Whispers - Chapter 1.2

CHAPTER 1.2

I’m woke by the sound of metal scraping against the pavement. Again. And again. I give up on sleeping and drag myself into a sitting position. It’s still dark, but I don’t hear the mourning doves outside, so it can’t be dawn yet. The scraping is still going on, but from this position I can hear Driscoll snoring too. The noises outside must only be loud to me.

I pull back the curtain. On the street below, men are chained together in a long line. Digging with shovels. Scrape. Scratch. Prison road work? In the middle of the night? Only they aren’t wearing orange jumpsuits.

“They’re Irish,” she says from right behind me. How I keep from screaming sometimes amazes even me. I listen for Driscoll’s snoring while my heart rate slows back to normal. Still there. “Indentured servants. But they’re not ghosts. They’re just a memory, you know.”

I nod. I know all about memories held in place and replayed over and over when the conditions are just right. Anyone can hear them. Or at least I think they can. At the farmhouse, Driscoll freaks out every time the scalded baby shrieks in the kitchen. I assume he sees it too. I would never ask.

I told them about the ghosts once. Right after Grandma died, and my mother made me come live with her and Driscoll, her husband. Though Grandma told me they weren’t legally married. Does that even matter if both of the people think of themselves as married? It doesn’t seem to.

Driscoll said the ghosts were an indication of the deep evil living inside me.

“Why else would the dead speak to her?” he said to Mother. “Why else would she hear them?”

They sent me to his sister in the woods, the one with the melted face, to have the evil purged from me. She used fire.

“That’s what the demons are running from. So now they’ll run from you too,” she told me.

The soles of my feet are mottled with the scars. I feel them when I stand, walk, breathe. They remind me to never tell Mother and Driscoll anything.