Whispers (55 page)

Hilary almost could see the big man's fear-twisted face--the shock-wide eyes, the pale skin, the cold sweat along his hairline.

The tape continued:

"Is it just one thing crawling on you?"

"I don't know."

"Or is it many things?"

"I don't know."

"What does it feel like?"

"Just ... awful... sickening."

"Why does this thing want to get inside you?"

"I don't know."

"And you say you always feel like this after a dream."

"Yeah. For a minute or two."

"Is there anything else that you feel in addition to this crawling sensation?"

"Yeah. But it's not a feeling. It's a sound."

"What sort of sound?"

"Whispers."

"You mean that you wake up and imagine that you hear people whispering?"

"That's right. Whispering, whispering, whispering. All around me."

"Who are these people?"

"I don't know."

"What are they whispering?"

"I don't know."

"Do you have the feeling they're trying to tell you something?"

"Yes. But I can't make it out."

"Do you have a theory, a hunch? Can you make a guess?"

"I can't hear the words exactly, but I know they're saying bad things."

"Bad things? In what way?"

"They're threatening me. They hate me."

"Threatening whispers."

"Yes."

"How long do they last?"

"About as long as the ... creeping ... crawling."

"A minute or so?"

"Yes. Do I sound crazy?"

"Not at all."

"Come on. I sound a little crazy."

"Believe me, Mr. Frye, I've heard stories much stranger than yours."

"I keep thinking that if I knew what the whispers were saying, and if I knew what was crawling on me, I'd be able to figure out what the dream is. And once I know what it is, maybe I won't have it any more."

"That's almost exactly how we're going to approach the problem."

"Can you help me?"

"Well, to a great extent that depends on how much you want to help yourself."

"Oh, I want to beat this thing. I sure do."

"Then you probably will."

"I've been living with it so long ... but I never get used to it. I dread going to sleep. Every night, I just dread it."

"Have you undergone therapy before?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I was afraid."

"Of what?"

"Of what ... you might find out."

"Why should you be afraid?"

"It might be something ... embarrassing."

"You can't embarrass me."

"I might embarrass myself."

"Don't worry about that. I'm your doctor. I'm here to listen and help. If you--"

Dr. Rudge popped the cassette out of the tape recorder and said, "A recurring nightmare. That's not particularly unusual. But a nightmare followed by tactile and audial hallucinations--that's not a common complaint."

"And in spite of that," Joshua said, "he didn't strike you as dangerous?"

"Oh, heavens, no," Rudge said. "He was just frightened of a dream, and understandably so. And the fact that some dream sensations lingered even after he was awake meant that the nightmare probably represented some especially horrible, repressed experience buried way down in his subconscious. But nightmares are generally a healthy way to let off psychological steam. He exhibited no signs of psychosis. He didn't seem to confuse components of his dream with reality. He drew a clear line when he talked about it. In his mind, there appeared to be a sharp distinction between the nightmare and the real world."

Tony slid forward on his chair. "Could he have been less sure of reality than he let you know?"

"You mean ... could he have fooled me?"

"Could he?"

Rudge nodded. "Psychology isn't an exact science. And by comparison, psychiatry is even less exact. Yes, he could have fooled me, especially since I only saw him once a month and didn't have a chance to observe the mood swings and personality changes that would have been more evident if we'd had weekly contact."

"In light of what Joshua told you a while ago," Hilary said, do you feel you were fooled?"

Rudge smiled ruefully. "It looks as if I was, doesn't it?"

He picked up a second cassette that had been wound to a pre-selected point in another conversation between him and Frye, and he slipped it into the recorder.

"You've never mentioned your mother."

"What about her?"

"That's what I'm asking you."

"You're full of questions, aren't you?"

"With some patients, I hardly ever have to ask anything. They just open up and start talking."

"Yeah? What do they talk about?"

"Quite often they talk about their mothers."

"Must get boring for you."

