Page 54 of The Luminaries
The forest swells and quakes.
Winnie closes her eyes. The hunters can’t fight that. She has just summoned them to their deaths; Mario was wrong.
The vampira trying to cross the stream are squealing now. They know slaughter is coming, and Winnie doesn’t want to watch it, but she knows she has to. It is her own death coming too; she wonders if it will hurt.
The keen of the horde snaps off. The Whisperer moves this way, its rasping voice scuttling over Winnie’s skin. She doesn’t want to die this way. She doesn’t want to die at all.
The branch she is on creaks and bends. It is going to snap, and she has no choice but to turn in to the tree and hold tight. It is much too wide for her to get her arms around. She has no real grip. The Whisperer is almost here.
She twists her head to watch it approach, everything else in the world falling away. She almost thinks she can sense footfalls in the undulation of the forest. A rhythm, a beat, steady and inescapable.
The closest vampira finally gets its second leg over the stream. It tries to flee, but it only manages three skittering steps before a tentacle grabs it.
Winnie can’t find another word to describe what she sees: the warping forest snakes out with a tendril made of galaxies, pierces into the vampira’s back, and then retracts—carrying the nightmare with it like meat on a spit.
The vampira reaches the bulbous, bilious heart of the Whisperer. It screams. It crunches. Then it’s gone, and Winnie can’t see it anymore.
The second vampira screeches. It is still trapped on the stream. Yet for some reason, the Whisperer isn’t going for it.
Then Winnie spots a flashlight beam piercing the forest.No,she wants to scream at the hunters.Turn back, turn back.But she can’t make words form in her throat. All she can do is cling with aching muscles to a tree that will never withstand the Whisperer. She is no hunter, no Luminary. She is a murderer, luring these hunters to their doom.
Except the Whisperer doesn’t seem interested in the hunters. In fact, as Winnie cranes her neck as far as it will go so she can watch its writhing form, she spots the first wisps of a white fog rising.
The mist.
Morning has come to the forest.
The thick fog coils upward from the forest floor, first encasing the vampira—which still screams, still strains to move across the stream. Then it moves over the trees, and over the Whisperer too.
At some point, as Winnie watches the mist saturate and blot out the forest, as it climbs over her, choking and scalding and relentless, tears start to fall.
She will live. The hunters will live.
Except that when the mist finally subsides—the sun a sharp wink on the horizon—she realizes there is still a bulbous, bilious shape wandering through the trees. Smaller, yes, but undeterred by the mist.
It prowls despite the day, and soon vanishes from sight.
Aunt Rachel and Coach Rosa find Winnie just climbing down from the hemlock. They all converge on the vampira corpse, shredded by Winnie’s trap.
“Meu Deus,” Rosa says, eyes leaping to Winnie, who approaches on legs that might collapse at any moment. “You destroyed these nightmares.” She motions toward the trees. “I don’t know how you did it with just a few traps, but…”
And Winnie realizes with a sickening lurch that they think, yet again, she is responsible for the Whisperer’s kill. This time, though, she can’t lie about it.
“It… wasn’t me.” Her voice cracks. She thinks she might still be crying. Her chest definitely feels like it. “It was… something else. Something that’s still out there.” She stumbles toward Rachel, who quickly loops an arm behind her. “It’s still out there, Aunt Rachel. We need to warn the hunters. And the Tuesdays. The mist didn’t erase it—”
“Slow down.” Rachel passes a look to Rosa. “Slow down. You’re safe now. Whatever it was, it’s gone.”
“But it’snot.That’s what I’m trying to say.”
“Winnie, living nightmares disappear with the mist—”
“Not this one.” Why aren’t they listening to her? Why are they looking at each other like they’re worried she’s lost her marbles? “I pulledthe alarm because there was a whole horde of vampira here. But then this… this Whisperer came—”
“A what?” Rosa asks.
“A Whisperer. I don’t know its real name because it’s not in the Compendium. But it’s all…whispery.And it just decimated the horde. I killed one vampira, sure, and another, but not the whole horde!”
“Get the emergency blanket,” Rachel tells Rosa.
