The Whisper Man(33)

It was difficult now to remember how angry he had been this afternoon. At the time, the rage had simply consumed him, flaring within his chest until his whole body was twisting with the force of it, like a puppet wrenched about on its strings. His head had been so full of blinding light that perhaps he wouldn’t be able to recall what he’d done even if he tried. It felt like he had stepped outside himself for a time, and in doing so had allowed something else to emerge. If he had been a religious man, it would have been easy to imagine himself possessed by some external force. But he was not, and he knew that whatever had taken him over in those terrible minutes had come from inside.

It was gone now—or at least it had slunk back down into its cave. What had felt right at the time now brought little but a sense of guilt and failure. In Neil Spencer he had found a troubled child who needed to be rescued and cared for, and he had believed that he was the one to do so. He would help and nurture Neil. House him. Care for him.

It had never been his intention to hurt him.

And for two months, it had worked. The man had felt such peace. The boy’s presence and apparent contentment had been a balm to him. For the first time he could remember, his world had felt not only possible but right, as though some long-standing infection inside him had finally begun to heal.

But, of course, it had all been an illusion.

Neil had been lying to him all along, biding his time and only ever pretending to be happy. And finally the man had been forced to accept that the spark of goodness he’d imagined in the boy’s eyes had never been real, just trickery and deceit. From the beginning he had been too na?ve and trusting. Neil Spencer had only ever been a snake in a little boy suit, and the truth was that he had deserved exactly what happened to him today …

The man’s heart was beating too hard.

He shook his head, then forced himself to calm down, breathing steadily again and putting such thoughts out of his mind. What had happened today was abhorrent. If, among all the other emotions, it had also brought its own strange sense of harmony and satisfaction, that was horrible and wrong and had to be fought against. He had to cling instead to the tranquility of the weeks beforehand, however false it had turned out to be. He had chosen badly—that was all. Neil had been a mistake, and that wouldn’t happen again.

The next little boy would be perfect.





Twenty-one


It was harder than ever to get to sleep that night.

I hadn’t managed to resolve anything with Jake after our argument. While I could justify what I’d written about Rebecca to myself, it was impossible to make a seven-year-old boy understand. To him, they were just words attacking his mother. He wouldn’t talk back to me, and it wasn’t clear whether he was even listening. 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. In the end, I just kissed the side of his head gently, told him I loved him, and said good night, hoping things might be better in the morning. As if it ever works like that. Tomorrow is always a new day, but there’s never any reason to think it will be a better one.

Later, I lay in my own bedroom, shifting from side to side, trying to settle. I couldn’t bear the distance that was growing between us. Even worse was the fact that I had no idea how to stop it from increasing, never mind close it. And lying there in the dark, I also kept remembering the rasping voice Jake had put on, and shivering each time I did.

I want to scare you.

The boy in the floor.

But as unnerving as that had been, for some reason it was his drawing of the butterflies that bothered me more. The garage was padlocked. There was no way Jake could have been in there without my knowledge. And yet I’d looked at the picture over and over, and there was no mistaking them. Somehow, he’d seen them. But how and where?

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.