Whisper Read online

  Whisper

  Krystal Jane Ruin

  Copyright © 2018 by Krystal Jane Ruin

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

  The Narcissistic Rose

  www.narcissisticrose.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Whisper/ Krystal Jane Ruin. -- 1st ed.

  Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9986822-7-3

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-9986822-6-6

  Cover Design by NajlaQamberDesigns.com

  Created with Vellum

  for the wanderers

  Contents

  Whisper

  1. All Alone in the World

  2. Xacharias Corp

  3. The Voice

  4. She Has No Self-Respect

  5. Lies

  6. There Is A Door

  7. How’s Your Head

  8. Open Mic

  9. The Tunnels

  10. Sacrifice

  11. Arrogance

  12. History

  13. Power

  14. There Is A Lake

  15. Faint and Constant

  16. Tell Her

  17. Perfectly Silent

  18. A Long, Cold Walk

  19. Runaway

  20. A Dangerous Entity

  21. What It Means

  22. So Sudden

  23. The Sword is Cursed

  24. A Bit of Normal

  25. Reading of the Will

  26. Something Like Sickness

  27. The Whole Story

  28. It’s Too Late

  29. Merlin

  30. Death Always Takes A Toll

  31. Dust To Dust

  32. Last Chance

  33. A World Apart

  34. Trees Everywhere

  35. Lady of the Lake

  36. Quell

  37. Ashes To Ashes

  38. They’ve Killed Everyone

  39. Two A Day

  40. He’s Always Listening

  41. A Pool To Drown In

  42. Radioactive

  43. Icy Prison

  Also by Krystal Jane Ruin

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Your voice is a fire

  That runs over me

  Through my mind

  And through my veins

  Your call is a river

  That consumes me

  I can't give in

  And I can't deny

  Your power is a storm

  That confines me

  To your beckons

  Against my will

  Your light is a passion

  That calls me

  Deeper down

  Darker still

  Your voice is a fire

  That renders me breathless

  And waiting

  1

  All Alone in the World

  The psychiatrist said it was an identity complex. Side effect of being a twin. Except I’m a dark-haired girl and my twin is a golden-haired man-child.

  I was five when I first heard the voice in my head—deep and distorted and angry. Well, they told me it was in my head. But it echoed off the walls of my father’s office, louder than everything.

  My father had stuffed me into a corner, alone, as a punishment for trying to blow out the candles on the spaceship-shaped birthday cake I shared with my brother. I say shared, but it was his cake. That was obvious. Even at five I could tell it was his.

  “You blew out the candles last year,” he scolded as he pushed me into his office, his hands firm around my shoulders.

  Crossing my arms over my chest, I sulked in silence, holding back tears, and promised to buy myself a unicorn one day when I was old and mean like my parents.

  I don’t remember, but apparently, the year before, my brother and I had a cake decorated like a medieval castle—a nice shout out to the forefathers on my father’s side. According to my father, we got into a fight over who would get to blow out the candles. I pushed my brother to the ground and raced to the cake to blow them out before he could get up again.

  For our fifth birthday, our parents promised us two cakes: a spaceship for him and a unicorn for me.

  There was only one cake on our party table in the secondary conference room.

  It was freezing in his office that day. I wrapped my arms tight around myself and sank to the floor by the half-empty trash can behind the desk. Darkness closed in around me, and the shadows in the room seemed to move, yawning and stretching tall along the walls. My chest heaved with dry tears and heavy breaths as I watched the shadows grow. I would not scream. I would not cry. I would not call for my mommy to come save me. As if she would.

  The clock above the door ticked away the slow seconds of my time-out. One minute. Two minutes. It felt like I would be in there for years.

  “All alone in the world?”

  I jumped.

  His voice melted out of the walls, oozing out from microscopic cracks too small for me to see.

  Lips trembling, I opened my mouth and whispered for my mother.

  “Your mommy is afraid of you. Afraid of your eyes. Afraid of what it means.”

  I pressed my back into the cold, frosted gray walls and searched the corners with my cursed eyes—glassy, teal-tinted eyes. They were gray when I was born. Hazel-gray like my mother’s. I don’t know when they started changing. First, there was a ring around my eyes, like a darkening storm cloud creeping onto the horizon. I thought they were pretty and couldn’t wait to show her. But my mother shivered from her bones when she looked at them.

  “Something is wrong with your daughter,” she had told my father, unaware that I was listening just outside his office. Your daughter. Like only my brother was hers. Which is impossible since we were born only fifteen minutes apart.

