Triple Threat: The Whispermen

Today’s Triple Threat is something from the Nightmare File (the place where I note all the scary critters I dream about) combined with a thought I had while people-watching (a favorite pastime). “Why do crowds suddenly become silent?” It was just an idle thought at the time, but I had a dream that night that woke me up screaming. I’ve never been so happy in my life to be able to scream as when I woke up during that night. Because sometimes you can’t scream. Sometimes the monsters get you and there is just nothing you can do about it. [Note: I highly suggest you loop Frank Sinatra’s “My Echo, my Shadow, and Me” while reading this to add a bit of atmosphere to the words. Remember, that the investigator is talking to someone who is in a mental institution and they have all sorts of creepy music playing…]

“Hush! Listen! Don’t you hear that? It might be here. It could have been here the whole time waiting to see if we had noticed it. You hear it, don’t you? I can hear it, but not when my head is full of cotton. It’s like a low hum-whir. I called you as soon as I could. I’m not going mad am I? No, no, that’s what it wants me to think. But what is it, you ask? It’s the unquiet silence. It’s that which lives between breaths. It’s a moment of pure terror frozen in time and space given will and thought, but not form or substance. It’s angry that it can’t touch or affect us. It wants what we have. It wants to be alive. But how can that happen you ask? By stealing our voices. By taking away the power we have to speak to one another. You know when you walk through a crowd and one minute it’s loud and then the next utter silence? That’s a Whisperman screaming without sound – we can’t hear it, but we feel it….”

“…That snippet of audio was taken from off a cellular phone’s voicemail. The speaker is Maxim Yusef Humberd of Phoenix, Arizona. Maxim or “Max” as he likes to be called has been institutionalized since early 2007 after he was found at the scene of a murder…”