Whispers (66 page)

Hilary said, “Mrs. Yancy was the only person she’d ever told about the incest, so when she settled into the new fantasy about a demon, she was eager to let Mrs. Yancy know the ‘truth.’ She was worried that Mrs. Yancy thought of her as a terrible person, a wicked sinner, and she wanted Mrs. Yancy to know that she was only the victim of some irresistible supernatural
thing
. That’s why she babbled on about it for so long.”

“But when Mrs. Yancy didn’t believe her,” Tony said, “she decided to keep it to herself. She figured no one else would believe her, either. But that didn’t matter to her because she was positive, in her own mind, that she knew the truth, and that truth was the demon. That was a much easier secret to keep than the other one, the one about Leo.”

“And Leo had died a few weeks earlier,” Hilary said, “so he wasn’t around to remind her of what she had forgotten.”

Joshua took his hands off the airplane controls for a moment, wiped them on his shirt. “I thought I was too damned old and too cynical to respond to a horror story any more. But this one makes my palms sweat. There’s a terrible correlation to what Hilary just said. Leo wasn’t around to remind her—but she needed to keep both of the twins around to reinforce the new delusion. They were the living proof of it, and she couldn’t put either of them up for adoption.”

“That’s right,” Tony said. “Having them with her helped her maintain the fantasy. When she looked at those two perfectly healthy, unquestionably human babies, she really
did
see something different about their sex organs, like she told Mrs. Yancy. She saw it in her mind, imagined it, saw something that was proof, to her, that they were the children of a demon. The twins were part of her comfortable new delusion—and I say ‘comfortable’ only in comparison to the nightmares with which she had lived before.”

Hilary’s mind was racing faster than the airplane engine. She grew excited as she saw where Tony’s speculations were leading. She said, “So Katherine took the twins home, to that clifftop house, but she still had to keep the Mary Gunther lie in the air, didn’t she? Sure. For one thing, she wanted to protect her reputation. But there was another reason, much more important than just her good name. A psychosis is rooted in the subconscious mind, but, as I understand it, the fantasies a psychotic uses to cope with his inner turmoil are more the product of the conscious mind. So . . . while Katherine believed in the demon on a conscious level . . . at the same time, deep down, subconsciously, she knew that if she went back to St. Helena with twins and let the Mary Gunther story collapse, her neighbors would eventually realize that Leo was the father. If she had to deal with that disgrace, she wouldn’t have been able to support the demon fantasy that her conscious mind had fabricated. Her new, more comfortable delusions would be replaced by the old, hard, sharp-edged ones. So to maintain the demon fantasy in her own mind, she had to present only one child to the public. So she gave the two boys just one name. She allowed only one of them to go out in public at any one time. She forced them to live one life.”

“And eventually,” Tony said, “the two boys actually came to think of themselves as one and the same person.”

“Hold it, hold it,” Joshua said. “Maybe they were able to double for each other and live under only one name, one identity, in public. Even that’s asking me to believe a lot, but I’ll try. But for sure, in private they still would have been two distinct individuals.”

“Maybe not,” Tony said. “We’ve come across proof that they thought of themselves as . . . sort of one person in two bodies.”

“Proof? What proof?” Joshua demanded.

“The letter you found in the safe-deposit box in that San Francisco bank. In it, Bruno wrote that
he
had been killed in Los Angeles. He didn’t say his brother had been killed. He said he, himself, was dead.”

“You can’t prove anything by that letter,” Joshua said. “It was all mumbo-jumbo. It didn’t make any sense.”

“In a way it
does
make sense,” Tony said. “It makes sense from Bruno’s point of view—
if
he didn’t think of his brother as another human being. If he thought of his twin as part of himself, as just an extension of himself, and not as a separate person at all, then the letter makes a lot of sense.”

Joshua shook his head. “But I still don’t see how two people could possibly ever be made to believe they were only one person.”