"Very seldom. Tell me about your mother."

"Her name was Katherine."

"And?"

"I don't have anything to say about her."

"Everyone has something to say about his mother--and his father."

For almost a minute, there was silence. The tape wound from spool to spool, producing only a hissing sound.

"I'm just waiting him out," Rudge said, interpreting the silence for them. "He'll speak in a moment."

"Doctor Rudge?"

"Yes?"

"Do you think...?"

"What is it?"

"Do you think the dead stay dead?"

"Are you asking if I'm religious?"

"No. I mean ... do you think that a person can die ... and then come back from the grave?"

"Like a ghost?"

"Yes. Do you believe in ghosts?"

"Do you?"

"I asked you first."

"No. I don't believe in them, Bruno. Do you?"

"I haven't made up my mind."

"Have you ever seen a ghost?"

"I'm not sure."

"What does this have to do with your mother?"

"She told me that she would ... come back from the grave."

"When did she tell you this?"

"Oh, thousands of times. She was always saying it. She said she knew how it was done. She said that she would watch over me after she died. She said that if she saw I was misbehaving and not living like she wanted me to, then she's come back and make me sorry."

"Did you believe her?"

"..."

"Did you believe her?"

"..."

"Bruno?"

"Let's talk about something else."

"Jesus!" Tony said. "That's where he got the notion that Katherine had come back. The woman planted the idea in him before she died!"

To Rudge, Joshua said, "What in the name of God was the woman trying to do? What sort of relationship did those two have?"

"That was the root of his problem," Rudge said. "But we never got around to exposing it. I kept hoping I could get him to come in every week, but he kept resisting--and then he was dead."

"Did you pursue the subject of ghosts with him in later sessions?" Hilary asked.

"Yes," the doctor said. "The very next time he came in, he started off on it again. He said that the dead stayed dead and that only children and fools believed differently. He said there weren't such things as ghosts and zombies.He wanted me to know that he had never believed Katherine when she'd told him that she would come back."

"But he was lying," Hilary said. "he did believe her."

"Apparently, he did," Rudge said. He put the third tape in the machine.

"Doctor, what religion are you?"

"I was raised a Catholic."

"Do you still believe?"

"Yes."

"Do you go to church?"

"Yes. Do you?"

"No. Do you go to mass every week?"

"Nearly every week."

"Do you believe in heaven?"

"Yes. Do you?"

"Yeah. What about hell?"

"What do you think about it, Bruno?"

"Well, if there's a heaven, there must be a hell."

"Some people would argue that earth is hell."

"No. There's another place with fire and everything. And if there are angels..."

"Yes?"

"There must be demons. The Bible says there are."

"You can be a good Christian without taking all of the Bible literally."

"Do you know how to spot the various marks of the demons?"

"Marks?"

"Yeah. Like when a man or a woman makes a deal with the devil, he puts a mark on them. Or if he owns them for some other reason, he marks them, sort of like we brand cattle."

"Do you believe you can really make a deal with the devil?"

"Huh? Oh, no. No, that's just bunk. It's crap. But some people do believe in it. A lot of people do. And I find them interesting. Their psychology fascinates me. I read a lot about the occult, just trying to figure out the kind of people who put a lot of faith in it. I want to understand the way their minds work. You know?"

"You were talking about the marks that demons leave on people."

"Yeah. It's just something I read recently. Nothing important."

"Tell me about it."

"Well, see, there are supposed to be hundreds and hundreds of demons in hell. Maybe thousands. And each one of them is supposed to have his own mark that he puts on people whose souls he claims. Like, for instance, in the middle ages, they believed that a strawberry birthmark on the face was the mark of a demon. And another one was crossed eyes. A third breast. Some people are born with a third breast. It's really not so rare. And there are those who say it's a mark of a demon. The number 666. That's the mark of the chief of all demons, Satan. His people have the number 666 burned into their skin, under their hair, where it can't be seen. I mean, that's what the True Believers think. And twins.... That's another sign of a demon at work."

