The Whispering Bridge

The Whispering Bridge

By Graham Swanson

For S,

Sareena Corteza took her dad by the hand. He gave her the keys to his car.

“Maybe I will give you a ride.” he reconsidered, his factory work shirt unbuttoned and cooled by the fan.

“I’ll be fine, dad. It's just downtown for work. Kylie and Brandon will be there.”

“And you will come straight home?”

“Of course dad.” Sareena thought of Brandon in the backseat of the car. “Don't worry so much. Nothing will happen to me.”

“Yes. I am taking care because I worry. You know that. You know what happened to that other girl.”

“Dad, it's not like I'm meeting up with strangers on the internet. It's just work. It'll be okay.”

“I do not think your grandma is well, she might go to the hospital soon, and if that happens and if something happened to you...” 

“I’ll come home, dad. I promise.” She smiled at him with her fat cheeks and shiny black eyes.

Her father smiled back at her and let her hand slip away. She put on her little earth-colored boots and went out the moonlit door.

Sareena shivered in the wet dusk. She stepped off the porch of her hilltop home. The moon turned bright orange as it hung over the truck stop at the bottom of the valley. Branches of darkened trees reached for the light and shivered as their leaves dropped onto her windshield. She listened to the chirping critters scurry away from the brisk pace of racing coyotes. They reminded her of her own cat.

The theater she worked at showed no cool movies. American movies about how hard it is to be husband or father. Animated movies for children and families about goofy cartoon characters lost in the big city. A movie about someone getting shot, or another superhero movie. Only old people and weird nerdy loners with no dates came in. She sold tickets and snacks, stood by the door when the movies got out, cleaned the bathroom and vacuumed the floor, then they all played hide and seek. Kylie hid behind the curtains by the fire exit. Brandon hid in the ticket booth. She almost couldn't find him, but when she did they held each other tight and started kissing in the dark.

Both of them left together, but when they came to her car, they stopped. Someone sat inside the car. A shadow sat still in the backseat. A head with long white hair and a pair of shoulders outstretched across the backseat. A pair of pale eyes looked at them both.

The two of them ran back into the theater, told the manager and told Kylie. The cops drove by when the manager made a call to them, but the patrol found no one in the car. Some broken glass on the pavement, maybe, but no person. They let her ride in the back of the cop car back home. She kept telling herself, it couldn’t be. The girls that went missing, they were all someone, rich blonde girls, popular girls, why her? Why go after her?

The cop mid-ride received a distress signal. She stopped her cruiser and responded to the radio. She told them she had a 9A-90. Escorting a minor. That’s when Sareena felt her phone vibrate. The number called her came from a three-digit number, and the location was from some country she never even heard of before out in the ocean between Indonesia and the Philippines. 

The next day she went on a walk with Brandon and crossed the weeping bridge. Ghost stories about the bridge spoke of a weeping woman who lured men to their deaths. They'd look under the bridge, and see a woman in white with a broken leg, or a baby wrapped up that she held under the creek water. Sometimes she’d be naked and would offer men a drink of liquor. Either way, when she whispers to you and you look over, she takes hold of you and pulls you under.

When Sareena got home, she discovered lint and broken pencil lead in her pockets. She dug further and further and discovered a folded-up note that she didn’t know about. She unfolded it, feeling her heart gush hot blood. She swooned at the thought of Brandon sending her a love note, but instead, it depicted a detailed sketch of the whispering bridge and the creek beneath. A red arrow pointed to a small cave beneath the bridge. She tore the note apart and left it in the sink.

After work, Brandon picked her up. They parked by his house and undressed each other. Night came fast and they both sweltered on the seats, pressing their feet and hands against the fogged windows, breathing into each other's mouths and licking the fluids they spilled on each other. She ran up, her shirt ripped and her pants unbuckled, blood trickled from her vagina.

“I dropped my phone.” she told him as they held each other under the swirling clouds and watchful planets under the stars.

“Really? I was getting some weird messages from you. Are you sure about that?”

“I couldn't find it last night or today. I think I dropped it at the bridge. What did these messages say?”

“Come find me at the bridge. There’s something I need to show you. Stuff like that.”

The next day, they recruited Kylie, her boyfriend Memphis, and they went looking together under the bridge. The creek waters almost completely receded. A few muddy rocks remained covered in footprints and slime, lots of garbage because the people living around the creek lived in poverty and dealt in meth, they tossed all their garbage down the hill when their cans got too full.

Crude, artless graffiti coated the bottom of the bridge and its columns. Birds nested in the steel beams underneath. A small fire lay extinguished on the cement platform amid a ring of glass bottles that reeked not of alcohol, but of candle wax.

“I found your phone.” Kylie located it right on top of a flat rock by a blue flower and a small ray of pale daylight.

The phone looked perfectly normal. No dust. No bugs. The battery was fully charged. Kylie gave it back to Sareena who thanked her friend and rewarded her with a big hug, and then they all went back to Memphis’s house to smoke a bowl and watch DRAG RACE.

Sareena hardly noticed the text messages coming in, and she left early to make out with Brandon. She showed him on her phone all the pictures she had of herself and her cat, but on the day she didn’t have her phone, a dozen or more photos went missing. The numbers went from #19, #20- straight to #33. Those pictures had been blocked by an encrypted password. She didn’t know what it was, nor did he.

That night, when she was back at her dad's all alone, she started wondering again about the missing girls. She heard the last one appear crucified on the lights of the new softball fields. She was the park commissioner's daughter and before that, the banker's daughter, and before that the principal's daughter, and before that a young girl went out while her parents fought and smashed bottles over each other's heads, and they never found her body. The others turned up floating in the carnage swamp, hung over a tree branch, or on the roof of a water tower. But that first girl, she never turned up. Some say they saw her last at the parking lot of the abandoned mall. Others say she ran away. But Sareena wondered if maybe she had a secret that no one else knew about.

That night just before she fell asleep in bed, her phone shook on her lap. It was a set of numbers from the strange number from before. She almost fell back onto her pillow, but then she realized that the numbers fit the set of numbers in the encryption key. A password.

She entered the numbers. 0.7.4.0

The pictures began to process, and they came in blurry and dark, but she recognized the felt of her seat covers, the staples on the ceiling of the cab, the digits on the radio of her favorite song, and her bare breasts in the pink lips of Brandon. She swiped through the dozen or so photos. Each one, of her naked body and his sweaty lustful hangs and lap. Her pale exposed flesh, his red beaten skin gnashing into hers. They were taken from the windows, the windshield, even the front seat. Then the last photo came in, not dark at all, but framed in a halo of light. She saw the flat nostrils and pale eyes of a ghastly face happily peering out from a hole in the dirt.