“You’re accustomed to hearing about split personalities,” Tony said. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The woman whose true story was told in
The Three Faces of Eve.
And there was a book about another woman like that. It was a best-seller several years ago.
Sybil
. Sybil had sixteen distinct, separate personalities. Well, if I’m right about what became of the Frye twins, then they developed a psychosis that’s just the reverse of split personality. These two people didn’t split into four or six or eight or eighty; instead, under tremendous pressure from their mother, they . . . melted together psychologically, melted into one. Two individuals with one personality, one self-awareness, one self-image, all shared. It’s probably never happened before and might never happen again, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have happened here.”

“The two would have found it virtually essential to develop identical personalities in order to take turns living in the world beyond their mother’s house,” Hilary said. “Even small differences between them would ruin the charade.”

“But
how?
” Joshua demanded. “What did Katherine do to them? How did she make it happen to them?”

“We’ll probably never know for certain,” Hilary said. “But I’ve got a few ideas about what she might have done.”

“So do I,” Tony said. “But you go first.”

 
By mid-afternoon, the amount of light coming through the east-facing attic windows grew steadily less. The quality of the light began to decrease as well; it no longer radiated out from the shaft form that the shape of the window imparted to it. Darkness slowly claimed the corners of the room.

As shadows crept across the floor, Bruno began to worry about being caught in the dark. He couldn’t simply snap on a lamp because the lamps weren’t in working order. There hadn’t been any electric service to the house for five years, since his mother’s first death. His flashlight was useless; the batteries were drained.

For a while, as he watched the room sink into purple-gray gloom, Bruno fought panic. He didn’t mind being outdoors in the dark, for there was almost always some light spilling from houses, streetlamps, light from passing cars, the stars, the moon. But in a totally lightless room, the whispers and the crawling things returned, and that was a double plague he must prevent somehow.

Candles.

His mother had always kept a couple of boxes of tall candles in the pantry, off the kitchen. They were for use in the event of a power failure. He was pretty sure there would also be matches in the pantry, a hundred or more of them in a round tin with a tight-fitting lid. He hadn’t touched any of those things when he had moved out; he had taken nothing but a few personal possessions and some of the collections of artwork that he had acquired himself.

He leaned over to peer into the face of the other Bruno, and he said, “I’m going downstairs for a minute.”

The cloudy, blood-muddied eyes stared up at him.

“I won’t be gone long,” Bruno said.

Himself said nothing.

“I’m going to get some candles so I won’t be caught in the dark,” Bruno said. “Will I be all right alone here for a few minutes while I’m gone?”

His other self was silent.

Bruno went to the set of steps in one corner of the room. They led down into a second-floor bedroom. The stairwell was not totally dark, for some light from the attic window fell into it. But when Bruno pushed open the door at the bottom, he was shocked to find that the bedroom below was black.

The shutters.

He had opened the shutters in the attic when he’d awakened in the dark this morning, but the windows were still sealed elsewhere in the house. He hadn’t dared open them. It wasn’t likely that Hilary-Katherine’s spies would look up and notice just one pair of opened attic shutters; but if he were to let light into the entire house, they would certainly spot the change and come running. Now the place was like a sepulcher, shrouded in eternal night.

He stood in the stairwell and peered into the lightless bedroom, afraid to advance, listening for whispers.

Not a sound.

No movement either.

He thought of going back to the attic. But that was no solution to his problem. In a few hours, night would have come, and he would be without a protective light. He
must
forge on to the pantry and find those candles.

Reluctantly, he moved into the second-floor bedroom, holding open the stairwell door to take advantage of the meager, smoky light that lay behind and above him. Two steps. Then he stopped.

Waited.

Listened.

No whispers.

He let go of the door and hurriedly crossed the bedroom, feeling his way between pieces of furniture.

No whispers.

He reached another door and then stepped into the second-floor hallway.

No whispers.

For a moment, enveloped in seamless velvety blackness, he could not remember whether to turn left or right to reach the stairs that led to the ground floor. Then he regained his bearings, and he went to the right, arms extended in front of him and hands opened with fingers spread in blindman fashion.

