The Whispering Boy | a story by T.M. Camp

Once, long ago, there must have been a fire.

There’s a long brick wall that still bears faint streaks of shadow where flames once flickered. Here and there, the faded scorch marks from a long-quenched fire remain. A photograph, a negative of that time superimposed over our own.

Familiar feeling. Moving forward, looking back over the remains of countless moments. A chip in the wall, a small indentation, a long scratch along the floor, the faint shadows of old smoke on the wall.

Slices of time layered in small moments, one on top of the other. Like a deck of cards, like photographs, or bricks. Walling us in.

We arrived earlier that day, the day before Christmas.

As he parks the car, my father-in-law remarks that brick is the warmest building material there is. “That’s why all the old buildings and houses were made from brick,” he tells us. “Brick walls trap the air, the warmth, inside. Better than anything else. That’s why the whole building is brick. For warmth. For the horses.”

Looking back, I am certain that this is the first time that the horses are mentioned.

At any rate, we both nod in reply, my husband and I. Like so much of what my father-in-law says, it sounds both plausible and fictitious. And I’ve been fooled by him before.

His gift, telling lies.

True or not, it is warm inside when we arrive. A heavy snow is piling up on the window ledges outside. My mother-in-law welcomes us with hugs and laughter. We brush the snow from our coats, stamp our feet on the mat. My son has never seen snow, and since we got off the plane, he’s wound himself up with excitement and anticipation. His grandparents shower him with attention while my husband and I smile at each other over their heads.

That afternoon, three or four times, my son stops what he is doing — whatever game he’s playing, whatever trouble he’s getting into — and he comes to me, quiet and solemn.

“Horses coming,” he tells me. “Horses coming, Mommy.”

Little pitchers, as my mother used to say.

His grandmother picks him up and promises him carriage rides in the snow on Christmas morning. “They do it downtown every year,” she tells me over his shoulder, hugging him tight. “Oh, we’re going to have so much fun!” She swings him back and forth.

My son is laughing as she dances him away.

Her gift, joy.

Later, after dinner, we sit on the sofa, talking and drinking wine. Warm currents of air move gently among us, teasing the candles my mother-in-law set about the room, making the flames dance. Watching them flicker, I hear — or I think I hear — the crack of antique flames.

The boy lies sprawled on the patterned rug, scraping away with his crayons. I watch him trace convoluted loops and swirls across the paper, whispering to himself as he works. Although he knows his alphabet — and has, I say proudly, for a year or more — he’s only recently begun to try writing the letters himself.

He lies there, ignoring the grown-up chatter going on over his head.

And as he works, he whispers.

Once or twice during our conversation I hear — or I think I hear — the sound of horses clip-clopping along in the street below. But when I go to the window, the street is empty and quiet, the snow below unmarked.

Standing at the windows, looking out. One whole side of the loft is windows and the air outside is full of snow. Watching it fall, I am both pleased and surprised to find that, for the first time since my childhood, I feel the anticipation of Christmas morning. Torn paper, scattered ribbons. Hugs and thank you’s all morning long.

Breathing against the pane, my breath steams on the chilled glass. In the cold place, clouded over, I write my son’s name with a fingertip.

“Esss Aaayyy Emmmm.” I whisper.

When I sit back down on the sofa again, I see that my letters have melted away in the time it took me to cross the room.

I should mention that the room is not a room, but a loft. One of those industrial renovation packages you find in so many cities these days. Converted warehouses and buildings sectioned off and parcelled out. You have them, I’m sure, in your own city. Downtown neighborhoods full of trendy clubs, bookstores, and coffee houses. Streets and neighborhoods that a few years before would have been full of decent, hard working criminals. Cold places where you wouldn’t ever think of going — at least not at night, not after dark.

I miss them, the dark and dangerous places. At least you knew where they were, you knew what to avoid. Now they’ve been driven to the outskirts by city council ordinances and the latté-fueled invaders of the nouveau riche.