"Twins are the handiwork of demons?"

"You understand, I'm not saying I believe any of this. I don't. It's junk. I'm just telling you what some nuts out there believe."

"I understand."

"If I'm boring you--"

"No. I find it as fascinating as you do."

Rudge switched off the recorder. "One comment before I let him go on. I encouraged him to talk about the occult because i thought it was just an intellectual exercise for him, a way for him to strengthen his mind to deal with his own problem. I am sorry to say that I believed him when he said he didn't take it seriously."

"But he did," Hilary said. "He took it very seriously."

"So it seems. But at the time I thought he was exercising his mind, preparing to solve his own problem. If he could find a way to explain the apparently irrational thought processes of far-out people like die-hard occultists, then he would feel ready to find an explanation for the tiny piece of irrational behavior in his own personality. If he could explain occultists, it would be an easier matter to explain the dream that he could not remember. That's what I thought he was doing. But I was wrong. Damn! If only he'd been coming in more frequently."

Rudge started the tape recorder again.

"You said twins are the handiwork of demons."

"Yeah. Not all twins, of course. Just certain special kinds of twins."

"Such as?"

"Siamese twins. Some people think that's the mark of a demon."

"Yes. I can see how that superstition might develop."

"And sometimes identical twins are born with both heads covered by cauls. That's rare. Maybe one. But not two. It's very rare for both twins to be born with cauls. When that happens, you can be pretty sure those twins were marked by a demon. At least, that's what some people think."

Rudge took the tape out of the player. "I'm not sure how that one fits in with what's been happening to the three of you. But since there seems to be a dead ringer for Bruno Frye, the subject of twins seemed like something you'd want to hear about."

Joshua looked at Tony, then at Hilary, "But if Mary Gunther did have two children, why did Katherine bring home only one? Why would she lie and say there was just one baby? It doesn't make any sense."

"I don't know," Tony said doubtfully. "I told you that story sounded too smooth."

Hilary said, "Have you found a birth certificate for Bruno?"

"Not yet," Joshua said. "There wasn't one in any of his safe-deposit boxes."

Rudge picked up the fourth of the four cassettes that had been separated from the main pile of tapes. "This was the last session I had with Frye. Just three weeks ago. He finally agreed to let me try hypnosis to help him recall the dream. But he was wary. He made me promise to limit the range of questions. I wasn't permitted to ask him about anything except the dream. The excerpt I've chosen for you begins after he was in a trance. I regressed him in time, not far, just to the previous night. I put him back into his dream again.

"What do you see, Bruno?"

"My mother. And me."

"Go on."

"She's pulling me along."

"Where are you?"

"I don't know. But I'm just little."

"Little?"

"A little boy."

"And your mother is forcing you to go somewhere?"

"Yeah. She's dragging me by the hand."

"Where does she drag you?"

"To ... the ... the door. The door. Don't let her open it. Don't. Don't!"

"Easy. Easy now. Tell me about this door. Where does it go?"

"To hell."

"How do you know that?"

"It's in the ground."

"The door is in the ground?"

"For God's sake, don't let her open it! Don't let her put me down there again. No! No! I won't go down there again!"

"Relax. Be calm. There's no reason to be afraid. Just relax, Bruno. Relax. Are you relaxed?"

"Y-Yes."

"All right. Now slowly and calmly and without any emotion, tell me what happens next. You and your mother are standing in front of a door in the ground. What happens now?"

"She ... she ... opens the door."

"Go on."

"She pushes me."

"Go on."

"Pushes me... through the door."

"Go on, Bruno."

"She slams it ... locks it."

"She locks you inside?"

"Yeah."

"What's it like in there?"

"Dark."

"What else?"

"Just dark. Black."

"You must be able to see something."

"No. Nothing."

