The Seven Whistlers
Copyright © 2006 by Amber Benson and Christopher Golden. All rights reserved.

The sun was barely above the horizon when Jimmy Lizotte made his first cast of the day. Nothing in the world gave him as much peace as fishing on the lake. He'd get up at five o'clock, walk down to the dock with a cup of coffee and a bag of the little cinnamon donuts Hannah always bought him at the Buffalo Nickel General Store, start up the outboard and have the little boat out on the water before he'd even taken a piss. That early in the morning, he could whip it out and piss right over the side and nobody was there to see it.

Now he sat there on the cushion he'd bought over the summer. The air was cool and the water dark this early. There weren't any bugs out yet. His line disappeared into the smooth surface of the lake.

Fuckin' bliss.

Jimmy took a sip from his coffee, congratulating himself on how smart he'd been to buy Hannah the machine last Christmas. He could prepare it the night before, set the timer, and wake up to the smell, like his life was a tv commercial. No calls for this electrician on weekends. Weekdays, he tried not to schedule anything before eleven o'clock, so he could get a few hours on the lake in. Half the time he didn't catch anything the law would have let him keep, and even when he did, it was barely enough for dinner, but that wasn't the point.

It was called fishing, not catching.

It's about the Zen, he told Hannah on a regular basis. She never got it, but that was all right. Most days she loved him enough to understand he just needed it, the way some guys needed beer. And fishing didn't do to a marriage what too much booze or too many nights in the titty bars would do. Hannah didn't mind. Most days. And on the days when she did, Jimmy didn't much care . . . once he was out on the lake, what was she going to do? Skip stones at him?

He took a deep breath and let it out. The pine trees at the lake shore were silhouetted by the rising sun. The chicory coffee was warm and sweet. Jimmy set the cup down and slid his hand into the plastic bag to retrieve a cinnamon donut. God's perfect food, as far as Jimmy was concerned.

A breeze rippled the surface of the lake and made him shudder a little. It felt good, though. He took another sip of coffee to offset the chill. The breeze came again, but this time, it carried a strange sound.

Jimmy frowned. "What the hell is that?" he whispered to himself.

The whistling noise struck him oddly enough that he disturbed his comfortable position, sitting up and looking around, trying to determine where it was coming from. It wasn't any ordinary whistle, not some bird call or policeman's warning. When he was a little boy he'd often heard the whistle that sounded the beginning and end of the work day at the lumber mill across the lake, but the mill had been closed twenty-three years, and this wasn't the same sound anyway. It reminded him more of the sound falling bombs always made in Bugs Bunny cartoons, but even then, there was more to it. The noise seemed a combination of sounds to him; a distant, reedy whistle, and a scream.

Then, as abruptly as it had begun, it ceased.

Jimmy kept looking around, fishing rod in one hand, brows knitted in unsettled curiosity. He told himself it was some kind of bird, though he'd been fishing on Goodman's Lake all his life and never heard anything like it. Some migratory breed, he figured. Global climate change had driven it north. Or east. Or something.

But as he settled down again, movement in the shadows of the pines drew his gaze. On the end of the dock where he kept his boat sat an enormous black dog. At this distance, it was hard to say for sure, but the dog seemed to be looking at him. Staring. The massive hound must have been wild, because he didn't see an owner anywhere. He wondered if it might be a wolf. This beast was way too big to be a coyote.

It just sat there, unmoving. It didn't scratch itself or wag its tail. The dog sat remarkably still, watching.

The tug on his line startled him enough that he nearly dropped his fishing rod, and he twisted around so quickly that his coffee sloshed onto his shirt. He cursed loudly and set the cup down, grateful that it wasn't hot anymore. At the same time, he jerked the rod back, setting the hook, and started to reel. He wound in a few feet of line and then let the fish rest a second. It darted back and forth, struggling to free itself from his hook.

"Come on, baby. Come to Jimmy," he said under his breath as he started to reel again. It felt big enough to be a keeper. Maybe big enough to feed both him and Hannah at dinner tonight.

There were a lot of things Jimmy Lizotte loved about his wife, but near the top of the list was that she never got tired of eating fish. Girl new a thousand ways to cook the catch of the day.

The rod arced down toward the water like a dowsing rod. Jimmy grinned widely and kept reeling. Something silver flashed beneath the dark surface of the lake, and as he wound in a few more inches of line he saw the fish fighting him. It had to be a two-footer.

"Come on, beauty."

The fish was heavy and strong. It gave a massive tug, one last ditch effort to escape him, and Jimmy rocked on his cushion, the boat tipping a little. He laughed and looked down into the water, and then a frown creased his forehead.

There were other silver flashes down there, some small and some as big as his catch. Fish knifed through the water around the boat. At first he saw only a few, but quickly they multiplied into dozens. A long dark shape darted toward the fish on his hook, and the line swayed to one side.

"You've gotta be shitting me," Jimmy said, chuckling in disbelief.

The swarm of fish—he couldn't really call them a school since they were all different sizes and types—gathered around the one on the hook, swimming right into it, bumping the catch and the line both. Jimmy tried to reel, but felt another powerful tug in downward. The rod bent further toward the water.

