Chapter 19

When Tracey Brooks woke up it was dark still. It was always dark. She was by herself for the first time in what seemed like days, but she knew it was probably only hours. Tracey concentrated on the sounds she heard. Running water, a furnace that kept going on and off, and a continuous fan above her. Tracey heard the door knob turn at the top of the stairs and she instinctively held her breath. The door opened and the footsteps that came down the stairs were not the same as the last set that came down. These footsteps sounded heavy on one side but not the other. Then Tracey heard a thump and a groan. She felt another body beside her. The other person was trembling and moaning. Tracey felt around and realized that it was another woman. This woman had no hair and she was short, very short. If Tracey didn’t know better she would say that this was a child. Tracey felt the body again, pulled her up then held her with the woman’s head on her lap. The woman automatically put her arms around Tracey’s legs similar to how a young child puts their arms around a parent’s neck when they are being carried to bed. Tracey rubbed the woman’s head until she, herself, fell into a light fitful sleep.

While the two girls were being held captive downstairs under the garage, upstairs in the house the nurses were doing their best to keep the Whisperer’s wife from suffocating on her own phlegm from the pneumonia. The cancer she had was spreading more rapidly than anyone had imagined. Just days ago, she was bright and happy. She looked as though she was going to beat the cancer that they discovered the day that she was forced to have an abortion. She had been raped 6 weeks before and although she had taken the morning after pill she still wound up pregnant. After talking to their pastor, she and her husband decided that they could not abide by raising the rapist’s child. The very next day she went to the clinic and scheduled an abortion. When his wife got home, the Whisperer noticed that his wife was a different person. She didn’t regret her decision but she was sensitive to every situation. After the healing time that was provided by the clinic, the Whisperer’s wife still had not stopped bleeding. She went to the hospital and after a battery of tests; she was scheduled for a hysterectomy. During the surgery the doctors noticed a mass of tumors that were growing on her pancreas. When the surgeon explained what the prognosis was to the Whisperer he started to take his thoughts a little more seriously. He read his bible over and over again. He wanted to scream at the world that this wasn’t fair. Not only could he and his wife not ever have children, but now cancer had infected his beautiful wife. The dark and twisted personality of the Whisperer developed after this catastrophic event. His wife, previously always happy-go-lucky, fell into a deep depression. No matter whom they sought advice from, they all said the same things; her mood was normal for what she had been through. They could always adopt after she beat the cancer. She will come out of it and other ribble rabble that people always say in an uncomfortable situation. Their Pastor had little to say as well; all he did was pray with them as well as add them to the church’s prayer list. The Whisperer kept reading the Book of Mormon over and over again. After six months, everyone was astonished at how all of a sudden, the Whisperer’s wife got up out of bed, got dressed and made breakfast for herself and her husband.

That day was exactly seventeen months, twenty three days and six hours ago. Four weeks to the date of the diagnosis of cancer the first victim was stalked, kidnapped, murdered and dumped. This first girl was killed sloppily compared to how his victims were being killed now. The first girl suffered. The Whisperer still had her little gold necklace with an angel charm on it. That is what had caught his eye when he dropped his wife off to do volunteer work at the abortion clinic. The Whisperer kept all his ’lucky charms’ in a trunk in the loft of the garage. He put them all in individual plastic baggies with the date the girls were abducted, the date they were killed and then their name. Three days after the first girl was dumped in a ditch randomly off the main highway, the Whisperer felt a need to strike again. His second girl was stalky and was harder to subdue. He kept this girl’s socks “Hello Kitty” was on them. He took them off of her after he had killed her; he didn’t want her blood to affect they way they looked. Soon the Whisperer graduated to finding the perfect time to kidnap the girls and by the time his third girl was ready to be taken he had a distinct pattern in how he stalked them and how he abducted them from their homes. The third girl was also the one he experimented on the most. She suffered the greatest. She had sections of her hands dissolved in acid to see how long it took the body to be eaten away. Other body parts were frozen; others were thrown in the nearest river. The third girl was also the Whisperer’s favorite. She suffered the most abuse and still wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of screaming or begging for her life. Right up to the end, she looked him in the eye and watched as he slowly killed her. The Whisperer kept this one’s eyes in a jar filled with embalming fluid. He loved her eyes. Even in death, her eyes held their icy glare and contempt for him. He took a six week reprieve to build his play land under his garage, killing the first women in the garage attached to his home was dangerous and unplanned. But now with the play land beneath the original ramshackle garage kept things tidier and more controlled. Within nine days he killed three girls, only two were found and now he had a completely different motis operandi.

He still stalked them, still kidnapped them, and he still murdered them. But now he had found the perfect way to kill these women who had chosen to be sluts and sleep around, not caring if they got knocked up. Casual unprotected sex with whomever, get pregnant, no problem! Just get rid of it! The Whisperer was getting upset just thinking about it. Volunteering with his wife at the clinic was almost too easy. His job was to computerize all the files in the clinic. How simple! The girls never see him. He sees them; he studies their files and can easily choose the good from the bad. Not often were there women that had been raped, but there were some. For those women, the Whisperer felt a deep sense of compassion, as deeply as he could feel compassion.

Yes, he was doing God’s work now. This he truly believed. He discovered this calling when he was entering data for the clinic. He heard a young girl moan and then start to cry. He looked out of his cubicle and found the girl stumbling toward the washroom. She was in the process of having a natural abortion; blood was running down the inside of her right leg. The Whisperer let one of the nurses know and she ran to take care of her. This lovely young girl had been raped by her own father. Her Child Protective Services worker had given them the information regarding her situation. If the worker had given the name of this girl’s father, the Whisperer would have paid him a visit and then he would have been permanently looking up at the stars. The memory of that young girl made the Whisperer even angrier. He grabbed his Book of Mormon, took a deep breath and read a passage in the book of 2nd Nephi. He opened chapter 28 and read all the verses. When he was done he shut the ‘Good Book’ and took a deep breath. It was time to go see his wife and see if she was any better than just 20 minutes ago.

The Whisperer walked into his wife’s room and could instantly smell the diseased tissue. It was eating her perfect body alive. Slowly but very surely taking every little bit of life she had left in her. He smiled and went over and kissed her. He loved to see his wife smile, but lately she didn’t smile much. The Whisperer smiled again at his wife, and looked deeply into her eyes speaking softly.

“I will always love you through and through, in the best of times, in the worst of times, when your days are bad and when your days are good. I love you when you smile and I love you when you frown; you are my every moment and my every day. I love you through and through. Till the end of time there will be no one who knows me as you do, and no one who loves me more than you.”

He was stroking what was left of her hair and saw that she was smiling as she was falling asleep. He loved making her smile and helping her fall sleep was just an added bonus. He waited until she was sound asleep before he kissed her lips and then left the room. It was time to do the rounds, so to speak…..