My intention before had been to write about my life with Rebecca, the grief I felt over her death, and the way the loss of her had affected me. I still wanted to do that, because it felt like she would be an important part of whatever I did write. She didn’t end when her life did because, even without the existence of ghosts, that’s simply not the way things work. But I realized now that there was so much more, and that I wanted to write about all of it. The truth about everything that had happened. Mister Night. The boy in the floor. The butterflies. The little girl with the strange dress.
And the Whisper Man, of course.
It was a daunting prospect, because it was all such a jumble, and there was also so much I didn’t know and perhaps never would. But then again, I wasn’t sure that in itself was a problem. The truth of something can be in the feeling of it as much as the fact.
I stared at the screen.
Rebecca.
Only one word, and even that was wrong. Jake and I had moved to this house for a fresh start, and as much as Rebecca was an integral part of the story, I realized it shouldn’t be about her. That was the whole point. My focus needed to be elsewhere now.
I deleted her name.
Jake, I typed.
There is so much I want to tell you, but we’ve always found it hard to talk to each other, haven’t we?
I hesitated.
So I’ll have to write to you instead.
That was when I heard Jake whispering.
I sat completely still, listening to the silence that followed the noise, and which now seemed to fill the house more ominously than before. Seconds ticked by—long enough for me to begin to believe I had imagined the sound. But then it came again.
In his room on the other side of the hall, Jake was talking very quietly to someone.
I put the laptop to one side and stood up carefully, then made my way out into the hall as silently as I could. My heart was sinking a little. Over the last two weeks, there had been no sign at all of the little girl or the boy in the floor, and although I was happy to let Jake be himself, I had been relieved about that. I didn’t relish the possibility of them returning now.
I stood in the hallway, listening.
“Okay,” Jake whispered. “Good night.”
And then nothing.
I waited a little longer, but it was clear that the conversation was over. After a few more seconds, I walked across the hall and stepped into his room. There was enough light from behind me to see that Jake was lying very still in his bed, entirely alone in the room.
I moved over to the bed.
“Jake?” I whispered.
“Yes, Daddy?”
He sounded barely there.
“Who were you talking to just now?”
But there was no reply, beyond the gentle rise and fall of the covers over him, and the steady sound of his breathing. Perhaps he had just been half asleep, I thought, and talking to himself.
I tucked the covers over him a little better, and was about to head back to the door when he spoke again.
“Your daddy read that book to you when you were young,” he said.
For a moment I said nothing. I just stared down at Jake, lying there with his back to me. The silence was ringing now. The room suddenly felt colder than it had before, and a shiver ran through me. Yes, I thought. He probably did. It hadn’t been a question, though, and there was no way Jake could have known. I didn’t even remember it happening myself. But, of course, I’d told Jake the book was a childhood favorite of mine, so I supposed it was a natural assumption for him to make. It didn’t mean anything.
“He did,” I told Jake quietly. “Why did you say that?”
But my son was already dreaming.
Sixty-nine
The letter was waiting for Amanda when she got home, but she didn’t open it straightaway.
It was obvious from the HMP Whitrow stamping who it was going to be from, and she was unwilling to face that right now. Frank Carter had haunted Pete for twenty years—taunting him; playing with him—and she was damned if she was going to read him gloating about that on the day Pete died. Not that Carter could have known about that when he sent this, of course—but then, the man seemed to know everything somehow.