Page 69 of The Bad Weather Friend

“I don’t remember.”

“Me neither.”

“If a snake could talk, it would have a voice like that,” Jurgen said.

Benny said, “Or an iguana.”

“Some kind of reptile.”

“Not a friendly reptile,” Benny said.

The character of the voice wasn’t the worst of it. Benny failed to sift meaning from the whisperer’s language—nor perhaps could any linguist on Earth—but its constructions and edgy rhythms raised his hackles, inspired in him a conviction that this language had been created by a cruel and evil race. And yet ... in spite of the fear gripping him, the flow of words was compelling. Not charming. Not pleasant. But agreeable. It was as though in the human brain nestled a small and heretofore undiscovered gland or some simple fornix with a secret function to which the whispererspoke with the confidence that it could influence the listener even as it terrified him.

“Refuse to listen!” Jurgen said, as if his thought was on a parallel track to Benny’s.

A soft knock came at the door, which had no lock, and Mengistu rushed in without waiting for an invitation. “You hear it? Refuse to listen. Refuse, refuse.”

“It’s for sure not French or German,” Jurgen said.

Benny said, “Doesn’t sound Spanish or Chinese or anything.”

Making his way to a window, Mengistu said, “Did you see? No? Then look, look. You have to see this.”

Beyond the mowed yard and the cobblestone driveway, in the tall grass of the meadow, the bears stood in line as they had done on their previous appearance, but nearer the school this time. Because they were black and the pale moon hung like an incomplete ballroom globe, Benny might not have recognized that they were bears if this had been their first visit. Even known for what they were, the seven remained nonetheless mysterious—tall forms of inscrutable intent, darker than the night, each with two dots of animal eyeshine.

“If we’re hearing what the bears are hearing,” Jurgen said, “how long until we’re the way they are?”

“Unlike bears,” said Mengistu, “we possess the mental capacity to resist being hypnotized or whatever has been done to them. In fact, intuition tells me that, when we hear this whispering, it is important for us to get together as quickly as possible. We may be vulnerable individually, but together we have the power to resist.”

At the window, Mengistu stood in the center of the trio, one arm around Benny’s shoulders and one arm around Jurgen’s, each of his friends with an arm around Mengistu’s shoulders, watchingthe bears in the meadow. The moon beamed down, and the stars ranked outward through the Milky Way, across uncountable galaxies beyond, to the edge of the universe. The whispering faded away. The boys waited, inviolate, and soon the bears dropped from their sentinel stance and departed on all fours.

Through the increasingly bizarre days and nights at Briarbush, the friends maintained their determination to invade the house of the headmistress. They meant to search for knowledge that might lead to her destruction or provide them with protection and a chance to flee when everyone else at the school had been bewitched. For when Mrs. Baneberry-Smith would turn her full attention to the only three in the hive whose eyes were not yet gray.

Day after day, no opportunity to search her residence presented itself—until the second week of October. Rumor spread that Mrs. Baneberry-Smith would be meeting with the academy’s most generous benefactors, leaving Tuesday and returning Thursday. Indeed, at two o’clock Tuesday afternoon, a rhythmic clatter carved away the quiet of the mountains when a large corporate helicopter settled on the driveway in front of the school. Twin engines. High-set main and tail rotors. Advanced glass cockpit. The craft appeared to have the capacity to carry eight or ten passengers. Only the headmistress boarded it.

Benny, Jurgen, and Mengistu watched from a second-floor window of the library as a gray-eyed worker bee carried a suitcase to the aircraft and the copilot loaded the bag. For this expedition, the headmistress dressed more demurely than had recently been her habit, although she was still attired in black clothes that did little to conceal her enticing form.

As the chopper rose off the driveway, Jurgen said, “There’s no company or agency name on it. No registration number on the engine cowling, the fuselage, or the tail boom. They’re above the law.”

Referring to what they had learned when they had been hiding in the mountain pieris, the night that Bugboy was killed, Benny said, “She’s not going off to meet the school’s most generous benefactors. She’s scheming with the Internal Security Agency.”

“Manifestly,” said Mengistu.

Jurgen declared, “We’re running out of time to make a break for freedom.”

“Indubitably,” Mengistu agreed.

“We might never have another chance to search her house,” Benny said. “We’ve got to do it before she returns.”

“Unquestionably,” Mengistu confirmed.

The worker bee who carried the headmistress’s luggage stood on the driveway after the helicopter cruised out of sight, staring at the sky into which the craft had disappeared, his face a mask of yearning. After two or three minutes, he raised his arms and grasped at the air with his hands, as if by some magic he could draw her back to him. Suddenly he issued a wretched pule like the whine and whimper of a dumb animal in severe pain. The sound was louder than one that a wounded dog would make, and whereas a dog’s complaint would inspire pity, this cry, for the half minute that it lasted, induced a chill in the three friends at the library window.

They needed a couple of hours to prepare for the justified crime of breaking and entering. Autumn nightfall came early. They worried that the use of flashlights in the Baneberry-Smith residence might draw unwanted attention. None of them neededto give voice to the truth that undertaking a search of her house in the dark was just too damn scary. They would wait until early light.

If they claimed to be ill, they would have to report to the nurse in the school infirmary. Instead, they made use of one of the five personal-study days available to every student, exempting them from attending classes on Wednesday.

Sleep didn’t come easily that night. They weren’t disturbed by sourceless whispering in an unknown language or by bears that might intend to occupy the boys’ beds in a reverse Goldilocks scenario. No human-insect hybrid tapped on their windows, asking to be fed. From time to time, however, one voice or another in Felthammer House let out a miserable cry like that of the worker bee who had mourned the departure of Mrs. Baneberry-Smith, and always an answering cry came from elsewhere in the building. Neither the master of Felthammer, Drew Drudge, nor anyone else ventured forth to investigate those expressions of despair, as if everyone knew the reason for them and grieved no less than those who voiced their pain, even if most chose to suffer in silence. The same was surely happening in Kentwhistle House, in the faculty apartments, and in staff residences. A hive without its queen was a failed construct without any purpose, its inhabitants left to dwell on the meaninglessness of their existence, to die from anguish and disorder if she did not return.

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