"What happens next?"

"I try to get out."

"And?"

"The door's too heavy, too strong."

"Bruno, is this really just a dream?"

"..."

"Is it really just a dream, Bruno?"

"It's what I dream."

"But is it also a memory?"

"..."

"Did your mother actually lock you in a dark room when you were a child?"

"Y-Yes."

"In the cellar?"

"In the ground. In that room in the ground."

"How often did she do that?"

"All the time."

"Once a week?"

"More often."

"Was it a punishment?"

"Yeah."

"For what?"

"For ... for not acting ... and thinking ... like one."

"What do you mean?"

"It was punishment for not being one."

"One what?"

"One. One. Just one. That's all. Just one."

"All right. We'll come back to that later. Now we're going to go on and find out what happens next. You're locked in that room. You can't get out the door. What happens next, Bruno?"

"I'm s-s-scared."

"No. You're not scared. You feel very calm, relaxed, not scared at all. Isn't that right? Don't you feel calm?"

"I ... guess so."

"Okay. What happens after you try to open the door?"

"I can't get it open. So I just stand on the top step and look down into the dark."

"There are steps?"

"Yes."

"Where do they lead?"

"Hell."

"Do you go down?"

"No! I just ... stand there. And ... listen."

"What do you hear?"

"Voices."

"What are they saying?"

"They're just ... whispers. I can't make them out. But they're ... coming ... getting louder. They're coming closer. They're coming up the steps. They're so loud now!"

"What are they saying?"

"Whispers. All around me."

"What are they saying?"

"Nothing. It means nothing."

"Listen closely."

"They don't speak in words."

"Who are they? Who's whispering?"

"Oh, Jesus. Listen. Jesus."

"Who are they?"

"Not people. No. No! Not people!"

"It isn't people whispering?"

"Get them off! Get them off me!"

"Why are you brushing at yourself?"

"They're all over me!"

"There's nothing on you."

"All over me!"

"Don't get up, Bruno. Wait--"

"Oh, my God!"

"Bruno, lie down on the couch."

"Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus."

"I'm ordering you to lie down on the couch."

"Jesus, help me! Help me!"

"Listen to me, Bruno. You--"

"Gotta get 'em off, gotta get 'em off!"

"Bruno, it's all right. Relax. They're going away."

"No! There's even more of them! Ah! Ah! No!"

"They're going away. The whispers are getting softer, fainter. They're--"

"Louder! Getting louder! A roar of whispers!"

"Be calm. Lie down and be--"

"They're getting in my nose! Oh, Jesus! My mouth!"

"Bruno!"

On the tape, there was a strange, strangled sound. It went on and on.

Hilary hugged herself. The room suddenly seemed frigid.

Rudge said, "He jumped up from the couch and ran into the corner, over there. He crouched down in the corner and put his hands over his face."

The eerie, wheezing, gagging sound continued to come from the tape.

"But you snapped him out of the trance," Tony said.

Rudge was pale, remembering. "At first, I thought he was going to stay there, in the dream. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. I'm very good at hypnotic therapy. Very good. But I thought I'd lost him. It took a while, but finally he began to respond to me."

On the tape: rasping, gagging, wheezing.

"What you hear," Rudge said, "is Frye screaming. He's so frightened that his throat has seized up on him, so terrified that he's lost his voice. He's trying to scream, but he can't get much sound out."

Joshua stood up, bent over, switched off the recorder. His hand was shaking. "You think his mother really locked him in a dark room."

"Yes," Rudge said.

"And there was something else in there with him."

"Yes."

Joshua pushed one hand through his thick white hair. "But for God's sake, what could it have been? What was in that room?"

"I don't know," Rudge said. "I expected to find out in a later session. But that was the last time I saw him."

***

In Joshua's Cessna Skylane, as they flew south and slightly east toward Hollister, Tony said, "My view of this thing is going through changes."

"How?" Joshua asked.

