The Whistling Man

written by Eduardo Hernandez (eddieuel)

In the mountains of the highest, where the air forgot to breathe and the sun touched nothing but ice, lived a wizard who granted a wish to whoever could reach the height on which he lived.

The villagers knew the stories well. They’d tell them by firelight as the wind scraped the windows, whispering like an old man who’d lost his way. No one dared to climb anymore.
Those who did—never returned.

They told themselves they were wise for staying.
But the truth was simpler: they were afraid.

So they starved quietly, fighting over crumbs, pretending their fear was patience. They convinced themselves they were “only human,” as if humanity were an excuse for the cages they built in their own minds.

They had forgotten that the mountain didn’t just kill—it tested.

One day, a boy rose before dawn and said he would reach the top.

The villagers laughed the way only cowards can—loud and certain.

But the boy didn’t answer.
He ran.

He ran faster than anyone before him, through the thorned paths and crooked caves, through mazes that bent back on themselves.

The mountain changed shape as he climbed.
Paths opened, then sealed.
The sound of rushing wind turned to a low whistle, like someone unseen was calling his name.

The villagers called it the whistling man—the sound that marked where the living ended and the lost began.

But the boy pressed on.
He met the silver goats that roamed the cliffs, their eyes like mirrors.
He crossed bridges made of ribs and root, where the wind sang in three tones—temptation, memory, and mercy.
He solved the riddles carved into stone, bled on the altar of dawn, and learned to listen to the silence between heartbeats.

At last, in a clearing of glass and snow, he found the wizard.
The old man was waiting.

“State your wish,” said the mage, his voice quiet as a flame behind glass.

The boy bowed.
“My wish is for the people of the world to end their wars and thrive as one.”

The mage studied him for a long time.
His smile was thin as breath.

“I can grant this,” he said.
“But to do it right—to make it true—will require something they are not ready to give up.”

The boy frowned. “What can’t humanity give up?”

The mage laughed softly, the sound echoing like whistling through a hollow cave.

“What do you mean?” the boy asked.

But the old man said nothing more.
The mountain groaned. The wind screamed.
And then—silence.

Ten years later,
the boy came down from the mountains.

The villagers had built him a grave to remind themselves what happens to those who climb too high.

When they saw him walking down the ridge, they fell to their knees.

He was changed. His eyes were deeper than the sky, and when he spoke, it felt like a memory resurfacing in the human heart.

The Whistling Man — continued (expanded night sequence)

“What did you wish for?” they asked.
He smiled faintly.
And he let out a whistle.

It wasn’t loud. It was thin and clean, like a reed flute across water. The sound slid along the eaves, threaded itself through hair and cloth, and kept going—far past where the houses ended, up into the timberline where the dark collects.

The villagers went still. Chickens blinked. A dog lay down without being told. It felt like the air had agreed to hold its breath.

From the ridge came answering howls—at first scattered, then drawn tight, harmonies nested inside harmonies until the hillside seemed to be singing back. Faces turned toward him. His eyes took the light and kept it; his skin shifted, not painted, but washed through—river-blue under moon.

An old man in the crowd stepped forward. No coat. No shoes. He moved as if someone far away had tugged a string tied around his heart.

“Papa,” his daughter said, catching his sleeve.

He kept walking.

“Papa—” She pulled harder; he wrenched free and her hands slipped. She stumbled, went to her knees in the dust. There was no anger in him; only distance, like a man listening to a music no one else could hear.

Then an older woman, hair silvery as the goats that haunted the cliffs, pressed a palm to her chest and smiled like she’d finally remembered a name. She turned toward the mountains and followed.

The whistling thinned to a thread, then doubled, then split into thirds. The howls found it and braided themselves around that thread until the night stood dressed in melody.

A young man in a wheeled chair reached down—almost curious—and set his hands to the earth. He paused, testing a body that had refused him for years. Fingers to dirt, a breath, then another. He rose—awkward, shaking, but upright—eyes wide with a child’s terror and awe. Someone cried out to him; he didn’t turn. He stepped. Then another step. By the third, he had the rhythm. By the fourth, he had the road.