No whispers.

He almost fell down the stairs when he came to them. The floor suddenly opened under him, and he saved himself by reeling to the left and clutching the unseen bannister.

Whispers.

Clinging to the bannister, unable to see anything at all, he held his breath, cocked his head.

Whispers.

Coming after him.

He cried out and lumbered drunkenly down the steps, lost touch with the railing, then with his balance, windmilled his arms, tripped, sprawled on the landing, face down in the musty carpet, pain shooting through his left leg, just a flash of pain and then the dull echo of it in his flesh, and he lifted his head, and he heard the whispers getting closer, closer, and he got up, whimpering in fear, limped rapidly down the next flight, stumbled when he abruptly reached the ground floor, and looked back, stared up into darkness, heard the whispers rushing toward him, building to a roaring hiss, and he shouted—
“No! No!”
—and started toward the rear of the house, along the first-floor corridor, toward the kitchen, and then the whispers were all around him, rolling over him, coming from above and below and every side, and the things were there, too, the horrible crawling things—or
thing;
one or many; he didn’t know which—and as he careened toward the kitchen, bouncing from wall to wall in his terror, he brushed and slapped at himself, desperately trying to keep the crawling things off him, and then he crashed into the kitchen door, which was a swinging door, which swung open to admit him, and he felt along the perimeter of the room, felt over the stove and the refrigerator and the cupboards and the sink until he came to the pantry door, and the things slithered over him all this time, and the whispers continued, and he screamed and screamed at the top of his raspy voice, and he pulled open the pantry door, was assaulted by a nauseating stench, stepped into the pantry in spite of the overpowering odor that wafted from it, then realized he couldn’t see and wouldn’t be able to find the candles or the matches by touch among all the other jars and cans, whirled around, into the kitchen again, screaming, flailing at himself, wiping the wriggling
things
off his face as they tried to scurry into his mouth and nose, found the outside door that connected the kitchen to the back porch, fumbled with the stiff latches, finally freed them, and threw the door open.

Light.

Gray afternoon light, slanting down the Mayacamas Mountains from the west, rained through the open door and illuminated the kitchen.

Light.

For a while, he stood in the doorway, letting the wonderful light wash over him. He was sheathed in perspiration. His breath came hard and ragged.

When he finally calmed down, he returned to the pantry. The sickening stench came from old cans and jars of food that had swelled and exploded, spraying spoiled goods and giving rise to green-black-yellow molds and fungi. Trying to avoid the mess as best he could, he located the candles and the can of matches.

The matches were still dry and useful. He struck one to be sure. The spurting flame was a sight that lifted his heart.

 
To the west of the northward-streaking Cessna, a couple of thousand feet below the aircraft, at the seven- or eight-thousand-foot level, storm clouds steadily approached from the Pacific.

“How?” Joshua asked again. “How did Katherine make the twins think and act and
be
one person?”

“As I said,” Hilary told him, “we’ll probably never know for certain. But for one thing, it seems to me that she must have shared her delusions with the twins almost from the day she brought them home, long before they were old enough even to understand what she was saying. Hundreds and hundreds of times, perhaps thousands upon thousands of times over the years, she told them that they were the sons of a demon. She told them they’d been born with cauls, and she explained what that meant. She told them their sex organs weren’t like those of other boys. She probably told them that they would be killed if other people found out what they were. By the time they were old enough to question all those things, they would have been so thoroughly brainwashed that they wouldn’t have been
able
to doubt her. They’d have shared her psychosis and her delusions. They’d have been two extremely tense little boys, afraid of being found out, afraid of being killed. Fear is stress. And a lot of stress would make their psyches highly malleable. It seems to me that tremendous, unrelenting, extraordinary stress over a long period of time would provide exactly the right atmosphere for the melting together of personalities in the way that Tony has suggested. Massive, prolonged stress wouldn’t, by itself,
cause
that melting together, but it would sort of set the stage for it.”