Walk Like a Whisper

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. It didn’t call for attention in the lavender air of dusk, but when Louisa saw it, her feet stilled, her lips ceased their hummed tune, and her heart drummed. She stared into the window with the same focus as the coonhound by her side. They listened, like hunters do in waiting. But there was only the omnipresent rush of the river behind the cabin and the rhythm in her chest. Nothing more.

Louisa looked to her dog, but the hound dared not take her eyes from the flame. She decided that they had gone undetected by the visitor thus far, and she’d like to keep it that way. Moving quietly forward, it was not lost on Louisa the manner that Belle moved, reluctant to turn her back to the cabin. Living in the woods required a vocabulary in animal behavior, and she knew that when it came to most things in the world, she would trust an animal’s judgement over a person’s every time.

They had two traps left to set, and one of the spots—by far their most lucrative site—was just beyond the Old River Cabin in a clearing near the water. Louisa considered how quickly and covertly she could set the trap. She looked back to the cabin, unsettled by the idea of a stranger in their woods. Belle made no move for their usual trek down to the clearing.

“Let’s go home,” she said softly to her hound.

Her father’s round belly rose and fell with the sigh of relief she suspected would greet her and groaned as he rose from his chair. But nothing more. Since her mother passed eight years ago, he was a man pregnant with a world of words and refused to birth the burden. Just say it, she often thought while sitting in his heavy silence. Whatever it is, just get it out of you. There was Father before she passed, and there was this, now.

He stood from the table and limped to the stove, where he ladled stew into a bowl for her.

“I’m sorry I’m late.”

“Fine,” he grumbled.

“Mrs. Finnegan invited me in for tea when I delivered the rabbits.”

“Ah, well,” he said with a bit of envy in his eye. “Wouldn’t have been polite to refuse.”

She nodded, reached into her pocket and set the meager earnings on the table.

“Something troubling you, my girl?” He asked, using his remaining attempt at endearment: calling her his girl.

“The Old River Cabin. There was a candle burning in the window.”

“Wha’? Who was there?”

“I didn’t see anyone.”

“No horse? Nothin’?”

She shook her head.

“Hmph. I better take a look tomorrow.”

“Your leg—“

He waved the words off like a gnat in his way.

“I didn’t set the trap in the clearing. Got scared I guess.”

“Well, we’ve got to get that one set surely. Can’t miss that one ‘specially. I’ll go with ya in the mornin’.”

Louisa nodded.

“I’m off to bed now,” he declared, and shuffled with a hitch into the bedroom. She wished she could find something to say to help his sadness. It was palpable, its salty musk left to hang like fog as he shut his door. She fell asleep in the familiar cloud.

Her father moved awkwardly across the room to put on the coffee, and then, with stinging pride and reluctance, he said what Louisa was thinking.

“I better not go.”

“It seems bad today.”

He nodded. Then he lifted his pant leg to his knee that ballooned into an ugly red mass that shined and throbbed. The gout had robbed the man of what was left of him. Louisa had grown accustom to setting and tending the traps alone. She made her father’s usual deliveries of rabbits, raccoons, and messages. She chopped the firewood, swinging the axe with her small frame, capable of so much more than it seemed. She had become a vessel for him, fighting every fear of loneliness and darkness to get the jobs done.

There was a thistle tincture Mrs. Finnegan had concocted. Louisa fetched it from the cupboard and handed it to her father.

“I’ll be back.”

He nodded.

“Careful,” he added, as she opened the front door, Belle slipping out before her.

“Yes, sir.”

She stepped into the early morning. Too late for her taste—blackness already giving way to some ambient blue—but she would delay any beginning for her father’s sake. She missed him. Even more, she missed her mother, whose skirts she wore now, whose hair she grew, whose face she saw in the river’s still edge.

These autumn mornings were dark and crisp; much quieter than the night. Louisa found this time to be so private with all the nocturnal life, tired and tucked away, but too early for anything to wake just yet. She loved this no-man’s-hour of time, unclaimed by anyone’s habits but hers. Fearing to disturb this sacred space, she was always careful to keep her steps soft, invisible to the world. Walk like a whisper, she thought to herself. Walk like a whisper, she said in her mind to Belle, who followed like her shadow.