Others came—those long called frail, those set aside, those the town had learned to walk around. Not hurried, not frantic. It wasn’t a march. It was a procession, quiet as river stones, each person catching the same far-off tune and aligning their feet to it.

“Stop this,” a woman whispered to the man who had once been a boy. He did not answer. The whistle wasn’t from his mouth anymore; it seemed to rise out of his ribs and the cracks of the street and the split bark of the trees. You could close your ears and still hear it behind them.

A child ran forward and wrapped both arms around his grandfather’s leg, digging in heels. The old man reached down, rested a hand on the child’s hair, gentled him aside, and kept going.

Lanterns wavered. Doors opened and stayed that way, throwing rectangles of honey light into the road that stretched like invitations no one accepted. The procession thinned the town the way a tide pulls shells from sand—quietly, methodically, without argument.

Far up the slope, the silver goats appeared: a few at first, then more, stepping out from between the pines, hooves clicking like beads on glass. They didn’t lead the people, exactly. They arranged the space around them—as if the mountain were setting its table.

Some prayed. Some cursed. Some tried to name what was happening and found no word that fit. You could feel it, though—the old story slipping its mask, the wish standing naked in the road. Mercy, or something that looked like mercy from far away.

By the middle of the night, the line had thinned to a thread of silhouettes on the switchbacks—elder after elder, the injured, the forgotten, the ones who had waited the longest. No one ran. No one screamed. The song made panic impossible; it put a hand on the throat of fear and held it still.

When the moon tipped and the dark began to blue, the whistling softened until it wasn’t sound anymore but a pressure, a hum inside bone. The last of the procession rounded a stand of fir and was gone.

What remained of the village sagged where it stood. Some sank gently to the grass, as if invited to lie down by someone kind. Others folded in doorways, palms still open. Sleep took them fast and deep, like wells without rope.

By dawn, half the town lay in the fields, faces toward the mountain, breath slow. They looked emptied, not harmed—like vessels poured out after holding too much for too long.

The ridge was quiet. No more howls. No more goats. Only the thin seam of trail where feet had passed.

The man who had whistled stood alone in the road. No triumph. No apology. Just the after-silence of a bell.

The sun cleared the peaks and touched the stones at the north fence—the ones with names and no dates—and for a moment it seemed they glowed. Someone whispered the old line like a charm against the morning:

“The fate of those who climb the mountain… is surely death.”

No one answered. The day began anyway.

Years later

He called himself The Chosen One.
Those of us who remember call him the Whistling Man.

There are no elders.

The night of the whistle took them—porch chairs facing the ridge still dented at the seat, blankets fossilized in the shape of knees. The canes lean where they were left. Wheel ruts in the dust go a few feet and stop like a sentence with the last word missing. At the clinic, a pair of forearm crutches hangs behind the door like wind chimes that forgot how to sing.

When decisions come due, there is no cough from the back, no slow voice saying Wait. The town is loud with youth and middle-age and the quiet where "wisdom" used to sit.

Week by week, he redrew the ground.

He sketched grids in dust with a stick. “Road. Clinic. Market.”
Saws answered. Poles rose. Stone wagons groaned.
Tag cords—blue, red, white—knotted at the collarbone.
Work by whistle: start, change, stop.
By month’s end, walls had the stubbornness of facts.

He called it the Promised Land.
On the maps we never see, it’s still a town.

With his wish—and whatever the mage taught him—things moved too fast to argue.

A ditch cut at dawn ran with water by dusk.
A road penciled at breakfast had truck lights by dark.
A schoolhouse opened in three days; the windows blinked like they were thinking.

Rules bloomed on doors: RATION • SHIFT • QUIET HOURS.
We learned the rules by how the notes sliced the air.

And yes—some of our people went to the mountain after that night as well.
Not in a parade, not with song—just those evening summonses you felt in the ribs. The ones who left had a sameness hard to name without being cruel; no one said it out loud because the point was not to say it. The lamps still came on. The pump still worked. The clinic returned children without fever.

“Better off now, right?” we counted lights instead of names.