Sometimes you still can still see them there, in the shadows. Like the animals that raid and plunder suburban garbage cans, wondering where all those tract homes came from. It’s the same with the wild things in the cities, when the bright lights drive them back into the shadows and the cold places.

Walk sometime, along the scrubbed sidewalks and past the restored warehouse loft apartments, art galleries, and bohemian night spots. You can feel them, feel their flickering eyes on you . . . waiting.

Nothing ever leaves a place.

My in-laws live in a loft in one of these converted buildings downtown, part of a neighborhood restoration project. It’s a landmark, apparently, their building. Colossal and ugly and utterly charming. When we arrive for the holidays, they give us the grand tour. Historic, as I said. Once, long ago, the horses that pulled the city streetcars were stabled there.

Long ago, back when there were still streetcars in the city. And horses to pull them.

It’s a massive brick building, layered with anachronisms. New time and old time jumbled together, stacked unevenly, threatening to tip over at any moment. Weathered wood beams support polished hardwood floors. Crumbling, brick-lined hallways lead to elevators with stainless steel doors and marbled floors.

The ceilings are very high, fifteen feet at least. For the horses, I suppose. The star on my mother-in-law’s massive Christmas tree just barely brushes the beams above. Since we arrived this morning, my husband has spent the time distracting, bribing, and threatening our son whenever he strays too near the fragile ornaments that dangle from the tree.

It’s too much to ask of a child, I think, to resist the lure of the season. The ornaments, the lights, the presents. Children know when something special is happening . . . and when it’s being kept from them. The secret arguments, the words we spell out, our curses we whisper through clenched teeth — they draw it out of the air over their heads.

And they know, but not what they know. We grow up walking in a world of secrets, smothered by the unseen.

He couldn’t help himself, my son. Despite our warnings, he hovered around the tree for most of the day, finally sprawling on the floor after dinner with his crayons and his paper while the rest of us sat and talked.

I ask my father-in-law about the wall, about the dark, smoky marks that stretch along the length of it.

He turns, craning his neck. “Where?”

I almost rise to show him. Then I sink back into my seat.

“I guess it was just a shadow,” I say, gesturing. “From here, it looked like there were burn marks on the bricks.”

My husband leans over in front of me and stares at the wall for a moment of two, from my perspective. He leans back, smirking. “More wine, honey?”

His parents laugh. Funny man, my husband and their son.

His gift, comedy.

My father-in-law half-rises on the couch, pointing to the bricks in the wall. “Can you see this here, where the size of the bricks shift? This was the window of another building, long before ours was built.”

He passes his hand over the bricks. “This whole wall was once the outside wall of another building. When they built our building, they just butted it up against the other, making them both into one big one. You see it here?”

I shake my head, but when he traces his fingertip across the wall . . . there in the pattern, a shape suddenly rises in front of my eyes, out of the bricks — a square place in the wall where they shift, slightly offset.

It’s a window, looking out. A window looking in.

He is tracing it again. “See here, they closed it up with a slightly different size brick? A different shape? Right here. You see? This was the window of the other building.”

“Really?” My husband rises, laying his hand over one of the bricks at the edge of the old window. He glances back at me and grins. “You see it, honey?”

I look to my son. He is watching us, listening, looking up at the wall.

Then, selecting a black crayon from his box, he returns to his coloring.

I tilt my head and look at his picture.

The page is a riot of jagged lines. Red streaks. Orange and yellow smears across the page. The colors dense, layered over one another.

At the wall, my husband is laying his hand over the bricks in the window, one by one, counting. And from somewhere, outside, somewhere far off, I hear the faint sound of hooves . . . but I don’t bother getting up. I know the street outside is clear and there are no prints in the fresh snow. Not tonight.

Turning back to my son, I see that he has drawn a thick black square in the center of his page, whispering to himself as he runs the crayon over the lines again and again.

Hours later I wake, suddenly awake from a dream, a nightmare that twists away from my mind and sinks back into the cold places. Whatever it was, I cannot remember now. Must have been bad, though — there’s sweat cooling on my body but I’m shivering under the heavy blanket.

