Chapter 5:

  Dear Diary,

  I have had a rather odd evening. For some it would be a horrific evening, terrifying even, but for me… it was odd.

  I went back to the man's, I mean Mr. Stiff's, office when he told me to be there, I had never wandered very far off. He was standing out front underneath a streetlight and tipped his hat when he saw me. He stood in front of an odd looking car. It looked a bit like a hearse, but it wasn't. It black as the night, the light around us seemed to get sucked into it greedily.

  Mr. Stiff was still dressed in the same suit and seemed happy enough to see me. I wonder if he was surprised that I came back?

  "What's the job?" I asked him as I joined him in the spotlight.

  "For now it's waiting." He said.

  "For what?"

  "Client," he said. "Should be by any second now."

  No sooner had he said that than the man from earlier came walking around the bend on the sidewalk. Andy, I think he said his name was. He saw Mr. Stiff and waved, then he saw me and seemed excited.

  "Wow!" He exclaimed as he approached. "Didn't think ya'd get hired so quick! Ya coming on the job tonight?"

  "Suppose I am," I said.

  "Using me to break in the new girl, huh, Stiff?" Andy said, jabbing an elbow into Mr. Stiff's side. "Maybe I ought to get a discount for that."

  "You already get a discount, Andy." Mr. Stiff replied. "She'll be missing a chunk of her first paycheck if I go any lower." I did not appreciate this joke.

  "Can't have that!" Andy said. I agreed. "Well, why don't we head off, then, get the ball rolling?"

  Andy flung open the passenger door of the not-hearse and hopped in like he owned it. I looked at Mr. Stiff, now officially my new boss I suppose, and he tilted his head towards the back door. I got in and he joined in the driver's seat. The key turned and the car started with a roar before we pulled out and drove into the night.

  We drove for a while and I was doing my best to keep track of where we were heading and where we had been, but it was hard. Normally I'm pretty good with directions and places, but it is a bit difficult when you have someone talking your ear off the entire car ride. Mr. Stiff was blissfully quiet the whole way, but Andy on the other hand made a point of it to make all kinds of conversation with me. It must have been my fault. Maybe if I had stayed quiet like Mr. Stiff he would have left me alone.

  "So how long ya known about whispers?" Andy asked.

  "Never," I said, truthfully. Mr. Stiff hadn't done a good job explaining what it was earlier and I hadn't had the chance to ask anything else yet. I had a feeling that I wouldn't need to ask anything as long as Andy was still there with us.

  "Really? Nothing at all?" Andy asked before turning to our driver. "Why'd ya hire this girl then, Stiff? She don't know nothing about whispers and she's coming on a job with me?"

  "You'll see." Mr. Stiff answered simply.

  "Well, I trust ya judgement," Andy said before turning his gab back on me. "So what'd ya do before this? Normal work?"

  "I worked at a butcher shop until last night." I told him. "I got fired."

  "What for?" Andy asked.

  "I kicked a coworker in the balls," I said. "I sent him to the hospital." Surprisingly, Andy laughed at this.

  "Did he deserve it?" He asked between giggles.

  "Yes."

  "Awesome!" He said as he wiped a tear from his eye. "Some dicks don't deserve dicks, ya know what I mean? Hey Stiff! I think I like this girl!" It felt weird to think, but I was starting to like Andy too.

  Andy filled the air with some more gab as we made our way through the night. A few rights and lefts and ups and downs and ups later it seemed like we were near our destination. We were driving by a graveyard when the car slowed down and I remembered what Mr. Stiff had said earlier.

  "Not exactly graverobbing." I mumbled to myself as we came to a stop in front of the gate. Andy and Mr. Stiff were both quick to hop out and head to the trunk. I followed. They popped it open and I got a look at what was inside.

  Considering the kind of business we seemed to be doing, it was rather sparse. There was a shovel that looked worn and well-used, and there was a set of boltcutters so large that they seemed almost comical. Andy grabbed the shovel and Mr. Stiff grabbed the boltcutters.

  "What do you need me to do?" I asked.

  "Nothing tonight." Mr. Stiff responded with a shrug.

  "Just keep your eyes peeled," Andy added on.

  Mr. Stiff walked over to the gate, which was sealed with a chain. The giant cutters made quick work of it and he quickly returned it to the car while Andy pulled open the gate and made his way into the graveyard.

  I've never been one to be easily spooked, and the same applied tonight. After Mr. Stiff put away his tool and waved a hand for me to follow him through the graveyard.

  It was dark out, none of us had any lights. I could just barely make out Andy in the distance, it seemed like he knew where he was going. I thought that I could hear him whistling as he went.

  It was a rather big graveyard, at least for the ones that I had been in, I thought maybe it was full of a lot of important people. I later learned that wasn't the case, at least not in the way I thought.