Shopkeeper:
“I used to sell salt by the pinch. Now I stamp ration cards. ”

Stone-crew lead:
“He points, we raise. He nods, we set. If there’s a story under this street, nobody’s left who tells it slow.”

Midwife:
“Fewer funerals. Fewer hands to tie black cloth. I have a drawer of baby bonnets that don’t get used. I keep it closed.”

Boy on the maintenance crew:
“The old lift behind the clinic? Belt still warm. Chair gone. Nobody logged an out.”

Teacher (to first-year civics):
“Our history section before the clinic is one page. A picture of the mountain. No faces.”

Carver at the north fence:
“Names only. No dates, he says. The mountain keeps time. I set aside small stones that fit child palms. No one asks why.”

Three feast days a year.
Banners: a white line climbing a black triangle.
Bread in the square. Children singing an ascending note until the pigeons lift like smoke.

He wears a coat the color of winter water and stands on the cart with open palms.
“Walk forward,” he says. Never “follow me.” Always “walk forward.”
People repeat it the way you repeat a rule you want to believe you wrote.

A lot of the loudest praise comes from the same mouths that laughed when the boy laced his boots. Volume does its best work where memory is thin.

Did he come back a god?
No.
He came back playing one. And the stage loves a steady hand.

Still—
no denying how much changed.

Roads where mud was.
A clinic where mourning sat.
A school where silence grew like mold.

At night, when the wind swings right, the town holds a long, low pitch without a mouth to claim it. Mothers hush their children to it. Work crews time their breath to it. No goats come down anymore.

Each morning the sun hits the markers at the north fence first, warming the names before it touches us. We pretend we don’t notice the order of things.

Better off now, right?

Twenty years on — a new voice

“Our little mountain town,” Ms. Yazzie told the freshmen, “wasn’t always like this.”

Chairs creaked. The lights hummed. A truck rolled by slow enough you could feel it in the floor.

“Twenty years ago we didn’t have a clinic. No paved roads. When the bridge washed out, we waited. On maps we were a blank between lines. No jurisdiction, no services. Our neighbors—other tribes—had support on paper.”
She held up the state map—thin, slick, already tearing at the folds. “Paper is power. The people outside drew lines. We fell off the page.”

She let that sit, head tilted like she was listening for something only she could hear.

“Then The Chosen One made his wish,” she said, softer. “And our people got something new: a way to walk forward.”

Through the window the clinic flashed clean. The road hummed. If you kept your eyes there long enough, you could also catch the north fence: low markers with names, no dates.

A hand went up halfway. “Ms. Yazzie… were you here—like, for the night? The first… whistle?”

Her smile came slow and a little sideways. Stabilized kookiness—warm, not quite steady. “I was in my mother’s yard,” she said. “Wind in the cedars. Smelled like metal. I remember… pieces. A line of folks heading up like they’d just remembered something urgent. I remember a note I could hear even with my hands over my ears.” She tapped each ear, once. “Dream-memory. You wake up and it’s still on your tongue, then it’s gone.”

She flipped the map closed. “Listen: History is not a parade of inventions. It’s a jurisdiction problem. Who draws the line, who gets services, who waits. Don’t let the roads make you forget the map.”

A few kids shifted. Someone’s pencil clicked too many times. Outside, a noon whistle—just the factory one—cut through the room. Two students flinched anyway.

“Founders’ Day is next week,” Ms. Yazzie added, pointing at the flyer—white line climbing a black triangle. “Bring your brains and your shoes. ‘Promised Land’ is a name. Names do work. So do silences.”

She stepped to the glass and traced the clinic’s roofline with a fingertip, steady as a ruler. “Look out there. See the clinic. Hear the road. Now shift your eyes. See the fence.”

They did.

“History isn’t simple,” she said, closing the book. “It’s a bargain. Make sure you know what was traded.”
Her head tilted again, listening for that not-quite-there note. “Some trades echo.”

The bell rang.

Chairs scraped. Backpacks swung. The room tipped toward the door.

Kai stood last. He glanced at the window, then the flyer, then the north fence—like he was lining them up.