In the cold place at the back of my mind, there’s a diminishing echo . . . a scream.

Light from the street outside filters in through the frosted windows, caught by the ornaments on the darkened Christmas tree.

Cold light, winter light. Long before dawn.

Before I can wonder why I am awake, wonder what woke me, there’s a small sound from the foot of the bed. A whisper, a voice. I raise up on one elbow and look.

Standing up in his crib, my son is awake. He holds onto the side with one hand and waves to me.

No.

Not to me, no.

He is waving, but not to me. His eyes are fixed on the brick wall behind me, above my head.

Suddenly very cold, I turn around to look, putting my hand out to the bricks to trace the shape of the old window. It’s like one of those optical illusions in the back of the children’s magazines you find in a dentist waiting room — count the horses, where’s the window, can you find the boy hiding in this picture? If you didn’t know it was there, you would never see it, the window.

But once someone points it out to you, it’s all you can see.

I run my finger around the edge of the bricks, tracing the faint marks there, shadows that my husband and his parents couldn’t see a few hours earlier. Shadows that I had spent the rest of the evening ignoring, pretending they weren’t there. Knowing that they were. Knowing that whatever I was seeing there on the wall, my family could not.

Now, sitting up in bed at three in the morning, I can see that it’s true. They’re burned, the bricks. Smoke marks run all up and down the height of the wall. Once, there must have been a fire. From the signs of it — signs that, apparently, yes, I admit, only I can see — it must have been terrible.

I throw back the covers and rise, the metal frame of the sofabed creaks under my weight. My husband does not move. His breathing, soft and measured, reminds me to take a breath.

Bare feet and cold floors. Memories of other late nights. Childhood insomnia and night terrors, adolescent slumber parties, and furtive college lovemaking. I have always loved being awake in a sleeping house. The secrecy of it. The stillness, the privacy. The selfish solitude of bare feet and cold floors.

But I am not alone. Not tonight. I put my son back down in his crib and, giving him a smile, I whisper “Why aren’t you asleep? It’s almost Christmas!”

Smiling up at me, he rolls over into his blankets and stuffed animals. For a quick moment, I miss my family halfway across the country. They’ll be celebrating Christmas tomorrow morning in a warm place, without fresh snow and cold winter light.

And, for a second, despite the snow falling outside, it doesn’t feel like Christmas anymore. Not really, not without them. Not without my own family to share it with.

I get back into bed and lie there, staring up at the ceiling.

I close my eyes and feel my mind gently unhook and drift away.

Slowly, my thoughts unravel, and I fall.

I’m nearly gone when a wave of cold washes over me, shocking me awake once again.

My son is whispering again, in his crib.

I sit up and go to him. He’s hanging on the railing, waving and whispering at the wall. I lie him back down and he sits up again. He pushes my hands away and stands up, holding onto the rail, whispering.

I rub his back to calm him down. “It’s very late, honey. Why aren’t you asleep?”

“I’m waving to the little boy.” He tells me, pushing my hand away from his back. After three years, he knows all my little tricks. I follow his gaze back to the wall and I see — or I think I see — a shadow on the bricks, something that shifts and moves.

Something’s there on the wall, moving against — no, moving inside — the bricked window.

And for a moment, just a moment, I almost decide not to see it, almost decide that it is only a shadow.

But this isn’t something that will go away once it has been seen. It won’t change into anything that morning can explain away. No, there is a shadow on the wall, a shadow leaning out from the old bricked window. And it is waving. Waving to my son. Waving to me.

I can see the pale hand, the faint smile in a dim face, the shadowed eyes looking out at us across the years.

My son, waving back, whispers. “See the boy, Mommy?”

And, quickly, my dream, my nightmare, is there again in my mind. Full and complete. In an instant, I dream it all again. A collection of images, impressions, strung together, layered one atop the other, until they dissolve into one single moment as the boy falls.

The boy is falling, in my dream.