"Well, at first, I looked at it in simple black and white. Hilary was the victim. Frye was the bad guy. But now ... in a way ... maybe Frye's a victim, too."

"I know what you mean," Hilary said. "Listening to those tapes ... I felt so sorry for him."

"It's all right to feel sorry for him," Joshua said, "so long as you don't forget that he's damned dangerous."

"Isn't he dead?"

"Is he?"

***

Hilary had written a screenplay that contained two scenes set in Hollister, so she knew something about the place.

On the surface, Hollister resembled a hundred other small towns in California. There were some pretty streets and some ugly streets. New houses and old houses. Palm trees and oaks. Oleander bushes. Because this was one of the drier parts of the state, there was more dust than elsewhere, but that was not particularly noticeable until the wind blew really hard.

The thing that made Hollister different from other towns was what lay under it. Fault lines. Most communities in California were built on or near geological faults that now and then slipped, causing earthquakes. But Hollister was not built on just one fault; it rested on a rare confluence of faults, a dozen or more, both major and minor, including the San Andreas Fault.

Hollister was a town on the move; at least one earthquake struck it every day of the year. Most of those shocks were in the middle or lower range of the Richter Scale, of course. The town had never been leveled. But the sidewalks were cracked and canted. A walk could be level on Monday, a bit hoved up on Tuesday, and almost level again on Wednesday. Some days there were chains of tremors that rattled the town gently, with only brief pauses, for an hour or two at a time; but people who lived there were seldom aware of these very minor tremors, just as those who lived in the High Sierra ski country paid scant attention to any storm that put down only an inch of snow. Over the decades, the courses of some streets in Hollister were altered by the evermoving earth; avenues that had once been straight were now a bit curved or occasionally doglegged. The grocery stores had shelves that were slanted toward the back or covered with wire screens to prevent bottles and cans from crashing to the floor every time the ground shook. Some people lived in houses that were gradually slipping down into unstable land, but the sinkage was so slow that there was no alarm, no urgency about finding another place to live; they just repaired the cracks in the walls and planed the bottoms off doors and made adjustments as they could. Once in a while, a man in Hollister would add a room to his house without realizing that the addition was on one side of a fault line and the house on the other side; and as a result, over a period of years, the new room would move with stately, turtlelike determination--north or south or east or west, depending on the fault--while the rest of the house stood still or inched in the opposite direction, a subtle but powerful process that eventually tore the addition from the main structure. The basements of a few buildings contained sinkholes, bottomless pits; these pits were spreading unstoppably under the buildings and would one day swallow them, but in the meantime, the citizens of Hollister lived and worked above. A lot of people would be terrified to live in a town where (as some residents put it) you could "go to sleep at night listening to the earth whisper to itself." But for generations the good people of Hollister had gone about their business with a positive attitude that was wondrous to behold.

Here was the ultimate California optimism.

Rita Yancy lived in a corner house on a quiet street. It was a small home with a big front porch. There were autumn-blooming white and yellow flowers in a border along the walkway.

Joshua rang the bell. Hilary and Tony stood behind him.

An elderly woman came to the door. Her gray hair was done up in a bun. Her face was wrinkled, and her blue eyes were quick, bright. She had a friendly smile. She was wearing a blue housedress and a white apron and sensible old-lady shoes. Wiping her hands on a dish towel, she said, "Yes?"

"Mrs. Yancy?" Joshua asked.

"That's me."

"My name's Joshua Rhinehart."

She nodded. "I figured you'd show up."

"I'm determined to talk to you," he said.

"You strike me as a man who either doesn't give up easily or never gives up at all."

"I'll camp out right here on your porch until I get what I've come for."

She sighed. "That won't be necessary. I've given the situation a great deal of thought since you called yesterday. What I decided was--you can't do anything to me. Not a thing. I'm seventy-five years old, and they don't just throw women my age into jail. So I might as well tell you what it was all about, because, if I don't, you'll just keep pestering me."