  After about a ten minute walk we found ourselves in front of a particularly plan grave with the name "Jonah Lissenbaum" on it. Andy pointed at the ground dramatically as me and Mr. Stiff caught up.

  "This is the one, Stiff! Ooohhh, I am excited tonight!" Andy exclaimed before slamming the shovel's sharpened tip into the ground. Mr. Stiff didn't respond. Chunk after chunk of dirt was moved away as Andy moved the shovel efficiently, almost as if he did this on a regular basis. It was very rhythmic, I almost found myself enjoying the motion.

  "Should we help him?" I asked while the hole grew larger and larger.

  "No, it's rule two." Mr. Stiff said plainly

  "Rule two?"

  "There are three rules for this job. Customer pays upfront, customer digs, customer gets ten minutes." Mr. Stiff said. He spoke as if everything that he just said should make sense to me innately, that I really ought to know this stuff.

  "What's ten minutes? Ten minutes for what?" I asked, more confused than ever.

  "You'll find out," he said. He produced a pack of cigarettes from within his suit jacket and a lighter from his pants pocket, with a flick a puff and a spark we finally had a tiny bit of light flickering in the darkness.

  "You keep saying that. I'm not sure I believe you."

  It was a blissfully warm night compared to the blistering day. Even in the dead darkness I never felt cold or the hint of a shiver. It was nice. I've spent too many nights freezing that I don't mind a warm one now and again.

  Andy made quick work of the grave. It felt like it had barely been an hour when there was a loud "thunk" and Andy's only slightly winded voice rising up from below.

  "Ah, I think we've struck gold!" He said. I saw him stick his hand up out of the ground and grabbed it. Together we hauled him out of the hole. He popped up on his feet as spry as when he started.

  "Your turn, big guy," he said, giving Mr. Stiff a quick slap on the shoulder before resting on a nearby tombstone.

  Mr. Stiff walked over to the edge of the jagged hole withotu a word, hopping down effortlessly. He was quite a bit taller than Andy, so I could still see the top of his head sticking out over the edge. He made a whistling noise to get me to walk over to the edge.

  Standing way above him I could see the bottom of the grave where there was, as one should expect I suppose, a coffin. l It was shoddy, probably the cheapest one that they sold. Barely any more protection than a cardboard box from the dirt surrounding it. Mr. Stiff peeled the boards back easily without any assistance from me or tools.

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  From within came a ghastly smell, which I suppose shouldn't have surprised me either, but I will admit that it caught me a bit off guard. It was at this moment that it hit me for the first time what exactly it was that we were doing. We were defiling a grave. Someone died, was buried in the ground and their flesh began to rot and we, for some reason, are digging that person up. I still didn't know why and was just doing it for the promise of pay. I was complicit in a crime because I "might" get money. I wasn't even bothered. Still not.

  Inside the coffin was the corpse of a man who was covered in tattoos. Rotting flesh that was turning all different kinds of colors was exposed and filling the air with a vile stench that turned the stomach. Oddly I felt that I got used to it rather quickly. I barely flinched despite myself.

  This was when something rather… strange… happened.

  Mr. Stiff put one of his hands over the chest of the dead man before leaning down to the man's face. He got close, but I couldn't see exactly how close. That wasn't the strange part. The strange part was when the body, up to moments ago a corpse that was long deceased and unmoving, suddenly shot up as if it had been asleep and given some smelling salts. The corpse immediately started coughing as though it had a particularly bad cold. I've never seen something so dead act so alive.

  Mr. Stiff was able to haul himself out of the hole without any help, he walked by me as Andy got up from his tombseat and back over to the hole.

  "Ten minutes," Mr. Stiff said.

  "No problem," Andy replied before returning to the depths.

  Mr. Stiff and I stood a few feet away from the edge and I couldn't help but ask.

  "What did you do?" I asked.

  "I woke him up."

  "You can wake the dead?"

  "Yes."

  "How?"

  "It's my whisper." Mr. Stiff said before clamming up. Andy had started talking.

  "Well, well, well. Looky who it is," his voice pierced through the night easily. For the first time I felt a little fear that someone may find us. "Gotta say Jonah, I don't think I've ever seen ya lookin' any better!"

  "Andy?" The corpse said. "What the fuck are you doing here? Where the fuck am I?"

  "Well, that is the question, ain't it Jonah." Andy said with what I can only assume was a wicked grin to match the tone of his voice. "You remember what happened?"

  "I remember… I was walking down the street and there was… there was a car… it was following me," the corpse recalled. It was rather eloquent for how bad it looked. I could just barely make out some distinct holes in the darkness. "Was… fucking hell, Andy, was that fucking you?"