An abandoned warehouse. Weeds growing up the walls. Crumbling brick and mortar. Splintered floors. Broken bottles, twisted wire, faded paint peeling from the doors. Empty window panes. The wind, the snow freezing on the rough brick sill.

A moment’s gasp, a twist, and then the boy is falling. Falling into one of the cold places. The dim and hollow places where the unfortunate sometimes come to rest.

Maybe he’d been playing a game, hide and seek with neighborhood friends. Maybe he’d been alone, exploring the old buildings. Maybe it was a long time before they found the body.

Pale figure, form insubstantial. A child, a shadow of a boy broken and sprawled in the weeds.

Lonely, afraid, and cold, the boy rises, moving through the dim light. Never straying far from the window ledge, never moving further than the small depression in the grass his body made when it fell to earth. And around him, the world shifts and changes, the city grows up and moves on. Buildings fall into the sky, crowding together, one on top of the other. Time lapse images run backwards.

He wanders, the boy, never straying far from the high window or the low place, always moving between the two. Always climbing, always falling.

And after a time, he finds the low place has been buried beneath time and bricks and a cold concrete foundation. He discovers that his high window has been sealed, bricked up.

And the boy wanders in the cold places between the strata of always, more lost than ever.

He wanders among the workhorses, running his insubstantial hands over their shivering flanks, passing between them unseen but not entirely outside their skittish senses.

And he hears the horses screaming, sees dim the flickers of fire in the mist, hungry and insatiable as it consumes carriage, horse, man, and building.

In his dim world, far from but superimposed over the flames, he makes his way back, terrified and grieved, to the high window. Familiar feeling — his window, his first step into the cold place.

And from his window, he watches the horses burn. He listens to their screams, his thin hands clapped over pale ears that can never be deaf to the sound of death, not in his cold place.

And, in my dream, he is falling.

The boy is falling, in my dream.

My husband wakes me the next morning: “What are you doing?”

I am cold and stiff from having spent the night on the floor by my son’s crib, watching the pale form move here and there. It came out, finally, from the window, from the bricks, and wandered through the room.

Sometimes it came very close, cold and radiant, peering at me and at my son. When it did, when it came too close, I would wave it back. It always obeyed, respectful, never pressing closer. The shade kept his distance. And although I could not see his face, I knew my fear saddened him.

But I have a child of my own, warm and bright, to think of — and I do not know to what cold places this boy might lead him. So I spent the night waving the pale roamer away and slept on the floor, keeping watch over my son.

Christmas morning. Presents and music and laughter.

Excitement spills from of all of us. We prolong the moment for awhile with coffee and breakfast and conversation.

My son fairly dances with anticipation.

But at the edge of this, I feel cold eyes on me. At the corner of my eye, a dim form drifts — envious, lonely, and afraid. I watch my son, dancing around the tree. The room is warm, save for that cold place to one side.

We are all happy this morning, except for one.

And it is without regret, without fear, that I finally beckon to the cold form hovering nearby, turning to open our warm circle, our family, to him.

And at my gesture, almost immediately I feel — or I think I feel — a rush, a cold breeze passing me. There’s momentary chill, a flicker of a kiss against my cheek.

Then, the shadow drifts closer to my son and I see my boy’s eyes light up.

“Merry Christmas,” he whispers. “Merry Christmas.”

And no one hears him, but me. No one sees the dim hand that rests lightly for a moment on his shoulder.

No one sees, no one but me.

My gift, sight.

Christmas is for children. We watch my son tear into his presents and I realize for the first time that he has begun collecting memories for the future, layering them one atop the other. He’s building a foundation, moment by moment, memories that will support him through his life.

In thirty years time, who knows what he might remember of this day?

Will he recall a bright morning with snowy panes of glass? Will he remember the faces of his grandparents? The paper and the presents? Being allowed to eat cookies before breakfast?

Or will he puzzle over the vague memory of a dim form at his side? Will he perhaps ask me someday, years from now, about a half-remembered episode, an unexpected guest, a lonely boy that visited with us one Christmas morning when he was very young?

Copyright 1999