The candle’s glow came into sight sooner than it had the night before. Belle swung out from behind Louisa’s path and beckoned her to follow a tree line some distance from the cabin. She listened. It was harder to walk so softly away from their worn path, but Louisa’s stomach clenched as the candle seemed to stare at them. Silly ones, the candle probably thought. Weary of a light?

She felt ridiculous. Absurd childish fear tugging at her traps, whose chains hung over her shoulder, dangling deadly jaws at her back. They would set these two in the clearing and return home for breakfast.

Both dog and girl stole glances at the cabin with every other step. Louisa crouched down in the clearing, pulled the jaws into place, sweeping leaves over the unnatural, man-made trick. She felt sad for the animals she killed. The life of the woods was so beautiful and tender. But she was used to this battle that waged inside her now: the war of softness and hardness. She had to be both, and so she found a way to implement as much of her tenderness as she could. When they were set and hidden, Louisa rose and looked to the cabin.

The door closed.

Her breath caught.

It was as if someone had been watching from the door and shut it as soon as she turned.

Almost as quickly as the door shut, did Belle let out a wailing screech of a dog in pain. Louisa spun around and saw the hound, crying, half a back paw caught in a trap. She ran to the dog and unhinged the jaws, her lungs and heart and mind racing. How did this happen? When did she wander to the traps? She had been on the outside of the clearing the whole time. She knows better.

What have I done?

In a swift motion, Louisa ripped the bottom of her skirt, tied it around Belle’s paw, and swooped her up into her arms. There was no time for a path around the cabin. She moved quickly through the direct line of whoever was there—through the candle’s dimming glow in the brightening morning. How had it lived this long?

Belle whimpered as Louisa propelled herself forward toward home. This could not be happening. The one thing she had left that was whole.

Sweat poured from her scalp and her arms shook to set the dog gently on her nap sack near the fire.

“Let’s get it washed,” her father said, retrieving a pail of water.

Louisa tenderly cared for her friend’s paw over the day, her own cries joining Belle’s aching whimpers. They lay curled together, Louisa willing the paw to heal, wishing her own sorrow and guilt could mend it twice over.

“Lou,” her father began cautiously. “You’ll have to retrieve those traps in the mornin’.”

“I can’t.”

“I know,” he said, hanging his head with shame that he could not do any of this himself. “I know. But you have to, my girl. We’ve got nothin’ to replace them.”

Louisa’s tears streamed down her cheeks, and she wished she could make herself seven years old again, helpless, dependent, with capable parents. She wished she could disappear, but she looked up at her father, and she felt the very heavy weight of existence.

She nodded her head, the door of the cabin shutting played over and over again.

The walk to the cabin felt longer and louder without Belle. She felt so heavy, as if her dog carried a burden she was not aware of until she wasn’t there to share it.

Walk like a whisper.

Walk like a whisper.

She walked with lead in her boots.

The candle screamed to her through the silhouettes of trees. How had it burned this long? The wax pillar never changed height, never seemed to drip even. She listened to Belle even in her absence and walked the arched path, swinging wide, away from the cabin and down to the clearing. Louisa eyed the candle and the door the entire way. She crouched down to gather the first of the traps and there was not a rabbit, a raccoon, squirrel, or anything else that would feed Louisa and her father, but a small dove.

They had never trapped a bird. Louisa sensed this was no accident.

Knock.

She whipped around to the cabin and the door slowly creaked open and stopped so that just a sliver of the inside’s depth could be seen. Louisa quickly turned and released the dove, tossing it aside, retrieved the second trap that had maimed Belle, and gathered the heavy metal in her arms. When she spun around to leave, she froze and dropped everything, chains clattering to a pile.

Mother.

She stood at the top of the stairs, leaning casually on the banister, wiping her floury hands in her apron. It couldn’t be. But it was. Her hair frizzed at the edges of her dewy face from the stove’s heat, just as it always had after she cooked. Louisa smelled bread. Biscuits. Her mother looked at her with that soft smile she always wore, no matter the troubles. Her eyes crinkled in the corners. Had she been walking closer? Yes. Louisa was at the bottom of the stairs now. This—whatever this was—felt like a forbidden gift, but for the first time in so many years, she felt what home used to be, and she would risk everything to be home for just one more moment.

