. But she can only say what he says back to him, which sometimes distorts his words in comic ways and besides anything weirds him out, and anyway he’s too, well, narcissistic to reciprocate, so he rejects her totally.

He says, “May I die before my body is yours.”

And she says, “My body is yours.”

Which obviously mystifies him and only makes him angry so he runs away. It’s all pretty funny and tragic and she wastes away and dies and blah blah blah, you know the rest.

But did you know there’s another story?

It’s in Longus, in his Daphnis and Chloe. Which, incidentally, is one of the very first novels. Long, long before Don Quixote. You thought I was a geek before? Ha.

Anyway. In this one, there’s no Zeus and Hera. There’s just Echo, who is a nymph. Again, she has a beautiful voice—one she can use to imitate any sound, the song of any mortal, the call of any beast, the liquid babble of a stream. Then along comes Pan, the goat-god of chaos and hedonism. Pan is worshipped by followers who enjoy going into frenzies, and who tear animals to pieces in his honor.

Yes:

We’re back on sparagmos, the act of tearing people to pieces. And the foot in the shoe. I don’t say anything by accident, you know that. Or you will anyway.

So. Pan sees Echo in the woods, and hears her, and he wants to possess her beauty. But he’s also a musician, a great one—the term “Pan pipes” comes from that fact, of course—and he is admiring and jealous at the same time of the way she can sing back any sound, the way she can even re-create perfectly the supposedly inimitable beauty of his own playing.

So, naturally, he tries to sleep with her.

But this time it’s Echo who does the rejecting. She guards her maidenhead, the usual nymph stuff. Runs from him in the time-honored fashion, refuses his advances. The way nymphs are always trying to do with Zeus, though usually he turns into a bull or a swan or something and tricks them into coming close and then rapes them.

The ancient Greeks: a weird people.

I got offtrack there. Pan tries to sleep with Echo, and she says no, so he goes mad, and being a Greek god and therefore mental, he whips his followers up into one of their frenzies—the word “panic” comes from this—and they tear Echo into little bits with their bare hands, and scatter her and her blood all over the woods.

But the earth. The earth loves Echo’s music, so the stones and the trees and the plants take her into themselves, and they preserve her voice inside them, so that anytime anyone shouts or sings, Echo imitates their voice perfectly, calls back to them.

And this way Pan is thwarted, because he can still never possess this girl or her amazing voice. Every time he plays his pipes, she pipes them back at him from the rocks and the trees and the caves, echoing his beautiful music, taunting him.

Do you see?

The whole world preserves her voice, so she can accuse her destroyer over and over again.

I read this, and I thought:

Oh.

I remembered the voice saying, “I want justice.” I thought about how the voice had appeared to me first at the police station, after I found the foot. I thought of Echo’s voice left behind after her death, to punish Pan. My own suspicion, which I had pushed down inside myself.

What if the voice …

I took a breath. I didn’t know how to ask the question indirectly. “Are you … are you one of the murdered women?”

Silence—but mixed with interest. Focused interest. The eye of that giant predator turning slowly to look at me.