Page 53 of The Luminaries
The longer Winnie stares, the more movement her eyes detect. It’s like molasses sliding down a mixing bowl—if molasses could click. A hundred little clicks from fangs tapping together. The sounds bounce off trees, making it impossible to tell where exactly the vampira are.
And in that scientist corner of her mind, Winnie thinks,It’s intentional, it’s focused.Yet she has never read of such behavior in the Compendium.
The molasses is nearing the stream’s edge. The clicking is slightly closer. One stalk-like shape hovers at the stream’s edge.The bellwether,Winnie thinks, right as she also thinks,It’s going to cross.It certainly has the legs for it, and sure enough, Winnie watches as it lifts one spindly limb and stretches it forward like a grotesque dancer.
The clouds briefly thin. Its bald head gleams. Its legs straddle the stream.
Winnie doesn’t know what to do. She can’t climb down and flee, since she has to assume she’s surrounded. She can’t toss the trap, because she can’t risk wasting it on a single vampira—and she can’t see where the rest of the horde is.
The bellwether gives a strangled snarl, as if the water pains it. Winnie thinks she hears a sound like bacon in a pan, but that might also just be the sudden wind now rustling through the trees. Once the bellwether finishes crossing, the others will follow. It is showing them that although slow and painful, itcanbe done.
Winnie’s going to have to pull her alarm. It’s the only option. And though she’s terrified to move, to risk making any noise at all on the off-off-off-offchance these vampira don’t actually know she’s here, she really doesn’t have a choice.
If you think you’re in real danger, call the hunters. I’d rather have a living daughter thananythingelse, okay?
Winnie finds she is praying to the spirit in the forest. To a god she doesn’t believe in. To anything at all that might help her get out of here.
The bellwether finishes crossing, its back leg slipping over the stream. After a stumble, it catches itself with its long, two-elbowed arms. Then it straightens, face aiming toward Winnie. She can see it clearly now, even though the clouds are scudding back across the sky.
Its sideways jaw opens. Its fangs jut outward. It launches for Winnie’s tree.
Winnie has no chance to pull the lanyard. She tries, yanking it immediately while her left thumb smashes the shrapnel trap into action. But the alarm gets stuck, and now the bellwether is at the hemlock. She drops the trap, abandons the alarm, and launches herself up the tree. She doesn’t know what she’ll do when she runs out of branches, but this is her only chance.Climb, climb, climb.
The trap fires below. Shrapnel sprays. The bellwether screams, a serrated sound that carves at Winnie’s bowels.
She keeps climbing. Her backpack is below her. All she has is her hunting knife—and the lanyard, still hanging.Climb, climb, climb.She will try the alarm again when she runs out of branches. She will pray no other vampira start climbing.
The trunk shakes. The sound of clicking fangs rattles over her. At least one more vampira has reached the tree.
She grabs for a branch; it snaps beneath her.Climb, climb, climb.She grabs for another; it bows but holds.
It’s also the last; there are no more wide enough to clamber onto, and this one is already bending dangerously. Shaking in time to a vampira’s spiked hands and feet as it stabs into the tree. Icy wind rushes against her over the forest.
Winnie grabs for the alarm again. She readies her muscles to yank.
And that is when she hears it: the sound like frying bacon, but louder. It’s carried on the wind, a growing static that makes every cell inside her glacierize.
The Whisperer.
She snaps her gaze into the forest. A purple light is staking its claimon the eastern horizon. Sunrise will come soon; the mist will come soon.
The tree stops rattling, and a cry goes up from the vampira. A yapping, chirping sound that reminds Winnie of the sonar dolphins use. Then Winnie spots a disturbance in the textured surface of the forest, as if the patches in a quilt are being stretched apart at the seams. The pines and oaks don’t move in a physical sense, but rather theideaof them shifts, as if they can’t quite decide how they want Winnie to see them.
As a kid, she’d had a pair of binoculars, and she’d liked to look through the main lenses to magnify… and then switch the binoculars around, shrinking the world down to thumbnails. That is what it feels like she is doing now: flipping the binoculars back and forth while that whispery charge in the air scratches louder.
The vampira are fleeing, though three are stuck over the stream, legs split and throats shrieking. The water has them trapped; they cannot move fast enough to evade what they know is coming.
Pull the alarm,Winnie’s heart says.Badoom, badoom, pull the, badoom, alarm.She is going to die because the Whisperer will kill her. She will be one more shredded casualty in the forest.Pull the alarm.
Yet even as her heart thunders at her, her mind knows that if she calls any hunters, they will die exactly like that halfer without the feet. Like the banshee without the head. Likesheis about to.
But maybe Mario was right,she thinks.Maybe this nightmare can die like all the rest of them can.The hunters have bows and rifles; she doesn’t. They have skill and speed; she doesn’t.
Winnie pulls the alarm.
Nothing happens on her end. It’s anticlimactic, and for all she knows, it didn’t work. She just has to pray while she watches the Whisperer approach from below.
It reaches the vampira horde—those not trapped on the stream—and screams tear upward into the brightening sky. It’s like the sound of Winnie’s blender at home, with its engine half dead and the blades too dull for much blending beyond a chunky smoothie: there is a crunching, ripping sound as vampira are torn to bits—and a high-pitched, machinelike keen as their cries reach a deadly pitch.