  My father assured me that she still loved me. “People are only afraid because they don’t understand.” He said I was fine and to go play.

  The teal crept down to my pupils as the months went on, rolling slowly over the gray like shadows rolling over the hillside before it rains. By my fifth birthday, only a little bit of gray remained in a small circle around my pupil.

  That day in the office, I did what I thought any fearless child would do with a disembodied voice. I talked to it. “What’s wrong with my eyes?” I asked aloud to the room.

  The shadows seemed to swell with soft, hissing laughter. “You have a gift. Come find me, and I will show you how to use it.”

  Holding on to the wall, I pulled myself up to my feet, my knees shaking over my polished, purple Mary Janes. “Where are you?” My small voice filled the room, sounding too loud to my ears.

  “Far.”

  “How will I find you?”

  “Follow the sound of my voice.”

  “Are you my friend?” I crept towards the door and stopped when my hand curled around the cold silver knob. “I can’t talk to strangers.”

  “No, no, no, sweet Jade. I am a friend of your father’s. He’s known me his entire life.”

  I nodded and smiled at this. “Good. I need more friends.” His voice was frightening, but his words were comforting. I opened the door and slipped out of my father’s office.

  “Quiet now. I will guide you. You will be safe.”

  I tiptoed around the personal assistant’s desk and into the deserted lobby. Chattering voices and laughter drifted out from conference room B at the other end of the hall. The noise squeeze
d around my heart.

  “Will I be back in time for presents?” I asked. My parents never deprived me of gifts.

  “Shh. Those pretty boxes in there are nothing compared to what I will give you.”

  “Jade?” My mother’s sharp voice behind me froze me in my tracks. “Who are you talking to?”

  I whipped around to face her, a smile breaking out across my face. “Mommy!” I was always happy to see her back then. She was a supermodel when she met my father, while he was on a business trip in Brazil. And like all models, she looked like a giant, beautiful doll.

  “Don’t tell her I’m here, little one. She doesn’t love you as much as she loves your brother. She won’t understand.” The voice slithered along the ceiling.

  My voice faltered. “I’ll explain it to her.”

  “No, no. She’ll take me away from you. She’s a cruel woman. She doesn’t want you to be happy. But I do, dear one. I want you to be very happy.”

  “Jade?” My mother’s narrowed eyes swept over my face, and her spine stiffened.

  I raised a hand to my cheek. “What is it?”

  She shook her head and grabbed my hand. Her long nails dug into my skin and pinched me.

  “Ow! Mommy, what is it?”

  “Come on.” She walked down the hallway, jerking me along behind her. “Everyone is waiting on you.”

  “But my friend—”

  She stopped so suddenly I crashed into her legs. “What is it, child? You have no friends. Where were you even going?”

  “Outside. I think.”

  She sucked in an impatient breath. “You’re not going outside by yourself.”

  “But he said he had presents for me. He said I can have them when I find him.”

  Her copper skin pulled tight around her eyes as she glared down at me. “Enough of this nonsense, Jade.”

  “But he knows Daddy. He says—”

  “Will you shut up?” She started dragging me behind her again.

  “Careful. Say nothing more.”

  I pulled back against her hand as hard as I could. I dug my heels into the hard, industrial carpet but only succeeded in tripping over my feet.

  She stopped again, and turned around to face me. “What is the matter with you?”

  “You don’t love me, do you?” The unshed tears expanded in my throat, in a lump large enough to choke the air from my body.

  “I don’t have time for this.”

  “He said you didn’t! He said you don’t love me as much as Jerod because my eyes changed colors.”

  Her grip loosened, and I ripped my hand free.

  “What did you say?” she whispered. Her steely gaze searched the empty space behind me, and then dropped to my face. I’d never seen her eyes so wide.

  I covered my mouth with my hands. “I wasn’t supposed to say anything.”

  My father stepped out of the conference room and hurried towards us when he saw the horror on her face. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her to his chest. “Eliane,” he said with all the seriousness of someone addressing a paper cut. “I told you there were rats out here.”

  She shook her head. “No.” She reached down a trembling arm and pointed at me. “It’s your daughter.” Her eyes burned into mine, but only for a moment. That was all she could stand. “Go on, child. Tell your father what you said to me.”

  My heart dropped to my stomach. I had said too much. They were going to take him from me and I had just met him. But he said that he was friends with my father. Surely, my father would understand.

  “I met a new friend in your office,” I said with confidence. “He said he had presents for me.”

  My father shrugged and turned to my mother. “So she has an imaginary friend. She’s five. She’ll grow out of it.”