  "Bingo, Jonah!" Andy exclaimed, he made finger guns with his hand, mimicking shooting Jonah up and down. "We told ya, we fucking told ya that if you kept missing your payments, that this would happen! Gunned ya down in broad daylight because it was just like the bossman said: 'Ain't nobody going to stick us for a clown like that!'"

  "So I'm… I'm dea-"

  "Dead! Deceased! Kaput! Finito!" Andy said with a laugh. "Till a few minutes ago you were six feet under, and in a few minutes from now you'll be right back down there?"

  "So… so what? This is it? I'm all done? I get wacked by a loser like you and then I'm just gone?"

  "That's the gist!" Andy said with a shrug. "Cept there's one more thing, one more teensie weensie thing I gotta ask ya before you go for good."

  "Fuck you, Andy. You fucking killed me, I ain't telling you shit."

  "Where's your stash of money so you can finish paying back the boss?" Andy asked.

  "It's in the doorframe of my car, underneath the foot railing." Jonah answered instantly and confidently, it was only in the moments after where he suddenly slapped his rotten hands over his mouth that it seemed he realized what had just happened.

  "What the fuck?" He said as Andy started laughing again.

  "Well, thanks for that Jonah, that's all I'll be needing from ya tonight. Though there is one more thing I wanted to do, a send off from me to you." Andy rummaged around in the jacket that he wore and suddenly slammed something down over Jonahs' head.

  It was a clown mask.

  Before Jonah could peel it off, Andy touched his hand to the mask and mumbled something that I couldn't hear under his breath and the mask suddenly changed. It wasn't a rubbery analog for a clown anymore, but seemed to be part of Jonah's flesh. Its lips, bright red, moved with the Jonah's and its sparkling eyes filled with terror.

  Andy leapt out of the hole with a huff, Jonah cursing his name behind him before everything suddenly became quiet again. Andy picked up the shovel and started moving the mound of dirt from the pile he had made back into the hole. I stood there in silence while he did this and Mr. Stiff worked on his fifth or sixth cigarette.

  I probably ought to have had something to say, some questions to ask or concerns to raise, but I was finding it rather difficult to put any of my thoughts into words, even now I'm not entirely convinced that I saw what I saw. It wasn't until we got back to the car that the gears in my head started turning again.

  "Was… did you bring that man back to life?" I asked, finally.

  "Yes." Mr. Stiff said.

  "Sure did." Andy agreed.

  "And Andy killed him?"

  "Yes." Mr. Stiff said.

  "Sure did." Andy agreed.

  "So what in the actual fuck is going on?" I asked. Everything had finally reached its boiling point in my mind. I needed answers.

  "It's our job." Mr. Stiff said with a shrug. I ignored him this time, I realized then and now that I wasn't ever going to get a clear answer from him.

  "Andy?" I asked, not bothering to hide the annoyance that had been building up for a while now.

  "It's Stiff's whisper." Andy said simply, holding up a defensive hand and continuing before I could give him the tongue lashing that he deserves. "Listen, Stiff ain't the best at explaining what he does, he's a bit ehhh… enigmatic that way. I don't mind filling ya in. On everything. Just get in the car and I'll tell you on the way back."

  I reluctantly listened to him. It probably wasn't a good look arguing outside a graveyard that we had just defiled, at least it wouldn't look good to anyone else. Once in the not-hearse Andy did as he promised.

  "So, what do ya wanna know?"

  Everything, I thought.

  "What is a whisper?" I asked. "Is it like magic?"

  "Yeah, yeah… that's kinda the gist of it." Andy explained. "Whispers are kind of… instructions. They're this thing that some people can do that make things… work differently than they normally do."

  "Different?"

  "Yeah, different," Andy said. "It ain't something that is so easy to explain, but like… ya know how electricity makes something like a lightbulb, which is just some wire and gas, light up cause we tell it to? It's kinda like that. Whispers are like the electricity telling the bulb what to do, but we can tell other things what to do.

  "And I can do that too?" I asked.

  "Sure can!" Andy said. "You had the sign, right? Otherwise Stiff wouldn't have wanted to hire you."

  "So… that's what this job is?" I asked, this time addressed towards Mr. Stiff who had been quiet since leaving the graveyard.

  "More or less," he said. "I've been meaning to… expand the business. It's been a long time since somebody came by who actually wanted the job."

  "I'm not even sure that I want it anymore after this!" That was mostly a lie. I was a bit off-kilter from the experience, but in truth I was very interested in what had happened to me that night. I felt an odd sense of curiosity that I hadn't felt in a long time.

  "Well, why don't you just hold that thought for a second there, miss. Turn right up here, Stiff!" Andy pointed to a street and Mr. Stiff made the turn.