Tino shoulder-bumped him. “You look haunted, bro.”

“Just thinking,” Kai said.

Liliani waited in the doorway, one hand on the frame, watching Ms. Yazzie wipe the board clean and leave one word untouched: JURISDICTION.

They stepped into the hall river. Kai leaned in, kept his voice under the crowd.

“It’s not a big leap,” he whispered. “The Chosen One didn’t just lose them that night. He killed them.”

Tino stopped walking.
Liliani’s eyes flicked to the ceiling speaker where the whistle never came from, then back to Kai.

“Say it quieter,” she murmured.

They moved in the shuffle—lockers slamming, shoes squeaking, laughter bouncing off tile.

If the story of the wish was true, then somewhere beneath the concrete and painted lines, something else was buried—
and none of us were sure what our land was really built on.

COLD OPEN

Kai's walk home had that wet-cold that gets into your wrists. He counted the mailboxes he always counted, checked the living-room window without turning his head. Lights off. He stood on the porch a second, key at the lock, wondering if his dad would be home or if the house would just be the kind that answers you with a refrigerator hum.

I was already fed up with Senior by dinner. He’d retired from the city last month, after dedicating his whole life to the Cause and the Chosen One’s vision. He hates when I call him the Whistling Man. I do it anyway. He slams the table; Mom rolls her eyes. “Here we go again.” I push him just enough to see how red he gets.

Don’t get me wrong—I like my dad. He’s proud. He puts dinner on the table. But sometimes it’s like there’s no room in him for a thought that isn’t already stamped APPROVED.

“Half our community drifted toward the mountain to die—” I say. “If that’s what this town was built on, don’t you think it’s worth bringing up?”

He grips his fork like it might run. “We moved forward,” he says.

“On what?” I ask. He doesn’t answer. Knife down. Plate forward. The discussion ends the way it always ends: with gravity.

I clear my dish. Go to my room. No dessert. After the old man threw his little fit, I lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling fan until the blades turn into a single gray coin.

The story I’ve been told my whole life—about the people who lived here before us—says they were “violent,” “feeble,” “unworthy,” depending on who’s talking. Or maybe the mountain swallowed them. Or maybe that’s just the lie the Whistling Man told so no one would ask why the porches went empty.

It dawns on me.

I grab my phone and text the group chat Tino named “your mom.” No one ever bothered to change it.

Kai: Hey. Brilliant idea after dinner with the fam.
Liliani: What kind of idea? And does it involve food?

I watch the three dots pop up under Tino’s name.
They vanish.

Kai: I think we should take a trip up to the mountain and see if there’s such a thing as a wish.
Liliani: Okay, but we should bring snacks.

The dots show again under Tino.
We wait.
Nothing.

Kai: Hope Tino’s not too chicken to go this weekend.
(no reply)

I drop the phone on my chest and reach up toward the fan, fingers grazed by the moving air. The window’s cracked; the night pushes a small, thin sound through the screen.

It isn’t a whistle. Not exactly.
But it remembers how to be one.

Morning

Morning came gray and thin. Kai packed his backpack like laying out a plan on a table—flashlight, coil of paracord, pocket notebook, cheap lighter, a clean bandana. He remembered Liliani’s snack obsession and slid in a Ziploc: cookies, turkey jerky, two granola bars, plus the last of the gummy bears, sealed with a prayer. By the front door, near Senior’s keys, a folded twenty rested under the mail. Kai took the bill, left the keys, and slipped out before the floor could complain.

The air tasted like iron. He cut behind the clinic, crossed the road where gravel still remembered being mud, and headed for Tino’s park.

Tino’s door

They knocked on the thin door of the mobile home—Kai’s knuckles made a soft, hollow thud. No answer. He checked his phone: three unread texts to Tino stacked like unanswered prayers.

“I don’t get it,” he told Liliani. “He saw the messages.”

The door opened. Tino’s mom filled the frame—robe tied tight, hair pulled back, kind eyes gone glassy like sleep kept missing her. “Morning, kids,” she said, polite because that’s the last gear that still works. “Come in.”