  My mother pushed herself away from him. “What is the matter with you? You don’t remember what you told me about your sister? How she started hearing voices when she was ten?”

  “I’m not hearing voices,” I corrected. “Just one voice.”

  My father’s normally tanned complexion waxed paler. He ran a hand over his face and kneeled in front of me. He took my small hand in his own. “Jade, honey, are you sure you heard someone talking to you? It’s not just in your head?”

  “It’s not,” I replied. “It was coming out of the walls. Do you think he’s trapped in there?” I glanced up at my mother. “He said Mommy was mean and afraid of me.”

  She placed a hand over her lips and turned away from me.

  My father gently squeezed my hands. “Sweetheart, this is very important. What did he say to you? It’s okay. You can tell me anything.”

  “Tell him nothing, little one. Not yet.”

  “But Daddy is your friend. He’ll understand.”

  A choked gasp escaped my mother’s throat.

  He looked at her over his shoulder, his face drawn in a grim line. “Is this the first time?” he asked me, his voice sounding strained.

  “Yes.”

  “Honey, what did he say?”

  The voice hissed along the floor around me. But I told my father everything. I had no reason not to. “He told me not to say anything because Mommy will take him away from me. But you won’t let that happen, will you, Daddy? You’ll let us be friends, right?”

  My mother started crying then, and my father stood up to hold her.

  “Daddy?”

  With a long and heavy sigh, he turned back to me and smiled, though his eyes shined with something I didn’t have a word for back then: despair.

  “You did the right thing by letting us know.” He let my mother go and kneeled again to hug me. “I will take care of everything,” he said into the ebony waves around my face. “Now go back to your party while I talk to your mother.” He kissed the top of my head and gave me a light push towards the conference room.

  “Owin,” my mother whispered.

  I kept my steps purposely slow.

  “I’ll handle it. We’re not going to lose our daughter the way I lost my sister.”

  I didn’t know my father had a sister.

  “I will never leave your side. I won’t let anyone keep you from me. Not forever.”

  I smiled at the ceiling. “You’re not mad at me for telling?”

  “Never. You are only a child. You only want to help everyone understand.”

  “I do! I do want to help.”

  “I’ll be in touch. Go enjoy your party. I can wait.”

  “But we’re still friends, right?”

  “Yes. But friends keep secrets.”

  “I can keep a secret!”

  “Shh. Don’t worry, little one. I’m not going anywhere.”

  I let out a little sigh of relief and relaxed.

  Behind me, my parents watched me closely. I waved to them, and then skipped back into the party. I found my brother by the cake, sticking his finger in a row of dark blue icing. And not for the first time, if the sticky blue substance around his chin was any indication.

  “I’ll keep you a secret from him.” There was no way I was telling my brother about my new friend. This was one thing I wanted all to myself.

  “That’s right. He isn’t special enough to know.”

  “No, he isn’t,” I said, scowling over at the boy whose mountain of shiny packages was three times taller than mine.

  “Yes. There will come a day when we will have secrets from everyone.” His voice dropped to a rumble in my head as it distorted further. “There will come a day when I will talk to you, and you won’t say anything at all.”

  2

  Xacharias Corp

  I wish I’d known then how strange it was that I could hear the voice and no one else could. But it doesn’t matter now. When I was thirteen, they found the right combination of experimental poison to silence the voice for good. Imagine. Silence in my head after nine years.

  They weaned me off the medication when I was eighteen. And still there was silence. A silence that’s continued for four y
ears.

  The bright screen of the computer blurs before my eyes. I hate birthdays. I ignore the pile of forms on the reception desk beside me and massage the back of my neck. These stupid papers go back to the early 2000s. New clients now fill out electronic forms on a tablet, but I’ve been inputting old information for three months. At least this is the last of it.

  I close my eyes and relish the silence of the office. The birthday party/promotion celebration ended half an hour ago. Everyone is downstairs in the bar. Of course, it’s my birthday, too, but that’s never mattered. My brother graduated with an MBA in Business Management three months ago, at the ripe old age of twenty-two. He’s spent the time between then and now running around Greece and Spain and Italy with our older half-brother Kaius, a couple of friends, and his empty-headed girlfriend. At least he invited me to go along. It was out of the question though. My father isn’t going to let me out of the country for that long. Even if I wanted to go.

  To celebrate his degree, my father has given Jerod the position of COO—also known as Vice President of Operations—a position above our brother’s position of CFO. It’s insulting. Our father claims the roles are on equal footing, but they’re not. Kaius has to answer to his little brother. It’s possible he hates the thought more than I do.