This was the craziest thing he'd ever seen. It was as though the fish were trying to save the one on his hook.

He stared down into the water. The sun rose above the trees and its light shone across the lake. In that same moment, he saw the blood clouding the water below him, and little bits of floating flesh.

The fish weren't trying to save his catch. They were eating it, like sharks in a feeding frenzy.

"No fuckin' way," he whispered.

But at least one of them was still on his hook, still tugging down. Jimmy tried to fight it, but the fish were strong, and the whole thing freaked him out. He took his knife from the sheath in his tackle box and cut the line. It had been pulled so taut that when it let go, he fell backward, and accidentally sliced the knife across the ball of his right hand.

He swore loudly, furiously, and let go of the rod. It banged on the side of the boat as it fell overboard and instantly sank into the darkness. Jimmy screamed in frustration and pain, wadding up a fistful of his sweatshirt and pressing it against the cut. The sting of that slice ran up his arm, but it hurt even less than the loss of the rod and reel he'd never see again. The cut could be stitched. His rig was money he could never get back.

Something bumped the boat. Not hard enough to rock it, really. It was more of a slap. But then it came again, and again, and then it was as though all of those fish were pelting themselves against the boat from beneath.

When he knelt to start the outboard, he crushed his cinnamon donuts beneath his knees. He hung his head and laughed at the absurdity of it all. He had to use his left hand to start the motor, and for a moment he was sure it wasn't going to start. This day had was one piece of bad luck after another, and it only made sense he'd have to swim back to the dock. But then the motor roared to life. A bunch of fish swam at the propeller and there was a grinding noise as the motor worked overtime, hacking them to chum.

He pointed the prow toward the dock, and headed in, wondering how the day had gone so completely wrong. His Italian grandmother had always talked about the Malocchio, the evil eye, and it sure as hell felt like someone had hit him with that whammy. But it wasn't the bad luck that made him feel like he had spiders crawling under his skin, and it wasn't the stinging pain from the slice on his palm. It was the behavior of those fish. That had been damned unnatural. Just plain wrong, and weird.

It scared him a little.

Hannah Lizotte woke to the smell of smoke. She called out for Jimmy even as she leaped from bed and threw her robe on. As she ran down the stairs, she lost her footing and tripped. Catching herself on the handrail, she twisted her wrist, hissing in pain as tendons tore. Hannah cradled her wrist against her chest as she ran into the kitchen and saw the coffee machine engulfed in flames, the black plastic melting and running down over the kitchen counter. The fire had started to spread on the counter.

Terror raced through her. There were too many things in this house that she could not bear to lose. Fire had always been her biggest fear. A flash of fury went through her as she mentally blamed her husband, thinking Jimmy had somehow left the machine on, though she knew it could have been an electrical fire.

Wincing with the pain in her wrist, she ran to the sink, choking on black, stinking smoke, and turned on the faucet. They had a spray attachment on the sink that was more powerful than the shower head in their bathroom. She switched it on, and began to hose down the burning coffee machine.

A fleck of burning black plastic splashed up at her and stuck to her cheek, burning, searing into her flesh. Hannah screamed, wiping at her face, trying to get it off, but it was stuck. She managed to keep the water spraying on the coffee maker until the flames were doused.

Only then did she let herself sink to the floor, tears and a trickle of blood running down her face.

Half a mile from the Lizottes' house, a sudden gust of wind blew down a dead, towering pine tree. It crashed down on Ray Winston's house, totaling the brand new Saturn he'd given himself as a fortieth birthday present.

On Charles Street, the brakes gave way on the mail truck and Audrey Tosches panicked. Before she could get control of the vehicle, she was up on the sidewalk and careening through the plate glass window that fronted Kelley's bar. She wept as she considered the irony of a twelve-stepper crashing her postal truck into a bar. Then the jagged remaining portion of the plate glass window fell like a guillotine and shattered her windshield. The steering wheel stopped the plate glass before it would have reached her legs, but she'd had her hands at ten and two like they'd taught her at driver's ed when she was sixteen, and three fingers on her left hand were severed.

The blood scared her more than the pain.

Seventy seven year old Aaron Chomsky caught his slipper on the metal lip that separated the linoleum of his kitchen floor from the bare wood of his basement stairs. For an old man, he was pretty spry, and he reached out to grab the door knob.

It came off in his hand, and he fell.

At the Red Oak Inn, the refrigerator had died during overnight, spoiling all of the food that Jenny would have made for guests at dinner that evening.

When Alan arrived at his antique shop, Cat O' Nine Tails, the heat was running and there was an oddly metallic, moldy smell coming from the vents. When he went downstairs, he found that boiler had given out, and water had soaked through the bottoms of dozens of cardboard boxes, perhaps damaging many of the items he had in storage.

Sheer bad luck. The boiler had been two days past its warranty.

Upstairs, he kept the door open to let the smell out. A strange whistling noise filled the street and he went out onto the sidewalk, searching for its source. A few seconds later, it stopped, and he shrugged and turned to go back inside.

On the street corner there stood the biggest black dog he had ever seen. It stared at him. Though it did not growl or bare its teeth or even take a step nearer, Alan felt waves of menace coming off of the dog.

He closed the door, and went about opening windows instead.