They stepped into a tidy room that felt used to being kind to people. A TV remote lay face down on a folded blanket. A mug with a tide line of tea. On a shelf, three carved animals made of driftwood watched the window. The place smelled like lemon cleaner and rain.

She moved to the kitchen—black-and-white tiles checked like a game board—and filled two cloudy glasses at the sink. Rain ticked the tin roof. It sounded like a thousand small fingers trying to get in.

Liliani’s leg started its quiet shake. Kai set a hand just above her knee; the tremor softened, kept time with the roof.

Tino’s mom set the waters down but didn’t sit. She opened her mouth, closed it, breathed once like testing a cold pool with a toe.

“You see, kids… Tino’s dad’s been trying to hide it. From all of us.” She touched her temple like the sentence hurt. “Lately it’s gotten… noticeable. He got sick.”

Kai felt the shape of the conclusion arrive before the words did. Something in his throat went cold, like wind passing through him.

She went on, words careful as stepping stones. “This town—what we’ve been given—I’m proud. We all are. The Chosen One takes good care of us.” Her eyes wet instantly, no build-up, just a spill. “But Hue—” she said his name like she might cut herself on it, “—he wasn’t getting better. He had to. But he wasn’t.”

She twisted the dish towel without noticing. “We didn’t take him to the clinic because… well.” She glanced at the window, at the rain writing fast on glass. “Because sometimes the walls have ears.”

The room heard her. The roof kept time.

Liliani’s voice came soft. “Where is he?”

Tino’s mom looked at them—kids, not really. “Up there,” she said, chin lifting toward the ridge no one could see from inside. “In the mountains.”

Kai and Liliani didn’t speak.

“There aren’t official laws up there,” she added, quieter. “No jurisdiction. No one to count what doesn’t want counting. If he rests a while—if he gets stronger—he can come back on his own feet. I told Tino to take a tent. To keep the fire small. To listen for weather and stay off the trails that sing.”

“The trails that… sing?” Kai said.

She nodded once, quick. “You’ll know them if you hear them.” Her eyes reddened at the rims. “I’ll check on them soon. But please—don’t say anything. I knew you two would keep asking till you found it. Now you’ve found it.”

Liliani slid one of the waters closer. “We won’t tell,” she said.

Tino’s mom’s mouth shook. She set a hand on the back of a chair to steady it—or herself. “Thank you.” She glanced toward the hallway where Tino’s room sat closed. “He didn’t want you to worry.”

Kai’s jaw worked once, no words. He pictured Tino’s sneakers by the door, a space where they weren’t. He put his pack on. “We should go,” he said, not unkind. “We’ll… bring him a message, if we see him.”

“Her chin dipped. ‘Tell him—’ She stopped, tried again. ‘Tell him his mother will get this house in order.’”

They nodded.

At the threshold she added, almost to herself, “Up there, the lines they drew on paper don’t reach. That’s all I’m saying.”

Outside

They stepped into the bright gray of rain. The cold found wrists and slid up sleeves. The awning dripped in a neat, stubborn rhythm. Across the park, a banner with a white line climbing a black triangle sagged in the wet like it might slide off.

“So it’s a rule,” Liliani said, barely above the weather. “Not written. Just… known.”

“Known,” Kai said. He looked at the twenty in his pocket. It felt like a small, guilty engine.

He thumbed his phone, called the only cab number that still picked up this side of the ridge. The dispatcher sounded surprised to be working. Kai gave the cross street near the old trailhead—the one where the gravel still remembered being mud. “Cash,” he added. “Twenty.”

“Fifteen minutes,” said the voice.

They waited under the awning. The factory’s noon test note cut the air—thin, obedient. Not the night note. Not the one that rearranged people. Still, the skin at the back of their necks remembered.

A car turned into the park—old sedan, dent in the door, TAXI stenciled soft with age. The driver raised a hand through the windshield like a question.

Liliani pulled her hood tight. “Quick hike adventure,” she said.

“Quick,” Kai agreed. He felt the mountain pretending to be patient.

They jogged to the curb. The cab door thumped open.
The cab arrived.