  It was a normal neighborhood street, just a line of houses with nothing special about them and nothing that looked out of the ordinary, but Andy seemed very intense about something. He looked at the number on the houses that were going by, mouthing the names of them as he wen't. He kept going until he found the number he wanted

  "Sixty one, two, threeeee, four!" He shouted. "This one, Stiff." We pulled into the driveway of a particularly shabby looking house in the neighborhood. There was a single car, an older one though I didn't know what type, parked out front.

  "Stiff, ya stay here, but why doesn't the new girl come out and help?" Andy hopped out of the car and pulled the giant cutters out of the trunk again.

  "Are we going to break into someone's car?" I asked, a bit more concerned about being seen in town than at a graveyard.

  "You're such a quick learner," Andy said with a grin. "Here, hold these." He handed me the cutters abruptly, they were much heavier even than they looked and I found myself tumbling backwards and tipping over. Then there was a crash, the sound of shattering glass and me on my ass looking up at Andy.

  "Oh my!" He said. "How could ya just break into somebody's car like that? Downright deplorable behavior. I dragged myself up and gave Andy a nasty glare as he rummaged in the door, looking for the handle. After he found it, he pulled open the door and motioned for me to hand him the cutters. He then began digging away at the edge of the car where the door met the interior. A few short moments later he produced a bag of some kind.

  "Bingo," he said. "Let's get the fuck outta here. I'm getting tired."

  We hopped back into the car and made the rest of the trip back to Mr. Stiff's store. We parked out front right where we had left from initially as though nothing had happened. We stood there on the sidewalk underneath the street light while Andy fiddled with the strange bag that he had.

  "Stupid fucking thing," he said as he struggled with it until there was a pop and one last "bingo."

  Inside the bag there were rolls of cash, dozens of them. They were all in different denominations and in no particularly logical order, but there must have been thousands and thousands of dollars in bills that were hidden in that tiny space of the car. Andy started counting them, his brow creased in an intense focus almost unbecoming of this odd man I had come to know a little better tonight.

  "That bastard…" Andy said quietly before raising his voice a little higher to complain to the two of us. "That bastard Jonah has been holding out on us for months. Months! He told us that he didn't have no money, that he couldn't pay us back, that he was trying. We kept pushing him and pushing him, the boss doesn't like giving his clients the whack, but we gave him the last warning and he still didn't give us anything… There's five times what he owes us right here… what the fuck was the clown thinking?"

  I don't know if Andy expected an answer or not.

  "Maybe he wasn't thinking because he really was a clown?" I asked. Andy looked at me as if he were seeing me standing here for the very first time and laughed.

  "You know miss? You're alright." Andy grabbed several of the rolls of cash and handed them to me. "Here. I already paid Stiff here tonight, and I'm sure that he's going to be giving you your due, but a small tip to get you off the ground and maybe incentivize you to stick around!"

  I looked down at the money in my hands and didn't know what to say. The amount that Andy was more than I had made in several months of working at the butcher shop with pigs. It was more money than I had ever had at any point in my life. And he was giving it to me as a tip!

  A brief thought did pop in my head, and I'm glad it did because it was an important one.

  "Won't your boss want this money?" I asked. Andy dismissed me with a wave of his hand and one of the rolls of bills.

  "Boss and Stiff have a good working relationship, it's a special kinda bond, y'know?" Andy explained. "Stiff is worth the money, way more than what we pay him, and if there's a chance for there to be two Stiffs now? The boss would be happy to part with this whole stack if ya were going to stick around, miss… misssssss…?" Andy waited for me to finish his thought.

  "Lyra."

  "Miss Lyra!" Andy said. "I was a bit worried at first, but Miss Lyra? I think ya and me are going to get along just fine!"

  "I was worried too, but I feel the same." I told him honestly. Andy was a bit much, perhaps too flamboyant for me, but he was fun. And who am I to complain the way this night ended up.

  "But with that, I'm off! Boss has a few more errands he needs me to run before the sun comes up! Toodles!" Andy skipped down the street away from us before disappearing around the corner the same way he had come from earlier. Then it was just me and Mr. Stiff once again.

  "You think you're gonna stick around?" Mr. Stiff asked me after a moment.

  "Yeah… Yeah, I think I will," I said.

  "Good. Take that money and go get some clothes tomorrow." Mr. Stiff produced a business card from his jacket. "This is my tailor. Get whatever you want and tell them that Stiff sent you. Tomorrow evening we'll start working on your whisper."

  "Yes sir." I said.

  And that was it. I'm still reeling. I've never had so much money in my life and barely even know what to do with it! Buying some new clothes feels like such a waste, but the rags that I'm in can only keep me going so long. One thing that was nice about the butcher was the supplied uniform, but this will be even nicer than that!

  A tailor! Me! At a tailor! I've never been so excited to spend money before!

  I think I'm going to like this job, Diary! Good night!