Whispers (60 page)

"Yes," Tony said. "Katherine carrying on about a demon--that bit of news gave me a big piece of the puzzle."

"For God's sake," Joshua said impatiently, gruffly, "stop being so damned mysterious. Put it together for Hilary and me in a way we can understand."

"Sorry. I was more or less still thinking aloud." Tony shifted in his seat. "Okay, look. This will take a while. I'll have to go back to the beginning.... To understand what I'm going to say about Bruno, you have to understand Katherine, or at least understand the way I see her. What I'm theorizing is ... a family in which madness has been ... sort of handed down like a legacy for at least three generations. The insanity steadily grows bigger and bigger, like a trust fund earning interest." Tony shifted in his seat again. "Let's start with Leo. An extreme authoritarian type. To be happy he needed to totally control other people. That was one of the reasons he did so well in business, but it was also the reason he didn't have many friends. He knew how to get his way every time, and he never gave an inch. A lot of aggressive men like Leo have a different approach to sex from the one they have toward everything else; they like to be relieved of all responsibility when they're in bed; they like to be ordered around and dominated for a change--but only in bed. Not Leo. Not even in bed. He insisted on being the dominant one even in his sex life. He enjoyed hurting and humiliating women, calling them names, forcing them to do unpleasant things, being a little rough, a little sadistic. We know that from Mrs. Yancy."

"It's a hell of a big step from paying prostitutes so they'll satisfy some perverse desire--to molesting your own child," Joshua said.

"But we know he did molest Katherine repeatedly, over many years," Tony said. "So it mustn't have been a big step in Leo's eyes. He probably would have said that his abuse of Mrs. Yancy's girls was all right because he was paying them and therefore owned them, at least for a while. He would have been a man with a strong sense of property rights--and with an extremely liberal definition of the word 'property.' He'd have used that argument, that same point of view, to justify what he did to Katherine. A man like that thinks of a child as just another of his possessions--'my child' instead of 'my child.' To him, Katherine was a thing, an object, wasted if not used."

"I'm glad I never met the son of a bitch," Joshua said. "If I'd ever shaken hands with him, I think I'd still feel dirty."

"My point," Tony said, "is that Katherine, as a child, was trapped in a house, in a brutalizing relationship, with a man who was capable of anything, and there was virtually no chance that she could maintain a firm grip on her sanity under those awful conditions. Leo was a very cold fish, a loner's loner, more than a little bit selfish, with a very strong and very twisted sex drive. It's possible, even likely, that he wasn't just emotionally disturbed. He might have been all the way gone, over the edge, psychotic, detached from reality but able to conceal his detachment. There's a kind of psychopath who has iron control over his delusions, the ability to channel a lot of his lunatic energy into socially-acceptable pursuits, the ability to pass for normal. That kind of psycho vents his madness in one narrow, generally private, area. In Leo's case, he let off a little steam with prostitutes--and a lot of it with Katherine. We've got to figure that he didn't merely abuse her physically. His desire went beyond sex. He lusted after absolute control. Once he'd broken her physically, he wouldn't have been satisfied until he'd broken her emotionally, spiritually, and then mentally. By the time Katherine arrived at Mrs. Yancy's place to have her father's baby, she was every bit as mad as Leo had been. But she apparently also had acquired his control, his ability to pass among normal people. She lost that control for three days when the twins arrived, but then she pulled herself together again."

"She lost control a second time," Hilary said as the plane bobbled through a patch of turbulent air.

"Yeah," Joshua said. "When she told Mrs. Yancy that she'd been raped by a demon."

"If my theory's correct," Tony said, "Katherine was going through incredible changes after the birth of the twins. She was moving from one severe psychotic state to an even more severe psychotic state. A new set of delusions was pushing out the old set. She had been able to maintain a surface calm in spite of her father's sexual abuse, in spite of the emotional and physical torture he put her through, in spite of becoming pregnant with his child, and even in spite of the agony of being girdled in day and night during all those months when nature was insisting that she grow. Somehow she maintained an air of normalcy through all of that. But when the twins were born, when she realized her story about Mary Gunther's baby had come crashing down around her, that was too much to bear. She flipped out--until she conceived the notion that she'd been raped by a demon. We know from Mrs. Yancy that Leo was interested in the occult. Katherine had read some of Leo's books. Somewhere she had picked up the fact that some people believe twins born with cauls are marked by a demon. Because her twins were born with cauls ... well, she began to fantasize. And the idea that she had been the innocent victim of a demonic creature that had forced itself on her--well, that was very appealing. It exonerated her of the shame and guilt of bearing her own father's babies. It was still something she had to hide from the world, but it wasn't something she had to hide from herself. It wasn't something shameful for which she had to make constant excuses to herself. No one could expect an ordinary woman to resist a demon that had supernatural strength. If she could make herself believe that she'd really been raped by a monster, then she could start thinking of herself as nothing worse than an unfortunate, innocent victim."

"But that's what she was anyway," Hilary said. "She was her father's victim. He forced himself on her, not the other way around."

True," Tony said "But he had probably spent a lot of time and energy brainwashing her, trying to make her think she was the one at fault, the one responsible for their twisted relationship. Transferring the guilt to the daughter--that's a fairly common way for a sick man to escape his own sense of guilt. And that sort of behavior would fit Leo's authoritarian personality."

"All right," Joshua said as they fled northward into the yielding sky. "I'll go along with what you've said so far. It may not be right, but it makes sense, and that's a welcome change in the situation. So Katherine gave birth to twins, lost herself for three days, and then got control again by resorting to a new fantasy, a new delusion. By believing that a demon had raped her, she was able to forget that her father was the one who had actually done it. She was able to forget about the incest and regain some of her self-respect. In fact, she probably hadn't ever felt better about herself in her whole life."

"Exactly," Tony said

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.