She stepped back, opened the door wide, and they went inside.

***

In the attic of the clifftop house, in the king-size bed, Bruno woke, screaming.

The room was dark. The flashlight batteries had gone dead while he'd slept.

Whispers.

All around him.

Soft, sibilant, evil whispers.

Slapping at his face and neck and chest and arms, trying to brush away the hideous things that crawled on him, Bruno fell off the bed. There seemed to be even a greater number of bustling, skittering things on the floor than there had been on the bed, thousands of them, all whispering, whispering. He wailed and gibbered, then clamped a hand over his nose and mouth to prevent the things from slithering inside of him.

Light.

Threads of light.

Thin lines of light like loose, luminescent threads hanging from the otherwise tenebrous fabric of the room. Not many threads, not much light, but some. It was a whole lot better than nothing.

He scrambled as fast as he could toward those faint filaments of light, flinging the things from him, and what he found was a window. The far side of it was covered by shutters. Light was seeping through the narrow chinks in the shutters.

Bruno stood, swaying, fumbling in the dark for the window latch. When he found the lock, it would not turn; it was badly corroded.

Screaming, brushing frantically at himself, he stumbled back toward the bed, found it in the seamless blackness, got hold of the lamp that stood on the nightstand, carried the lamp back to the window, used it as a club, and glass shattered. He threw the lamp aside, felt for the bolt on the inside of the shutters, put his hand on it, jerked on it, skinned a knuckle as he forced the bolt out of its catch, threw open the shutters, and wept with relief as light flooded into the attic.

The whispers faded.

***

Rita Yancy's parlor--that was what she called it, a parlor, rather than using a more modern and less colorful word--almost was a parody of the stereotypical parlor in which sweet little old ladies like her were supposed to spend their twilight years. Chintz drapes. Handmade, embroidered wall hangings--most of them inspirational sayings framed by penny-sized flowers and cute birds--were everywhere, a relentless display of good will and good humor and bad taste. Tasseled upholstery. Wingback chairs. Copies of Reader's Digest on a dainty occasional table. A basket filled with balls of yarn and knitting needles. A flowered carpet that was protected by matching flowered runners. Handmade afghans were draped across the seat and the back of the sofa. A mantel clock ticked hollowly.

Hilary and Tony sat on the sofa, on the edge of it, as if afraid to lean back and risk rumpling the covering. Hilary noticed that each of the many knickknacks and curios was dustfree and highly polished. She had the feeling that Rita Yancy would jump up and run for a dust cloth the instant anyone tried to touch and admire those prized possessions.

Joshua sat in an armchair. The back of his head and his arms rested on antimacassars.

Mrs. Yancy settled into what was obviously her favorite chair; she seemed to have acquired part of her character from it, and it from her. It was possible, Hilary thought, to picture Mrs. Yancy and the chair growing together into a single organic-inorganic creature with six legs and brushed velvet skin.

The old woman picked up a blue and green afghan that was folded on her footstool. She opened the blanket and covered her lap with it.

There was a moment of absolute silence, where even the mantel clock seemed to pause, as if time had stopped, as if they had been quick-frozen and magically transported, along with the room, to a distant planet to be put on exhibition in an extraterrestrial museum's Department of Earth Anthropology.

Then Rita Yancy spoke, and what she said totally shattered Hilary's homey image of her. "Well, there's sure as hell no point in beating around the bush. I don't want to waste my whole day on this damn silly thing. Let's get straight to it. You want to know why Bruno Frye was paying me five hundred bucks a month. It was hush money. He was paying me to keep my mouth shut. His mother paid me the same amount every month for almost thirty-five years, and when she died, Bruno started sending checks. I must admit that surprised the hell out of me. These days it's an unusual son who would pay that kind of money to protect his mother's reputation--and especially after she's already kicked the bucket. But he paid."