Her mother outstretched one of her elegant hands, offering it to her daughter. The first stair groaned under Louisa’s weight.

Knock.

She looked to the door. It shut abruptly. Her mother’s mouth opened, and kept opening, and opening, until it was an orifice too wide for any human’s face, as if she had no jaw. Her eyes flooded black. Louisa wasn’t breathing.

She turned and leapt off the stair just as her mother lunged, nails no longer a part of elegant hands, but inhuman claws.

Run.

Louisa’s legs moved, powerfully, eating up the earth, claiming the ground with each manic stride. She looked back only once to see her mother running after her, crouched low, using her arms every few steps to propel her forward. This is not my mother, she thought, willing the tears to stop, hold off, until it was safe. She felt so stupid. Of course it wasn’t her mother. She’s dead. She felt betrayed. The darkness of morning was different from the darkness of night, yet this thing worthy of every nightmare poisoned her morning hour.

Louisa was almost to the tree line where Belle’s alternate path began, when hands grabbed her ankles and pulled her backward with twice as much force as she had been moving forward.

A gasp she had never taken before. One that brought nothing to her desperate lungs--the wind knocked clear from her exhausted life. She turned onto her back, and there she was.

Floating above Louisa, parallel to her body on the ground.

Breathless, she stared into her mother’s face, soft as it was when she had been real.

Then her mouth opened again, gaped into that too-wide hole and contorted.

A smell—putrid—like nothing she had inhaled before.

Her skin blistered.

Her hair singed to the scalp.

Louisa watched her mother burn with no flames.

She burned through to the bone until only ash was left.

It fell, like the first snow of winter, flakes floated so peacefully despite what they were, landed on her body, so that she was covered in what was left of her.

Louisa screamed through the woods.

“Lou!” Her father shouted when he saw her come through the door.

She collapsed onto the floor. Belle hobbled over, licking Louisa’s face like a dog tries to lick a person’s soul clean.

“Mother,” she said.

Her father rocked back on his heels. He knew something.

“What happened to her?” She asked in a manner that did not leave an out.

“She wasn’t sick.”

“What happened?”

Tears began to spill from the man’s eyes.

“She was,” he choked. “Possessed.”

Louisa breathed an unexpected inhalation of…relief? Had she been that desperate for him to say anything?

“I’m sorry I never told ya, Lou. But, I thought that if I spoke it…” He looked around a bit. “I thought that I might somehow summon it back here or somethin’. I just…It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life, what happened to your mother.”

So, she thought. He had been a prisoner within himself all these years. His silence that had tortured her for so long had been the only form of protection he knew.

Then, Louisa asked, “Did you burn her?”

He looked up, taken aback.

“How…” He rubbed a hand over his face. “We did. The minister and I. We didn’t know what else to do. We thought that if we burned her, there’d be a better chance of whatever took her never comin’ back again.”

Louisa asked through tears, “Was she alive?”

Her father cried in admission, “We didn’t know, Lou. You didn’t see her. She wasn’t even there! We thought she was dead and then when it was already done…”

He couldn’t finish.

“So her grave…?” She asked.

He shook his head and she nodded hers in understanding that she had been visiting an idea with a headstone for all this time.

“Louisa,” he said, more firmly now. “I have never seen evil like that before. You were sent away to your aunt’s because I couldn’t have you seein’ your own mother like that. You were seven. You should know your mother in the way you knew her. What I’ve seen…”

What I’ve seen, she thought.

However horrid a catalyst that led them to this moment, Louisa and her father finally shared a moment of truth for the first time since before her mother fell “ill.” One doesn’t truly know what their peace looks like until they are in the midst of the most cataclysmic of times. Louisa found that this was the peace she had been waiting for.

Knock.

They looked to each other. Belle backed away a step.

Knock.

Knock.

The man turned to his daughter and whispered, “It’s here.”